So, I've been brainstorming my "post-apocalyptic, supernatural Western" setting for several months now, most recently in this thread. A lot of things in that thread have changed during the process, sometimes two or three times.

Rather than going back and correcting everything, I've decided to start a new thread with the most recent (and thus mostly correct) posts. Apologies for the reposts.

Thanks to everyone who read, commented, and offered suggestions.

The Future Came To Pass

In 2015, the rotting plague killed a quarter of humanity and shattered the existing social, economic, and governmental orders. Famine, civil strife, and outright warfare followed, killing another third of humanity (or more). A scant decade later, and the survivors were banding together, striving to restore order, when the Emergence began.

There is another world beyond ours, a world of magic and power. Vortexes connecting our world to the Beyond opened up, and out them came monsters, refugees, and magic itself. And in the middle of the Atlantic, a single vortex of immense size disgorged the ancient and uninhabited island of Atlantis.

All across the world, magic now worked. All across the world, monsters Emerged from the vortexes. And all across the world, the Beyonder races sought shelter from the evil consuming their homelands.

It is 2039, and the United States has been shattered. The government controls but small portions of the country.

The rest is "The Outlaw", places and people beyond the control of the government. The Outlaw is a chaotic place where people fend for themselves. No safety net, no police, no government save for what people make themselves.

There are dangers here. Bandits, thieves, and murderers. Bloodgangs, packs of vampires or ghouls that hunt humans for food and sport. And Emerged creatures, nightmarish and powerful.

Then there are the Guns. Freelance lawmen (or vigilantes), heroes (or thugs), and killers. Always killers.

When people need protection, when they need revenge, when they need a monster hunted and killed, they hire Guns. Some work for the wealthy, some even the government, others work for the dispossessed and powerless.

They are assassins, mercenaries, freelance lawmen, bounty hunters, and, yes, even criminals. Sometimes there is but a sliver of difference between the marauders who rape, kill, and steal, and the Guns who hunt them.

In post-Emergence America, Guns are the heroes and villains of The Outlaw.

What Are "Guns"?

Guns are the player characters of a GiTO campaign, the rough equivalent of D&D's "adventurers". They are mercenaries, bounty hunters, and freelance lawmen. They are hired to face and fight the various threats of the post-Emergence world.

Guns are not just gunfighters (though nearly all do, in fact, carry guns). Guns can be mages, technicians, con men, or hackers. What matters is that, no matter their skill set, they are willing and able to fight, and capable enough to survive. (Gun life has a high mortality rate.)

The following are the major archetypes that Guns tend to fall into. They are not absolute categories; any given Gun could mix and match skills and abilities from each. But when people hire Guns, they will tend to request one of these... "We need a magus, an iceman, and a cracker."

Magus — A spellcaster, one who follows either a Beyonder tradition or one native to Earth. Twiddle your fingers, say a few words, and you make things happen with magic.

Technomage — Magic responds to electrical current, and you can build gadgets that cast spells. Technomages carry several devices that allow them to duplicate the abilities of maguses.

Technoshaman / Sorcerer — Magic emanates from the shadow world, which is the domain of spirits. When magic flooded the world, these spirits came with it, and many took up residence in everyday objects. Technoshamans cannot cast spells, but they have the innate ability to commune with spirits and even summon them into the material world (or banish them from it). More, they can summon/banish while projecting inside a computer construct (see "cracker", below). "Sorcerer" is the Beyonder name for a technoshaman.

Gun Knight / Avowed — Magical abilities manifest in many ways: spellcasting, shadow-walking, spirit summoning, and augmentation. Augmentations are innate magical talents that enhance the abilities of a person. They can make one stronger, faster, more stealthy, and so forth. Developing these abilities requires intense studies and vows. There are dozens of Avowed schools, and each has their own moral code and required vows. On Earth, the Avowed were called knights (their vows and moral codes being mistaken for chivalry, and their schools being conflated with knightly orders) and those who hired themselves out as Guns became Gun Knights.

Augment — Properly constructed technomagical devices allow people to gain the abilities of a gun knight, without the need for years of study or vows. These require painful treatments however, and expensive metals, as runes must be etched onto a person's skeleton, then filled with metals. Augments are usually far less powerful than true Avowed, and usually less skilled.

Cracker — Shadow Walkers are mages who can project their mind into the shadow world. Electricity affects magic, including electronics. Computers, in particular, have a strange effect on the shadow world. They create small nodes in the energies of magic. Any magician with the ability to project their mind into the shadow world (via spell, technomagical device, or a shadow walker's projection ability) can enter these nodes and steal data from the computer. To combat this, people create constructs, false realities with their own internal laws of physics. To break into the computer, a person must penetrate the construct. Crackers are maguses, technomages, shadow walkers, or technoshamans who specialize in this sort of activity. (Though, as a rule, all shadow walkers are called crackers.)

Iceman — A person who specializes in combat abilities, typically a gunfighter, sharpshooter, or sniper.

Face — A negotiator, interrogator, interviewer, and seducer. Crackers hack constructs, faces hack people.

Tracker — A bounty hunter, someone skilled in finding other people. Usually assumes some facility with following tracks in the wilderness.

Stakers — Guns who specialize in fighting anthrophagians or "eaters" (vampires, ghouls, & wraiths).

Specialist — A catch-all category for roles not covered above, like wheelman, hacker (still necessary, oddly enough, because of limitations on cracking), gunsmith, lawman (someone familiar with legal codes, who can enforce the law), and so forth.

I'm currently building ∞ Infinity, my own little action-movie RPG. Guns in The Outlaw is being built as a setting for that system.

∞ Infinity is skill-based, so any character can learn any skill. (Though some have an additional cost, and those who spread points around tend to end up being mediocre at everything.) Therefore, the setting assumes that there are no strict classes, but rather abilities and skills that any character can acquire.

A character can start off as a magus, and learn to summon spirits. They can begin as an iceman, and later learn spellcasting. The above categories are thus descriptive, not proscriptive.

Magic and Technomagic

Alright, before I continue with the background information, I just wanted to touch on magic and technomagic.

Magic involves several abilities or talents: shadow walking, spirit summoning, spellcasting, augmentation, and imbuing. (Imbuing is the magical talent of enchanting items, for example to create magical swords, wands, rings, and so forth. Such magicians are called "thaumaturgists".) These abilities are called "talents" for a reason: they are innate capacities, that you have to train to use effectively. People can be born with them, or can develop their latent talents later, but everyone must learn how to channel them.

When the first vortexes opened up, magic flooded Earth. In its wake, Earthers discovered that they, too, had these innate magical talents. They could train to use them, just like Beyonders.

The other surprise was that magic — the energies of the shadow world — responded to electrical current flowing through a wire. With the right circuits (which make no physical sense), you could even craft electrical or electronic devices ("devisements") that could create a magical field.

Maguses can cast "flash freeze", and freeze an opponent. Technomages can do the exact same thing, with the correct devisement.

Creating technomagical devisements takes no innate talent, just a knowledge of the proper mathematics and the ability to solder, wrap wires, and screw together a case. Any mechanic can learn to do it, once they learn how to wire the correct circuits. Blank circuit boards, wire cutters, batteries, and spools of wire are the tools of the technomage.

Here's the key question, one that baffled Earthers for many years: why does electricity affect magic, while magnetism, heat, kinetic energy, and other phenomenon doesn't? And why just wired electricity, and not lightning?

Beyonder magics hold the key.

There are three "elements" in Beyonder cosmology: materials such as water, rocks, ores, air, basically anything tangible, energies such as electricity, heat, sound, "force" (or kinetic energy), and ephemera, like the soul, thought, emotions, and magic. These three elements pervade all Beyonder magic.

As an example, all wisps, a Beyonder race, are innately tied to one of the three elements. There are material-aspected wisps, energy-aspected wisps, and ephemera-aspected wisps. Each variety has different abilities, depending on its patron element.

Anthrophagians are people afflicted with a magical curse that forces them to feed on other people. Ghouls feed on the body, they're aspected towards the material. Vampires feed on the life force of victims; they're aspected towards energy. And wraiths consume the souls of their victims; their element is ephemera.

The Beyonders arrange the elements in a hierarchy: material -> energy -> ephemera. Energy is "close" to materials and ephemera, and materials and ephemera are "distant". Thus, it's easier to create energy with a spell (freezing a target) than it is to create material objects (a chair).

Materials affect energies, energies affect ephemera, but it is very rare for ephemera to affect the material in a lasting way (which is why all spells are temporary) and vice versa. Electricity, on the other hand, is an energy, and it is very common for energies to affect the ephemera.

But why electricity in a wire?

Metals, refined ores, have a special property: they can hold a magical charge better than any other material. This is why there are many different magical ores, why swords and rings are more often enchanted than wooden wands, and why augments have metal laced into their enruned bones (the metal holds the magic).

Electrical energy affects ephemeral magic, when it is flowing along metallic wires. The two phenomena, long known to maguses, work together to form something wholly new. (Beyonders lack the knowledge of electricity and electrical circuits.)

Each of the five talents has manifested in strange ways on Earth. Shadow walkers became crackers, sorcerers became technoshamans. Thaumaturgists enchanted rings and swords over the course of weeks or months, technomages can do the same thing with just some wire and a few batteries, in less than an hour.

Both sides have had to adjust to the new circumstances they find themselves in, and the adjustment has been hard for everyone.

Races of the Beyond: Trolls and Fae

When the vortexes opened up, monsters came to our world. The vortexes also disgorged the lost island of Atlantis, with its wrecked cities and powerful guardians. Of equal importance were the Beyonder races: trolls, fae, alfar, and wisps.

Trolls

Trolls are tall, muscular carnivores, with green or brown-shaded skin, and long limbs. Many trolls have upper or lower tusks, and horns of various sizes and shapes are not unknown. Trolls are roughly 25% larger than humans, on average, and tend to the very muscular.

Trolls are born leaders. Their confidence and strength of personality is magnetic, they are naturally charismatic. [Note: In game terms, trolls have a bonus to Strength and Influence, the social stat.]

Trolls are devastating combatants in hand-to-hand combat. They are also famed as warriors and leaders, and many of the most charismatic Beyonders are trolls. Trolls have — despite their appearance — been widely accepted in Outlaw settlements.

In the Beyond, trolls worked as mercenaries, generals, and military advisors. Post-Emergence, this effortlessly translated into service as Guns (especially Lawgivers).

The oldest kingdoms in the Beyond were Trollish. In most ways they were the dominant race. Trolls are as admired as they are feared, and other races often served in Trollish armies and emigrated to Trollish kingdoms.

Fae

Fae are an otherworldly race, famed for their shadow walkers, who generally keep themselves apart from other races. They are slightly shorter than humans, and tend to be extremely thin, unhealthily so from a human standpoint. ("Cadaverous" or "emaciated" are the terms often used.) They tend towards metallic shades of hair and eyes; their hair and eyes actually shine like metals — silver, copper, gold, iron, and so forth.

Fae are natural shadow walkers. Not all fae can or do project into the shadow world, but the facility is far more common among fae than any other race. (Which means, in The Outlaw, fae are often found in cracker circles.) [In game terms, fae characters can gain the shadow walking talent for free, though this isn't mandatory.]

Fae tend to be introspective and withdrawn, often reluctant to speak or act. This derives from the wyrd. Through the wyrd, Fae can sense oncoming misfortune. It's commonly believed that fae can see the moment of their own death; this isn't true, but the wyrd can warn fae of danger to themselves and others. (Though they get no warning of what that danger might be.)

This strange sense cannot be controlled or predicted. It strikes at random (not every misfortune is predicted), and usually unwelcome times.

It is an uncomfortable experience, to know that after anything you say or do, you can be struck with a great dread that suffuses your mind. Then, to know that this dread is well-founded, that it almost always presages some ill event. Then to know that this event may well be your fault... fae find the experience draining, and tend to separate even from each other, leading solitary lives.

Fae are few in number, and standoffish. In the Beyond, they had no kingdoms, nor a homeland. They were nomadic and shunned any allegiances beyond their family Line.

Races of the Beyond: Alfar and Wisps

Alfar

Alfar are the most human-appearing Beyonders. In fact, they look exactly like humans, but at three quarters the size.

Alfar are quick-learning and versatile. As a race, they possess an innate ability to master subjects faster than any other race. More, they can choose their talents (unlike humans). When young, alfar decide which area they wish to master, and their natural facility goes to work, allowing them to grow in that area faster than any other race.

As a result, Alfar are famed as artists, craftsmen, warriors, performers, and much beside. The most promising students tend to be alfar, and the most accomplished masters the same. [In game terms, they receive a bonus to one specific skill, chosen during character creation.]

The downside of this facility is the alfar tendency towards obsession. Alfar don't just seek to master their subject, they are driven to it. Each alfar has a specific obsession relating to one tiny area of their chosen subject, one area they are driven to master. Perhaps it is a specific model of firearm, or a painting technique, or searching for a means to temper gold. Whatever it is, they pursue this obsession for years and decades, until they have mastered that one thing, at which point some other obsession comes to dominate their interest.

Their obsessions don't dominate their entire lives, mind, just their professional life, their pursuit of excellence. Alfar cannot be generalists within their chosen area of expertise, they must focus on a very small part of it and master that one part.

Wisps

Wisps are among the more populous Beyonder races (tending towards multiple births, usually 2-3). Tiny humanoids (between 9 and 12 inches high) with elfin features, wisps are innately magical, and closely linked to one of the three elements of Beyonder sorcery: material, energy, and ephemera. This innate link grants them fantastic abilities, like the facility some wisps have for passing through metal without leaving a trace.

Wisps are winged, though their ability to hover and fly isn't linked to any physical feature. In personality they are — forgive the pun — flighty. They tend to extremes of emotion, extreme joyousness and energy, or extreme pessimism and depression. When excited, they tend to glow.

Wisps are short-lived, maturing in just a year and living for a total of 15, if very lucky. Their legendary drive — wisps seldom remain passive for long, and suffer no half-measures when pursuing a goal — and daring is no doubt due to their awareness of their short spans.

Wisps are naturally magical; every wisp has an innate talent with magic, usually spellcasting. Their diminutive stature means they find it difficult to fight in hand-to-hand combat, so their facility with magic was, very often, their only means of protection. [In game terms, they don't have to spend points at character creation to gain their first magical talent.]

As with all Beyonder races (and humans, as well), wisps are affected by the anthrophagus curses. Will-o-the-wisps are a common threat in the Outlaw, being packs of wisps who have become anthrophagians, either vampires, ghouls, or wraiths. (Unlike the other races, which variety of eater the wisp becomes is determined by their element, not their killer.) Flying near lone or unwary travelers, the eater wisp lures them away to a secluded spot with a mesmerizing light display. There the rest of the pack descends and consumes the luckless wanderer, like a school of piranha.

NYC: The Archetypal Enclave City

New York City is the most populous and most important city in post-Emergence America. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of an Enclave city; every other major city shares at least some elements with New York.

By modern reckoning, Manhattan is New York, the other boroughs are separate municipalities (a consequence of the breakdown of order during the plague). The center of the city, the core, comprises the neighborhoods from Midtown to the Battery. A clean and relatively peaceful place, it houses not only the city's businesses and residential districts, but the national government as well (headquartered in the old UN building).

There are a great many neighborhoods in the core, some patrolled more frequently and more thoroughly than others. Residents pay an annual fee for residency badges, which gives them permission to live in specific neighborhoods and access “munies” (municipal services like policing, water, power, sewage, trash collection, snow removal, pothole maintenance, etc.) The more exclusive the neighborhood, the more expensive the badge, the better the policing and munies. (This residency fee is the replacement for of the old income tax.) This pattern is followed across the country. The irony is that, for all that the feds rail against private security companies, they are, through residency fees, simply the biggest one.

Residency badges are a big deal, as is having one revoked. Building security and patrolling police have the right to check badges at any time, and people are required to keep them on hand. People who carry fake badges are detained (in the notoriously brutal city holding cells) and exiled. Serious offenses merit revocation of residency rights, and expulsion from the core.

Surrounding the core are “the jungles”. These neighborhoods lie outside the police cordon, and have no official access to munies. Policing is handled on an ad-hoc basis, by vigilante committees, criminal gangs, and private security firms. (Sometimes it’s difficult to tell these apart.) Other munies are also ad hoc, jungle residents maintaining infrastructure themselves, or contracting with a private municipal firm (called “bundeskorp”). Jungles residents are technically citizens, but have few rights.

The rotting plague and the aftermath killed 60% of the country. Like most cities, large chunks of New York (called “the wastes”) are mostly empty, abandoned to the elements. These deserted areas, outside the jungles, are a dangerous urban wasteland, filled with eaters (often feral), Emerged creatures, and many other dangers.

Scattered here and there in the wastes are compounds run by chartered companies. Chartered companies are businesses who pay an annual fee for certain legal rights, one of which is the right to operate in unincorporated areas (areas fully outside the control of the Feds) with near impunity. They can seize land and property from non-citizens, can train and maintain private security forces (in essence, their own armies), and have free reign on their compounds to do as they see fit (within a few strict limits). [These companies are analogous to the East India Company, except that colonizing other countries, they colonize unincorporated territory.]

Outside company compounds, the core is the safest area in the city. But even it isn’t fully secure. Gangs and creatures can make their way into the core, and do with some frequency. More, the underground tunnels (of which there are hundreds of miles) are sealed off, a haven for ghouls, other eaters, and the vilest sorts of Emerged monsters. Very frequently, these break through the barricades blocking off the subways and other tunnels, and make their way into the city to prey on innocents.

The tunnels out of the city are collapsed, filled with water. There are three surviving bridges off the island: Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and the George Washington. The first two are mostly well-maintained, a duty NYC shares with the neighboring Bronx Independent Municipality.

The George Washington is one of the most crucial routes out of the city, unfortunately it's far to the north, well into the wastes. The bridge itself is maintained by Jersey, who charges convoys ruinous fees to cross. Unfortunately, they only police the bridge itself, so everything between the core and the bridge is no man’s land.

Trade convoys to and from the farming communities upstate travel the bridge route, but go loaded for bear. On a good day, the trip out of town is like a peaceful journey through occupied territory: tense, but uneventful. On a bad day, it’s Baghdad.

killing 25% of the population isn't enough

In the US this would take you down to population levels in 1982 hardly throwing the country into chaos....

75% death takes you to 1902 which is better but for a real cataslysmic event you need 90 % (1860) but NY City still has a million people making it the size of Prague and gives it a a population density of c 7,000 people per square mile (its currently 66,940 per square mile in Manhattan) which is definitely suburban rather than rural and is actually higher than the population density of pretty large towns in California (San Luis Opisbo has a population density of 3,500 per square mile)

Quote from: jibbajibba;694136killing 25% of the population isn't enough

In the US this would take you down to population levels in 1982 hardly throwing the country into chaos....

I did some research about this (for previous projects), and when 1 in 5 people die from a plague, domestic order collapses. People withdraw from each other, out of fear of catching the disease, and commerce, travel, and law-and-order cease. That's all from 20% deaths. (The academics I read based that figure on historical accounts of past pandemics.)

Now, order can reassert itself fairly quickly, in less than a decade. (Which is what was happening here.) But that interregnum can be bloody and violent.

In the US, the rotting plague killed 25%. The ensuing famines (masses of urban dwellers, suddenly without food), civil disturbances, and near-civil war killed another 35% of the populace.

That's just under 200 million dead, 2.5 times the number killed by WWII. I think that two-and-a-half World War Two's, in less than a decade, is cataclysmic enough for anyone.

Quote from: jibbajibba;694136NY City still has a million people making it the size of Prague and gives it a a population density of c 7,000 people per square mile (its currently 66,940 per square mile in Manhattan) which is definitely suburban rather than rural

Suburban population density in NYC would leave a lot of apartments or whole buildings empty. This was deemed undesirable, for a few reasons.

Almost all Enclave cities have a densely populated core, surrounded by the less densely populated jungles, and the nearly-abandoned wastes. This is a side effect of a deliberate government policy: "urban concentration". The policy was to concentrate people at pre-plague levels, to "maximize utility of existing structures and transportation infrastructure, simplify service infrastructure maintenance, and reduce policing loads".

That is, they emptied out 60% of the city, so they'd have a smaller perimeter to patrol. Fewer occupied buildings also meant fewer buildings to maintain, and fewer sewage lines, power lines, and so forth.

(The Outlaw is far more spread out, to be sure.)

Quote from: jibbajibba;694136killing 25% of the population isn't enough

In the US this would take you down to population levels in 1982 hardly throwing the country into chaos ...

Of course it is.  The Black Death killed no more than a third of the population of Europe, and took half a century to do it, and it still transformed the history of the world.  Sheesh, 9/11 didn't kill as many as 10% of the people who were working in the Twin Towers at the time of the attack, and that act wrought serious changes in the United States as well as the world.

Quote from: Ravenswing;694176Of course it is.  The Black Death killed no more than a third of the population of Europe, and took half a century to do it, and it still transformed the history of the world.  Sheesh, 9/11 didn't kill as many as 10% of the people who were working in the Twin Towers at the time of the attack, and that act wrought serious changes in the United States as well as the world.

That's because Americans are more panicky and in need of authority than we lead ourselves to believe.  

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;694187That's because Americans are more panicky and in need of authority than we lead ourselves to believe.

I completely agree, and firmly believe that Osama bin Laden is laughing at us from Hell, because he won: he did exactly what he set out to do.

Of course, a more self-reliant, hardy folk wouldn't freak out so completely over a level of threat that would have your average Israeli sputtering with laughter, but that just validates the OP's assertion.  It's absolutely defensible, in any event, against the "well-I-don't-agree-with-25%-just-because-well-hurr-um-hrmm-I-just-don't-like-it-is-all" type of argument.

Sure, if one out of every four people I know died that would pretty devastating just on a personal level. It's an emotional tidal wave that a number of people wouldn't bounce back from right away, if ever. In any community it's going to be a lot of useful knowledge and skills that will be lost and take time to be relearned/retaught. Fewer doctors/police/emergency personnel right when you really need them. The potential for panic and violence would seem quite large.

Quote from: Simlasa;694208Sure, if one out of every four people I know died that would pretty devastating just on a personal level.

Then there's the disease itself. I haven't exactly described it, but the nickname "the rotting plague" and the medical name "Induced Systemic Necrosis" should be enough of a hint: your body rots while you're alive. Eventually you die of multiple organ failure.

Have you ever smelled rotting meat? Have you ever seen pictures of gangrenous flesh? Yeah, it's all that. Some people referred to it (inaccurately) as "slow motion Ebola", due to the copious bleeding that occurs late in the progression. It's a pretty horrible affliction (fortunately, it no longer occurs, except in very rare cases).

A mysterious, untreatable, and incurable affliction, with horrific symptoms, that's 100% fatal (the survivors never contracted it), uncontrollably sweeping the globe, killing 1 and three quarters billion people... yeah, that precipitated a social meltdown.

The Design of NYC

Many games have default or archetypal settings. Seattle, for Shadowrun, is a perfect example. GiTO has NYC. In many ways, NYC typifies the entire game, as nearly any type of adventure the setting supports can be found here.

The core is a typical Enclave, high tech, happy, clean. (Well, "happy" if you're a resident. Not so much otherwise.) There are many adventures possible here, from bank jobs to data runs, assassination or bounty hunter missions, body guarding or monster hunting, con jobs and political smear jobs.

The jungle is an urban nightmare. It has very different opportunities: gang warfare (against a gang or for a gang), lawmen-for-hire, raiding a company compound, guarding (or raiding) a convoy. Then there’s assassination or bounty hunter jobs, bodyguarding or monster hunting, and so forth.

The wild is largely empty of human life. Still, lone nuts and small settlements can be found here. It’s also filled with nests and lairs of strange and monstrous creatures that emerged from the vortexes. Also common are tribes of Beyonders who fled the dark forces consuming their world.

Then there’s the tunnels, an entire setting in and of itself, complete with settlers, survivors, and monstrous beasts.

And the vortexes.

Vortexes are not a rare thing. Many Guns find employ fighting the creatures that pour from a newly opened vortex; many find wealth venturing into the Beyond (a very different adventuring opportunity).

So, in the same city you can go from a high tech city, to a crime ridden slum, to a gang-ruled urban hellhole, to abandoned zones where monsters thrive. Nearly any adventure opportunity the game offers can be found somewhere in NYC.