So, thinking of running a PbP with some far flung friends, using Barbarians of the Aftermath. Your task: provide the narrative for the table results I rolled, below. (just some ideas would be cool, as well). Thanks in advance.

When did the apocalypse occur? Within the next 10 years. So, current, more or less.

How did it happen? "Things fall apart." Specifically, "Biological Shift." Mother Nature rebels, something of that nature.

How long since it happened? Four centuries. Folks don't remember a great deal about the old world. (or DO they?)

How's the resource outlook? "It don't come easy" (struggles due to rarity).

What's the highest tech level? Iron Age stuff (standard BoL). Clang, clang, yo.

What's the pinnacle of civilized society? City States (max 3d6x1000 inhabitants), with scattered villages within 3d6X10 miles. Armies might total as much as 30% of the population.

Any weird shit? "Hokum and Fairy Tales" Nothing resembling magic exists (though certain tech might appear to be magic). Doesn't mean people don't believe in stories, etc.

Who lives here? Humans and two other sentient species

Ideas, anyone?

Hmm on the whole "things fall apart" and "biological shift" front you could go with the rise of antibiotic bacteria combined with another pandemic flu. Those things if they happened the right way could break the systems in many developing nations and stress them badly in more developed countries. Besides then you have a nifty little myth about a great plaque for your campaign.

You said these were rolled randomly and you're here for advice, so here it is. Take what you have and share it with your players. Ask them to help fill in those blanks. Work with them to create a collaborative world. Let them give their thoughts on what happened and use that. They don't have to be right, either. If one player says one thing and another says something different, decide which is true and which one is the common belief.  By engaging them from the start your players will have a greater buy in on the setting and game as a whole.

Quote from: Certified;881124You said these were rolled randomly and you're here for advice, so here it is. Take what you have and share it with your players. Ask them to help fill in those blanks. Work with them to create a collaborative world. Let them give their thoughts on what happened and use that. They don't have to be right, either. If one player says one thing and another says something different, decide which is true and which one is the common belief.  By engaging them from the start your players will have a greater buy in on the setting and game as a whole.

I shared the list with them prior to posting here, actually.

The sentient species are the hardest bit. I`d go with alien refugees show up in a falling apart piece of shit space ship and they seed Earth with their own plants and animals since they can`t digest Earth food. Interaction between native and alien life forms makes everything go to shit.

Raid Tekumel liberally.

Good change of pace from the end being caused by human technological hubris.

Quote from: Arkansan;881122Hmm on the whole "things fall apart" and "biological shift" front you could go with the rise of antibiotic bacteria combined with another pandemic flu. Those things if they happened the right way could break the systems in many developing nations and stress them badly in more developed countries. Besides then you have a nifty little myth about a great plaque for your campaign.

That's a REALLY cool suggestion, thank you.

Next 10 years?
Biological Shift?
Shit falls apart?


I am going with nanotech plague that radically energizes Mother Nature while devouring man's civilization. We are on the cusp of nanotech now so 10 years sounds good for us to oops our civilization.

The airborne nanotech plague ate plastic - eliminating our tech, but leaving buildings. It was developed to deal with all the garbage in the oceans, oil spills, etc, but it mutated and ate civilization.

I like the idea of the nanotech empowering biology and botany, not only revitalizing the oceans, but making the planet's flora and fauna thrive in a
way not seen since the age of the dinosaurs.

Man is struggling for top tier of the food chain.


4 centuries later - question of memories?

Without electronics, its all word of mouth and old books. Of course, modern books are made on cheap ass recycled paper so even books are, except for certain kinds that are made of sturdier stuff.


Resources are a struggle?

Nanotech - robots that are self-repairing and self-evolving - are now embedded in animals and plants...so every generation of flora and fauna are becoming more and more evolved and dangerous.


City States - Iron Age city of 18,000 is pinnacle of world civilization.

I'm good with this. It's hard to keep up infrastructure when being overrun by evolving nature. However, I'd be more apt to have a Man vs. Nature campaign where most city-states had more friendship than war. The fight was against the fauna that keeps getting smarter and fiercer.


Weird shit is fairy tales?

Humans are stupid. Superstition runs rampant and blood sacrifice religions reign supreme. Mad Max Mayans!


Two sentient species?

Cats...hear me out.

House cats like us because we treat them like gods. What if the nanotech evolution that is making the flora and fauna smarter trips the switch to make cats sentient?  Unlike other animals, cats do better with humans than without. Mr Fluffy and his brood can be eyes and ears for human allies in exchange for safety and food.

I am thinking Dolphins for the second species. They are already damn smart and a revitalized ocean would give them an ecosphere of their own. Who knows what they may do with their smarts? They would the weird NPCs whose motivations may or may not be understood.

On the flip side, you could do Apes and make it a battle between Man vs. Ape as each develops Iron Age tech and only one can survive into the future - aka like Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon.

You've got a hardscrabble civilization pressed against the glaciers -- something like Harry Turtledove's Beyond the Gap setting -- with long, brutal winters and fleeting growing seasons.

Scarcity is the dominant factor. It's pervasive, it's everywhere. It takes the common folk all day long to gather or hunt the food necessary to give them enough strength to hunt all day tomorrow; time/motion isn't a consideration. The nobles in the "cities" don't really have abundance ... they have enough food to get by, and they don't have to hunt all day for it ... but it's not going to take too many peasants to starve for them to be on the razor's edge themselves, and they know it.

Come to that, the "cities" are that by courtesy alone - you don't have enough surplus to amass that much of a leisure class. If there is a large city or two (and by "large," we're talking about more than 5,000 people), it survives on the spearpoints of a sizable and brutal army, engaged in the full-time work of extorting food from the peasants or stealing it from their neighbors.

The chief god of their grim pantheon is the Volcano Goddess, whose fumaroles are the center for worship, because everyone knows what will happen if the lava no longer flows and the fumaroles go dormant. If the food runs slack enough, surplus mouths are fed to the glowing maw of Her craters ... and who gets chosen to be sacrificed or not is a brutal decision in of itself.  (Their morals do not admit -- at least not in public, at least not widely -- that what is flung into the craters constitutes meat ... and meat is edible.)

"People remember a better time. Old gaffers remember when the hunting was better, when the ice wasn't as far south as it is now, when the fishing season was a couple months longer before the pack ice set in, when you could see more flowers and greenery in the south in the summer, when barley and rye grew far enough north to make for sufficient harvests, when grapes still grew for wine.  (Wine is reserved for the priests and the Palace, now; there are not many bottles left.) They only made a few sacrifices a year, then; the Glowing Goddess is plainly displeased with Her people, in these dissipated, terrible days.

"For the glaciers are advancing.  Fast.  Mistress Eliana, the wisest and oldest of the Queen's advisers, remembers when Idrinsk and Mongun were living towns, not forgotten names on faded maps.  The Queen finally ordered the evacuation of Khozuun last year; the glacier's as far as the town's northern wall now.  A keen eyed man on a clear day, standing at the pinnacle on Tower Hill, can see the glint of the morning light now from the eternal ice on the northwestern horizon.  And has been able to for a few years now.

"No help will be had from the Chakari, who've sealed themselves into their Holdfast in the hill country, and claim we should have listened to them five generations ago.  And all we want from the barbaric Yraah is their painful and slow deaths!

"But they know the ice.  They live on the ice.  I fear very much they will survive us yet." -- from the hand of Master Noran of the Grand Chantry

Frank Herbert wrote a sci-fi book called The Green Brain. Essentially nature begins to fight back against mankind's deprivations. Intelligent swarms of insects, giant mutated bugs, etc. You could use that as basis of your collapse.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53727.The_Green_Brain?from_search=true&search_version=service

Or you could go with the Gaia hypotheses and have Mother Nature as a whole fight back. What if rice, corn and wheat just stopped growing? Suddenly 90% of the world's population would begin starving or fighting over the last stockpiles of food. 400 years later...

Are you familiar with the setting from the video game, The Last of Us?

This could be that setting 400 years down the line.

Technology has completely fallen apart, leaving the remnants of humanity in medieval city states.

The spores that turned people into zombies acclimated enough to the human brain to gain a rudimentary intelligence.

And Firefly experiments at finding a way of letting the human body live in symbiosis with the 'infection' resulted in an offshoot of humanity that is not as murderous as the "zombie" infected, but is instead possessed of a sort of chilling druidic neutrality.

I'd go with the extremely rapid Arctic ice sheet melt, aided by a "gold rush" into Arctic Ocean frontier behavior, screwing with the planetary ocean belt current. That screwed up ocean current messes with climate bands and massive permafrost degassing happens atop. What was speculated to be in a century or so spirals out of control in years.

Flooded Post-Apocalyptic Tropical Earth.

Everything advanced is either not waterproof enough, or humanity's too isolated in a grand Polynesia style post-apocalyptic world.

The creatures from The Abyss (yes, that movie) end up revealing themselves and tentatively work with humanity. But they came to the conclusion Little Brother is still "spiritually lost" and keep contact mystical and obscure.

In a last bid for relevance we found the lost Navy-trained dolphins during our attempts to breed domesticated versions. The Abyss creatures protect the militarized ones in an attempt to see if they can "evolve into their own peaceful way" (yes, hippie bullshit), while we struggled with our domestication program. The result is the decimation of the original bottlenose species and the rise of two very different and competitive breeds.

To finish, go get Blue Planet the RPG and rip out most sci-fi material. Keep the aboriginal and forgotten colonist stuff. Tone down the elevated sapience of dolphins and killer whales.

Ta-dah! Done.

This is all Sem amazing stuff. Thank you all!