Not Your Father’s Doomsday

“For such a taboo shattering group of iconoclasts, we sure are bound by the laws of our tribe!” – Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, “Fallen Angels”

Nearly every published doomsday setting I’ve seen has been set with the disaster happening either modern day or in the very near future. After a point, this gets boring, I think. After all, we’re supposed to be creative, right?

Here’s some ideas for doing doomsday in alternate settings:

Fantasy

The original wide spread post-holocaust period in human history was the Dark Ages, the first few centuries after the fall of Rome. Barbarian invasions, the rise of a mystery-cult to great power, the loss of learning, epidemics, mass starvation, you name it, the Dark Ages had it. Here’s how to bring a dark feel to your Medieval setting.
The Magic Goes Away

The existence of powerful magic in a Fantasy setting makes quite a difference in how things are done. In some respects, it replaces technology and allows a semi-modern civilization to exist despite being limited to horses and blacksmiths. Perhaps a massive offensive spell went horribly wrong. (or horribly right…) There’s a book (or a series of them) who’s name slips my memory where spells actually use up the non-renewable magic of the world. Whatever the cause, the result is similar to the mundane disaster of The Machine Stops in my December article. People starve, armies become less effective, and rulers fall to howling mobs while the mages who held such power are lynched by manaphobic peasants.

The Evil Overlord Wins

What if Frodo had done the sensible thing, and let Sam off Gollum when he had the chance? Orcs feasting in Minas Tirth, the Shire in flames, massive glue factories in Rohan… you get the picture. Legend of the Five Rings has supplements for the Shadowlands that are chock-full of ideas along these lines, as are the scenes set in Scorch in Ralph Bakshee’s “Wizards”. Turn the natural order of things on their head. Shave the Dwarves, and put them to work in the fields, while the Eves have to work the mines. Let Orc tax collectors have a free hand to collect tribute from the Halfling villages. Clearly a time for Brave Heroes ? to set things right.

Extended Wars

Wars are hard on the peasantry. They get conscripted into armies, their crops get trampled by cavalry or requisitioned by commanders, their daughters and wives are carried off to be camp followers. Life as a peasant is hard enough. Years or decades of war makes such life nearly or literally impossible. Without the peasants bringing in the crops, the cities start to starve, even when they aren’t under siege. The great historical example of such primitive total war is the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. This was the longest and bloodiest of the post-Reformation Wars of Religion. It featured the Catholic Hapsburgs against the German Protestant princes and their supporters from Lutheran Sweden and Catholic France. The final result was a stalemate as they fought each other to exhaustion. Again, since magic can substitute for technology, you can have this sort of total war without the advances of the Renaissance. As an alternate, you can go with low-key magic, and have the matchlock muskets. Systems to look to for that would be GURPS: Spirits or Call of Cthulhu. (Preferably without the Big C and his buddies. That would be too much disaster to handle…) Farms fallen into ruin, cities wracked by plague, the Dwarves mostly retreated into their mountains, the Elvin forests now dark and hostile to outsiders, and roving bands of zealots, mercenaries, and bandits haunting the countryside set the scene. With magic in the mix, worse things can be haunting the countryside as sorcerers on both side conjure up things Man Was Not Meant To Know for tactical advantage. Heroes could be mercs fallen on hard times, willing even to fight for three square meals and a roof over their heads for a few nights. The Seven Condottieri anyone?

Space

There’s two types of disaster in sci-fi settings, local and widespread. Local disasters only affect one base or colony. While that’s bad for them, life goes on as normal for everyone else. Worlds like that can be either a side trip as a change of pace, or the setting itself. (It’s like Mad Max, but on an unterraformed Mars…) Widespread is much worse. The interstellar civilization itself is what fell or retreated. This is generally called “The Long Night”, and is often a feature in the backhistory of settings that have Humans scattered amongst the stars. Local disasters can be most any of the ones listed in my December article, plus one other.

Abandoned Colony

Perhaps the megacorporation that financed it has gone bust. A change of government back home may have cut back on the space program. A localized war or space phenomenon may have cut them off from the rest of the Galaxy. Perhaps the supply ships just stopped coming, and they don’t know why. All of a sudden, the colonists get to find out what self-sufficiency really means.

With the widespread disasters, you have a bit more of a problem. Space is big. Really, really big. It’s hard to knock everyone for a loop when they’re spread over hundreds of cubic light-years. Even if you’re limited to one system (Like in Dream Pod 9′s Jovian Chronicles or Steve Jackson Games’ upcoming Transhuman Space), it takes quite a wallop to accomplish this. Some suggestions on how to do this.

Economic Crash

Traveller’s (GDW, SJ Games, and others) Second Imperium went out with this sort of crash. Ships cost money to build and maintain, after all, and with too few ships plying the space lanes things fall apart.

War

Alien fleets swarming across the borders. Fleet Admirals grabbing for the Purple. Colonists rebelling against the core worlds. Rival megacorporations redefining the meaning of “hostile takeover”. Again, space is really, really big, so the weapons regularly in space combat would qualify as weapons of mass destruction if turned against a planet. Trade gets disrupted by commerce raiders and privateers. Depending on what you use to power your ships, they can make quite a mess as they blow up. Damaged fission plants contaminate atmospheres on reentry. Fusion and Antimatter plants blow up real good, but generally aren’t hazardous to the environment. Quantum Black Hole power plants can be very bad when wrecked. Slurp!

Homeworld Disaster

This one works best if you’re set in a single star system. While it’s suggested as a possible cause for a local disaster, it’s also good for a system-wide disaster. Instead of being stuck on Mars or Europa, you’ve got the whole system to play with. Ship to ship combat is much more serious when all the shipyards were at Earth and are now gone.

Supers

Superhero settings tend to do their post disaster stories as limited edition “alternate universe” stories. Still, they’ve got an honored place in the genre. It certainly adds some shades of gray to an otherwise black and white four-color morality. Under the stress of a disaster established heroes can have switched sides, as can some of the villains.

The Evil Overlord Wins

Replace Sauron from the Fantasy section with Magneto or Lex Luthor, and you’ve got the basic idea. I know Marvell has done this at least once. How bad things get depends on the villain.

Mundane Disasters

Just because you have tights and a cape doesn’t mean you’re exempt from regular troubles. A nuclear war will still ruin your whole day, and Y2K bugs will wipe your checking accounts just as easily. Even more than the Evil Overlord option, this will test what your heroes are made of. While outlining this article, I thought of an interesting twist on the “Super who can stop time delays a nuclear attack, but can’t unfreeze time or everyone gets vaporized” cliché. His power only effects a limited area. The super stops time just in his city. Eventually he’s able to disable the nuke, but by this time, the rest of the world is toast. Without outside support like farms and factories, the city will starve. He maintains his time-power until he dies alone of old age, and the city unfreezes to find that they’re now living 50 some odd years after a nuclear war. Imagine your players as the other supers in town and having to deal with this. Or present it as a puzzle for the surviving heroes from other cities: A pre-war city frozen in time behind an impenetrable barrier, with a half crazed hermit occasionally seen wandering the streets.

There’s no setting that can’t be made post holocaust with a little tweaking. The Weird West game I was running featured an extended US Civil War in the backtory that caused large parts of the nation to effectively be post holocaust wastelands. If things have gotten stale in your current game, feel free to shake things up with one of these Crashes and destroy the old order. The scramble to get to some form of safety alone will get your players’ hearts racing. Until next month, have a nice day and don’t forget to smash the state!