Taking all of these examples into account, one could describe the overlapping subgenres, or, more aptly, themes/motifs as:
1. Ongoing war 2. America occupied/imperialized 3. reconstruction/slow-death of society (usually paired together, another example of this but in the opposite direction of the other two examples' nihilism being The Postman novel, where survivalists finish what nukes and plauges started but ultimately reconstruction a decade or two later does begin in earnest) 4. apocalypse as a shift not an end (most "balkan US" scenarios such as Jericho) 5. far future apocalyptic (usually borrowing from another period or genre, such as futuristic scifi in the case of fallout or the middle ages in the case of Canticle For Leibowitz). 6. new world (somewhere between 3's reconstruction and 5's total end of the old ways are things like Jeremiah where society obviously can never return the way it was but is no longer "apocalyptifying" per se, and reconstruction is creating a new society altogether. Could be seen as the genesis of odd futures like Liebowitz where civilization has restarted but in a post or pre-industrial mindset)

As far as the classic nuclear apocalypse, research into nuclear war (especially from the 80's rather than 50's mentality) has led me to believe that the typical scenario would not result in most large cities or most military bases being destroyed - whereas the nebulous PA genre often has such destruction taken for granted. In such case nuclear winter and radiation would probably be so prevalent as to be the source of a completely depressing and unheroic setting if realism is the key or an outrageous mutants-and-savages setting in more cinematic/fantastical scenarios like Fallout. Twilight 2000 takes the middle road in it's military trivia fetishism and has 20-30 nuclear strikes of varying size, but the fact is even at the height of the cold war the silo control centers, SAC bases, and ports for nuclear submarines are a little less than that (in the case of T2000 some infrastructure, mostly oil facilities, is taken out as well) and that's assuming a full first wave could be performed before both sides are knocked out.

WarDay goes to the opposite extreme of the total bombout scenarios and has the US completely devastated by 7 or so strikes of varying size (which in reality wouldn't even take out all are nuclear capabilities). It's explaination is the classic "four high-voltage h-bombs detonated aerially as to EMP most of the nation", with the chilling idea that it's far cheaper to produce a nuclear explosion capable of going through EMP shielding than it is to actually shield equipment from EMP. Thus in the WarDay scenario the US military/government ceases to exist as a coherent network, and the Soviets are intimated as having done twice as badly. However, WarDay makes up for it's lack of multitudes of bomed out cities or nuclear winter with a hyper-realistic view of the danger and ability to spread of fallout and also tries to be in a more muted realistic genre by dealing more with the economic and sociological impact of the nuclear exchange - it's hinted that the US could be recovering at a much more ideal rate if Europe weren't dependent on US food production and thus sapping much of the agriculture, intent on keeping the new america as several divided nations in all but name (and as an agricultural society rather than an industrial one).
.

My own pet scenario is somewhere between Twilight 2000 and WarDay - positing an accidental confrontation in the near future between the US and Russia following the ongoing tensions of NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, with Russia having time to launch half of it's primary wave attack (30 or so targets, with superior US missile defenses allowing one to shave that down to a third depending on just how gritty they want to make fallout on a nation-wide scale). I did some die rolling from a randomized table going with half of that attack going through. Even assuming D.C. as a sure thing (and NYC being hit by the luck of the die off of a list of likely targets), LA missed out (while a SAC base further up the coastline didn't). I then mapped out first the "fallout footprints" where fallout would be carried by local weather and then the large scale weather patterns based on America's westerly winds and the fact that a weather front's moisture tends to get absorbed by mountain ranges in their path). The resulting map showed a suitably "apocalyptic" setting despite the low-key scenario.

Based off of that map I surmised a few completely lawless areas (the Black Hills being one of them, the entire state of Kansas more or less being another), the holdouts of warlords and anti-government militias (such as South Florida), and even a low-intensity civil war between the functioning state governments and non-functioning (and thus under martial law) territories held by the remnants of the government and the coalition of functioning states that have declared their autonomy from that remnant (claiming it is not legitimate, in the same vein as the CivGov from Twilight 2000). The idea being that this is not so much a civil war as a map of the differing levels of military/federal control over areas (mostly limited to those functioning state governments that make an effort to coordinate with them and those areas they physically control through troop placements and control of trade routes/strategic resources).

The extra fly in the ointment, stolen shamelessly from Warday, has European neo-colonialism desperate to secure some of shattered america's agriculture/natural resources. In WarDay this is in the form of a paramilitary group/colonial company under the guise of a "red cross with teeth" called the British Medical Relief. In my scenario it's through the UN, which in the absence of the US, Russia, and China (wasn't hit by any more than two "let's nuke em all" strikes from a US sub following it's set contingencies in case of lack of communications, and was persuaded not to strike the by then crippled US by Europe, only to invade India later that year and get in a war with Europe, hence Europe's need for materiel and food) has become a dressed up colonial office of the new European military combine (the European Directorate).

The stylistic watchword I went with for this pet set-up of mine was "new wild west", with the US still being mostly there, but kicked back a 100 years or so - with fallout and lack of proper medical treatment bringing the mortality rates back up and the EMP knocking out most of the electronics we take for granted, bandit gangs instead of Indians, and UN-Directorate exploitation instead of robber-barons. People clinging to their guns and riding in older cars converted to run on distilled fuels such as alchohol (or the more efficient biodiesels), essentially. This is a mindset that in a scenario trying to be realistic (but in a social breakdown way not in a "rads fall everyone dies" way) would usually be seen as far-fetched but is appropriate to America's portrayal in media and to the American mindset.

And of course, in the fine Twilight 2000 tradition, it has an standstill war with Mexico providing a low-intensity warzone full of ex-soldier bandit gangs from either side in the southern parts of states like Texas, New Mexico, and California.


Of course everyone has their own favorite subgenre (or combination therefore of) of the apocalyptic genre, including ones not even discussed here such as the Mad Max-ian tradition and more surrealistic/stylistic takes like Six-String Samurai. But at the essence of it all are usually some of the assumptions I've mentioned here in my genre dissection and my pet scenario. The sort of "default" bare-bones setting that shows up in the excellent post-apocalyptic radio-show threads, for instance. Everyone fills in the fat around the bones (in my case with liberal sprinklings of Twilight 2000 and WarDay, with you maybe Fallout and Mad Max to go in the other direction).

- Fin

Nice thread.

As for me...I liked the whole 1950's world of tomorrow optimism being shattered by atomic apocalypse paranoia.

As Such The Fallout Series is at the top, even though the whole "Blasted into the stone age" setting gets blurred when there's still plenty of high tech stuff still working, like robots and ray guns.

Still, I think Fallout 3 got the whole rough survivalist aesthetic down even though it bastardizes it's own source material.

Playing Fallout 3 always felt like it was only a century after the bombs dropped.

In short: I like the period of post apocalypse themes where it's still chaos and anarchy, but there is a few generations who have grown up hardened and unfamiliar with what was lost and just accept the current situation that they are in and try to just get by with out dying.

>>3636016
Probably not the most appropriate attire, when the number of cannibalistic and sadomasochistic raiders in the wasteland out number townspeople 22 to 1, but hey, that's what the Chinese Assault Rifle and Med-X is for.

>>3636047

Protection from the elements and modesty aside, one would think in lieu of having access to armor tighter clothes less likely to be grabbed/snag would be better than baggy clothes. That was the novelizations' of the Resident Evil series' excuse for Jill Valentine's outfit, at least.

>>3636016

For me the Fallout kind of scenario works best if the bullets have been all used up and the only tech durable enough to last was the futuretech stuff, so you have a clear dichotomy between the savages and the enclaves/vaults/crazy-robots.

Having old ammunition scavengable 150 years after the end of the world doesn't really seem sensible to me, but at least the first two Fallout games were pretty good about depicting pre-industrial society in most other ways.

It seems like you like the "grandad's shotgun" scenario better - long enough for it to be a brand new world but recent enough for the tail-end of the scavenge economy to be plausible.

Combining that with the 1950's vs. apocalyptic savagery dichotomy without the fancy rayguns would probably be the province of a cinematic (as opposed to outright batshit) "Cuban Missile Crisis war +two subsequent generations" setting.

>>3636047
Hard to recognize Dimitrys stuff if it doesn't have a ridiculously large penis on it.

>>3636115
Indeed, you nailed it on the head.

Although I would have to defend chemical combustion firearms. It's plausible for some of the survivor towns to still produce modern/current brass cased bullets with center fire firing caps. lead is still lead, and maybe they are using more primitive and unrefined gun powder, or other propellants.

A large militant group could probably restore an ammunition production facility.

Also there are many individuals who practice hand loading and in a survival scenario; could recycle spent casings.

Hell, even if advance weapon smithy was lost, then it would be understandable and believable that everyone would and could revert back to using black powder flint and match lock firearms.

>>3636222
Indeed.

>>3636248

The Morrow Project goes the blackpowder future route. Mad Max was far closer to the end of the world but still had most people with bows and arrows, though then again Australia probably has less gun ownership than the US, heh.

A "radioactive meteors cause the apocalypse in the wild west" setting I tinkered with once had appropriately little change in the types of guns used as it was before factorization in the first place.

I suppose guns could hold on for a long time even in their modern incarnations if you consider that even in mudholes like Afghanistan a village can hand-smith an AK-47 every year or so.

Also, a post-war setting will have military stockpiles of well-stored stuff to be uncovered and a post-future setting will have more rugged equipment as well as better storage methods.

I like the unambiguity of Twilight 2000 type stuff in this regard. If third world warzones are any sign, it's not unreasonable to think the fallout of a major gov collapse/war will have guns abound in civilian hands for years. If you have only the US and whoever it fought (Russia usually) knocked out and the rest of the world merely run ragged (either by secondary attacks or economic damage) then there's always a steady supply of new arms as well; as in an ongoing war scenario.

Thinking about it, one of the few industries that would be kept going in martial law areas even if everything else was falling apart would be munitions production, I would imagine. Or would the military just rely on their stockpiles until they ran out? (probably a combination of the two depending on who and where, I guess)

>Thinking about it, one of the few industries that would be kept going in martial law areas even if everything else was falling apart would be munitions production, I would imagine. Or would the military just rely on their stockpiles until they ran out? (probably a combination of the two depending on who and where, I guess)

Militaries don't think this way. They operate as if their supplies will never run out. This explains why the US currently uses a turbine engine tank in an age when fuel is insanely expensive, for no other reason that it's fast.

A military never thinks that it will be destroyed. If you have members of a military force in your Apocalypica, they should be leaderless, eventually devolving into bands of brigands, as they'd be the biggest and baddest in the area.

>>3636308
/K/ had threads discussing this matter many times before and consensus is that the number of civilian/sportsman firearms, ammunition and ammunition reloading material available on the American market alone could see current firearms running 150 years in an unmolested state without tapping into military and police cashes and production resources.

A particular chain of outdoors men stores found in the U.S. called Bass Pro Shops could arm an entire community with weapons and ammo for at least a year.

>>3636357

Continuing my thoughts, they don't HAVE to devolve into raiders. They just could. They may cling to the old ways of order, and honor. The highest person in their chain of command could operate as if he was now the commander and chief of his own area, and declare martial law, enabling him to continue or procure production of ammunition and weapons.

Eventually this would likely become highly ritualized, as is the nature of all military organizations. After a time, except for the weapons used, the may not be recognizable at all by their former comrades. They would become something like the Steel Legion, albeit with a focus on battle rather than technology, like space marines of 40k.

>>3636413
>A particular chain of outdoors men stores found in the U.S. called Bass Pro Shops could arm an entire community with weapons and ammo for at least a year.

That's really not very much.

>>3636428

Brotherhood of Steel, sorry.

>>3636357
That's partially true, You can probably see marauder war bands and fortified communities having a huge advantage at first if they had access to military vehicles and heavy weapons, but only for a generation or so.

eventually tanks will only be rolled out when absolutely necessary to destroy rival community strong holds and eventually just become static gun emplacements built into a town's wall.

Machine guns will be only allowed so much ammo to be fired in a single day and eventually might be scraped in favor of saving the ammo for other guns.

>>3636436
Indeed, but that's still just one of the larger stores. There are thousands of gun shops and sporting shops that carry firearms and ammo. Also the reloading/recycling of ammo is a skill that many hunters and sport shooters have learned and practice.


Reloading is a common and wide spread practice and as such, this knowledge being passed down from father to son will survive in the post apocalypse world.

The excellent Gurps post-apocalyptic supplement, Y2K, lists the military (along with small towns and the Mormons) as one of the groups that won't dissolve in the wake of the apocalypse. I think that's probably true even if the government completely collapsed.

But your statement about using the stockpiles until they run out is probably true. The military would start out with more hoarded resources than anyone else and would probably adapt to taxing food and luxury goods pretty quickly (and replacing EMP-d electronics as a priority), but they'd have enough ammo for a long time.

Of course first you run out of aviation fuels and then it's one thing after a next after that, alongside the fact that many areas will no longer be able to support their garrisons foodwise as droughts, fallout, and refugee-flood famines kick in.

Taking time into account the areas that are able to support their troops will probably simply turn into de facto warlordships not from deliberate renegadeship but just when the last of the surviving electronics/chain of command breaks down (whether it's a matter of years or a decade or two) - that is if there's not a reconstruction (and likely some sort of balkanization or at least weakening of the government and putting the military into the hands of the regional civilian leadership). And the groups in areas unable to support them will either migrate to other military controlled areas, become mobile units (not rogue per se, but foraging/mercenary-ing out inbetween contact with friendlies and the missions/resupplying that entails), or desert (probably in very small numbers at first if Y2K's statement in this area is correct).

>>3636484


I will say, I've put more thought into raiders in the past than into the military. Banditry, guerrilla groups, and militias behaving in a government-less area have a wide range of behaviors, conveniently visible in many thirdworld hotspots such as Iraq - ranging from the highwaymen that exist in any period where there's trade/travel on the roads to the seasonal wilderness lurking thieves of medieval statistics (who would either go back home to the farm or purposefully get arrested in the winter only to be back at it in the summer!) to the warlords/militias/gangs that rise up as local governments in lawless areas (taxation and forced labor of the populace are the usually setups in this regard in PA settings but groups like certain middle-eastern militias in the real world show that just having no other groups in charge can allow monopoly of things like drug running to fund an organization and actually get them wildly popular among the populace in part due to them not directly taxing at all).

>>3636461

Not unless that is a highly technologically advanced community, with the mechanics to repair the tank itself, maintain its engine, and provide battery power for the tank. A tank without a battery can't even fire it's main weapon. Tanks in an apocalyptic setting would be a huge waste of resources.

Not to mention, you have to CREW the things.

>>3636473
I have a reloading station in my garage. Recently I've had little time to shoot at the range, or go hunting because of work and family issues, but I still have the knowledge in my head.

Worse case scenario, the bombs fall and I die, but some brave scavenger will find my work bench and figure out how it works and will be able to put it to use, or at least barter it to somebody who does for a small fortune of bottle caps

>>3636504

This. Although, at some point, you need new brass.

>>3636492

Yeah, T2000 has alchohol powered tanks but for the most part the military's main advantages are, especially considering fear of invasion militia arming and overtaking of national guard units putting large amounts of military rifles and machine-guns into raider/bandit/militia hands, 1. their training 2. their large pools of jeeps/trucks and 3. their stockpiles of plentiful ammunition for those military grade small arms, not to mention other arms ranging from grenade-launchers to recoilness rifles. EMP and fuel shortages may leave you without air support or armor, but a truck can still drag a small artillery piece and most T2000 party setups tend to have a jeep/truck armed with all sorts of recoiless rifles and machineguns and things. So it's safe to say many military units would still have the advantage of firepower (not to mention training) for quite a while.

>>3636504

leave an interesting diary (though just a few pages, protagonists have short attention spans) then for the guy who finds your workshop

Besides the classic "street gangs take over the cities, motorcycle gangs roaming the highways and raiding/taxing farms" sort of thing and the logical progressions of bandit/military warlordship, a likely genesis to many local gangs/militias would be vigilante groups created to "deal" with refugees flooding into close-knit rural areas from the urban areas demanding food and overwhelming the locals with their numbers. The T2000 supplement "Allegheny Uprising" deals with this in depth: the refugee camps provide a Palestinian type breeding ground for new recruits for the marauder bands, while the mountain counties are intent on not letting the fate of the valley towns happen to them and have formed into various militias - some more noble and fair minded than others.

>>3636492
Your kind of proving my point: Fuel, Parts, Shells, Battery Power and other vital fluids are needed to maintain those things and eventually your going to run out of at least one of them.

Tanks will have an extremely short life span and if your smart, you'll only use them in a siege.

FYI, Nuclear Winter is seriously overblown. Fallout is indeed a potential threat, depending on where you are compared to where the bombs went off, and what kinds of bombs and detonation points were used.

For example, look up Crossroads Able and Baker (wikipedia has a decent writeup). Able was an airburst bomb that sank a few ships, did some damage, and the immediate radiation would have morally wounded a lot of sailors in a real attack. However, most of the fallout was dispersed across the upper atmosphere, diluted to the point where it didn't really hurt anything. Baker, OTOH, was an underwater explosion in a very shallow lagoon--almost an absolute worst-case-scenario for fallout. Every ship nearby was coated in lethal fallout, and many (including Saratoga and some BBs) sank from minor leaks days later because they couldn't put anybody on them to stop the leaks.

That said... Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both airbursts, and were safe to move through within two weeks. The thousands who died from radiation sickness all lived nearby. Both are large, populous cities today, and a memorial is held each year directly under where Little Boy went off.

>>3636047
Thanks for the pic

Also love your ideas OP.

I personally think a lot of the charm (if you can call something about keepin' on after mass death charming) is the return of the small, ordered community. After people get over the chaos and confusion, you have small bands of people who are united by common experience, a desire to rebuild, and intense regard for the safety of prosperity. It hearkens back to a time where everyone knew each other, men were men, and the town watch kept the scum and brigands away. The post-apocalypse brings back black and white in a sense, which makes for a more spirited background.

feel free to disagree

>>3636513
Melt down my plumbing, it's all brass. Shit, I'm a 100 year old charred skeleton, It's not like I care. Also I kept a bottle of scotch hidden behind my couch, help yourself.

>>3636581

The nuclear winter idea comes from the fact that no one knows what will REALLY happen in a nuclear war. Right now, the US maintains 70,000 nuclear weapons, most of them in the 300-500 megaton range (The hiroshima and nagasaki bombs were only a few kilotons). If all of them were unleashed in an engagement, it would likely mean that no one would really survive to care. The Earth would become so saturated by radiation, and the atmosphere so damaged, that most if not all of the planet couldbecome uninhabitable within a decade.

>>3636580
Well, apparently, there were T34's rolling around in service in Africa as late as 1996. So, yeah.

>>3636581
(cont)

At any rate, the *real* dying from a nuclear war, even a late-80s 10,000-warhead slugfest, would be from the breakdown of civilization.

You wouldn't die from a nuclear fireball, or from the plot-device fallout from The Day After... you'd die because a smaller (but still sufficient) number of people *would* die from those, leading to a collapse of civilization and the economy.

Without reliable food shipments, most urban populations will starve in a few months. Everybody knows that, and thus fighting begins immediately, followed by sickness and starvation. The key to stopping it is to impose order (preferably by somehow convincing the survivors to hold things together, rather than using the point of a gun--because that tends to fall apart over time).

for a more /tg/ take on the scenario, try the Emberverse books by S M Stirling. They're not perfect by any means, but they are a fairly interesting take on survival after somebody mucks around with the laws of physics dealing with how electricity and the compression of gasses work. Spoiler: Knights in steel plate armed with swords cut from leaf springs.

>>3636619

T2000 has nuclear winter overblown but the combination in minor temperature shift mixed with wind-rending hydrogen blasts altering weather patterns to cause many areas that were once fertile to drought and other areas to flood, devastating the previously recovering communities of many parts of America (successful completion of the first few America modules lead you to think of rebuilding communities, the new Texas Republic, and so on; and then Kidnapped basically bayonets the survivors by listing area after area they will basically become a deadland from drought and famine).

>>3636619
What the heck are you smoking? The biggest bomb ever set off was 50MT (it could have potentially been set to 100MT), and weighed far too much to be of any military use. Most US *strategic* nukes are in the 150-250KT range.

Oh, and we don't have 70,000 of them. We're down to around 2,000 nukes of all sizes today, and to be honest, we're not totally sure how many of them actually work... because they were built in the 60s and 70s, and, you know, uranium... decays.

Scientists *think* that most of them will work, but none have been tested in 20 years to see.

At least, we know India's and Pakistan's newly-built nukes work...

>>3636681
Protect your future today! Don't kill your family by not reserving a spot, today!

>>3636694

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7jKRDTg8m8

>>3636681
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Wpngall.html

Someone archive this. This is too cool not to read later when I have time. Plus /tg/ is being civil and fun, and I like seeing that.

>>3636681

We have 5400 just on ICBMs currently.

Indeed, this thread is full of progress...it's scary.

Well, the fire is starting to die down. Hey, body, could you pass the can of "Pork n' Beans?"

read The Postman by david brin its good :3

>>3636757

Indeed, Postman is a must for the kind of thing this guy

>>3636646

is talking about. Y2K also talks about the disruption of the shipping system combined with the lack of self-sufficiency of most first world communities today being the real apocalypse, but Postman does that one better with the fact that things could of been restored if the construction workers, messengers, emergency services, and so on hadn't been beset upon by the hypersurvivalists as soon as the bombs dropped.

Armed groups would include... streetgangs (scavenging, lording over unaffiliated scavengers and urban farmers/trappers/hunters in a feudal way), anti-refugee militias, refugee-camp spawned marauders (begin as "resource allocation committees" swarming the probably better-armed locals, evolve into armed and desperate gangs), road gangs (raiding/tithing for distilled fuels, food, etc.), war partisans/guerrillas (any active, even low intensity, war front will generate lots of these as well as abandoned/deserted military units - especially from lower grade armies or nations in a state of civil war), town militias (like the Rangers in Jericho), survivalist groups (from fortified farming communities to armed cityslickers who bought their retreat out here years ago and suddenly find themselves unwelcome by the refugee-harmed locals and probably throwing in with the fugees themselves or proving their worth by becoming a particularly violent anti-refugee militia in order to tax the locals for their protection), rural bandits, highwaymen (including groups that "own" a certain bridge, river crossing, major highway), and the few rare large raider groups (small armies of pillaging marauders with looted military gear and liberal sprinklings of army deserters, paramilitaries operating from a consolidated base of power in the form of their unofficial nation or a decentralized movement)

but what about william johnstone's ashes series it pretty much covers the same stuff as fallout basiclly it's pov is through a right wing writer who survives world war III in which about 95% of the world gets blown back to the stone age and how they rebuild i've got most of the books in dead tree format & pdf's but mr johnstone died before the series could be complete

The Best Post Apoc Series I have ever seen are the "Death Lands" Books by James Axler. There are 80+ Books and they all play out like Awesome D&D Stories.

You can get them all in Audio book formats, Try finding the Graphic Audio Versions.

They Books are for adults, they do not pull any punches. There is Sex where sex should happen. If two chars would get it on, it happens, and they DO NOT FADE TO BLACK. There is death and killing, Rape and Abuse. Hell one of the main chars who has been in 6 books so far just hanged himself. You could almost see it coming two books or so in advance.

They world setting that is developed is believable.
Alternate lingo is used and used in a consistant manner, for example. "Im am going to kill you" would be "I am going to chill you.

The Series is scifi at times. One of the main chars "Doc Tanner" is from the late 1800s and was pulled from the past to 1998, and then later pushed 100 years in to the future, after Sky Dark.

There are secret abandoned government bunkers called Redoubts, they house some advanced Tech, one being the Mat Trans Chambers, that act as Teleportation Chambers, one can travel from redoubt to redoubt, but the process is largely random, as the main chars have yet to figure out how to select a Destination, but that have figured out how to use the last Destination option, so they can jump to the previous location.

The whole shabang is set roughly 100 years in the future.

I highly recommend it.

James Axler
http://www.jamesaxler.com/TheBooks/tabid/55/ctl/ViewBookList/mid/374/SeriesID/1/Default.aspx
Check it out

The Audio books are nothing short of Amazing.

>>3635915
Hell yes, Paradise Falls.

Most satisfying town to slaughter ever.

>>3636710
I hated how they fucked up Jet in Fallout 3.

Some folks have talked about guns, and I want to clarify some things. I can live in NYC, Queens. Queens is the most anti-gun borough of all, and even here there's atleast a dozen gun shops (this all excludes gang bangers).

In parts of Africa that didn't so many caches from Soviets, Americans or firearms manufacturers, you have the natives making breech loading firearms.

Breech-loading & repeater firearms would be the most common sight. You'd also have converted semi-autos and cheap, simple machine guns (think sten guns).

Pic semi-related.

I think if you really want to take this in a /tg/ direction you have to remember that all communications would essentially be destroyed by the blast(s). Which makes it interesting for PC's to see how each community responded to the blast. Its like an endless well of mini-stories. The Mormon town that still functions, The suburban neighborhood taken over by the obsessed ex-marine leader of the neighborhood watch. The small right wing christian town. A Manson family type commune in the mid-west. All of these could be fantastically depressing and terrible scenarios that are sure to make players feel like humanity has actually gone insane after the destruction

>>3637477

All of that can and probably would happen, but it is not due to lack of communication. We've had radio for over a hundred years and the first thing to do (beyond food) would be broadcasting.

So you have an even more awesome and terrible scenario. All of the situations described, yet there is on the airwaves, the POWER OF ROCK!!!!

Are you a bad enough dude to overthrow your lame-ass apocalypse town run by cowards and join up with teh WKLF RoCK-NET?!

Two questions... where do i sign up for THE MOTHER FUCKIN WKLF RoCK-NET? And do we get to ride around in Jeeps blasting Painkiller? Also, her's some food for you hungry birds, an awesome link with a map of all military bases in the U.S. Good article too.

http://www.brainsturbator.com/articles/do_you_have_a_community_resistance_plan/

>>3636047
Pic is actually surprisingly /tg/ related. Dimitrys is doing concept art for an upcoming tabletop 20mm scale skirmish game called Warlands, to be produced by Aberrant Games.

Link goes to preview of the game done at GenCon '08, currently the only existing footage of minis and whatnots, besides the wip of the truck you see to the left.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rbPVT4pdzw&feature=related

>>3638098
Kind of reminds me of ramshacklegames.com

>>3637565
>>3637477
>>3637468

Keeping what's been said in mind, the specific tone/dial you have your setting at can affect these sorts of things greatly. For example, War Day and T2000 both have some sort of national identity through a patchwork of military controlled areas and semi-stable local governments. In T2000 things are sliding down the drains, the whole world is fading out, and small towns likely don't have a long-range radio that's working and only know the last six month's news except for the local/regional gossip. In WarDay the war is over and while the war destabilized most of the world through food shortages and economic disruption, America is...under control. Under the colonial jackboot and the radio and roads not keeping people from starving in a super-deflated economy where governors are setting up rival alliances and some states have quarantined themselves off from refugees, but a distinctly non-feudal setup. Surprisingly, even though travel is much harder in T2000, it's focus is on it far more while in the book WarDay most people don't travel - because what the novel does focus it's apocalyptic-y feel on is starvation, rad sickness, and the fact that underfed people don't stay up after dark or have any expectations about the government that let them get bombed. If the rest of the world survives in some semi-orderly form to show up at the American doorstep, expect many people to feel war guilt (but I also imagine many people to just be envious and xenophobic too, something Warday kind of glosses over).

A permanent craphole-but-civilized situation like WarDay will have (dangerous) roads, trains, and buses. It will also have state border patrols, highwaymen, a rebel nation calling itself Atzlan, and the loving embrace of the fascistic California police force.

>>3638814
Your classic "wild west" post-war PA, whether reconstructing or going downhill, will look more like T2K - with their being a patchwork network of governments but a major shortage of communication equipment. Either some heroes are going to have to make the roads safe for travel and news or things are going to go down the neofeudal dark ages fiefdoms shitter.

Then there's settings where there are many intact communities and many are rebuilding, but they aren't talking to each other. I guess depending how heavy you play up the "deliberate EMP attack during the exchange" this could be for you. This is great for a variety of communities and situations like one of these anonymi are talking about, rolling into a different sociopolitical climate each week like one of those 80's action-adventure tv shows (man/woman/intelligent car roams around towns helping people solve their problems).

And then there's the Fallout spaghetti western far gone vibe where "civilization" is just a handful of sinful boom towns and ranches out in the radioactive desert.

And various other feels inbetween. Adjust your dials and find the one you want to use at the given moment.

>>3637196

Seems, to overly simplify, like Fallout but with dark ages tropes instead of spaghetti western ones.

Looks cool.

Also, it's wikipedia article is certainly...enthusiastic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathlands

Overall: looks cool!

I vote for archival. Do it fuckers

>>3638901

I voted.

Sounds a bit like shattered union.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4GMPTMiFQ4

I'll grant that some of the extremes I've mentioned are a bit light on the social breakdown, as they take more of a look at what even non-batshit poverty and sickness will do in a sad realistic sort of way, but even if they're treading the shallow end of the pool they're still swimming in the waters of PA, while Shattered Union is just a straight-out balkanization scenario that has a nuke just as the plot device eliminating the federal government. It's not post-apocalyptic and doesn't try to be, from my understanding (have not been able to find a copy so if I'm mistaken please forgive).

I ran a PA game, and I didn't worry about the background, because there characters were not born in it. It might as well have been a foreign planet.

I also like the aspects of sci-fi PA, mutants, zombies, things from the stars, because it's still grounded in a ruined modern world, that players can associate with, but also has fantastic elements for high drama and conflict.

btw, Oklahoma is a post apocalyptic waste land right now. for the reeelz.

>>3639060

The point is to focus on anywhere from the town-militia to "the governor's raised two rifle companies" and all the "oh shit" cut off and decentralized actual military units in-between (T2000 for instance states that most military units in this kind of environment will be platoon level) rather than "this is the new balkan American nation of Blah with it's own army and intact industry".

But that doesn't mean you can't have that sort of stuff.

In T2K, to use yet another example, a network/movement of survivalist groups calling itself New America survived, by design, the nuclear exchange and has enclaves in various areas. These enclaves have the same difficulty communicating with each other as everyone else usually, despite specifically stockpiling shielded electronics, but as a movement they do represent some sort of network - the same way the rather decentralized Military and Civilian governments exist, pockets of small areas of total control creating a web of influence, rumor, and trade routes between them.

Basically we're talking about a collapse index here.

1 - Jericho. You have a few large mostly orderly governments. There's lots of smuggling on the highways between small towns, most of which are still largely cut off from one another, but there are also military patrols curtailing these as well as road gangs and mobile mercenary/criminal groups.

2 - WarDay. Sure a train system runs through most of the states, but it doesn't go into the heart of the radioactive great plains, in many areas you have to get out and walk or take a local bus and risk bandits, and the more intact a state is the more likely it's going to boot refugees at the door and not accept out of state travelers. No large coherent factions, at least not domestic ones, the federal government exists but unofficially the individual states are no longer cooperating outside of the specific blocs/alliances they've formed.

>>3639116


3. Twilight 2000. Most state governments don't exist, the main governments are enclaves (of varying size) of civilian control (more of a ideological and political network of individual communities providing their own militias and sufficiency cooperating with one another) or martial law (areas where large numbers of troops have set up their cantonments, or where an active military base is currently in operation). Outside of those places individual communities go on the best they can, areas near bomb-sites tend to be the lawless domain of gangs as our the roads and rural areas inbetween farms and communities, and some areas have rallied behind a strong warlord (such as the New American enclaves like the provisional government of St.Petersburg Florida; or the unaffiliated warlord running the refugee camps in Western Pennsylvania). Gangs, vigilante groups, and ad hoc militias from decentralized communities are often the reality of small-scale government in other areas.

4. Deathlands, I'm guessing. The networks have collapsed and now every individual enclave is out for itself.

5. No longer even the large but isolated warlordships of 4, this is Fallout territory. Any groups larger than the town/city level are movements or secret societies or paramilitaries, not really geographical governments. Even the largest government shown, the NCR (which is more an exception than the rule), is basically a city-state with some allied ranches around it.

To use the catchphrases of the sort of peak-oil/war-on-terror age hypersurvivalist blog Global Guerrillas, eventually the nation-state even as a concept will be ground down in this sort of setting until there are just the global guerrillas (read: decentralized gangs/tribes) and resilient communities (read: self-sufficient and self-defending communities). Of course the dynamics do tend a bit more towards centralization in some cases due to the fact that the apocalypse, unlike the prophecized disastrous age of globalism biting us in the ass, won't have internet and cellphones for the guerrillas to coordinate among each other with from half the world away.

But the point about in the lack of any official or community selected authority guerrilla groups rising to power drawing on primary loyalties like race, religion, family, or any other sort of common mythology/kindship (including the kind gangs manufacture artificially) is a good one even in a PA, and those un-networked (electronically speaking) environment.

One lesson to take from this is that maybe raider groups wouldn't be the media archetype of "just a big gang led by the strongest or most charismatic" but instead not have leaders so much as more senior members who are more like village elders than bosses, and that the groups might be part of an entire raiding economy that goes beyond them.

An example using modern day guerrilla groups is that any area where temporarily there is no government becomes a self-financing HQ for these kinds of groups, and that warzones provide a market of job opportunities (they're being a competitive market for freelance attacks, that is terror for pay, in Iraq; the success of Somali pirates like how they got 3 million for that Ukrainian boat this week; etc.).

Certainly the dynamics will be limited to the regional level in a non-electronic world, but you could do well to spice up your crazy marauders by having them playing this sort of game. Imagine the look on the party's face when they're ambushed by a bunch of kids from the peaceful farming community doing it for cash to eliminate the kinds of armed bands that make things harder on the local marauders - and the marauders themselves actually being dependent on the convoys and messengers of the regional warlord/authority/government, making their living from looting after ambushes and ransoming those they capture.

There are more raider dynamics than just the fortified or roving gang extorting the farmers for food is all I'm saying.

To go back to the tribal metaphor, tribes (the guerrillas/raiders/marauders) go to war over petty honor and turf, but the reality is that the warring is an end in itself. They avoid straight out conflicts they can't win but they're decentralized and use unconventional tactics and most of the kinds of attacks they perform are actually profitable and part of their life-cycle/ecology. So their petty tribalism is actually a state of being - the life of the neo-warlords and his warriors (as opposed to the nation-state and the soldiers). Like how Bedouin tribesmen used to, no matter how rich they got, still participate in raids and even random sniping of travelers in the desert.

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With military stockpiles, various (botched) government relocation efforts, some of the better stocked variety of survivalist groups, and the fact that the collapse prevented the existing stockpiles of food in the nation to be distributed in their normal way until running out, stored goods could, in a Twilight 2000 type situation, be stretched out. In theory the U.S. only ever has enough food to feed itself for what, 40 days? But with the collapse and people subsequently killing each other over the stuff, hoarding it as often as not and only using it when what they can produce is inadequate, one could be taking canned goods off of rival gangs and community chests' for years (but not decades - though old fashioned home preserved local produce would be another story). It's not that the food would go bad, it's just that there isn't enough of it for it to last forever when there's a bunch (admittedly a far reduced number) of hungry people about.

>new wild west

Anyone up for a game of Deadlands: Hell on Earth?

Anyways, for how civilization (and technology) actually /working/ is going to kill civilization, see here

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/


However, as gameable as the peak oil - networked tribes - "personal superempowerment" - global guerillas sort of downward spiral (with shiny consumer tech all the way) is, it's a bit beyond the subject matter of here and now, so I apologize for tangentizing on it earlier.

>>3641132
I prefer Weird West myself.

>>3636694
Seems there's been a lot of talk these days about Vault life. But not all of us have the luxury to spend so much on something that, frankly, we may not actually need. Unlike those other guys, the sensible folks at Pulowski Preservation Services have created an affordable line of personal protection products to make sure no one gets left behind. Personal protection, there when you actually need it. Remember, that's Pulowski Preservation Shelters. Simply there when you actually need them. Exact change only.

>>3642731

...is that a personal coin-operated fallout shelter?

OP, is your map in enough shape to share?

This may be a bit off topic but... did anyone else snicker and think of Guardsmen Gary when they found the vault full of Garys? I think the highest number Gary I found was 47. Never did find out why all those buggers were running around down there. But then again, I never really found out much about the vault with the mysterious gas and delusions either.

>>3642871
Indeed it is. When you find them ingame, the typically have Skeletons with a gun and some liquor inside.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

One of the more convincing nuclear war scenarios I've read.