What do you want the next RPPR campaign to be?

[clockworkjoe]

Another trope I want to challenge is the idea of a single apocalyptic event changing everything. The closest we've ever been to a real apocalypse is the Black Death and that wasn't a single instantaneous event - it was a gradual apocalypse reaching different regions at different times. There was also a lot of ambiguity as people didn't have the right information to understand what was going or react accordingly.

Imagine a city getting wiped out by...something. If you never interacted with that city or anyone that lived in it, your life would continue on without much change. But another city is devastated, then another. Gradually, life changes for you even if you had no direct connections to the city.

[unitomega]

Another trope I want to challenge is the idea of a single apocalyptic event changing everything. The closest we've ever been to a real apocalypse is the Black Death and that wasn't a single instantaneous event - it was a gradual apocalypse reaching different regions at different times. There was also a lot of ambiguity as people didn't have the right information to understand what was going or react accordingly.

Honestly, the Black Plague was only an apocalypse in term of a body count and area. There were even multiple outbreaks over a period of time. It definitely changed people's world view, but not in the way most people probably think of today, or appears in a lot of post-apoc fiction. It was the dark ages, for most people life was shitty before, shittier during and slightly less shitty again after.

You want something that has correlations to most apocalyptic fiction, try the fall of the Roman Empire. That was a paradigm-shifter for most of Europe, and not all of a sudden. But it would have seemed similar to a lot of post-apoc fiction we have today. Also, it was a gradual chain of events, like you said.

[Shallazar]

Rome falling didn't really hurt the tribes of the Americas, or China. Just as today if an entire civilization fell, one of the big 3, the ramifications would probably be less severe than the sacking of Rome. I imagine that we might entire a crazy economic collapse, if say china went nuclear, but we'd rebound after changing the way we do things. The Dark ages were dark for some but not all, but the plague hit more places. We didn't loose any technology like we did after Rome fell.

[Setherick]

post-apocalyptic campaign update: One of the ideas/tropes I want to challenge is the idea that an apocalyptic event utterly wipes out all technology, science and knowledge except for the remnants. I want to create a post-apoc world that still has wireless computer networks

Enter the global mesh/darknet http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/the-darknet-plan-netroots-activists-dream-of-global-mesh-network.ars

Instead of a global internet, imagine countless local wireless networks, some connected to nearby settlements/enclaves - some not. People use repurposed computers to use it - old PCs, refurbished cell phones etc.

Trent is exploring that same idea in Calypsis. I'm angry that he hasn't posted the new site yet, but I think he's taking the semester off of working on it so he can apply for jobs.

[clockworkjoe]

Another trope I want to challenge is the idea of a single apocalyptic event changing everything. The closest we've ever been to a real apocalypse is the Black Death and that wasn't a single instantaneous event - it was a gradual apocalypse reaching different regions at different times. There was also a lot of ambiguity as people didn't have the right information to understand what was going or react accordingly.

Honestly, the Black Plague was only an apocalypse in term of a body count and area. There were even multiple outbreaks over a period of time. It definitely changed people's world view, but not in the way most people probably think of today, or appears in a lot of post-apoc fiction. It was the dark ages, for most people life was shitty before, shittier during and slightly less shitty again after.

You want something that has correlations to most apocalyptic fiction, try the fall of the Roman Empire. That was a paradigm-shifter for most of Europe, and not all of a sudden. But it would have seemed similar to a lot of post-apoc fiction we have today. Also, it was a gradual chain of events, like you said.

I only used the Black plague analogy in that it was a gradual collapse, not a sudden event. It's very common for post-apocalyptic stories to have this structure:

BEFORE:Everything is normal!
DURING:OHSHIT (5 minutes)
AFTER: Shits fucked up D:

Everyone in the world knows about the apocalyptic event and everyone is aware of how the world has changed. So I want do more of a gradient from normal to postapoc world and have it so that many people aren't even aware of it until the very late stages of it.

[Ezechiel357]

The "Gradual Apocalypse" has also something else for it: you don't know when it is over !
So if people believe it is still happening, they will be paranoid, will have strange behaviour or believes about what needs to be done to preserve them.
Of course, you will also have all the associated behaviours like finding scapegoat, blaming this religion/race/deviant behaviour for the apocalypse, religious zealots of all kind.

Also, having as background huge city with only a few hundred people living in can be quite creepy - for reference the first 20 minutes of "I am Legend", where almost no words is heard, except Will Smith talking to himself.

The cause of a accelerated death rate can be a new disease (classic), the Red Plague, can be huge swarms of insects (like cricket) flying apparently randomly and leaving behind them a desert, without any lifeform left, plant or animal, can be radiation or contamination of  air/water/some type of food.

Looking forward which spin you want to give.

[Salkovich]

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a great, great book for an example of this.

[clockworkjoe]

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a great, great book for an example of this.

http://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/

Whole Foods Market

Noe Valley - San Francisco, CA

Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

Four stars.

The sheriff and the posse were now a block away and riding seven abreast rifles in hand and horses snorting and wildeyed. The outlaw dropped his pistol and stiffwalked into the parking lot of a grocery store. Around him young women in skintight sporting clothes stopped and stared.

The ground shook as the posse rode up on the parking lot entrance but the sheriff stopped his riders with a raised hand and sawed his palamino around sending the animal sidestepping like a showhorse into a newspaper box which fell over with a great cacophony. When the noise subsided the neighborhood and the parking lot were silent. The riders and the outlaw and the women frozen like actors in some gypsy roadshow.

A rider wearing an elaborate mustache and carrying a Winchester onehanded nudged his quarterhorse toward the sheriff. Hell he’s right there sheriff.

I know it. Im lookin at him same as you.

What are we waitin for then.

We caint touch him now deputy. They got their own way here.

The riders watched as the women left their station wagons and strollers and encircled the outlaw. As if some ancient instinct united them. Silent as wolves and staring intently at the broken man standing there. He saw his mistake and called out to the riders reaching toward them with his one good arm but was struck down with a savage blow from a rolled yoga mat.

That old boy done walked into the wrong parking lot, said the sheriff.

The posse sat their horses and stood silent witness as the women swarmed over the outlaw’s fallen form and soon they could not see him but for the flurry of spandex and ponytails.

[Teapot]

Again, I'll suggest http://rantmedia.ca/afternow/ Tales from the AfterNow, which features many parts of the Slow Apocalypse. It's really more of a melding of Post-Apocalypse and Cyberpunk in that there wasn't one specific event that changed everything but now the world does suck and has for a long time. But the internet is still there sort of, it may or may not be the home of a singularity called "Server" praying to Server might make your searches work faster, it makes you feel better anyway.

[Setherick]

You need to read more J.G. Ballard when setting up this game if you want to do gradual collapse.

[clockworkjoe]

You need to read more J.G. Ballard when setting up this game if you want to do gradual collapse.

got one ballard book on my reading list. Any others you'd recommend other than high rise?

current reading list

High Rise
McMafia
Shadow Cities
Shock Doctrine
Cities under Siege
BLDG Blog
Virtual Light

[SageNytell]

Comedy option: The Last Centurion.  Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but I definitely don't agree with some of the major points made inside.  Deals with a US army unit stranded overseas in the deepening aftermath of a mild Ice Age event and a pandemic flu.  Never gets quite to the point of an apocalypse, but it gets pretty crazy.

[Setherick]

You need to read more J.G. Ballard when setting up this game if you want to do gradual collapse.

got one ballard book on my reading list. Any others you'd recommend other than high rise?

current reading list

High Rise
McMafia
Shadow Cities
Shock Doctrine
Cities under Siege
BLDG Blog
Virtual Light

Millennium People and Vermilion Sands.

[BOMherren]

I hope it isn't too late to offer up a campaign idea, because I just had this ridiculous notion that came to me in a fever dream. I call it Rogue Trader: House of Gaga. 

The House of Gaga, once a great and powerful Rogue Trader Dynasty, has since fallen into ill-fortune and disrepute. Now, cast into the Koronus Expanse by the vicissitudes of the Warp, and armed with nothing but a dilapidated old trading vessel, personal magnetism and a cargo hold full of hallucinogenic drugs, it falls to Lady Gaga the 117th and her ragtag crew of misfits to restore the family name and find a way home.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Sounds more a like Black Crusade game. Only twist is if you grow to Corruption 100 instead of becoming a chaos spawn you become one of the Lady's back up dancers.