Post-Apocalypse Campaign

[safisher]

What are the key features (thematically speaking), you would want to see in a PA campaign? Isolation, desperation, man versus man, etc. What draws you to that setting?

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by safisher

What are the key features (thematically speaking), you would want to see in a PA campaign?

Mutants
Neobarbs fighting over the architectual and literal bones of Western Industrialised society
The lack of centralised authority
Spam as a valuable commodity
The shock of leaving a controlled enviroment (aka Fallouts "Vault") and going into an unknown and unmapped wilderness.
Really big insects
Psionics

[Victor Maxus]

ROAD WARRIOR... 'nuf said.

[Greg 1]

I can't give a simple answer because there are so many ways to play a post-apocalptic campaign and different styles appeal for different reasons. Something gonzo like Gamma World can be more about the infinite resiliance of life than the tragedy of self-destruction.

I do think that to draw me, a post-apocalyptic game has to mix the familiar and the dangerous in some way that makes internal sense. I also think that, unlike a lot of the best post-apocalyptic fiction, there has to be a sense of hope or it won't work as a game.

That's a bit vague. Oh well. I'm going to bed.

[Crakkerjakk]

A sense of desolate isolation. Sitting on a ridgeline and seeing nothing but wilderness as far as the eye can see.

Depending on the time after the apocalypse, a sense of what's been lost. Wandering along streets made of broken asphalt, with plants pushing through the cracks. Crumpled skyscrapers soaring into the sky, windows filled with broken glass. If it's nuclear, clearing the edge of a crater in the middle of a city, the ground dropping away, with a sheet of glass in the center.

Muskets. Muskets can be manufactured at very low tech levels. Same with powder and shot. Unless the apocalypse threw us back into scattered groups of stone-age tribes, muskets should be around.

People trying to rebuild. Some society would arise. Roving bands of maniacs riding bikes and cars a la mad max wouldn't be sustainable for long.

Just a partial list. If it's cinematic, I agree with the mutants and giant insects and animals and stuff.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Greg 1

I can't give a simple answer

But you gave a good one. Hope and desolation.

[whswhs]

I've run a postapocalyptic campaign, at least by certain definitions: It took place in the world of Atlas Shrugged, starting ten years after the first scene in the novel, which portrayed the total economic and political collapse of American society.

I didn't go for any wild pseudoscientific stuff like mutants. The exotic scientific phenomena were all based on things in the novel itself: A structural metal with half the cost and three times the strength of steel, a power source that was a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, and a circular area of Iowa that had been totally demolished by a sonic disintegration attack. The struggle wasn't to survive but to rebuild economically, by building a new bridge over the Mississippi to make possible the laying of eastbound track. On the other hand, there were a lot of lawless areas and North America had been balkanized (functioning political units were the United States—from California to Kansas—the Confederacy, Texas, West Virginia, the New England Confederacy, Quebec, the Yukon, the gangster-run city-state of Chicago, and the kingdom of Hawaii). The main theme emerged as the role of violence in the creation and preservation of a free society.

I always wanted to run an Aftermath campaign. But I never actually tried anything during a Mad Max type of wasteland or an Andre Norton radioactive postholocaust desert. Building campaigns interest me more than campaigns about struggling to survive, or the war of all against all.

Bill Stoddard

[Nymdok]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

..Depending on the time after the apocalypse, a sense of what's been lost. Wandering along streets made of broken asphalt, with plants pushing through the cracks. Crumpled skyscrapers soaring into the sky, windows filled with broken glass......

Couldnt agree more. There should be some reflection on mans former greatness, its what gives the theme weight.

Buildings, bridges and Monuments are great visual representations. Who can forget seeing the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes? More interesting still is how is that feeling similar to seeing some of the Ruins of Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt or other historically great civilization?

The little things that make our life easier do well also. Anything electric and niche works as a nice curio, but dont forget some of the other odd, self indulgent tech we have like reclining chairs. (What society is so lazy it invents a special chair to increase its comfort during laziness?)

Other trivialities that I think could make neat cameos in PostApoc

Magic 8-Ball
Rubiks Cube
Sleep Bindfolds
Back Scratchers
Loufa(sp?) sponges
Disco Mirror balls

Nymdok

p.s.
One of my earliest exposures to Far history PostApoc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Waters_of_Babylon

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

People trying to rebuild. Some society would arise. Roving bands of maniacs riding bikes and cars a la mad max wouldn't be sustainable for long.

When I saw that Pyramid was doing a Post-Apocalypse issue, I tried to put together an article about what a typical community might be like. I never got past the early stages, but I think you'd see a lot of communities on the big rivers. Most Post-Apocalypse stories seem to emphasize big cities (in ruins) or the desert, but, as they did in early times, rivers offer enormous opportunities for societies knocked out of their comfort zone by some war, cataclysm, etc.--fresh water, energy for mills, fish, a "highway" for trade with other communities, etc.

Places that need a lot of high tech support, pipelines, etc. like Phoenix are likely to be in trouble. Places like Little Rock or Omaha, right on a big river, are going to have some significant advantages because it will be easier to get low tech access to fresh water, power, etc. That will keep the city going long enough, one hopes, for people to rebuild.

Mark

[safisher]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Building campaigns interest me more than campaigns about struggling to survive

I've always seen this as simply a matter of scale. An empire or a log cabin? The struggle for both can be epic, personal, and very important to the world's outcome -- whether that world is continent or a valley in the Ozarks.