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[jim_hague]

So, with the collapse of the pulp game (every single one of which is cursed, cursed, I tell you!), and the mean little teasers for Fallout 3 out there right now, I'm thinking of starting up a new game. Likely run through one of the online clients out there, no less, since my time and others' is at a premium

Comments

[bittercupojoe]

Do you want slightly pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, or post-post-apocalyptic? In other words, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, or Day of the Dead? Or Gamma World?

[jim_hague]

Good questions, Joe. I'm thinking 'some time later' - not the far, far thereafter, but long enough that the chaos of the cause of whatever the Ruin was has passed. Now there's a new world for people do deal with, and all the works of man still lay about, for good and for ill. Somewhere between Day of the Dead, time-wise, but not so far as Gamma World or The Morrow Project. Call it...2-3 generations, roughly.

Sadly, zombie horror is a hard sell to this group, for a number of reasons, though I do have One of the Living for AFMBE for some guidance on keeping a PA campaign going.

Mind you, if I wanted pre-apocalyptic, there's Amused to Death, which starts with the PCs in the early days of the fall of civilization, then turns them loose in a world rapidly going mad for a rather startling reason...but I'm busy writing that up for publication.

[bittercupojoe]

This doesn't quite fit your parameters, but I almost, several times, ended up running a World War Z campaign. The characters are all soldiers, pushing from California east as the wave that's cleaning up America. Each of them has a background, and there would be flashbacks to their lives before as they became relevant. Of course, the players wouldn't know when it would be relevant, so there you go. It wasn't intended that the zombies themselves would be all that dangerous in the "present," altho other humans, etc. could be. Mostly, the horror was reserved for the flashbacks, with the present being more like a slightly post-apoc/returning to civilization military campaign

[snowdog]

I have just one thing to say on this idea.

"Who runs Barter Town?"

:D

Apocalpse scenarios

[bombaatu]

Well, two immediately come to mind, both rather grounded in present-day events.

1. The Oil Runs Out and, a la The Road Warrior, the remaining military powers duked it out for the scraps that were left. World gone mad, cities destroyed, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

2. Global Warming - all of the direst predictions come true and, in fact, were *light* of the reality.

Or a combination of the two. There is also resurrecting The Wasteland setting... but of course, you wouldn't be able to publish that.

[jim_hague]

Oh, I'm not looking to publish - this is just something new to torment my group with. Exit Mundi I've got bookmarked, along with a few others.

Creepily enough, the Oil Runs Out is closer to what's going on now than it was way back when with Mad Max and the Road Warrior.

Hmm. I'm liking the flashback idea, though I wonder how that might be employed...

[bittercupojoe]

Basically, when it came time for the flashback, I'd hand each of the players a new character sheet, and for a session, sometimes a little less, sometimes two sessions, they'd play a different character. The person having the flashback would have a younger version of themself, and the folks around them would have entirely new characters, usually. I'd also planned to have extra character sheets in reserve, as the characters besides the main one at that point were considered fairly disposable

[bombaatu]

Well, if you're not interested in publishing, feel free to revisit this if you want: http://home.austin.rr.com/sfike/wasteland/

[jim_hague]

Well, The Oil Runs Out is the implied disaster that touches off the nuclear holocaust of Fallout - China invades Alaska, the U.S. annexes Canada via bloody invasion (as seen when the PAG in the first intro movie plugs the captured insurgent Vietnam-style)...and it's an ugly apocalypse indeed. I'm wondering, though, if there was ever any explanation of how FEV got out into the environment...