11 thoughts on “Fury Road is the new cultural touchstone for apocalypse world right?”

  1. Mad MaxL Road Warrior and Mad MAx: Thunderdome were always part of the picture, so in terms of widely accessible mass media, yeah, I think that’s fair. Then layer in current events like the earthquake in Nepal and the floods in Texas, mixed with the unrest in Baltimore and economic collapse in Brazil, and you’re good to go.

  2. Meguey Baker ‘s comments got me thinking.  Thanks for that!

    Might be interesting to play a campaign DURING the apocalypse, especially if it’s a long, drawn out process of rising tensions, breaking points, and devastating upheavals:

    Do the players fight or foment the death of civilization?  Do they sacrifice to protect cultural artifacts and knowledge, or abandon their past entirely? 

    Honey bee colony collapse – 

    How long before cultivated and wild flora wither and die, followed by fauna.

    When does “we can’t feed everybody” turn into “who do we eat first?”

    Is the fungus that emerges safe to consume, in quantities enough to be reliably available?

    CERN Astray –

    How does a firing of the LHC open all our brains to the world’s psychic maelstrom…?

    Is anyone NOT affected?

    Are the localized acts of violence, occurring globally, as isolated as they appear at first glance?

    Why do some people have halos of light radiating from (floating above?) their heads now?

    I think i’ll start listening to Coast to Coast AM again, for awhile, with a notebook.  And prepare to surf the crest of a breaching apocalypse.

  3. The aesthetics of AW are totally mad max (way more Max than, say Gama Word) but the question AW asks is “What happens to Furioisa after she takes over the Warboys compound?”

  4. Andrew Fish -yes, this. One thing that is really interesting to look at is the scale of the apocalypse world your PCs inhabit. Take the ones that actually exist, like Appalachian mountaintop removal and strip mining contaminating most of the water and a good portion of the land, or NOLA after Katrina, or costal Japan after the tsunami, or Haiti after the earthquake, or the Aral Sea after the recent damn and irrigation projects diverted all the fresh water and destroyed the fishing-based way of life that supported the entire population.

    To tip it over into a game setting, figure out how the world’s psychic maelstrom manifested and continues to mess with what we would consider “normal reality”. The apocalypse that stretches 300 miles in all directions from where you stand may as well be the whole world. If you don’t have reliable cars, 100 miles will do. If staying alive involves your basically nonstop effort to find water, shelter, food, and safety, you’re not going on a lot of long road speculative trips.

    This is one thing I found really compelling about Fury Road, that Furiosa remembered a place that wasn’t desert. The idea that other landscapes and other possibilities might exist is really interesting when applied to AW. Do you leave the Hardhold where you know you are at least alive on the off chance you can make it past the cannibal pots and the poison wastes to reach something the Hocus saw in a vision or the Quarantine remembers or the Brainer yanked out of the mind of a raving refugee? Are you all wandering, fleeing from a place that has become toxic and forced to face what comes? How far apart are these micro cultures and is there anywhere untouched by the apocalypse? 

  5. Kingston Cassidy: Also, what happens to Max after he leaves? And what happens to the Vulvalini? And what happens to The Dag and those seeds? And what happens to the Stiltwalkers in the wastes? And who takes over Gastown and the Bullet Farm?

  9. Tim Franzke Let’s put it this way… The Road Warrior was once the benchmark for longest chase scene. I think it’s only been surpassed by the most recent Fast & Furious sequels and, of course, Fury Road

  10. for the longest time, I’ve felt like Apocalypse World was what was left in the aftermath of Bliss Stage. specifically, the maelstrom as the fallout from the at-least-partially psychic nature of the invasion/war, along with the loss of so much knowledge and so many resources (but plenty of bullets and gasoline left).

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