Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[starslayer]

What if the disease actually caused the lost knowledge. Some sort of brain infection that literally wipes all active knowledge from all humans on the planet resetting us to muscle memories only (an airborne version of syphilis might be able to do it, some sort of new bacteria or virus that hosts in the brain and mimics the action of the neuron release hormones would do it it too). Most people die in horrible starvation (even though they might have cans of food right in front of them they don't know to open it), no one can communicate with one another, everything is new and scary, people don't know who there children are, or parents are.

Some people are immune, like with any disease, but they are fleetingly rare, just enough to make sure that society does not completely die out. If you want to make it ironic make people who are fundamentally flawed in some way be the immune, like say- those with MS are unaffected by the virus because there brains are already under constant autoimmune assault.

The disease lasts a few generations with multiple full force 'resets' for the infected, before mankind adapts and becomes immune (this would mean that the few who were immune from the get go are now dead, and they may never have found another immune individual to pass on there knowledge to).

Everything is forgotten, but a lot of the stuff might still be there. Now that the disease is largely in regression things are going to advance, and quickly; but for the scope of the game you can have whatever mix of 'rediscovered' technology you like (Just expect that the PCs are going to 'discover' a lot of things you were not expecting them to do so by pointing out how simple it would be).