Inspired by the “back to the cave” blog entry…

http://rpgpundit.xanga.com/740262034/item/

And a recent re-reading of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six… I got to thinking, what would the world be like if they pulled it off?? And only around 500 million or so were left?

What would the fallout of such an event be like?

It would have to be some kind of engineered bio-weapon with a really long gestation and airborne contagious period, but a 90% plus kill rate. And once the symptoms hit, people drop within a few days.


Would there be a viable RPG setting??

Just a few ideas:

1: A general bio-weapon plague…

The 500 million or so survivors of a 90% death rate plague are more or less spread evenly around the globe. With a few hidden compounds set up by the Eco-wacko’s, getting ready to gather and lead the survivors; whether they like it or not.


2: An ethnic bio-weapon plague…  (Or, a (pick-a-race) supremacists wet dream)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon

The Eco-wacko group decides they’d like to keep a little more of “their” civilization and infrastructure, so they make and use an ethnic bio-weapon that kills everyone 99.9%, but (pick-a-race) who are ethnically “immune”.  

And by “immune” I mean the relatively healthy– those with sickness, disease, or compromised immune systems probably won’t be strong enough to fight off the plague.


3: A mutagenic bio-plague - it mutates the survivors and other random animals! Giving them Kewel powerz!!

For Gonzo/special snowflake minded people. Someone would suggest this anyway.

4:   A general bio-weapon plague… But one or a few governments find out the world is infected a few weeks before people start dropping.

They hunt down the Eco-wackos and get a cure. But can only make the cure in very limited amounts given the time they have to work with.


 Any other ideas?

Which one has your vote as the most workable as an RPG setting?

 

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I'm pretty sure number 2 can't actually be done; of course, I'm very sure number 3 can't be, either, so don't let that stop you.

Anyways, you left out the other option: people foolishly buy into this "sustainability" idea as some kind of a solution to the environmental problem, and 5 billion people gradually starve to death.

RPGPundit

An oft-overlooked pulp SF thriller by David Drake and Janet Morris is Kill Ratio which deals with a radical group of white separatists from South Africa who have engineered a bioweapon that works like a super-hemorrhagic fever on indigenous sub-Saharans.  It's tested on a small enclave on a colonized moon in the book (because, you know, FUTURE!) and the hero Must Stop Them - But Is There Time?!  Still it's an interesting read and might work for a sort of "Whoops, looks like there's a lot of their gene structure in mostly everybody!" root cause for the disaster.

You could tweak The Morrow Project so that Morrow and his agents were pulling the whole "let's get the population to a sustainable level* and start over" thing with the third world war.

*=the "500 million".

Quote from: RPGPundit;437070Anyways, you left out the other option: people foolishly buy into this "sustainability" idea as some kind of a solution to the environmental problem, and 5 billion people gradually starve to death.

You're thinking of the Fox World setting: thrilling roleplaying adventures on a flat earth where pi equals 3.0 and brave defenders of entropy fight a never-ending battle against the forces of science and rational enquiry.

Equip your character with a crippling fear of uncertainty, inconsistent superstitions, a deficit of critical thinking skills, and enter a world of high adventure and low education!

Can you escape preventable disease, slavery, and resource wars long enough to viciously slaughter the people who want to eradicate those things, or bravely attempt to claim the credit if they succeed?  Find out today (before the rapture)!

FW boxed set only $19.99, but make sure every player buys one, because sharing is communism.

This reminds me of the old British series Survivors (and its less than excellent remake). A bunch of people after a plague, trying to relearn all the survival skills that city folks have forgotten... before it's too late.
It was a fairly straight and serious show... probably not action-packed and crazy enough to inspire the average RPG group. Most of the episodes had more to do with stuff like animal husbandry, community government and making soap than they did firefights with nomadic biker gangs.
With the right group of people it would make an interesting game... run it kind of like a dirt-level version of Rogue Trader where the PCs are the headmen of a small collective... managing barter with other groups, defending against marauders and self-appointed kings... planning out crops and passing laws... searching for lost knowledge and skilled individuals.
Probably better as a computer game though.

Quote from: Hairfoot;437094You're thinking of the Fox World setting: thrilling roleplaying adventures on a flat earth where pi equals 3.0 and brave defenders of entropy fight a never-ending battle against the forces of science and rational enquiry.

Equip your character with a crippling fear of uncertainty, inconsistent superstitions, a deficit of critical thinking skills, and enter a world of high adventure and low education!

Can you escape preventable disease, slavery, and resource wars long enough to viciously slaughter the people who want to eradicate those things, or bravely attempt to claim the credit if they succeed?  Find out today (before the rapture)!

FW boxed set only $19.99, but make sure every player buys one, because sharing is communism.

BRILLIANT! :rotfl:

Pundy, you gotta quit your day job and go work for Fox News!   Your ability to pick a fringe group and declare it the mainstream is worth real money.   Just switch that "only Science can save us" with "only Bejezus can save us" and you're sitting on a shitload of money.

I'm all for a mass die off of the human race.   In theory, the remainder could move the species in a better direction without the mass population pressures that are devouring resources at an insane rate.  In practice, there would just be savage chaos for a long time.

People forget that back when we did have 500 million, we mostly just killed each other in the name of imaginary skygods, to defend arbitrary borders and for the whims of wealthy rulers.   It wasn't kumbaya harmony, nor would it be if we lost 90% of the populace.

Even with massive tech innovation, the population growth is so enormous and devours so much non-renewable resources that losing a couple billion poor people would only be a benefit right now.   It would buy science some time.

As for a RPG, its just Systems Failure without the monster bugs or Dead Reign without the zombies.  

If we suddenly lost 90% of humanity, the world would grind to a halt, and fall into dark age barbarism outside of sustainable (agrarian) enclaves that somehow were able to keep their shit together.  

The corpse issue alone would a nightmare.   Then the degradation of all the tech and that effect on the remaining populace.   It would not be pretty.  It would be brutal and ugly and savage for a couple generations.

A guess a good template to start developing a campaign world on this model would be the Black Death in Europe and how humanity there changed as a result of the Black Death.

Quote from: Hairfoot;437094You're thinking of the Fox World setting: thrilling roleplaying adventures on a flat earth where pi equals 3.0 and brave defenders of entropy fight a never-ending battle against the forces of science and rational enquiry.

Equip your character with a crippling fear of uncertainty, inconsistent superstitions, a deficit of critical thinking skills, and enter a world of high adventure and low education!

Can you escape preventable disease, slavery, and resource wars long enough to viciously slaughter the people who want to eradicate those things, or bravely attempt to claim the credit if they succeed?  Find out today (before the rapture)!

FW boxed set only $19.99, but make sure every player buys one, because sharing is communism.

If what you're suggesting is that the whole "sustainability" argument is a bullshit pipe-dream that could only ever actually be enacted as a dystopian reality of the fever-dreams of anti-"NWO" conspiracy theorists, I guess I'd agree with you.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Spinachcat;437181Pundy, you gotta quit your day job and go work for Fox News!   Your ability to pick a fringe group and declare it the mainstream is worth real money.  

The Carnegie Institute (the guys who were on the Nobel-prize winning "international panel on climate change" that shared the Nobel with Al Gore in 2007), Barack Obama's Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Forum For the Future are "fringe groups" in the Environmentalist Left?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;437070I'm pretty sure number 2 can't actually be done; of course, I'm very sure number 3 can't be, either, so don't let that stop you.

Anyways, you left out the other option: people foolishly buy into this "sustainability" idea as some kind of a solution to the environmental problem, and 5 billion people gradually starve to death.

RPGPundit

It will fade away, like that Internet fad and that whole smallpox fiasco.

Quote from: Drohem;437184A guess a good template to start developing a campaign world on this model would be the Black Death in Europe and how humanity there changed as a result of the Black Death.

That's a good template especially if you focus on the biggest plague years and the decade afterwards in those areas hardest hit.  I have no idea how much information exists, but I am sure some historian has done extrapolation.

As for a RPG, I guess the book/movie The Road would a good resource.  I'm not sure if I would enjoy such a game.  I prefer the gonzo in my post-apoc.  

Man, that would be some dark, nasty shit.

Quote from: Spinachcat;437293That's a good template especially if you focus on the biggest plague years and the decade afterwards in those areas hardest hit.  I have no idea how much information exists, but I am sure some historian has done extrapolation.

Yes, that's what I meant- specifically look at the first couple of decades after the event and it's impact on civilization during and after its recovery.  Civilization in Europe took several steps backward after the Black Death, and it affected the psyche of Europe thereafter.

Don't worry about Pundit.

Now, relevant to an rpg setting, which is much more interesting than Tangency-style political wank, I would say a couple of things.

The first is that you don't actually need to know the Big Story. You only need to know as much as the PCs would know. Often in postapocalyptic campaigns the GM focuses on the Big Story, but it's stuff PCs would never find out. For example, in a nuclear war between the USA and USSR, their ICBMs would launch within 20 minutes of each-other. Down here in the ruins we would never know who fired first. Nor would we care much. The apocalypse has happened, millions died, we live, now let's adventure.

The second is that to have 90% of the world's population die, you don't need a single cause, a single virus. Just think of the disruption caused to transport and economies by the destruction of a single city in a cyclone. When that happens, a country usually needs all its transport and emergency personnel just to deal with that, it often needs foreign help, too. Now imagine that it was instead five or six cities, and in every country in the world. Recovery would be very, very difficult - and systems might collapse.

Once systems collapse, you get a lot more deaths. Electricity and natural gas and oil aren't in great supply, so people die of heat or cold, or the weather makes them more vulnerable to ordinary things like seasonal flus.

When the power stops, water treatment plants no longer work, and you get typhus, cholera and e coli - people vomiting and with diaorrhea, infants, the elderly and those already unwell or weak will die at horrific rates. And once you get more than a few thousand people dead in a week, you get corpses in the streets and mass graves.

Sure we can boil water, but without electricity or natural gas, it's wood fires from the trees in the streets and people's fences, and boiling a few litres at a time. And most people simply don't know how to have basic personal and food hygiene without using copious amounts of water and energy. Ex-soldiers and hunters and so on will often be alright, they're used to daily personal hygiene. At the moment we have a visitor from Europe, she uses 3-4 litres of water to wash and rinse a single plate, and her showers are 20 minutes. That ain't happening when you're boiling all your water in a pot heated with flames from fence posts.

With even 10-25% of the population dead, it becomes harder to pick ourselves up. Because we'll have lost 10-25% of our engineers and technicians and drivers and so on, the people who keep our utilities running.

Then there's plain old hunger. Because renting or owning land costs money, shops have a "just in time" ordering system. Thus the typical supermarket or grocery store or greengrocer's can supply the local area with food for 3-8 days. If the drivers and farmers have died in large numbers, then the rate of resupply of these shops will be slow. And maybe currency won't be worth much to people during a collapse - the Reichsmark wasn't worth much in April 1945 - so we'll get barter happening. What can you offer me for this bag of apples that I want or need?

So people go hungry and die. And then their bodies get left lying around and contribute to spreading more disease.

Because our countries are so rich and help each-other out in difficult times, and because our disasters rarely severely affect more than a single city at a time, we often don't realise just how overwhelming a series of disaster can be. So you don't need a virus with a 90% mortality rate to destroy society. 10-25% would do it pretty well, and actually lead to the deaths of more than half the population.

Just look at Haiti a year or two on from its most recent major disasters. It's still a mess. Now imagine there were no foreign aid, because all the other countries had their own disasters to deal with. Just look at Hurricane Katrina, and imagine that every other state in the US was having a disaster, too. The Superdome would have been a mass grave.

Quote from: RPGPundit;437246The Carnegie Institute (the guys who were on the Nobel-prize winning "international panel on climate change" that shared the Nobel with Al Gore in 2007), Barack Obama's Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Forum For the Future are "fringe groups" in the Environmentalist Left?

I'd love to know what sort of paranoid rubbish you've glommed onto with this, but let's not shit all over Jaeger's thread to do it.  You've got a whole forum for your World Net Daily leftovers.