[PTTG]

Yellowstone-2: Yellowstone went off in 1963, just as everyone was breathing a sigh of relief from the Cuban missile crisis. It's a worst-case scenario, of course. What that means for your players is that a fascinating parachronic disaster or just a random portal they find can put them into an ash blizzard if you like.

Lotus Eaters featured the 1999 invention of an easy means of trans-cranial stimulation and neural synergy. It may be mundane or it may be psionic. In effect, it's an easy and computationally cheap means of full-immersion VR. It taps into the brain's own ability to create imagery, meaning that even a 2000s-era computer can make vivid photorealistic experiences.

The company selling the Dreamscape System grew explosively, and soon, despite scattered moral panic, more and more people were wearing the devices and dreaming away the day. Apparently they were even able to hack into subjective-time experience, meaning that eight hours of use could feel like 40 or more hours of perceived time.

By accident or by design, the device was extremely addictive, and once hooked, withdrawal lead to rapid decline in initiative, and without care, it was terminal. The population collapsed, with people either neglecting to eat and drink, or attempting to go cold turkey and entering a kind of waking coma.

The world is actually almost untouched -- if poorly-maintained -- with a dramatically reduced population living in the overbuilt cities. But society has lost its sense of vivre, possibly only because the population of a fraction of what it once was. More and more, the survivors give up on reality, find a comfortable place and a discarded Dreamscape device, and dream their quietly depressing lives away. Current date 2018.