Modern Dark Ages

With the international, nay intercontinental, nature of the War on Terror (and all that hooplah in the Middle East) it could be argued that we’re living through World War Three. With that as a backdrop, it seems fitting to cover Post-Holocaust settings. As we all know, the first genre to hit it off in the role-playing world was Fantasy. The next most popular one was Post-Holocaust. In fact, I think that the second RPG I ever owned was TSR’s “Gamma World”. This was soon followed in my collection by FGU’s “Aftermath!”. For all of its mind-boggling needless complexity, “Aftermath!” was one of the first games I had played where you could semi-design your own character by buying skills, instead of just taking a character class. Many old time gamers still have a soft spot in their hearts for this sort of setting.

So, what do you want the destroyed world to be like? Cinematic or Realistic? Empty cities, or blasted rubble? Creeping glaciers or advancing kudzu? Pockets of civilization and technology, or book-leggers and memorizers being martyred by luddite hordes? Did the End come years ago, centuries ago, or is it happening in game?

I strongly recommend going Cinematic in this genre. Modern weaponry without modern (or magical) healing makes for a very high body count. Adding infection and gangrene into the mix means that you’ll be making lots of back-up characters as the old ones die slowly and painfully from peritonitis.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper,” — TS Eliot

The next big question is did things go with a whimper or a bang? Then it’s your pick of just which whimper or bang did the dirty work. Basically, whimpers leave things more or less standing, while bangs leave no stone standing on another, and generally salts the fields to boot.

Whimper endings

Germs (::cough, cough::)

A popular one in books and films. (Saves big-time on sets and locations for filmmakers, since they don’t have to trash things too badly.) This is the softest of the whimper endings. There’s going to be lots of stuff for the PC’s to salvage. Medical supplies will be in short supply, but there’ll be lots of everything else. Usual variants on the theme are escaped bio-weapons (Captain Tripps), virii from space (Andromeda Strain), and the tropical disease du-jour (Outbreak).

Environmental Collapse (Put him in charge of the Exxon tanker, ear-ly in the morning!)

As I mentioned two months ago, environmental collapse was a popular nightmare in the 70′s. The more extreme “Silent Spring” type disasters have much in common with Curtis LeMay style spasm nuclear exchanges. You aren’t going to have anyone left to play. A workable option for this would be abandoned stretches of the Rust Belt having gone all “Mad Max” while the civilized types have sealed themselves in Arcologies. It kind of blurs the line between Post-Holocaust and Cyberpunk, but that’s always been a question of degrees. The difference is that the folks in the Arcs are ignoring the folks outside, instead of using them openly as cannon-fodder and such. The advantage with this sort of arrangement is a source for magic ite… er, high-tech goodies.

Societal Collapse (Helter-Skelter!)

This is one of the more Bang-like Whimper endings, and one that could call for a bit more discretion than usual. Civil disturbances escalate into civil or racial war. A less contraversial version of this would be a total economic collapse where the world’s economy goes south along the lines of what happened in Weinmar Germany or early post-Soviet Russia. Even then, you’ll have a fair amount of ethnic violence thrown in to the mix as folks look for scapegoats. The two feed into each other in a nasty feedback loop. I’m including it mainly for completeness, and don’t actually recommend playing it.

Weather (Ridin’ the storm out!)

Often a side effect of other disasters, but at least one book I’ve read had it as the main disaster. Perhaps global warming is the only thing holding back the next ice age. It’s also useful for one-shot type games where the players are dealing with a localized crisis like an earthquake or a hurricane. It’s under the Whimper section, since there isn’t much damage, until the glaciers get there.
The Machine Stops (What’s this button do?)

Someone sets of a world wide network of EMP satellites, frying all the electronics. The Saudi oil fields get turned to radioactive glass. The Y2K bug bites. It’s conventional wisdom that no nation is more than three meals from a revolution. This one knocks us back to the stone age without killing anyone right off. Good to test just how ruthless your players can be. “The Trigger Effect” is the definitive film on the subject.

Bang endings

Nuclear War (So long Mom!, I’m off to drop The Bomb…)

The classic. Cities turned into sheets of green glass. Fallout killing everything down wind. Smoke from the fires kicking off Fimbulwinter. It’s pretty much clichéd. One way to make it new and interesting again would be to change the setting. For example, I was once reading GURPS: Y2K (SJ Games post-disaster sourcebook) while listening to a Jimmy Buffet CD. The mad thought of running a post WWIII game set in the Caribbean came to mind. Outside of Cuba, there aren’t many targets in the area. Plenty of sailboats for transport after the petrol stocks run out. Lots of excuses for bad Jamaican accents, mon!

Meteor Impact (Twinkle, twinkle little star…)

This one has a little bit of everything. Earthquakes, tidal waves, weird weather, glaciers, nutcases taking it all as a sign. You may have to throw in a limited nuclear exchange to speed up the end in places like the Midwest and Trans-Ural Russia, which aren’t on the coasts.

Alien Invasion (“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one”)

Well, we all know about those one in a million shots, right? The best way to think about this would be to picture Earth as a strategically located atoll during WWII, and the two races of aliens as the Japanese & Americans. We’re the stone age natives of the atoll, caught in the crossfire. One group sets up shop, and swats aside all we throw at them. Next group comes in and shoots the heck out of the first group, shoots the heck out of us for helping them, then leaves. (Ok, so not quite like us in WWII, but you get the point.) Lots of nifty alien stuff left laying around afterwards. No idea how or even if it works, but, hey it’s there…

Other endings

The Magic Returns (It’s maaaaaaaaaaaagic!)

Maybe they shouldn’t have let the new-age Druids play around with Stonehenge. Perhaps the ley-line power converter plants that they built as renewable energy sources were a bad idea. Whatever the reason, tech type stuff became flaky, and spells started to work. Perhaps with a little time to adjust, things might have been ok, but this happened all at once.

Return of the Old Ones (Hastur, Hastur, Hastur! See? Nothing hap…)

Much like when The Magic Returns, only ickier. Gibbering monstrosities from beyond the void show up and start eating people. Think about what would have happened if the heroes had failed in “The Mummy” or “Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions”.

So, you’ve knocked to world flat. Now when do you dump your characters in?

As It Happens

Your characters get to make the hard choices, and there’s plenty to loot. On the downside, this is when eight or nine people out of ten croak.

10 to 20 Years After

Less to loot, but the threats are reduced as well. Ammo begins to be more expensive than the guns that fire it. One benefit of this is that you can play the first generation of kids born after the End. This was the default setting for “Aftermath!”.

100 Years or More

Fantasy, with different props. You have mutants instead of Orcs, tech instead of magic, and ruins instead of dungeons. One nice point is that you can be much more vague about what-all went wrong. You can also throw in nifty mutations. Twenty years after, you might be able to handwave, say semi-sapient rats or big armor-plated cockroaches, but hundreds or thousands years later you can have all sorts of mutations & such. “Gamma World” had such a setting.

Generational

This is the sort of long term grand campaign that can keep a gaming group occupied for years of real-time. Basically, you start things off with an assortment of everyday folks when the End hits. Run that until they find a safe place to settle & fend off the hordes of other folks who’re also looking for that sort of shelter. Cut ahead ten to twenty years. Modify the characters to allow for the decades of down-time, or bring in new ones. They deal with the new emergencies that have come along. Repeat for a few more generations. I’ve been working on a setting like this, set on a distant corporate colony planet. An interstellar war leaves the workers to fend for themselves. For the second generation crisis, I’m planning on having the corporation returning to claim their lost holdings, while the abandoned workers see no reason they should give it up. The niftiest thing about this sort of campaign is that you and your characters get to see the long term effects of what they do.

I’ve forgotten who said it, but “An adventure is someone else having one hell of a rough time, far away”. Post-Apocalypse setting is a chance to adventure in the roughest of all possible times.