Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
In The Fires of Spring
By the 2040s most of the world had been through two decades of hell. COVID, the Russo-Ukrainian war, the famines and economic collapses caused by two of the biggest exporters of grain, fertilizer, and petroleum products going off line for years, the birth derth, the demographic collapse, the ending of the Mare Librium (Freedom of the Seas), the general isolationist trend in the USA, and the collapse of China, all were trouble enough. The Indonesian volcanic events placed vast clouds of sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere creating a sudden brutal freeze worldwide. Thanks to both strong internal lines of supply and the petroleum supplied by fracking the USA was far more stable than any other developed nation. During the decades of winter the USA kept scientific progress going. By 2070 the USA had commercially viable fusion generators. By the 2090s the world was coming out of the crisis of the 21st century. But now in 2115 there are suddenly signs of the vulcanic winter going away. No one had expected the the icy new equilibrium to end for centuries. Now it looks like the skies will clear in a mere twenty years. The problem is that, between the collapse of theMare Librium and the introduction of the American fusors, people had to deal with the brutal cold and the lack of fuel by burning lignum, the lowest grade of coal. Because lignum is 40% water by weight, it's the smokiest and highest polluting coal there is. The fading of global winter will bring a whole different climate disaster to a world that hasn't yet recovered. Basically, the world is almost collapsed from an apocalyptic crisis and is going to slide into another one immediately. A fragile and wounded world is lashing out. Some fighting for life, others simply flailing as they die. PCs can take many roles. Espionage is always an option. Many of the surviving nations want to find something that gives them a handle on the handful of still strong nations. A means of gaining power, control,or at least aid. Aid workers in the middle of a humanitarian disaster trying to save lives in what is becoming a killing field. Marines trying to extract aid workers from a killing field. In a collapsing nation, ordinary people trying to keep themselves alive can be a grim adventure in itself. Remember, adventure is somebody else having a hard time. Assume that this world has just become TL9. However, most people are lucky to live in TL8 circumstances and many people's circumstances are in free fall. Any positive level of wealth should come with Unusual Background costs. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Some ideas and thoughts about this scenario.
First a several decades long winter from a vulcanic catastrophe is always a possible scenario in the real world and it has has happened before. But you would have real cold temperatures maybe 6 or more °C less. Second coal smoke also drops the local temperature a lot, in some real polluted european heavy industry areas, changing from coal to gas raised the local temperature by up to 3°C, just because of the smoke particles shielding the sunlight away, it worked also at a global scale. It is a discussed topic in climate scientists circles, that this smoke masked the coming climate catastrophe. From this 2 things we could conclude several facts for your scenario. The masked climare change can bring a even faster change from cold to hot, with all what comes from this, like destabilisation of nation for example. A decade long crisis you describe would kill any known nation on earth! Because if you lower the temperature the food production will break down nearly completely. Tambora created a year without summer and a food crisis, your scenario has a real chance to destroy the worlds breadbaskets until the little ice age is over. Border for effective farming of cereals will move several 100 km southward. Add a changed rain pattern and farmers all over the world will struggle to produce any surplus. And the world bread baskets supplied a lot of otherwise failed states, who will now break down. Their population wants food and will travel to the known farming areas. The cold also make some region uninhabitable. Actually a lot of persons want to migrate ot US / Canada or europe, in your scenario the population from europe and US / canada will move southward. We speak here of several 100 million climate refugees. Even fusion wouldn´t change that. The food problem will lead to a massive die off, and the migration will lead to armed conflicts, luckily for the so called western nations the potential host nation have not enough firepower to stop them. I guess if 10% of the actual global population are alive, once the weather changes again, humanity can be lucky. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Dandelions through the Pavement
They never can seem to get any clear answer as to what the wars were about. The best I ever got was that several nations in Asia started fighting over resources and money. After a while both the sides demanded America join their side. I hear that the leaders at that time pointed out to both sides that all of them had labelled America a warmonger and said we needed to stay out of their business. So we chose to stay out of the war. But as both sides were facing famine and needed American food, neither side could tolerate American neutrality nor take the chance America might join the other side. They fired missiles at America. They weren't good at maintaining their weapons so few of them hit. But that caused chaos. Everyone blamed America for being attacked. In the middle of this chaos someone used bioweapons. Since the Americas are surrounded by oceans, we got a little time to prepare. But it was still hell. That's why we've had sixty years of misery. However, they've got new power plants on line. Not nuclear, something called fusion. We're going to rebuild. Basically, a nuclear attack, America used the blackmail of using their highly functional missiles to deter further attack. The bioweapons were asymmetrical warfare. But the blowback from using the bioweapons destroyed the users. The world is climbing out of a brutal if short dark age. The Amer-Canadian fusors are reviving North America. Europe wants its own fusors. As Europe largely went fascist during the crisis (Ireland and the Nordic nations being the exceptions) the now Social Democratic North American nations aren't interested. Asia and Africa are chaotic wastelands. Africa, because of its mineral wealth is the target of the European powers. As the combination of excellent farmlands, vast systems of navigable rivers, and abundant mineral resources is on the side of the North American democracies, the rulers of Europe fear a resurgent North America might make their people unwilling to accept fascism. PCs can be spies, refugees, explorers, or Merchant adventurers. A variant campaign might involve the life of a small town in the USA or Canada being reconnected to the modern world. In many ways it would be like going from 1820 to 2030 in a decade. The lives of junior high and high school aged kids in the middle of the transition dealing with the changes in their town and their lives and the social disruptions caused by it all could be dramatic. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Utopia Bites: Well, they did it. They invented robots and AIs that could do pretty much everything that a human could do and a fair bit no human could do. They sent robot miners out there to provide all the metals they needed and more. They built clean and safe fusion power plants to give themselves all the power their shiny cities needed. They built utopias.
And they locked us out. They didn't need our labour any more after all. Machines were just as good and much more docile. They built machines to be their soldiers as well. They put down the uprisings. They told themselves that we were intellectually inferior and natural criminals. We didn't deserve a piece of Utopia. We'd just wreck it. Well, we may be criminals, but our "intellectual inferiority" isn't enough to keep us from working out the flaws in their security systems, the limitations of their dimwitted automaton guards. They want us to be criminals? Then we'll be criminals. |
Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Monsters from the Id, and Other Strangers
Brain science finally made PSI respectable, and for that matter, practical. ESP and Telepathy first became practical and then normal. Soon a broad range PSI powers were proved real and made practical. The more dramatic powers, like teleportation were rarer. However, an unexpected problem came up. Psychology used to think of dissociative disorders as rare. That was proven wrong. Dissociative disorders coming to the surfaces of consciousness and take over a person's actions was rare, dissociative disorders were actually commonplace. Worse, with telepathy, telekinesis, and other powers, formerly suppressed personalities, can interact with the outside world. "Stray thought" is no longer a metaphor. Basically, the world of 2120 is haunted. The lost and walled off fragments of human minds are taking the roles they always had in dreams. The PCs are elite trouble shooters. They use their PSI powers to corral trouble making "Ghosts" and their hosts. This job requires several types of skills. Social skills to deal with the hosts who are generating "Ghosts." Psi and physical skills for dealing with monsters. Investigate skills for finding which ghost belongs to whom. Note: Some "Ghosts" find places to haunt and follow local folklore and urban legends in their behavior. I picture this setting as having about the same technology as Transhuman Space . Use those books as a source. |
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