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[The Grinning Bandit]

SO.

As everyone obviously knows, I'm fucking terrible at doing anything on my own and have a strong liking for anarchistic and collaborative projects in general, so the thought struck me: why not utilize a roleplaying game for the sake of writing fiction? Invent a setting, hand the reigns to the player characters and watch the stories unfold.

A little game called Dawn of Worlds decided to take that a bit further by facilitating the collaborative creation of the world itself, removing the unfortunate tendency for a GM's work on a complex setting to go utterly to waste because they didn't bother explaining it in detail, or they did and nobody cared to read the 200-page guidebook.

Now I've had the idea to combine a few ideas into one: a post-apocalyptic adventure game (likely played via the Bay12 forums) combined with the world-building aspect of Dawn of Worlds, zoomed-in Google Maps-style to the foundation, population, and eventual apocalyptic destruction of a small American town (or a metropolis, maybe).

That is, phase one of the game would be the group of players using Dawn of Worlds-style rules to build a town from its roots and follow it through the most important periods of American history, up until the day to end all history (and possibly just beyond, with the final moments of the phase seeing the children of the post-apocalypse finally reaching adulthood; alternately, the players would take up the role of the few survivors from their little town).

Phase two would follow the intrepid survivors in their attempts to survive in the post-apocalypse, whatever that entails; either settling down in one place, attempting to create a sustainable life or else sending out constant scavenging parties, all the while protecting their ramshackle home from whatever threats sent by the apocalypse - or else wandering the wastes as nomads, journeying through wilderness, ruins, and the first settlements of a new society.

I'll hold off momentarily at making the first shoddy attempt at laying down some rules; for now, does anyone find this idea interesting or, better yet, potentially badass?

Spoiler: Alternate Idea (click to show/hide)

My alternate idea is to simply run a forum adventure as a collective of young rebels and runaways attempting to steal and scam their way from their suburban homes to a mysterious gathering of anarchist revolutionaries across the country. See The White Shark Tales and Dropping Out (For Students) to see some of the inspiration behind this. This is a much less in-depth idea and one I'm unsure about; it struck me that I've never seen a forum adventure have a crack at the adventures still capable of being found in the present day, but maybe that's because it'd be better to live them than play them!

[piecewise]

Step 1 of a dawn of worlds game: Draw a map that looks like a penis
Step 2: Create penis mountains
Step 3: Create sentient penis race to inhabit penis mountains
Step 4: Corrupt other races
Step 5: Wiggle eyebrows at other players
Step 6: Get punched in the face


I vote for a non-traditional because, as I said here, the traditional nuclear end of days is getting pretty fucking boring. How about a race of flaming mountain lions has invaded earth and flame-raped everything to pieces?

[The Grinning Bandit]

Step 6: Get punched in the face

oh how did I forget the most important phase

I vote for a non-traditional because, as I said here, the traditional nuclear end of days is getting pretty fucking boring. How about a race of flaming mountain lions has invaded earth and flame-raped everything to pieces?

That would be an interesting take on the "insurmountable invasion" apocalypse. Who needs zombies?

I suddenly had the idea of maybe a bio-engineered infection that:

- kills 90% of the planet immediately - the actual "apocalypse", plain and simple.

- kills 9% of the planet within 10 or 15 years - the short-lived parents of the children of the apocalypse, untouched by the plague due to their parents' partial immunity (or because it's only transmittable through direct contact with the engineered toxin, whichever is more believable), and thus the source of the characters who are essentially blank slates having had no concept of society before the apocalypse and nothing to fill in those blanks but the simple childhood lessons gained from their now-dead parents, and whatever scraps of civilization they can piece together.

- leaves 1% (or much less) of the planet completely uninfected - the last remains of a dead world, the only ones with firsthand knowledge of life before the apocalypse.

Alternately, zombies.

[Aqizzar]

You could also go for the pseudo-science possibilities the "History" Channel likes to posit.  I say pseudo-science, in that they're plausible happenings, but so massive and poorly understood, you can attribute pretty much any outcome to them.

For instance, a meteor on the scale of the dinosaur-ending one.  The sky lights on fire from the amount of supersonic particulate scattered over the Earth, the world freezes for a year under dust clouds, and when the sky clears, the ground is polluted, everything is ashed away, and the coastlines are completely rearranged.

Or the climate goes crazy like the worst nightmares of environmentalists, a la The Day After Tomorrow, but not as corny.  The Atlantic Conveyor shuts down, everything north and south of the Tropical latitudes is glaciated, mid-level southern hemisphere turns to desert, the water is deoxygenated and horribly polluted from man's collapse and subsequent wars, and everything is cruel and cold.

Or Earth gets hit by a gamma-ray burster star.  The whole surface is cooked like a microwave, except for a little patch on the far side and very well protected shelters.

Just pitching those out there.  I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic world-building, and I've considered starting a "hey, let's make a world" thread myself, but I figured it was too open ended.

[piecewise]

We could use an idea I had for an awhile ago but never got around to putting into a proper story.

Setting: large boarding school in the middle of a heavily forested area, only one road in or out and all food and water if delivered by supply trucks.

Problem: One student wanders into the woods, returns several days later and walks to the center of campus before freezing as though freezeframed. Another student attempts to rouse the first but he too freezes, not breathing, not moving, completely and totally immobile. This happens to several students before the others realize something is wrong and go back to their dormitories. Story begins there.

Future problems: The Freezing effect continues to spread, becoming easier to be effected, sometimes simply by looking at one of the "statues". Escape into the forest or down the road seems impossible, none who try ever return with the help they promise to send. Supply trucks stop coming. Food and water begin to run low as winter sets in.

[The Grinning Bandit]

Just pitching those out there.  I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic world-building, and I've considered starting a "hey, let's make a world" thread myself, but I figured it was too open ended.

Yeah, that's why I decided it might be better to shrink the scope down to an individual town or city within the area of an existing country as a whole, which ought to keep the fun of creating a setting and background without the incredible difficulty of making an entire world from scratch.

I'm really liking the idea of an illness that kills off kids' parents within ten or fifteen years, though. I guess it's because I'm not so much focused on the actual cause of the apocalypse as I am on the implications:

Imagine the entire world being wiped clean of anyone with any knowledge of the workings of modern society, the only survivors being young kids and teenagers who received a haphazard education of survival skills, their parents/guardians' professions, and what little history their parents could relate to them, much of it likely sounding like a fairy tale. The fate of humanity's survival and rebirth left in the hands of children.

I think I like this idea because it's sort of the big appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction; the ability to leave behind all the trappings of modern life and set out to rework the world to your imagination. Every kid's fantasy kingdom in his backyard suddenly takes on the potential to enter reality.

Alternately, the great plague could mostly effect only those finished with puberty, which would have different implications; rather than being the children of the last, short-lived survivors of the apocalypse, the players would simply be teenage survivors who are suddenly thrust from their presumably boring lives of schoolyard monotony and family drama into a daring fight for survival amidst the ruins of the society they once knew.

I dunno, am I talking out my ass here? I'm still doubtful - I might be the only one who finds this concept at all interesting.