Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

Or, to spin it up a notch, what caused the apocalypse and how can we make it happen again?

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

Sure, I'm just saying that if it was billed to me as a small group of PCs totally alone, struggling to survive, thats not the type of campaign I'd want to play in. Like has been mentioned before, there has to be hope, and if it's just the 4-6 of us PCs, unless I was assured that we would have the opportunity to contact others in the game, I probably wouldn't sign on for the campaign. Isolation is good, but only in contrast to the comfort of "home," whatever that may be. It's a candle in the darkness, all that is left of the glorious light that was human civilization.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

I usually go for the whole Last (wo)man on Earth type feeling, but I also really enjoy some sort of transitive element. Say with what you have up there a campaign that begins with some who got isolated during the EVENT* survives for a while on his own but then learns that their are other survivors who are trying to rebuilding society or just a place to live.

Some things that if I would include were I writing a campaign up:

1) Barter/trade rules...what good is paper money gonna do? This would require tinkering with the wealth rules a lot, but I think would be worth it in the end if you can get it functional.
2) Some expanded scourging guidelines, say something like a margin of success chart. You rolled 1 under your skill, you didn't find that semi-new carburetor you were looking for but...you did find one, it needs work. You rolled 5 under your skill...the carburetor is still in the box, lucky you! Maybe techniques for scourging specific things, or in specific places.
3) Set down guidelines for making things: this one ALWAYS comes up no matter what game I run/play in. Somebody always wants to build something, the rules presented in 3ed Low-tech work well enough.
4) Conflict: whether its the nuclear winter you are trying to outlast or mutant space wolves from Saturn. When playing in a post-apocalyptic setting you should feel you are just barely surviving (at least at first ^_^), barely making due, barely able to keep enough food in your belly if not your knapsack.
5) Lastly, if your the GM, listen to what you players want, give them a survey, or just ask them. One man's PA could be alien overlords, anther's zombies, and a third Hell on Earth, The Rapture, and Hallelujah! Praise Jesus. Heck one could ask for all three, know what scares/excites your players, know what they each want and try to tailor it to them. Nothing sucks worse than a Apocalyptic future than just doesn't do it for you.

Hope it helped you some,

Ghostdancer


*in this context meaning what ever world-ending life shattering incident that had happened.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

I enjoy Gamma World or Twilight:2000 kinds of post-apocalypse games. They seem to be two extremes:

Gamma World has mutants, blasters, mutagenic radiation, and super-science fiction bubbled cities. There isn't much of a theme of "there is no hope, everyone is going to die." You get to play with cool tech, but it's often dangerous and it's not easily replaced. You can build up civilization or just wander around trying to find that Black Ray Pistol you know is out there somewhere.

T2K is more realistic. You can use cool military tech, but you have to worry about radiation and marauders and keeping your ammo supply up. You get less Gun Bunny issues than a modern game - your corporal can't have a totally tricked out custom-made handgun with tactical whatevers and a grip made out of some special material he just read about in Handgunner magazine, because he can't get it and he can't have an unlimited supply of match-grade ammo. You get less mutants, but your concerns can vary the same way - just try to get home or try to set up a base and work local issues.

In both I like the scarcity of resources - you don't have the issue of PCs getting lethal high-tech weaponry with unlimited access to ammo (if they've got the money and connections). You can use a cool technical item, even a damaged one, like "treasure." But it'll all run out unless the GM gives you replacements, so it's worth conserving until you need it. It can be loads of fun running a guy with a .357 magnum pistol and broadsword and a shield made out of a stop sign and some wood, facing off with equally motley-armed fellows.

I think I dislike the "hopelessness and fear" aspect you see in some games...I enjoy the occasional zombie apocalypse, but it's got to be a one-shot or short-term game. I just can't get into civilization crumbling, people dying horribly everywhere, there's-nowhere-to-run gaming for more than a few sessions. After that, really, I just want to shoot mutants with my Mark VII Blaster Rifle or collect brass for my 5.56mm rounds after shooting it up with a band of marauders, not deal with the dying of humanity.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

I tend to like the (just under) over the top stuff... a cross between Fallout and Gamma World.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

This is just huge . . . way more important than anything in the thread so far. Everything else depends on the answer to this question. From experience:

This works the best by far. Few players like settings where the most important events are in the past and they get to see them only in "vignettes" and "cut scenes," if at all. Most players like to be there when the fit hits the shan, and want to roleplay the cleverness that let them survive when most other people did not. Moreover, players have a much easier time identifying with their characters if their characters could be them. They can talk normally without the GM having to remind them every few minutes, "Uh, you never saw one of those," or, "You wouldn't know what that is."

Conversely, these two are the least likely to work as explicitly post-apocalypse campaigns. They might work fine as slice-of-life games set in alien societies that happen to live on a planet very much like our own, but they won't have the post-apocalypse "feel," any more than would a game about Victorians digging up Greek and Roman artifacts. All sense of immediacy will be lost, and if there are still people around after a century or especially a millennium, then plausibility demands that hand-to-mouth survival is no longer an issue, as generations of people have clearly figured it out. See, for instance, Horseclans.

These two comments suggest two important themes:

1. A chance to be clever.
2. Hand-to-mouth survival.

All-in-all, something disturbingly close to a fantasy dungeon crawl. It's no surprise that Gamma World did just that.

—

I should add that pure-strain survivalist, cabin-building gaming – in the vein of, say Twilight 2000 – is a rare and acquired taste. Most gamers really don't want to count cans, make tons of rolls for searching ruins and building shacks, and avoid violence because there aren't enough bullets or bandages. The majority view of post-apocalypse gaming has mutants, psis, weird tech, zombies, etc. It comes closer to something like the Resident Evil movies. In my case, for instance, I couldn't imagine a fun post-apocalypse game without zombies. Oh . . . and dog skull.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

Not necessarily true. I ran one that featured cryogenically frozen early 21st-century people unfrozen way, way too late. Worked just fine, and avoided the whole "the zombies are coming, run!" element I didn't want and let them use their out-of-game knowledge to try to solve in-game situations. They could act like modern-day people who got to play with a user-friendly Death Ray Zorcher to fight some rampaging psionic mutants. Sure, they encountered people who'd solved the whole "survival" problem, but the PCs hadn't, and not everyone just wanted to help them.

Except you need an established civilization for your Deathball or Jugger league, dude. Otherwise you're just a bunch of weird refugees with sticks with a chain on the end and a dog skull.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

In general, gamers don't like or want meta-plot – partly because "meta-plot" has been co-opted to mean "publisher-side story arc with which my campaign is liable to get out of synch." As well, for mundane apocalypses, getting at the source can lead to moral explorations that most players aren't up for. So a big campaign about the social decay that led to destruction, ending in developing a new and ethical society, probably has limited appeal.

On the other hand, this is where the gold is in weird apocalypses! Dig back through the rubble and find out who made the Death Ray, zombie plague, or whatever. That brings the PCs into conflict with the surviving remnants of those who did the deed – and most players love conflict more than anything else. It also extends the hope that the PCs can find a cure for the plague, huge underground city with food to which they can lead the survivors, whatever.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

Oh, you can engineer things so that it works. Defrosting the PCs is a different and unusual premise, though. I was mostly assuming people who didn't have a 100- or 1,000-year discontinuity in their memory.

Zombies don't preclude established civilization. Humanity could fight them back and entrench, and build an uneasy civilization outside which zombies are dialed back to the threat level of storms, enemy invaders, or man-eating lions: lethally bad, but not automatically society-destroying. Check out Unhallowed Metropolis, for instance. One thing I find weird is the assumption that a zombie apocalypse is more grim and less likely to let society rebuild than, say, a nuclear one. I see it as quite the opposite.

Re: Post-Apocalypse Campaign
 

You missed the option of the Integrated Human-Zombie Deathball League.

The IHZDL is pretty popular in some regions. ;)