Post EMP dystopia, viability as a RPG setting?

[Luke Bunyip]

Thank you all for your thoughts and time.

I think I've got enough grist for the mill.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by (E)

- Panic, a false alarm for something like an Ebola outbreak, meteor strike or Yellowstone eruption may cause lingering chaos.

This touches on what I think is the *real* requirement for an ATE setting. It's not killing a lot of people or damaging a lot of stuff - civilizations have operated on a fairly high level in the past with a tiny fraction of our population and infrastructure. What you actually need to do is to shatter people's confidence in the existing social institutions and make it difficult to form new ones. It's the psychological damage, not physical destruction that gets you an *end* rather than just a few bad years. If people still trust a government, almost any government, the rebuilding effort starts almost immediately. Some panics that have shaken public trust are a good start.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It's not killing a lot of people or damaging a lot of stuff

Well, it can be, but it has to be in an ongoing way. The closest RL equivalent to After the End is various perennial warzones where external groups keep funneling weapons in (e.g. Afghanistan, the Congo).

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by malloyd

... What you actually need to do is to shatter people's confidence in the existing social institutions and make it difficult to form new ones. It's the psychological damage, not physical destruction that gets you an *end* rather than just a few bad years...

This is the background setting flavour I'm seeking to have. It wouldn't require much handwaving for my players to live in a bleak future Australia; we down here can be insanely proud of our own states, but the thing which generally unites us is a dislike of the Commonwealth government. We joke that Canberra is a waste of a perfectly good sheep paddock.

A bit of outside events (Great Depression 2.0, anyone?), a decrease in central authority, and some localised mayhem (asymmetric warfare, rioting, cyber attacks to infrastructure, severe bushfires followed by floods etc)... Sounds like the ticket for me.

[(E)]

After reading through everything here another angle occurs to me.
A major and more importantly very well publicized disaster occurs and the powers that be do a truely bad job with disaster recovery in the aftermath. This leads to a "Do it yourself" attitude in society akin to prepping but with a vocal segment who actively fear, dislike or distrust the government.

[Luke Bunyip]

Hey (E)! I just stumbled across your [AtE] Farming thread! Respect, man. I'm only halfway through, but there's so much there that I can repurpose for my own setting.

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by (E)

After reading through everything here another angle occurs to me.
A major and more importantly very well publicized disaster occurs and the powers that be do a truely bad job with disaster recovery in the aftermath. This leads to a "Do it yourself" attitude in society akin to prepping but with a vocal segment who actively fear, dislike or distrust the government.

...Puerto Rico -should- become that but won’t.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by malloyd

This touches on what I think is the *real* requirement for an ATE setting. It's not killing a lot of people or damaging a lot of stuff - civilizations have operated on a fairly high level in the past with a tiny fraction of our population and infrastructure. What you actually need to do is to shatter people's confidence in the existing social institutions and make it difficult to form new ones. It's the psychological damage, not physical destruction that gets you an *end* rather than just a few bad years. If people still trust a government, almost any government, the rebuilding effort starts almost immediately. Some panics that have shaken public trust are a good start.

That makes it sound like the "best" way to get an ATE setting is to start with a dystopian world that then completely crumbles. To many survivors, rebuilding would seem to lead inevitably to the past society, not conceiving of creating a better one.
That could solve my major problem with most ATE fiction. People always seem self destructively anti-society and antisocial to a deranged degree. This would give them at least a plausible reason.

[Jack Sawyer]

I think the most important thing is a timeline and planning. One of the things I've noticed about Fallout is that it could do with more 'breadth' and less 'depth.' They could be spending less time on developing a particular region and advancing chronologically, and showing the larger picture of a post-apocalyptic Fallout Earth. It's the glimpse you get beyond the larger region and hints (even stuff like Mothership Zeta) that really can grow things. For me, at least.

There's also pacing, since that can have an impact on the theme and mood. If you want something grimdark, then you don't want progression to be too obvious or persistent (Metro 2035 is a good contrast there, because it's a pretty damn bleak setting, especially the novels.) If you want to stay away from grimdark, then you have to carefully pace that rebuilding to give that sense of hope and accomplishment (esp if it involves the players) but not too quickly that you end up diluting the 'post apocalyptic' atmosphere (again, like Fallout)

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by malloyd

So why not just say that? How did that happen? Who cares? It's a setting assumption that it did somehow.

My bad. It's taken till now for me to get up to speed with the forum zeitgeist* re: AtE, so I now get where a lot of the responses up thread were coming from thematically. (E)'s [AtE]Farming thread was an absolute goldmine for ideas.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Note that vaguely realistic EMP isn't going to be enough. It is simply not all that bad.

Noted. I've been listening to what folks have been posting in this thread, and I've quietly discarded having just one singular cause (ie EMP), and decided to go with a host of catastrophe, rather than just one event.

* I've been elsewhere on the interwebs for the last couple of years. Something something World of Tanks, something.