[ATE] What makes you interested?

[acrosome]

I'll add to my previous post to agree with a point others have made: the "familiar" setting. Half the work of world building is done for you- the geography.

For one thing incredibly detailed maps are available for free on the internet. Hell, you can download 7.5' quads free from the USGS if you want ridiculous detail! And for inspiration, just look around you...

Frex:

I live in Colorado Springs. I can see the entrances to Cheyenne Mountain from my back porch. Or, consider the Eisenhower Tunnel- great opportunities as a lair of some sort. As is the Moffat Tunnel. The missile fields in northern Colorado/southern Wyoming around Cheyenne beg to be scavenging targets of some sort, assuming that they weren't nuked. If they were nuked then a large radioactive wasteland extends eastwards almost to St Louis (they would be ground bursts with a lot of fallout). Check it out in NukeMap. Fort Carson means that (also assuming that it wasn't nuked into glass) there will be a lot of well-armed ex-soldiers about, perhaps with the old CG as warlord. The US Air Force Academy is on the north end of town- another opportunity for a powerful legacy group. The San Luis Valley has outstanding potential as a self-sufficient agricultural area due to it's unique hydrology. An allied society of ranchers in South Park seems like a neat idea.
Looking farther afield, there simply must be an organized, though smaller, Deseret popping into existence to the West. Perhaps an Inland Empire in the inland empire and Palouse? Black Hills Ammunition is just a little bit away in, well, the Black Hills. Perhaps they continue in some capacity as the ammo suppliers for the American west? Perhaps controlled by the Lakota of the Pine Ridge and/or Cheyenne River reservations, who are now a continental power because of it? The Navajo Nation to the south and west would almost certainly also survive as a polity- and a powerful one at that. Colorado is perfectly situated as a 'wasteland' between these groups. Most of the plains to the east are pretty hopeless for primitive agriculture until you hit about 100 degrees of longitude or so, so mostly now at best nomadic herders. Etc.

I'll come out and say that IMHO from what I can tell without the second supplement being released yet- despite his protests to the contrary, PK wrote Mad Max and Gamma World. He didn't write for more (for lack of a better word) "realistic" or "low" post-apoc settings. Which is great- that's clearly what most people want! Just not me. Frankly, the most ridiculous thing I want is a believeable source of automobile tires- they have a short lifespan and can't be recycled. But again, that's OK- ATE is still going to have lots of goodies for me to use, and so long as I know it's going to be SJG's official post-apocalyptic work I can freely go ahead and work on my own without worrying about be over-ruled by later publications. I'm very aware that I have eclectic interests.

This is very much in agreement with my sentiments:

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

I guess to sum up the things that make ATE interesting to me is...

...survival. Period. Full stop. Doing what it takes to survive (but see "...having humanity")
...building. I love the idea of building something from the ground up. Picking up the pieces from a broken world and making a new one as best you can.
...hope. Hope springs eternal and while realistically I think if we survived a cataclysmic event we'd kill each other off in 20-30 years from a gaming viewpoint I want hope. People coming together to do something good instead of acting like crabs in a bucket. Overall, I've always been the kind of person to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness (sometimes I do both).
...having humanity. Not even apocalypse should be Season 6 Walking Dead. Despite what I think if it's every man for himself then what the hell's the point? Sometimes you have to protect what's yours, but that doesn't mean you hose everyone in the wasteland.
...ingenuity and adapting. Being able to make one thing do another or working with what you got is something that calls to me on a visceral level.

I am a big hiker and camper and general outdoorsman- much more so than I am a role-player- so wilderness appeals to me. And most of the post-apoc world is wilderness. Maybe that's another reason I'm drawn to it. Heck, even playing fantasy I tend to enjoy wilderness sandboxes more than anything, and favor rangers and horse nomad types of characters. The American West is almost the perfect post-apoc setting because there is a lot of distance between town and cities.

As a total non sequitur- I once read an interesting scifi novel that included a social group called the Librarians Militant, and ever since then I've wanted to include a group by that name in a post-apoc setting. They'd be a group descended from an old university or some such who peregrinate about trying to acquire and preserve old knowledge, books, etc. to take back to their surviving library.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by scc

Some of the comments on the last two pages make me wonder if PTSD should be the norm for people in AtE.

@tshiggins on your comments about farming, realize that land quality and water availability have probably been shot to hell as well, looking at the LTC3 rules I'm thinking herding cattle, or more likely sheep, would be the best way to get food until land quality improves (I figure that most land will be Desolate because apocalypse).

Now it takes 20-40 years for Desolate land to recover a step and someone said that the comment of two generations means 40 years, and I think I've got the gleaming of a setting/game.

I think it depends on the nature of the apocalypse, really. If it's a pandemic, then the survivors should be able to find plenty of fertile, well-watered land. They just need to have viable seeds, or the presence of an existing agriculture base (orchards and vineyards and herds and flocks), or both -- plus the knowledge to use them, effectively.

Oddly, the places most likely to survive are those that struggle the most to cope with the modern world -- they just don't have as far to fall. Modern, cash-crop industrial agriculture depends heavily upon the industrial infrastructure for parts, replacements, chemicals and genetically-engineered seeds that maximize yields.

By contrast, Appalachian Kentucky, where I grew up, never got much into industrial agriculture -- nobody had the money to gain access to the industry. The only exceptions were those who had tobacco allotments, and that doesn't pay nearly as well, these days, as it used to (and tobacco rapes the soil, almost as badly as cotton).

However, a lot of people had huge gardens to supplement their diets -- effectively trading their time for money they didn't have. A lot of heirloom seed lines floated around, and anybody could almost always find anything they wanted to plant, without too much trouble.

It may be that I'm old enough that a lot of the grandparents of people my age had lived through the Great Depression. For a lot of them, having a backup was just reflexive.

Nowadays, I think a lot of the modern "organic and sustainable" farms may offer similar opportunities, along with a vast cultural difference. In their own way, a number of them have just as much trouble coping with the complexity of the modern world, so "a return to simplicity" is something many find quite attractive.

They have no interest in industrialized agriculture, so heirloom seed lines is what they want. One reason I picked Paonia as a worked example is because I learned that, following a 1992 New Age festival, the Rainbow Gathering, a lot of the participants chose to settle in and around the North Fork valley.

They formed the core of the sustainable agriculture movement (and probably bred Paonia Purple Paralyzer) that continues to exist in the area, now. So, that mix of old-school ag, coal-mining, ranching, and New Age sustainability, gives the area a unique mix of skills.

That mix, combined with an existing agriculture infrastructure that doesn't depend on industry, which is (in turn) combined with a geographical isolation and the fertility of a river valley, makes it one of the places most likely to survive an apocalypse of any sort.

I think there would be places like that, spotted throughout the map. Appalachia would have a lot of them, as would the Pacific Northwest, upper New England and upstate New York, maybe. The foothills of the Carpathians would have a lot of them, too, and I'd bet the Pyrenees would, also (the Basques are already pretty isolationist).

But, that's the pattern to look for -- isolated, fertile regions where time has (to some extent) already passed the locals by, or one in which the locals have deliberately turned their backs on modern society. Those will form the hearths of a future societies -- if they get the help they need to survive and prosper.

[vicky_molokh]

Usually I am not all too interested in post-apocalyptic gaming. Not in the sorts of settings that are considered typical, anyway. Of those that exist, I'd rather take a setting where the apocalypse came and went, and people adapted, stripping their tech tree to something that is both easily sustainable with a minimal infrastructural footprint and taller than the tech tree of the steam era. Such as Defiance, where much of the human infrastructure has been lost, but people still use the stuff that can be maintained/rebuilt without a big logistic footprint, such as nanotech. Or the Tiberian Sun series, where by the end much of Terra is barely-inhabitable, so people use semi-mobile ultra-tech enclaves.

So in a way it's a variation of rebuilding the high/ultra-tech civilization, following a scheme that will make it more robust in the face of another collapse. I know it's not a popular preference.

[scc]

Buying and going through he book, I think the problem is that it's written for fans of Mad Max, Fallout and Borderlands, because for some reason I get the vibe that despite The Eng having occurred generations ago, scavenging is still your main source of supplies

[(E)]

One thing that would be nice is a list of lifespans for various items.(might even merit a thread)

Numbers pulled out of thin air for example use only.
Desktop computers 5 years in good conditions due to cmos battery corrosion
Petrol 4 years to stage 1 degradation
Throw in a few modifiers for storage and weather.

[Minuteman37]

One thing that caught my eye was that MREs are specially mentioned as existing and being valuable trade goods when TL9 MREs only last 15 years and still only 30 years at TL10. Frankly I'm ok with this, but I normaly give my pre-end civilizations higher bio-tech then they're general TL would indicate. It's how I justify a lot of "mutations" in my wasteland.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by scc

Buying and going through he book, I think the problem is that it's written for fans of Mad Max, Fallout and Borderlands, because for some reason I get the vibe that despite The Eng having occurred generations ago, scavenging is still your main source of supplies

Well, for many materials, that is likely. 21st century civilization has produced massive amounts of raw materials by the standards of even poor countries today let alone the much smaller and poorer world after the crash, and if nobody local has the tech to make stainless steel or aluminum any more, there is still plenty to salvage. The parts of the world which have rebuilt capacities comparable to the industrialized countries circa 1900, and can cast their own steel, roll it, and galvanize it are not the wasteland ...

Even while Roman civilization was going strong, there were times when it was more common to tear down someone's old monument and use the good bits to build yours than to find artists who could make sculptures just as good, work porphyry, ... (and this continued into the 16th and 17th centuries ... Roman bronze went into the crucible, and Roman marble into the lime-kiln or the porch and floor of the new church, because that was cheaper than mining it from scratch or nobody had rediscovered the source for that particular hard green stone).

In poor countries today many people make their living recycling discarded machines from richer countries, the garbage from the rich suburb behind the wall, etc.

[scc]

Poly please think about the dissimilarities between the two situations. Your describing one where the old is used as raw materials for the new, generally as low grade. The one I'm doing is where it is used as is under conditions where it should have suffered massive amounts of damage. Please also remember that most consumer products AREN'T designed to last long.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by scc

Poly please think about the dissimilarities between the two situations. Your describing one where the old is used as raw materials for the new, generally as low grade. The one I'm doing is where it is used as is under conditions where it should have suffered massive amounts of damage. Please also remember that most consumer products AREN'T designed to last long.

No, they reused old columns and porphyry and panels of sculpture because they were better than what they could build (any book on later Roman art or early medieval churches will have examples). And Roman bronze statutes made excellent cannon: famously the bronze beams of the porch of the Pantheon went into the crucible for one of the renaissance popes.

When things which poor people are using break, they repair them or turn them into something else, because they can't afford a new one. When a city burns or is bombed, people haul what they can out of the ruins to repair or rebuild. I am pretty sure that people in Afghanistan have been salvaging war debris for 35 years, and many people in Latin America and Africa and Southeast Asia make their living salvaging disposable broken consumer goods.

[Ji ji]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

As I'm currently working on the idea of a post-apocalyptic fantasy campaign it struck me as interesting what attracts me to the After the End's genre. This in turn leads me to want to ask the GURPS community, what is it about ATE as a genre that interests you?

I like the idea of a wild world coming after, that is, a world where there is the legacy of society and culture and philosophy of today along with more primal values.