So, I've decided to start a post-apocalyptic/sci-fi collaborative universe, a la Fallout or somesuch. The world of course, is our world, after an apocalyptic disaster.
I'll start this with a few guidelines:
Tech level is essentially Afghanistan or Somalia-level - primitive with sprinklings of more advanced technologies, particularly in weaponry. Super-science (think powered armour, anti-gravity, laser guns, etc.) is allowed, but must be rare. This includes lost superweapons and other such really powerful stuff, which should be very very rare. AIs housed in massive, building-sized mainframes and such are allowed, but no god-level stuff, robots or compact AIs.
The cause of the apocalypse should be left undefined, and articles about it should be entirely in-character.
Society has relatively stabilised, as it's 500-600 years after the great disaster that caused the apocalypse. This means feudal kingdoms, empires, etc. not roving gangs of bikers like in Mad Max (although you can have a Mongol-esque horde using motorbikes. That's cool).
Try and put your articles in-universe, with an optional 'what's really going on' bit at the end with out-of-universe information. Or you can do it entirely IC or OOC. All ideas for how to write articles are cool with me.
Anybody interested?
After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Universe
Moderators: Invictus, speaker-to-trolls
After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Universe
You have ruled this galaxy for ten thousand years.
You have little of account to show for your efforts.
Order. Unity. Obedience.
We taught the galaxy these things.
And we shall do so again.
You have little of account to show for your efforts.
Order. Unity. Obedience.
We taught the galaxy these things.
And we shall do so again.
Re: After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Univer
To be honest, 500-600 years is a bit long for a "post"-apocalyptic timeline - humanity most likely would have rebounded since then, to the point of not being anywhere near the title of "post"-apocalyptic. Less than a hundred years after the nuclear barrage/angel-demon war/plague/zompocalypse/canceling of World of Warcraft would be far more post-apocalyptically.
I say this, with post-apocalyptic literature as easily my favorite genre of fiction - stuff along the lines of Mad Max and the Book of Eli are about to archetypical of the genre as you can get.
I say this, with post-apocalyptic literature as easily my favorite genre of fiction - stuff along the lines of Mad Max and the Book of Eli are about to archetypical of the genre as you can get.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Re: After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Univer
I was thinking it could be set mid-rebound, with lots of 'uncivilised' areas and nomadic tribes, but also city-states and relatively small kingdoms.Mobius 1 wrote:To be honest, 500-600 years is a bit long for a "post"-apocalyptic timeline - humanity most likely would have rebounded since then, to the point of not being anywhere near the title of "post"-apocalyptic. Less than a hundred years after the nuclear barrage/angel-demon war/plague/zompocalypse/canceling of World of Warcraft would be far more post-apocalyptically.
I say this, with post-apocalyptic literature as easily my favorite genre of fiction - stuff along the lines of Mad Max and the Book of Eli are about to archetypical of the genre as you can get.
You have ruled this galaxy for ten thousand years.
You have little of account to show for your efforts.
Order. Unity. Obedience.
We taught the galaxy these things.
And we shall do so again.
You have little of account to show for your efforts.
Order. Unity. Obedience.
We taught the galaxy these things.
And we shall do so again.
Re: After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Univer
I'll be interested once I'm done with Nanowrimo and Secsan, so hold on for me. Does it have to be just nations and polities, or can it be individuals as well?
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
-Joseph Campbell
-Joseph Campbell
Re: After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Univer
re: How you construct an RPG
AFTER THE FALL: VAN WINKLE TEAM
People aren’t really sure what happened, to be honest. Some claim a single source for what most simple call “The Fall.” The truth is far more complex – the real question is what didn’t happen during the end times. Comp Cent’s data is probably the most complete record we’ll find on the continent, and it’s fairly certain it can say when – 202X. That was the year things went down the shitter. Even with all the patches in our memories due to the cryo freezing process, we can at least corroborate that fact.
It began with the Peak. In histories passed down by the scavenger packs, the Peak’s referred to with the sort of ironic reverence someone would say with the phrase “man grew proud.” It was a shifting of the global paradigm. New powers were emerging, but the old ones weren’t about to go gentle into the good night. And that’s when the oil ran out. It sounds pretty dramatic, but it was a slow burn. At first there was the huge push into alternative energy, the type you get every couple decades or so. But it all got eaten up by the wars. More brushfire conflicts, perhaps as a chance to redraw a couple of lines on the atlas.
And that’s when the fragment hit. Comp Cent calls it the Hawking-Barnum XX203, but most people referred to it as the point where the shit simply hit the fan. Things sped up at that point, as though the half-mile wide fragment that hit in the South Atlantic was a catalyst to a rapidly decomposing system. The coasts of South America and Brazil were swamped, with casualties hitting a half million. At first people seemed to pull themselves together, probably like they did during the ’04 Boxing Day tsunami. Billions of dollars of aid got moved around, and initially it looked like ol’ Barnum was the kick in the pants humanity needed.
No dice. Barnum had initially been a much larger asteroid, but enough Hollywood blockbusters had convinced the leaders for at something of a contingency plan when it came to giant space rocks. The largest fragment got the most attention, but what we didn’t see was the smaller debris that rained over southern Africa, India, and China. Barnum hadn’t come to unite, but to divide.
The first cases were sparse, barely reported. It’s speculated, because the incubation time was so variable, the transmission so easy, the outward signs nonexistent, the virus was able to get through global transportation. That were the worst of it was, cities, airports. A billion people dead within six months. Things started accelerating, the center couldn’t hold. This was the nightmare part, what I remember most vividly. It’s also when the United Nations – it had grown powerful in the aftermath of the brushfire wars and the tsunami – started seriously contemplating contingency plans. At first, people talked with hushed tones, a sort of half-smile on their faces as though they were humoring it. That was the first month. Before the Panic.
It was a nasty feedback loop, and by the fourth month people discovered the mutations. One in a hundred, but damn near bulletproof and could manage a hell of a mess before they were put down. That’s when the military was still organized, and probably when I saw the most action. We had been trying to recapture some southern city that had succeeded in the chaos – again, when we all discussed such things with half-grins. What we met weren’t zombies, even the running ones. Any military could handle a mob. The mutas were something different, a whole different ball game.
The wars broke out, mostly the old rivalries first. Places that the infection hadn’t taken a hold of but were never too stable descended into free-for-all warzones. A couple of countries tried to seize a hold of power, the types that had been rising before the Peak. Brazil fortified its borders, but something got it from within. Perhaps one of the last things I remembered personally was the radio broadcast from Rio, right before the station was overrun. Nightmare fuel, just pure unleaded shit that haunted my dreams for a century.
The pacific rim was a warzone, with China and India completely gone. India was the last to go, and I think they had decided at one point to go out with a bang. The nuclear barrage between them and Pakistan was somewhat limited, but as I had learned at that point, things could always get worse.
This is where the UN finally enacted the their Van Winkle initiative. Bunkers were built across the world, with enough supplies to last a century or more. Infrastructure, terabyte upon terabyte of human culture all filed away. And the key centerpoint - the Van Winkle teams themselves. Renaissance men and women, proficient in more fields that we could count. Fighters foremost, because after they were thawed out they’d run some surveillance, take the lay of the land, and gauge what was left. And then they’d take back the planet, bit by bloody bit.
We went down in 204X, frozen like popsicles, right as first nukes began to fly. I remember watching the television stations, what braves ones that remained, going off one by one as I waited my turn to go through the prep process. We were originally only supposed to go for seventy years, but something broke along the way.
Central computer – Comp Cent as were all call it, was supposed to be our guardian, but more importantly, it was supposed to catalogue the last dying breaths of humanity as the Fall entered its final stages. Someone sabotaged it, I don’t know how, and here we are, thirty years past our due date, 214X. Comp Cent isn’t exactly operating with a full deck of cards, and cataloguing what’s still in our inventory will be a bitch. We certainly weren’t lacking in toys, but scavengers had long since done a once over of the place. Cameras paint a spotty picture – people broke in, but we’re pretty sure mutas (nothing like I’d ever seen) chased them off. A cave-in sealed off the entrance, but the damage was done by the firefight. The bloodstains are still there, as well as the shrapnel scars that hit one of Comp Cent’s cores. We’re running half-blind, and we’re going to have to get our hands dirty if we want to get an idea of what’s out there.
Comp Cent has given us all but the most rudimentary overview. We were buried in Eastern Texas, near the coast. There’s scavenger bands, the odd wild west city-strip, and what we’re pretty sure is an Enclave near Houston. Things get hazier past that. Mutas have certainly started breeding, thinking they’ll take a shot at being the dominant life form. The virus is still potent in some places, as are the odd patches of radiation. The rest of the world doesn’t seem to be in much better shape. One of the team has the odd theory Australia probably a bastion in every meaning of the word based on some dives into Comp Cent’s archives, but we’re still dealing with our backyard. I tell everyone we have to keep in mind that we’re not the only Van Winkle team around. Others will have gone active decades before us. For all we know, we could very well march up to a green zone they’ve carved out for themselves. Time will tell – or at, until one of the team works with Comp Cent to fix the transceiver and see if any of the Van Winkle-coded beacons are active. It’ll be our first real trip outside.
I’d ask for luck, but we make our own luck at this point.
Signing off,
Colonel Ezekiel Frost
AMMENDUM:
Bad news. The transceiver’s range is limited. Looking for a work-around.
AMMENDUM TWO:
Even worse. We’re sure we’re covering at least all of North America and part of South America. Of then ten or so Van Winkle teams sprinkled through the western hemisphere, we’re getting eight are in range. We’ve got three dead signals. No, scratch that, compromised. That’s what you get when the base’s Comp Cent has been damaged to a degree that it’s inoperable or the base had been overrun. Another three signals are simply not picking up – western seaboard stuff. We’re still waiting for the decode of the last two.
AMMENDUM THREE.
Hope, an emotion I technically haven’t felt for over a century. The Miami base – the huge port bunker that the team’s been all talking about as a gateway to the rest of the world – is reading active. They’re well established, but our communication options are limited.
The other team’s in the other direction. North. Corn belt, or whatever remained of it. Essentially the middle of the country. We’re getting a distress signal – the base is under attack, and only just recently. It’s time critical, but we’ve got to finish repairs on the antenna before we get any more info.
Besides, number one rule I remembered from the planning session. Fix your own house first. This used to be a nice neighborhood.
The idea is the usual group of soldiers - a well proven formula - combined with a wide scientific mixing. Worldbuilding can exist on any level - local, national, or global, but the story is essentially character-driven and plot-driven. Options exist for local exploration with all the usual post-apoc tropes, as well as campaign ideas for interactions with other teams - perhaps the well-established conclave that's succeeded in it's mission - or has long gone corrupt. Teams can come across empty bunkers, some of which may not even be Van Winkle bases. Perhaps even a Van Winkle team has gone corrupt, either as a massive tyrannical Mad Max-style town or using their signal to lure in and destroy other teams so that can gain their supplies and the massive technological advantages the bases represent.
Granted, things aren't perfect. The base is missing gear and isn't perfectly safe. Comp Cent may or may not be insane and rampant, and any lack of gear can be thought up by the participants as a way to impose challenges - or, more importantly, force specific quests outside the base to scavenge replacements - perhaps to interact and barter with the more peaceful towns. The threat of mutas and the plague is everywhere - any sort of monster seems only limited by the player's imagination. Perhaps the players can take a town under its wing and defend it from a swarm or cannibal bikers. Or even worse, perhaps when exploring, they'll lead the plague or mutas back to their allies. Research into a cure to the virus can be a long-term goal, tied with an eventual quest to the coast and across the world. As the players go out farther, more of the world's situation reveals itself to them, with even larger situations, consequences, and enemies. I want a very real sense the players are a force in their sphere of influence and are in fact shaping the world around them.
AFTER THE FALL: VAN WINKLE TEAM
People aren’t really sure what happened, to be honest. Some claim a single source for what most simple call “The Fall.” The truth is far more complex – the real question is what didn’t happen during the end times. Comp Cent’s data is probably the most complete record we’ll find on the continent, and it’s fairly certain it can say when – 202X. That was the year things went down the shitter. Even with all the patches in our memories due to the cryo freezing process, we can at least corroborate that fact.
It began with the Peak. In histories passed down by the scavenger packs, the Peak’s referred to with the sort of ironic reverence someone would say with the phrase “man grew proud.” It was a shifting of the global paradigm. New powers were emerging, but the old ones weren’t about to go gentle into the good night. And that’s when the oil ran out. It sounds pretty dramatic, but it was a slow burn. At first there was the huge push into alternative energy, the type you get every couple decades or so. But it all got eaten up by the wars. More brushfire conflicts, perhaps as a chance to redraw a couple of lines on the atlas.
And that’s when the fragment hit. Comp Cent calls it the Hawking-Barnum XX203, but most people referred to it as the point where the shit simply hit the fan. Things sped up at that point, as though the half-mile wide fragment that hit in the South Atlantic was a catalyst to a rapidly decomposing system. The coasts of South America and Brazil were swamped, with casualties hitting a half million. At first people seemed to pull themselves together, probably like they did during the ’04 Boxing Day tsunami. Billions of dollars of aid got moved around, and initially it looked like ol’ Barnum was the kick in the pants humanity needed.
No dice. Barnum had initially been a much larger asteroid, but enough Hollywood blockbusters had convinced the leaders for at something of a contingency plan when it came to giant space rocks. The largest fragment got the most attention, but what we didn’t see was the smaller debris that rained over southern Africa, India, and China. Barnum hadn’t come to unite, but to divide.
The first cases were sparse, barely reported. It’s speculated, because the incubation time was so variable, the transmission so easy, the outward signs nonexistent, the virus was able to get through global transportation. That were the worst of it was, cities, airports. A billion people dead within six months. Things started accelerating, the center couldn’t hold. This was the nightmare part, what I remember most vividly. It’s also when the United Nations – it had grown powerful in the aftermath of the brushfire wars and the tsunami – started seriously contemplating contingency plans. At first, people talked with hushed tones, a sort of half-smile on their faces as though they were humoring it. That was the first month. Before the Panic.
It was a nasty feedback loop, and by the fourth month people discovered the mutations. One in a hundred, but damn near bulletproof and could manage a hell of a mess before they were put down. That’s when the military was still organized, and probably when I saw the most action. We had been trying to recapture some southern city that had succeeded in the chaos – again, when we all discussed such things with half-grins. What we met weren’t zombies, even the running ones. Any military could handle a mob. The mutas were something different, a whole different ball game.
The wars broke out, mostly the old rivalries first. Places that the infection hadn’t taken a hold of but were never too stable descended into free-for-all warzones. A couple of countries tried to seize a hold of power, the types that had been rising before the Peak. Brazil fortified its borders, but something got it from within. Perhaps one of the last things I remembered personally was the radio broadcast from Rio, right before the station was overrun. Nightmare fuel, just pure unleaded shit that haunted my dreams for a century.
The pacific rim was a warzone, with China and India completely gone. India was the last to go, and I think they had decided at one point to go out with a bang. The nuclear barrage between them and Pakistan was somewhat limited, but as I had learned at that point, things could always get worse.
This is where the UN finally enacted the their Van Winkle initiative. Bunkers were built across the world, with enough supplies to last a century or more. Infrastructure, terabyte upon terabyte of human culture all filed away. And the key centerpoint - the Van Winkle teams themselves. Renaissance men and women, proficient in more fields that we could count. Fighters foremost, because after they were thawed out they’d run some surveillance, take the lay of the land, and gauge what was left. And then they’d take back the planet, bit by bloody bit.
We went down in 204X, frozen like popsicles, right as first nukes began to fly. I remember watching the television stations, what braves ones that remained, going off one by one as I waited my turn to go through the prep process. We were originally only supposed to go for seventy years, but something broke along the way.
Central computer – Comp Cent as were all call it, was supposed to be our guardian, but more importantly, it was supposed to catalogue the last dying breaths of humanity as the Fall entered its final stages. Someone sabotaged it, I don’t know how, and here we are, thirty years past our due date, 214X. Comp Cent isn’t exactly operating with a full deck of cards, and cataloguing what’s still in our inventory will be a bitch. We certainly weren’t lacking in toys, but scavengers had long since done a once over of the place. Cameras paint a spotty picture – people broke in, but we’re pretty sure mutas (nothing like I’d ever seen) chased them off. A cave-in sealed off the entrance, but the damage was done by the firefight. The bloodstains are still there, as well as the shrapnel scars that hit one of Comp Cent’s cores. We’re running half-blind, and we’re going to have to get our hands dirty if we want to get an idea of what’s out there.
Comp Cent has given us all but the most rudimentary overview. We were buried in Eastern Texas, near the coast. There’s scavenger bands, the odd wild west city-strip, and what we’re pretty sure is an Enclave near Houston. Things get hazier past that. Mutas have certainly started breeding, thinking they’ll take a shot at being the dominant life form. The virus is still potent in some places, as are the odd patches of radiation. The rest of the world doesn’t seem to be in much better shape. One of the team has the odd theory Australia probably a bastion in every meaning of the word based on some dives into Comp Cent’s archives, but we’re still dealing with our backyard. I tell everyone we have to keep in mind that we’re not the only Van Winkle team around. Others will have gone active decades before us. For all we know, we could very well march up to a green zone they’ve carved out for themselves. Time will tell – or at, until one of the team works with Comp Cent to fix the transceiver and see if any of the Van Winkle-coded beacons are active. It’ll be our first real trip outside.
I’d ask for luck, but we make our own luck at this point.
Signing off,
Colonel Ezekiel Frost
AMMENDUM:
Bad news. The transceiver’s range is limited. Looking for a work-around.
AMMENDUM TWO:
Even worse. We’re sure we’re covering at least all of North America and part of South America. Of then ten or so Van Winkle teams sprinkled through the western hemisphere, we’re getting eight are in range. We’ve got three dead signals. No, scratch that, compromised. That’s what you get when the base’s Comp Cent has been damaged to a degree that it’s inoperable or the base had been overrun. Another three signals are simply not picking up – western seaboard stuff. We’re still waiting for the decode of the last two.
AMMENDUM THREE.
Hope, an emotion I technically haven’t felt for over a century. The Miami base – the huge port bunker that the team’s been all talking about as a gateway to the rest of the world – is reading active. They’re well established, but our communication options are limited.
The other team’s in the other direction. North. Corn belt, or whatever remained of it. Essentially the middle of the country. We’re getting a distress signal – the base is under attack, and only just recently. It’s time critical, but we’ve got to finish repairs on the antenna before we get any more info.
Besides, number one rule I remembered from the planning session. Fix your own house first. This used to be a nice neighborhood.
The idea is the usual group of soldiers - a well proven formula - combined with a wide scientific mixing. Worldbuilding can exist on any level - local, national, or global, but the story is essentially character-driven and plot-driven. Options exist for local exploration with all the usual post-apoc tropes, as well as campaign ideas for interactions with other teams - perhaps the well-established conclave that's succeeded in it's mission - or has long gone corrupt. Teams can come across empty bunkers, some of which may not even be Van Winkle bases. Perhaps even a Van Winkle team has gone corrupt, either as a massive tyrannical Mad Max-style town or using their signal to lure in and destroy other teams so that can gain their supplies and the massive technological advantages the bases represent.
Granted, things aren't perfect. The base is missing gear and isn't perfectly safe. Comp Cent may or may not be insane and rampant, and any lack of gear can be thought up by the participants as a way to impose challenges - or, more importantly, force specific quests outside the base to scavenge replacements - perhaps to interact and barter with the more peaceful towns. The threat of mutas and the plague is everywhere - any sort of monster seems only limited by the player's imagination. Perhaps the players can take a town under its wing and defend it from a swarm or cannibal bikers. Or even worse, perhaps when exploring, they'll lead the plague or mutas back to their allies. Research into a cure to the virus can be a long-term goal, tied with an eventual quest to the coast and across the world. As the players go out farther, more of the world's situation reveals itself to them, with even larger situations, consequences, and enemies. I want a very real sense the players are a force in their sphere of influence and are in fact shaping the world around them.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Re: After the Fall - A Post-Apocalyptic Collaborative Univer
Thread, I bid thee rise!
Anyway, I've been ruminating on this for a while, mostly on the subject of polities.
I think polities are definitely workable - after all, New Vegas has Caesar's Legion and the NCR - but we shouldn't have too many of them - there should be wilderness, wild places, No-Man's-Lands. Naturally inhospitable places, like Siberia, the Sahara, the American South-west, are perfect for this. I don't agree that a post-apocalyptic situation means utter anarchy. After all, humans band together naturally, and it would be impossible for any apocalypse to destroy civilisation one-hundred percent without wiping out something like 100% (or 99.9%, which is pretty much the same) of humanity, so it's not like we're going back to caves - more like gravitating around strongmen, much more like feudal kingdoms after the fall of Rome than the usual utter anarchy.
As for superscience, perhaps half of it can be remnants of the world before, and half can be the creations of independent scientists. I've also had an idea on the subject of regions - perhaps different collaborators can focus on different regions, giving everybody his little playground of some sort. After all, Earth is big enough for 203 nations - shouldn't the
Anyway, I've been ruminating on this for a while, mostly on the subject of polities.
I think polities are definitely workable - after all, New Vegas has Caesar's Legion and the NCR - but we shouldn't have too many of them - there should be wilderness, wild places, No-Man's-Lands. Naturally inhospitable places, like Siberia, the Sahara, the American South-west, are perfect for this. I don't agree that a post-apocalyptic situation means utter anarchy. After all, humans band together naturally, and it would be impossible for any apocalypse to destroy civilisation one-hundred percent without wiping out something like 100% (or 99.9%, which is pretty much the same) of humanity, so it's not like we're going back to caves - more like gravitating around strongmen, much more like feudal kingdoms after the fall of Rome than the usual utter anarchy.
As for superscience, perhaps half of it can be remnants of the world before, and half can be the creations of independent scientists. I've also had an idea on the subject of regions - perhaps different collaborators can focus on different regions, giving everybody his little playground of some sort. After all, Earth is big enough for 203 nations - shouldn't the
It can be anything you can imagine up, Heretic.Heretic wrote:I'll be interested once I'm done with Nanowrimo and Secsan, so hold on for me. Does it have to be just nations and polities, or can it be individuals as well?
You have ruled this galaxy for ten thousand years.
You have little of account to show for your efforts.
Order. Unity. Obedience.
We taught the galaxy these things.
And we shall do so again.
You have little of account to show for your efforts.
Order. Unity. Obedience.
We taught the galaxy these things.
And we shall do so again.