For some odd reason, I seem to be writing a post-apocalypse pencil and paper RPG. I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on a few things.
The general idea, I think, is that this world will be one in which there has been a die-off of humans. I am not thinking about a full-scale nuclear/biological warfare exchange so much as environmental degradation combined with, perhaps some global pandemic. I am thinking that the catastrophe itself happened, I don’t know, something like 50 years from now and the game itself takes place perhaps 300 years from that point. The basic idea is that the die-off would have happened close enough to now that the tech level would be familiar to modern gamers, but far enough ahead that you could sprinkle in an occasional element not in play today. Also, while there would be issues of environmental poisons and the like, and while most of the cities would have fallen to ruin, you wont have radioactive craters or that sort of thing.
Anyway, here are some questions.
[ul]
[li]Character Creation:[/li]
I am thinking that the vast majority of folks around will be human, however in terms of ambiance you pretty much really need Mutants. Now, I don’t want to fall into the Gamma World trap with mutants. Honestly, while making mutant characters was kind of fun, one has to admit that they were nowhere near plausible and sort of stupid. So, how should I handle mutants? I am thinking of some sort of edge/flaw system where edges have to balance flaws. Any thoughts on this? Specifically, what would be reasonable edges and flaws?
[li]Understanding of tech in general:[/li]
In general, what do you think that people 300 years after a major die-off of humans would be like? Figure that during that time all communication and distribution networks will have broken down. Figure further that it may have only been the last 20 to 30 years that people have been able to focus much past base survival. Would anyone still be able to read (assuming that they could find a library with intact books)? What tech knowledge would have survived? Would any tech left over still work?
[li]Money:[/li]
While I recognize that barter would probably be the rule of the day, how should I handle this for the characters in a way that would not totally bog down the game and be irritating, but still be sort of different and plausible?
[/ul]
There is a lot more, but as this is getting pretty long I think that I will let this serve as a jumping off point then take it from there. As always, thanks for any thoughts that you may offer.
A large proportion of the answers to your question will be governed by two things: How large a die-off, and how quickly? The larger and quicker the die-off, the more catastrophic the effect on the overall level of civilization that is maintained and the amount of technical knowledge retained. If the die-off was slow enough, some people would have been able to set up knowledge storage sites, or evolve communities that could come through the events relatively unscathed. At that point, you have a great set-up for the civilized groups vs the barbarians. If it wasn’t that slow, then you’re going to have a situation where knowledge retention was secondary to pure survival.
Three hundred years isn’t actually that long a time, so I would suspect that a lot of things have probably survived. Large structures would have a good chance of being largely intact. Books that have been kept inside would probably still be legible. I wouldn’t be surprised if something like the Library of Congress actually made it through ok, especially if the die-off was not too catastrophic and somebody had the brains to recognize it as a prize worth preserving.
I am thinking something like 95% of humans died. Figure that things would have been in terrible shape leading up to some pandemic that finished the job. In other words, things would have been in decline before the catastrophe (massive civil unrest, water wars, wars over remaining arable land, looting and so on).
For the most part, no one would have been prepared for what happened as the decline would have been gradual enough, right up until it was a crisis that hit the point of no return. I am not above having a community somewhere that managed to create some sort of a vault or giant shelter, but the general idea is that the bulk of the world would be post tech, and at a hunter/gatherer or simple agriculture level once again
Have you read The White Mountains? That’s a pretty fair description of a world where people have lost their technology due to alien invasion. They don’t know what a subway is, or hand grenades.
People would only know their local language. Some would be able to read. Some wouldn’t bother to learn.
There would be caches of equipment and supplies (National Guard Armories, for example) that might not have been broken into; some of that stuff would still be useable.
I don’t know how much post-apocalyptic fiction you’ve read, but there are a number of good novels with different scenarios and plausible aftermaths:
[spoiler]Earth Abides: A plague sweeps the globe, leaving perhaps 1 survivor in 100,000. Electrical and water utilities continue operating for several months or years, until the automated systems break down. After a few generations of scavenging off the old world, people become hunter-gatherers and largely revert to stone age technology.
Lucifer’s Hammer: A comet breaks into several dozen pieces and strikes the planet in various places. Coastal regions are hit hard, but inland areas are relatively unaffected at first. A few people with foresight make plans to preserve as much science and technology as possible, while a TV evangelist goes insane and starts a cannibal cult. In the end science triumphs over religion (heh), although rebuilding will still be a slow process.
Wolf and Iron: The world economy collapses, and many communities essentially become xenophobic city-states. The US becomes sort of a new Wild West, minus the Federal Marshalls.[/spoiler]
A 95% mortality rate from your disaster might be a little too low. With that rate and three hundred years I’d expect society to be almost back to normal though with large areas still depopulated.
300 years afterward I would expect most of the major cities to be coming back. Cities are cities for a reason and people will settle in them in preference to the middle of nowhere. On top of that the cities already have some infrastructure which may not be in great shape after 300 years it would still be better than nothing.
Manufacturing would be back, infrastructure would be back, resource use such as mining and refining would be back. I wouldn’t expect high tech industries to be back to normal quite yet but getting close.
Don’t expect a lot of lost knowledge. It’s all pretty much written down somewhere and even if Washington DC is nuked and the Library of Congress is gone there’s an entire world out there.
A higher death rate and maybe a third as much time might be a better way to go about it. Some people would be pushing toward re-establishing civilization, others would be doing their own thing scavenging off the corpse of the previous one. 300 years is just too much time, though.
If there has been enough time to re-establish civilization, but not to establish a currency, then the barter may be standardized from town to town. Major population centers might trade staples (wheat for corn) and tradesmen or farmers who work together might exchange the fruits of their labors (horse manure for carrots and oats) when the exchange is clearly symbiotic.
I think, however, that labor would be the universal trade between travelling strangers. Characters with a high DEX or STR might agree to perform unskilled labor in exchange for some of the proceeds (helping to tan leathers in exchange for a coat). Characters with high INT or WIS might suggest a process improvement, or design a mechanism, to help the tradesman after they’ve gone. A particularly clever character might be able to remember five or six different tradesmen they’ve met, each of whom needed one or two things… and suggest a trade network between six different farmers that is to all of their benefits (such a smart person might find himself out of favor with the middleman who had already discovered this network and was profiting by it).
Economy drives a lot of behaviors. Control of valuable “public” resources, like clean springs, libraries, bridges, or radio masts (observation towers) might be disputed, and could form the basis for any number of interesting conflicts on the way from Point A to Point B.
A lot of this is just fine-tuning. The basic idea being that I want enough time to have passed that there will have been significant changes in language and culture as well as changes to life forms. We can wipe out a lot more people in the catastrophe if that adds to plausibility. I also don’t want to have the catastrophe be just a bunch of nukes (although we could have a few here and there) because that has pretty much been done, and I don’t want to waste a bunch of game mechanics on dealing with radiation and crap.
I think that conceptually things will have been falling apart before the final pandemic, so even before things went totally to hell, the average person would have been far more concerned with just getting enough food and water than they would with visiting the library of congress. Also, as far as the “everything is just written down” idea, I am not that convinced that it would be as useful as one might think. For example, take an average guy with a high-school education today, hand him written instructions of how to make, say, a flintlock rife that are written in Middle English. How well would he do? In any event, I don’t know if I want a much sorter amount of time to have passed because I don’t want anyone left alive that even would have known someone from the old world.
I am less interested in the fine-tuning of “how did this happen” than I am in some of the nuances of character creation and the like that I have mentioned.
Well, I hate to be a stick-in-the mud, but you don’t have much of interest here. The only real thing we can get any clear picture on is this: there are 300 million people left. There are a lot of systems that have already done this: what makes yours interesting right up front?
smiling bandit, I don’t really know how to answer you without wondering aloud if your post is intended as something that others can link to if they are looking to cite a perfect example of thread-shitting. I have no problem with this thing dropping like a stone if people do not find it interesting, I will take my lumps and move of but I am not sure what point there is in your post.
With a 95% die-off you’d be back to present population well within 300 years. A 95% loss would still leave China with 50 million people, and the UK with 3 million.
If you don’t want mutants, how about genetic engineering? Humanoid wolves etc?
Fair enough. Lets say a 99.9% die-off. As far as mutants go, I do want them as I think that they are pretty important for the feel of a post-apocalypse RPG. What I am looking for on that front is something that is at least slightly reasonable. For example, in Gamma World they were just stupid and had no possible basis even in funny-book science.
There was also a game called “The Morrow Project”. The premise was that the world was going to hell, so an organization called the Morrow Project created caches of technology to restart civilization if needed. Teams were put in suspended animation to be revived when needed. The premise made for automatic parties…players would all be members of a revived team of people with roughly 20th century knowlege facing some assignment in a post-apocalyptic world.
As for game mechanics, I would just take an off the shelf existing game system like GURPS and create a personal worldbook for it. No sense reinventing the wheel. Then your worldbook will just included allowed skills, new skills, and allowed advantages and disadvantages. If you want to allow mutants that makes handling mutants easy…they just have to pay points for their powers, which means fewer points for characteristics and skills.
There was also a game called “The Morrow Project”. The premise was that the world was going to hell, so an organization called the Morrow Project created caches of technology to restart civilization if needed. Teams were put in suspended animation to be revived when needed. The premise made for automatic parties…players would all be members of a revived team of people with roughly 20th century knowlege facing some assignment in a post-apocalyptic world.
As for game mechanics, I would just take an off the shelf existing game system like GURPS and create a personal worldbook for it. No sense reinventing the wheel. Then your worldbook will just included allowed skills, new skills, and allowed advantages and disadvantages. If you want to allow mutants that makes handling mutants easy…they just have to pay points for their powers, which means fewer points for characteristics and skills.
See if you can find an old game called Aftermath. As a gaming system, it was horrendously complex. But as a post-apocalypse campaign sourcebook, it was great.
As for a system to deal with a barter economy, Aftermath simply took the old cliche of “gold pieces” and substituted the term “barter points”.
I am being critical,. but I’m not being mean. There are a lot of “Oh F*** it’s all gone!” settings. What about yours makes your players want to use it over others? Does it have any unique themes? Technologies? What sets it apart from everything else? The very first question you need to answer is: why do I want to play this?
You say you want mutants runnning amok o’er the land, but also say that you want only scientifically plausible mutations. Well, you probably aren’t going to get too many super-men this way, but you’re also not going to get much of use to the characters.
Basically, you’re positing 300 years of recover and isolation for small, scattered groups of humans. Nobody can predict what people will be like after that. Each “city” would probably have its own micro-culture, similar to the parent nation-state. On the bright side, people won’t have had to worry about war until pretty much now.
Depending on how far down we got kicked, most of the population may have to go back to farming.
Language doesn’t change that quickly. If two groups start out speaking the same language and then seperate, it’ll be about 1500 years before they are mutually uninteligable.
If he had a large library of other works in Middle English, he’d do pretty damn well.
Why were things falling apart before the crisis? Why are there mutants? What knowledge survived? What skills will be available to the characters? What has the world they’ve grown up in been like? What kind of world are they going to be running around in?
I also agree with Smiling Bandit. What does your game offer that others don’t? Depending on what exactly I want, I can try Gamma World (IIRC now in D20), a modified Rifts, the Palladium books in Scott Plaid’s links, Mutants And Masterminds etc. Unless your game offers something that the others don’t, nobody will play it.
Re Gamma World
I believe you’re the first person I’ve ever heard say that the mutants were a problem with the game. (And they certainly were not impossible even by “funny book science”. Gamma Radiation gave us the Hulk, The Abomination, The Leader, Halflife and the Fantastic Four. All the various nuclear and biological stuff used during the black years should cause all kinds of weirdness). The complaint I’ve heard over and over was that there wasn’t enough material-expansion books, extra settings, and especially campaign modules.
