What was your apocalypse?
Do your characters ever know?
Do your players?
How much of what you play to discover comes out of the apocalypse you imagine?
Or rather, how much of your apocalypse informs the things you discover?
Zombies? Robots? Nuclear war?
Is there any benefit to fleshing out the end of the world for your group?
In two of my games it’s been perfectly clear: mountain top removal strip mining led to ecological disaster, and nuclear winter. In most of the rest, no one ever knows.
I played in one that was zombies, but we never found out where they came from.
Every other time it was mad max style: implied nuclear and/or ecological disaster, but we were too busy trying to survive to worry about how it happened.
I’ve also played in global warming-related water rising in the bayou on a chain of islands, after the volcanos under Hawaii erupt, and during the 1920s Dust Bowl with thick black dust killing everything. Oh, and once where the main threat was that features of the landscape, like lakes and hillsides and canyons, had become sentient.
My current game is set in the ruins of an 80km long starship built by several civilization working together to flee a doomed Galaxy. It started out as a planned AW setting. I’m actually using a custom variant of GUMSHOE, but the player facing mechanics I’m using, the style and play-to-find-out structure are heavily AW influenced.
In the game we’re start in up soon, a massive cyberattack set off a significant majority of the world’s nukes in their silos (or caused meltdowns in reactors, etc). Afterward, about 90% of the survivors are sterile, so now (50 years after the event), the remaining population, already drastically reduced, is facing extinction. Aaaaaand go…
Our Fort Thunder Season 2 revealed that it was an alien ship with highly controlled interior environment. When it crashed the nanites that supported the interior environment tried to work on a suddenly much bigger volume (the whole planet), but managed only to screw everything up. So changing climate, “monsters” (protective mechanisms) and all that stuff. And the Maelstrom is the ship computer that tries to do something, but fails so far.
But I feel that it’s not the whole story. Our hocus reached behind the Maelstorm and saw the world almost intact though almost unpopulated. She and her followers (children she saved from Fort Thunder and more from a a savage tribe) decided that world to be “too strange” and stayed in this one. We’ll see where it gets us in season 3.
In most of the games I’ve played we don’t really know why. My favorites have been sort of implausible. We had one where some kind of early nuclear experiment changed the nature of light. The world was shrouded by a constant living darkness that got thicker and thinner, depending. Functionally it was the early 1940’s. All very noir.
We had another with an alien spacecraft that crashed in the Baffin Bay. Some kind of disease had spread through the world that was only inhibited by cold temperatures. Our ‘world’ was the hulk of the spacecraft itself, clearly built on an inhumanly large scale.
In one I ran, the maelstrom was some kind of extra-dimensional entity that had been partially pulled through to our world. All the brainers turned out to be descended from the scientists who had done it.
And one of my absolute favorites was some kind of unexplained apocalypse that was all volcanoes, where the ash fell like snow.