How did the world end?

How did the world end?

How did the world end?

This is one of the core assumptions of Apocalypse World. It’s a simple question that sets the tone for the entire game, but it can also be taken for granted. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that all AW games are like Fallout or Mad Max, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is certainly post-apocalyptic, but the different tone makes for a completely different story. Just by changing this one assumption.

So, how did the world end? I’d like to hear some different answers to this question, particularly ones that would lead to vastly different post-apocalyptic scenarios than the default. Science-fantasy apocalypses are especially of interest to me.

19 thoughts on “How did the world end?”

  1. We played a low-earth-orbit game where the Maelstrom on the surface was so powerful it broke people’s minds and turned them into reavers. One of the PCs was a former reaver who’d been brought into space and trained to control their urges (a Touchstone).

  2. Alien invasion. Humans responded with a nanite plague that was encoded to eat organics. The aliens flipped the switch on it that made it differentiate between earth organics and extraterrestrial organics. The nanites eventually shut off or went away… except for the ones the Angel uses to heal wounds.

  3. It didn’t end, per se. It just stopped. Frozen. The time travel experiment was a failure and now we’re stuck. I don’t know why it didn’t effect everyone. Most people are statues but some if us aren’t. Some if us are trying to make the best of things but… some of us aren’t.

  4. One of my favorites is the Jetstream relocating to 2 feet above the ground leaving the surface to deal with constant 300 mph winds. I also like “the world was different?”

  5. Our first game involved toxic plants that somehow overtook the cities. we never explored the cities to figure out how toxic they were.

    The first game I MCed involved a Biblical apocalypse and I had session-based countdowns for Pestilence, Famine, Death and War.

  6. My favorite game was set in a centuries old malfunctioning ark/world ship.  Everything was cramped and space was at a premium (especially space where food or water could be found).  Travel took circuitous paths, faction owned spaces were common, and blowouts into space were on your mind in certain corridors — but noone knew anything about where they were, or what space even was… Just that this was the way of things.  The psychic maelstrom was the wireless user interface to the central computer that noone knew how to properly use any more.

    I’ve also heard of a game by Kira Magrann where there was a fae-pocalypse, where fae-kind came into being and wrought havoc with the existing known world?

  7. I ran a pretty simple “nuclear fimbulwinter” once. Straightforward but just the simple twist of snow instead of desert gave the end of the world a very different feel.

  9. Humans spliced their DNA with plants for reasons, it went awry and now the world is covered by giant life plant. The Maelstrom is the Green taking through really-mutant humanity.

    Yes, we saw Avatar. We also put a lot of Nausicaa in it. One of my characters was a Driver with small planes that could whiz through the trees, and everything the Brainer had was vegetal.

    The Touchstone had a bunch of old western Italian comics and a toll star.

    We had Vincent writing a custom move for that Apocalypse. It was about foraging for the most dangerous lifeform in the world: the blueberry. 

  10. Generations ago we tried to contact another world across the void between to solve all our problems. We opened a breach and they changed our home. This is how we killed the world. 

    The quarantine said so. She’s got a cult now. 

  12. 1. Aliens came and blew us all to high Hell. Now they live in massive walled cities while humanity lurks in the shadows of ruination. The aliens don’t interfere with people, they don’t torture them or kidnap them, they just don’t care. The youngest people have no idea what they look like, they only know them from the occasional jet flying overhead.

    2. Humans created the Psychic Maelstrom, then a massive factory-computer, to give us everything we wanted… but there were so many conflicting ideas it went crazy. It made grotesque half-formed “sexy” creatures, mutated people to have fantastic powers, built towering monuments to day-dreams and creates pulsating lumps of edible meat-stuff. Nothing is permanent as the PM is still altering things to try and suit everyone at once.

    3. The bible was right about something. The Horsemen rode out, spirits and demons screamed forth from Hell; in the end, terrifying angels with fifty wings and burning swords blew trumpets to the tune of “fuck you!”

    But it isn’t the meek that are left over, its scarred, mentally broken survivors. 

    4. All the humans are dead. How they died out is a mystery, but the craters allude to war. In their place are robots, uplifted animals and designed lifeforms. The world is a shithole, but it’s the Eden their gods left for them.

    5. An illness came and wiped out everyone over the age of 12. Five years have passed. Those that survived rule an empty world. Everything still stands, overgrown and rife with skeletons.

    6. Ancient Godzilla-style monsters woke up to clear the slate, as they have done many times before. They crushed nations flat and are still going strong. They can’t be defeated, only avoided… at least, no one has so much as dented one yet. Most people live nomadic lives, using what little tech remains to track the roaming giants, either running from them or following in their wake.

    7. A colossal volcano erupted in Yellow Stone for a full month, covering the skies in hot ash. People need gas masks just to go outside, and the ash still stains the clouds and pollutes the water.

    8. Humans invented teleportation, but a fatal error shifted everything in the world, including fucking continents, someplace else. Now the world is a patchwork mess… and no one is quite sure if we’re on the same planet, under the same sky, or even if we’re in the same universe!

    9. The Psychic Maelstrom arrived. Drove people mad, gave others power beyond understanding. That was enough to end everything.

  13. The people revolted. By god, they actually did it. They finally unified and stood up for all the slights and wrongs perpetrated by the governments the world over. And they were successful, too! But there was a problem. At the end of a long campaign against politicians and their ilk, when there’s no one left to blame and no one left to kill, you don’t really have anyone left who knows how to lead millions of people at a time. Maybe we can teach people how with books? That should work, right?

  14. To date I still want to run a very meta game of AW where the Psychic Maelstrom is the broken shards of the fourth wall, and the Master of Ceremonies is an NPC in the game world who literally sends the players weird letters.

  16. 1)  There was no single cause, and since most of the available evidence went up along with the World Before, there’s no way to piece together the way it all went wrong.  Whatever the Quarantine says is but one tiny (but accurate) glimpse of the full horror.  Yet the words “full system cascade failure” more or less cover the basics.  It was almost certainly all down to one idiot with a backpack nuke kicking off a domino effect of flying ICBMs.

    2)  Shades of another little indie game called Over The Edge…when the Throckmorton Device went fully online, the last non-dominated Cut-Up frantically dumped a ton of books into the Cut-Up Machine and flipped the switch, hoping against hope to rewrite the Device out of history.  Unfortunately, when you’re a dog, you can’t read…and Andalusia ended up tipping a whole crateload of cheap post-apoc paperback novels in.  Oops.

    3)  Some damn fool accidentally summoned Azathoth.  The Maelstrom is what’s left of the Daemon Sultan of the Gods after the gate slammed shut five minutes later.

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