So…
Tell me about your apocalypse!
Mine was an arid wasteland with toxic ground water based on a trip to the Atacama desert. It was nominally somewhere on the west coast of Canada, next to a giant salt flat that was all that remained off the Pacific Ocean.
No one knew what caused all the water to dry up.
There were three “major” settlements: Cactus Town, a farming community based around the production of cactus juice, the only non-poisonous beverage around; Junk Town, a scrap pile full of scavengers, thieves and mechanics; and The Factory, an abandoned refinery stocked with oil and gas, and inhabited by a vicious gang of bikers.
Read “Soft Apocalypse.” That’s pretty much what I’d like mine to look like. Because DAMN.
I’ve been thinking about reusing the one we did for Gamma World d20 back when, where embedded artificial intelligence became completely ubiquitous – think of RFID chips + Bluetooth + wifi + whatever, and of everything around you having the potential for as much as intelligence as you, or more. Inevitably pushes comes to shoves, key bits of infrastructure and supply break, and down it all goes. We had a good vibe of a sort of latter-day haunted landscape, full of things as confusing as the gods and spirits of mythology, potentially lurking just about everywhere.
One of my authors produced this absolutely wonderful chapter explaining differences in genre using as his example a valley whose people are watched over by the human-/transhuman-smart children’s toys from before the collapse. They do their best, but while they have the potential to learn a lot, they still have the constraints imposed by their fundamental programming. I’ve always wanted to do a Seven Samurai sort of short campaign with the PCs hired to provide the the skills, resources, and outlooks the toys can’t give the families they’ve been taking care of for generations.
My favorite that I actually ran, conceptually, was probably the nuclear fimbulwinter one. Scarcity of heat, scarcity of light. Mushroom farming tunnels below the hardhold.
Ooh, much potential for cool stuff there. Er, so to speak.
My favorite one that I didn’t run was inspired by a comment John Harper made once about line-blurring, and how “Obviously the PCs aren’t ACTUALLY getting (MC Love letters) in the mail” and I replied along the lines of “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m going to go run a game where the world’s psychic maelstrom is the broken shards of the fourth wall!” I would still run the hell out of that game. I mean… imagine the uses of augury. Or the implications of a quarantine who was completely unconnected to it. Or or or….
(Now that I think about it, I think I ran, like, one session of that for a single PC, or something?)
HOLY CRAP I WANT THAT. It’s like being Deadpool!
[EDIT: Sometimes I am terrible at replies. Just meant to note that I’ve used the following for ideas, and here’s a link and a quote from Fred Hicks on it.]
http://favstar.fm/users/fredhicks/status/21941067311
“Randomly roll your terrible future using ORE. Genius in a post. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=532788 “
– The Ford, a loosely knit collection of folk living at a ford in a badlands river. The Hocus ruled over an artist’s collective with a dangerous streak of cannibalism. Action shifted to Carny, a hardhold built around a traveling carnival that had stopped traveling.
– At the Gates, a Maestro’D dance bar/drug den/whorehouse built on an abandonded oil derrick. All the holds were on similar aquatic sites amid a drowned city, because the land was very, very scary.
– The Leviathan, a zeppelin powered by brainers that traveled from town to town amid a newly born empire. One character decided to rebel, and the others did not, and so there was a little bit of bloodshed.
– Gator, a motley collection of jungle hardholds on the banks of a river. Everything wants to eat you, except the people who came back from the dead. They just want you to join them.
And a few one-shots, the most memorable being in a dam on a frozen river.
Our group doesn’t have a clearly defined apocalypse. We know that the old cities aren’t safe because the plants have grown over all of the buildings, and we encountered a psychic tree that we only escaped by setting it on fire. There’s something wrong with the plants, but not all the plants, just some of them.
My character is a Chopper named Ghost who leads a biker gang called the Undead. We started in Big 90, a slaver hold where the ones in charge are all numbered, 1 to 12. #1 was paranoid about our gang camping outside of his walls so he sent some guards out to work them over and we burned down part of his hold in retaliation.
Fleeing to the bureaucratic hold of Barbecue we looked for work and found a few odd jobs. When the leader of Barbecue, also named Barbecue, asked our gang to steal sugar cane and then burn the fields around Big 90, Ghost couldn’t say no. But Ghost’s sister lives nearby and she wasn’t going to decimate Big 90 just for Barbecue, so Ghost has decided to take the area over and make her own hold, the Shop.
Our last session had Ghost single-handedly getting into Big 90 and killing half of the numbers that were still alive while her gang stole sugar cane and set fire to the fields. (She took “Not To Be Fucked With!” as one of her improvements.) Then she strapped #1 to her bike, drove him around the hold for everyone to see, parked her bike in the center of Big 90, and blew both of them up. (She became a Hardholder during that session.)
There are a couple of other characters:
Truth, a Hocus who venerates the America of old times, lost half of his followers in the first fight at Big 90 and now he’s becoming a Faceless with a burned American flag as his mask.
King, a Driver, has been there to help out in fights and provide transport for some jobs, but he seems to be falling in love with Ghost despite her malevolent streak.
Jackson, a Brainer, was serving as #1’s advisor but secretly wanted to overthrow him. Now she doesn’t have to.
Arcade, a Maestro’D and Ghost’s sister, runs an arcade built inside of metal shipping containers in the cluster of buildings known as the Shop.
In ours, the Quarantine was the one responsible for the Apocalypse.
Paul Tarussov : does he/she know how yet?
We just ended a game where we were the Quarantine woke up on a generational spaceship to find out that the ship was standing still, everything was half-stripped, and the people were divided up into a tribal society. We started out working for the Shed which was next to the Green. Plenty of water, and food, but lots of fighting off invaders. Scariest things were Leggers (mutates that could survive in the Black for a short period of time) and the Company (we thought they were man-shaped robots that came out of places and stole people a number of times). Our maelstrom was the song of the Core gone mad and screaming through the ship, but you could access parts of the ancient mainframes in different parts of the ship if you could keep your sanity well enough. It was pretty cool. Machine priests, religions based on half remembered stories of heroes in comics, and the usual wacky AW hyjinx.
AW on a generation ship? Stras, I love that to pieces.
We’ve done dozens of the traditional apocalypses so I usually start by suggesting something that went wrong with the world that shattered it (the Magic, and all of the things that feed and are fueled by it return. Another ice-age starts. Alien invasion, humans in camps and in the wastes, praying to the 7 sisters that keep them safe). We’ve done some cool ones.
That’s fantastic.
1) When folks die, occasionally their spirit hovers around for a while before being vacuumed away, right? But in this apocalypse, the vacuum broke and they just kept building up. And they were often not too happy about things. Also, there was mist everywhere.
2) Some kind of demonic hive-mind made grass-hoppers (and bugs in general) super-well organized; not like intellectual, but they had enough of a leg up that they famined the world.
3) The sun just grew super-harsh for unclear reasons and wiped out lots of life, spurred on increased mutations and pushed humanity underground, breaking down lots of social constructs.
4) Gaia strikes back against so much pollution and mutates critters into dinosaur-like stature, also driving humanity underground.
5) Alien ship arrives in orbit and begins terraforming ops with nanotechnology. The nanotech doesn’t work in the coldest parts of the world and when we nuked the ship, it crash-landed on Greenland.
6) There is a small population on real-life Ascension Island. One day the planes and boats stopped coming and the radios went silent. No one knows any more than that.
7) Aliens arrive at the moon, establish that there are no sentient life-forms in the solar system and begin colonization – killing and enslaving humans and using us for parts. They define sentient as creatures who use the psychic maelstrom to communicate and stuff. They’re kind of anarchic and very alien.
The one I want to run is set in NYC after a 20 foot rise in sea-level. No subways, lots of island skyscrapers and cobbled sky-bridges. Humid and mossy. The Rise happened fast, over maybe a month, so there’s masses left down there to dive for and recover, if you can get to it. There’s things down there, though. Inland, there’s a thin strip of arable land, then everything gets too hot and dry. Drinkable water’s a top commodity.
Ones I’ve enjoyed playing:
The Windmills – Mountain ridges of Appalachia, where the Apocalypse was triggered by mountain-top removal. There’s no birds, the ground-water’s toxic, and the folks living down in the depths of the old mine are soaking in toxic run-off from degrading holding tanks. Up on top, we’re cannibalizing the bits of a half-built wind-farm for tubes to live in. Our chopper gang road ATVs.
Silo 48 – Deep in an abandoned missile silo, with weirdness getting more intense the farther down you go. There’s other silos we traded with, but the intense cold made visits risky, even for our half-track truck.
Oooh, I love the sound of Sunken New York, that’s fab.
My group’s apocalypse was the standard Mad Max arid savannah. I’d like to do something a little different if I ever run.
After reading the Wool Series I’d like to do one that takes place in a huge silo bunker, like for 10,000 people, the outside is still too dangerous except a bunch of folks had the bright idea to start digging down and laterally connecting to natural caves and that’s when things started getting weird.
Ones I’ve run:
A failed attempt at building utopia via the discovery of a source of energy that became the maelstrom (this is the G+ one, New Seas New Skies). Everyone tried to outrun the consequence of the past (global warming, economic inequality, etc.) and as a result the technology that was supposed to save everyone just made things worse, far, far worse. All sorts of mutant creatures and deviated forms. The apocalypse was in living memory of the oldest individuals, with the world’s upheaval being grossly aggravated by the new technology.
Far after the collapse, which was based on conventional pressures that bring down large scale societies, there is a new dark age coinciding with a deepening ice age (somewhat offset by greenhouse gas shifts). The maelstrom is explicitly religious and priests of the gods that dwell within control temple-factories that produce the guns and cars that empower them. It was weird.
One I want to run:
The maelstrom is the cause of the apocalypse. It rushes in and suddenly the vast majority of men in the world go insane. Worse their insanity becomes manifest in their flesh. Some hulk out, some become lurking predators with bodies meant for such, and so on. Needless to say this causes a huge number of problems and a generation or so later, the remnants of humanity are colonies of women holding out against the roaming packs of mutant men.
The only unmutated men are the sort that would take a Weird+2 playbook–you either rule the maelstrom as a man or are ruled by it. The maelstrom is like a sort of collective uber-id, a seething collection of primal impulse tuned to the frequency of the male psyche. Theoretically it could at any moment tune in to women or expand to them, and sometimes the maelstrom does burn out the higher functions of women–just ‘luck’ has kept that from happening.
The idea gets some of its shape from Y: the Last Man, but the spark came from some random comment about aesthetics on some piece of media or other. It was about the discrepancy in how male and female characters in it looked, and it sort of bloomed into that.
Tim Groth In your second scenario, what happens if you are ambiguous or transgressing? Tying binary gender into a game that explicitly aknowledges more than two gender choices seems a bit strange to me.
That’s for the players to decide when they take such a character.
My personal take on it is that, just like with things like height, it is about overlapping distributions that people perceive as part of a binary divide (i.e. men are taller than women) because that’s what people are like. As a result the middle ground is ripe territory for outcast types who are going to be seen as suspicious–either because they’re Weird or because they aren’t Weird and thus could at any moment turn out to be a mutant.
More concretely, if I were making an ambiguous or transgressing character that wasn’t Weird (which is free license in this scenario), I’d want to be threatened with being pulled under by the maelstrom. The maelstrom is, ultimately, more devastating on average to the higher functions of men than those of women. And once your higher functions are taken out, it rushes in and makes your body a more suitable expression of your base urges. For me, the fun of playing a transgressing or ambiguous character would be being closer to that threat than say a regular male who happens to be Weird or the like.
I could see it being used as a marker that you want to not be threatened by it or to challenge the understanding of the maelstrom or to be a reaction by humanity to the apparent way the maelstrom worked. Maybe a desperate bid by a mother to protect her son from changing early on, or the like. I dunno, I’d be interested to see what players would bring to the table.
There could definitely be interesting ground to play in there, but there could also be some awkward implications to work around.
If only men are affected and your ambiguous character is affected, doesn’t that remove the ambiguity?
Of course, the ambiguity could be that they appear male in all respects except for being unaffected by the maelstrom…
Yeah, it could totally be done that way. Or as I say, you could wiggle through the more devastating loophole. Women aren’t immune, just less likely to be impacted (just like different sensory range averages for instance).
One of the things I envision is women living among the mutants who are just as lost to rational thought, though they generally have succumbed later in life due to deliberate opening to the maelstrom that went badly. A mirror of men who are totally out of tune with it would be fine, but again those are things I’d really prefer to shake out of play rather than defining ahead of time.
My apocalypse was in a swamp world, after the rain started falling 50 years ago and had never stopped since, making sea levels raise by 100 meters. The PCs had just crossed the ocean to the US from Europe, fleeing from a powerful warlord. Having lost their ship during the crossing, now they moved around in riverboats and a small powerboat. On arrival they met a population that was being oppressed by a local gang which got the population addicted to a glowing powdery substance they harvest from the bottom of the sea. The situation got explosive when they all crashed against a cult to mutated, giant crocodile who nested in the remains of a submerged nuclear power plant. That was a fun game, it’s a pity that we only got to play a few sessions.