Campaign Ideas: After the Warming Apocalypse

This month’s rapid and unexpected disappearance of the Arctic sea ice is perhaps the first time that global warming (AGW) has really shown an ugly side that can’t be easily put down to just weather and/or luck. But something that surprises me about the sci-fi genre is that AGW’s worst case scenarios don’t seem to have made much impact on the genre – there don’t seem to be many stories which make it a central part of the setting or the narrative, even though it’s rich with possibilities and very topical. I guess I could be wrong, but it seems to have slipped under the sci-fi radar. But as it becomes apparent that we are heading into a future that will not be consistent with any part of our recorded history, a wider and richer fictional discussion of the topic seems like exactly what sci-fi was invented for. How will the world change? Will it be ruined? Will the move to a low-carbon economy happen organically, or will we see authoritarianism and fascism take over only when things become desperate? Will societies adapt or collapse? I’m an optimist about AGW, I think it’s not going to be as bad as the worst case scenarios suggest and I think human society will respond, probably just a bit late and at greater expense than was necessary, but life will continue pretty much as it always has. Nonetheless, the world of the future will be different and the combined challenges of population growth, development and AGW open up vistas of apocalyptic catastrophe that, while they may make for disturbing public policy planning, make for an excellent potential role-playing setting. What would they look like?

Like the After the Flood campaign setting that I’ve been thinking about recently, apocalypses of the AGW kind offer gamers the ability to have a kind of canned Traveller universe in the world we’re familiar with, because the creeping imposition of rationing and constraints means that some societies will adapt and continue to develop, while others will collapse or go backward. If the apocalypse is just bad enough that the altruism of the adapters is challenged, or their accumulated (social and infrastructure) capital is depleted enough to make their situation fragile, then the world will fragment relative to the state it is in now, creating even greater gulfs in technology between the haves and have-nots, and making transition between them more difficult and dangerous. But unlike the After the Flood setting, a post-warming world won’t be quite so catastrophically environmentally challenging (maybe). So it offers the potential for apocalyptic adventuring with occasional havens of rest and peace – probably the best kind. However, under the worst case scenarios we see a global desert, ruled by road warriors and lunatics. Either situation is unattractive in the real world but very appealing in gaming. So let’s consider a few post-warming worlds for adventurers to explore.

The Collapsed Water World

This is the classic figment of AGW “alarmist” visions, and one that can be played up with a bit of sci-fi chucked into the mix. In this scenario, the campaign setting is perhaps 100 years from now, and in addition to Al Gore’s most fevered sea level rise (what, 60m?) we imagine a few simple positive feedbacks, such as reduced ice albedo and a bit of permafrost melting, to project the sea level rise up beyond reasonably expected norms – say about 200m. This completely changes the geography of the Earth, and with a bit of poetic license we could imagine quite exciting new settings: Indonesia becomes an archipelago of tiny islands, like Earthsea; Australia’s inland deserts flood, forming a shallow sea; Russia and parts of Asia are divided into new, more desperate entities (what would the Siberian archipelago look like?). Britain in this kind of scenario was described in the White Bird of Kinship series, in which the UK had divided into multiple small island countries, ruled over by a harsh and authoritarian church (there was a musician involved in a heretical movement, I recall). JG Ballard’s The Drowned World also possibly describes this kind of setting. This setting encourages maritime adventure, but the collapse of the population and nation-states of the existing world mean that much of the world will have been thrown back to a previous era – perhaps that of the mid-19th century  – with occasional small countries retaining higher technology, artifacts available for discovery, and organizations gaining great power by hoarding old technology.

Such a setting gives a GM the opportunity to set a campaign on earth, but to fiddle with the geography pretty much at will, to have a semi-mediaeval science fantasy setting, and to populate it with a wide range of different societies and tech levels. The players can prosper through finding old artifacts and adventuring for more powerful forces, there will be new lands and kingdoms to explore but the world will largely retain the geography (and in many cases, the social orders) of now – just perhaps poorer and more devastated.

The Warring States Model

In this model the sea levels are largely irrelevant, but environmental and resource collapse have led to wars and chaos, and the late response to climate change has led to enforced energy poverty for much of society, at the same time as it has forced rapid technological change. Some societies have become winners in this new order, but most have lost out, falling into poverty, war and chaos. This kind of society might be what we see in Alita: Battle Angel or Appleseed, where a small community lives with extreme technology in a highly protected enclave while the world outside goes to hell in a hand basket. This is also, perhaps, the world of Judge Dredd (though the causes are different in all these cases). In this world the adventurers might be barbarians from one of the collapsed countries, or they might be agents for one of the survivors. Either way, there will be much conflict in this world, and adventures may derive from resource conflicts and the shady dealings of corporations, countries and rich individuals that are trying to get ahead in a harsh new world. It’s an ideal setting for a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk themed campaign.

The Ascendent South

Perhaps more interesting for its context, in this campaign global warming has devastated the nations of the North, but was far less destructive in the South, leaving the old South to become the new world powers. In this world Africa and latin America is where the new superpowers are gathered, and Europe, North America and much of Asia are in ruins, the home of multiple warring cities and tribes. The civilized peoples of the South ride out from their high-tech enclaves to exploit or aid these ruined nations, and vie with each other for supremacy in the new world. But with the environment more fragile, the world has become more dangerous. Perhaps also many of the countries of the South fell victim too, so that next to a super-advanced Ugandan power we find a huge expanse of starving and desperate Africans, warring with each other and desperately trying to form alliances with their stable neighbour.

Alternatively, with the collapse of the old order the South has reverted to older and more traditional structures of governance, so instead of seeing nation-states in Africa along current lines we see the empires of the old world, such as once stretched from Nigeria to the mediterranean, or over large parts of the southern half of the continent. With these new empires come new political fault lines, new resource wars, and very old imperial tensions – which the ruined nations of the north can only hope to benefit from, or become victims of.

The Full Reversion

In this model, the collapse of the environment took society with it, and after hundreds of years of chaos a completely new world order has emerged, based on new (or very old) technologies, with completely new social systems. Maybe it is a single nation for the whole world, ruled by a technological priesthood who hold much of society in chains; perhaps it is a couple of great empires with extremely authoritarian and regressive governments (theologies, monarchies and fascisms) that continually war with each other for the earth’s few remaining resources; perhaps the world has reverted to some stone age ruin, and looks more like the world of the Atlan saga or Julian May’s Jurassic world than the modern era. In this campaign setting global warming is really just an excuse to make a science fantasy campaign setting out of a newly primitivized earth, on the bones of the earth we already know.

Mysterious Powers

In this setting, global warming either caused or was caused by the unleashing of mysterious arcane powers, and led to a new society ruled by magic and superstition. This was part of the pre-text for an old apocalypse campaign I ran years ago, although the apocalypse in this case was a direct satanic intervention on earth. In this case one could gild the lily to make the current crop of climate scientists (Mann, Hansen etc.) either heretical figures (because they are believed to be the evil wizards who caused the apocalypse) or saints (because they warned of its coming and tried to stop it). Maybe if they caused it they are still around, ruling post-apocalyptic mediaeval states from their position as immortal heads of an AGW priesthood – a denialist fantasy made true by Satan himself! Alternatively, all of the past is forgotten and the world has reverted to magic and faith, but one can occasionally dig up relics of the old world – along, perhaps, with the true story of how it fell apart and how it can be restored …

The X-Files

In this near-future campaign, the scientists of AGW have found a secret magic or technology that enables them to make any universally-held view become the new reality. For some reason (service to their alien masters?) they have decided to make AGW the new reality, and the PCs stumble somehow on this fact, and have to race to save the world from oblivion – or worse still, to prevent various churches from managing to get hold of the magic that makes mass beliefs come true. This campaign could fit in a whole range of other conspiracy theories – about moon landings and assassinations and the like – and potentially allow the slow introduction of magic into the world as the science cabal’s secrets become known to the PCs. It also allows a sequel campaign – if the PCs prevent the technology from being used, they enter a new campaign of spies and international intrigue as major governments pursue them to get hold of it; if they fail, they shift straight into the beginnings of the Mysterious Powers campaign. Or, they could use the technology to make any other campaign world of their choosing …

Post-apocalyptic fiction, movies and games are quite common, but I’m surprised at the dearth of specifically global-warming focused ones. Depending on how much one wants to play fast and loose with the science, it can provide a potentially rich backdrop for a post-apocalyptic setting, since it doesn’t just change human society, but changes the very environment in which that society lives – it’s like transplanting the human society to a new world, in the near future, but retaining the geography and many of the properties of this world. It also offers on the one hand a very mild form of apocalypse, characterized by nothing worse than population crash and technological regression; or, on the other hand, any level of extremity up to and including people being forced to live on a new version of Venus. Many of these settings are replete with adventure opportunities and, unlike the After the Flood campaign, don’t involve the kind of extreme terraforming that makes it difficult to imagine any hope in the world. I think this makes AGW a rich mine of possibilities for campaign settings and adventuring. I wonder why it hasn’t been explored more?

 

After the Flood: Raft Cities

During the later years of the flood, many people took to the water independently, taking to ships and rafts and trading with the remaining parts of the land for food. Rather than developing communities through the seizure of large facilities, these formed communities over time through accretion. Small boats might gather around an abandoned collection of flotsam, or a small failed arcology; to these would be attracted random communities living on rafts, loners who are sick of plying the seas on their stolen boat, or raiders who want a permanent base to return to. These communities will not survive unless someone can come up with an industry that will hold them together, but such industries are not impossible to create, even amongst the flotsam and jetsam that naturally accrete to such places. Perhaps it would be prostitution in a raft city near a well-plied trade route; or a group of rafts and raiders congregated around a collection of barges that are used for scrapping stolen ships and selling the parts. Maybe someone will establish a shellfish farm on a partially-submerged ship, and then turn the shells into glass that is in turn ground into lenses; or turn unwanted glass from passing traders into valuable lenses. Perhaps the raft floats near a rich fishing area, and can sell preserved fish to traders in exchange for raw materials.

Life on raft cities is harsh, and even if they have some central industry or focus these communities will always have a sense of impermanence, of being a precarious gathering of wind-tossed rubbish that will soon be washed away. Indeed, when the ocean world’s great storms hit they often are, or only those who live near the centre survive, with the rafts on the edge serving as nothing more than human barricades against the fury of the sea. If these communities want to survive they will need to attract larger ships or rebuild themselves around abandoned arcologies and flotsam; and indeed, if a better opportunity appears the raft community will rapidly disperse to take it on. The landscape of a raft city is always changing as newcomers enter and leave, ships are cut free to sink or drift away, or storms wipe out neighbourhoods. Adventurers may find that a whole city they once knew well has gone, or that people they knew have disappeared and all who knew of them have gone as well. In the shifting world of the waves, it is often impossible to know whether they have gone to the deeps, or to a better chance.

In his book, Baxter describes one of the few pieces of useful bioengineering that are of value after the flood: a type of genetically modified seaweed that hardens into a plastic-like material as it grows in seawater, and can be shaped over time to form raft-like structures. Through the use of such biotechnology, perhaps connected to an original large base such as a floating wind power farm or larger river barges, raft cities can establish a central space on which they begin to pin some hopes of permanence. A wind-farm might be jury rigged to provide power again, connected to a ship that will form the administrative centre of the new city, and the plastiweed slowly grown around it to form a kind of island, raised from the water far enough to offer opportunities for farming and shelter from the worst storms. These raft cities will then attract less secure suburbs and exurbs, boats and rafts docked together in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, neighbours who change by the week or the month. The city as a whole will be impossible to catalogue or sustain, but its core will be permanent, and as that core grows over time – or as other parts of the city form their own stable pastiweed bases – the city will slowly take on a permanent character. As the plastiweed subsumes new ships and rafts, a floating island of chaotic colours and shapes and sizes will grow into being. These cities will often be filthy, poor and dangerous, but they represent the only legacy that the original raft communities have any hope of leaving the world.

For adventurers such cities always offer opportunities. The factions within the city will always have some nasty job they need done, and there will always be individuals who have been wronged and need to find their own justice. Though unable to offer much, many of the rafts and ships in these cities hail from before the flood, and may contain relics of technology that the rafters have no use for, but which the adventurers can use or take to a place where they can repair it. A householder looking for the return of their children from hostage takers might offer the adventurers the radar equipment from their long-immobile yacht, or a radio communication set, or a night-vision camera they have not needed since they ceased roaming the ocean. The adventurers may also be able to find more exotic work, chasing old treasure maps or taking on security work for passing traders. The bars and brothels of a raft city will be full of travelers with tales to tell and jobs to share, so a good sized raft city will always have a surfeit of work for intrepid adventurers. But it will also be full of thieves and bandits, looking to steal a good ship with its weapons, or to lead the adventurers to a pirate trap. These cities also offer repair work and resupply opportunities, though they may be overpriced and unreliable, but with the distances between communities often great, adventurers may find they have no choice.

The raft cities of the flood are like the hard scrabble colonies of intergalactic frontier settings. This is where Serenity-style adventures unfold on a yacht, and where the lowest tier of adventurers and scoundrels hide out while they wait for their chance to make their fortune. Raft cities, then, are a place all players will be familiar with, and an excellent setting to start a campaign from.

 

After the Flood: OTEC Cities

In the first chaotic years after nations ceased to exist, before the last of the land disappeared, many people would have set out on their own, by whatever means they could secure, to make a new life on the waves. These people would have formed small bands and taken whatever they could find on shore and off, and after they set out to sea they would have raided and fought and traded for whatever would make them better off. Over time the most successful of these survivors would have formed into communities, either static or mobile, who live as best they could as independent city states in the new world. These states survive by trading with strangers and defending themselves against anyone who would try to take what is theirs – or by amalgamating with other states to form new and stronger collectives. Not as stable or as strong as the pelagic kingdoms and dependent on trade with them for new resources, these independent kingdoms offer their citizens greater freedom than the pelagic kingdoms, but at the risk of a precarious existence that may be subsumed by raiders or sink beneath the waves at any time. If such a city-state does not have its own special property to trade upon, it will no doubt disappear, becoming living space for the pelagic kingdoms (who exterminate residents of any property they subsume to make way for their own suppressed masses) or losing its populace to other, more stable economies.Ocean Thermal Energy Collection (OTEC) platforms are one of the greatest possible prizes for such fledgling communities.

An experimental technology before the flood, OTEC platforms use differentials in the ocean’s heat to produce electricity. Anyone who could seize one of these after the flood has guaranteed themselves a tradable commodity – especially if they can somehow secure a supply of batteries to trade, or develop an industry in converting water to hydrogen and oxygen for fuel cells and combustion engines. City-states built around OTEC platforms will typically consist of many small ships, many no longer capable of independent movement, roped together to form a permanent floating colony based around their central power source. On the edge of the colony will be a few archaic patrol boats and the other mobile trade ships of the city, all converted to run on hydrogen-oxygen power and/or sails, and intended for trade and defense against attackers. The city itself trades on a special property that very few societies after the collapse can offer – abundant electricity. This means karaoke bars, game centres, concerts, and all the night life of a real city of old earth, all taking place across a wild and floating city of rafts, barges and yachts bound together and heaving and sighing on the wild deeps.

Such a community is a great prize for any pirates or conquistadors who want to add a stable source of energy to their possessions. As a result, these city-states change hands often, and defend themselves ferociously… or make very dubious deals with any neighbouring kingdoms in exchange for their security. They may also offer special deals to the Pelagic kingdoms in exchange for their independence and security, but more likely they will develop a strong close-defense navy, and possibly even a primitive air force, to ensure they remain independent. Adventurers may be employed to help defend a platform, or to infiltrate it and take it over, but the most likely role of a platform in a campaign is as a rest and recuperation city, a place where mercenaries from many communities meet to find work and to sell the ill-gotten gains of their dubious profession. Here, adventurers will likely find an environment free of repression, where they can cut dubious deals and find new and sinister work, and where a strong but morally flexible industrial sector is able to provide them with equipment suited to a range of morally dubious tasks.

In the world of the flood, OTEC cities hold one of the keys to power – energy. Life after the flood is determined by who has access to energy and who can control its use, and anyone who can find an OTEC city and make themselves useful to its leaders is guaranteed safety and success. This makes OTEC cities a much sought after location – and a dangerous nest of scheming, backstabbing vipers, to boot. The perfect adventure setting!

 

Campaign Setting: After the Flood

In the novels Flood and Ark Stephen Baxter describes a natural disaster that leads to the complete inundation of the earth by a massive flood. This flood is not a global warming horror story, but a completely new disaster in which oceans of water leak out of fault lines in the earth’s crust, submerging the continents and ultimately all land on earth. The first novel ends with a gathering at the peak of Everest, as it finally sinks below the waves. Ultimately the new oceans stop about 7 or 8 km above the old sea level, and the earth has officially become a water world. I reviewed the first of these novels here.

The survivors of this flood are mostly trapped on rafts and boats, bereft of any natural resources that might enable them to retain a civilized existence, and over the generations of the flood these survivors slowly change to a new and more primitive form of humanity, eking a subsistence existence from the sea and slowly forgetting all that they had been. The only remnants of civilization are a few arks, which Baxter envisages maintaining some semblance of the pre-flood societies. We only see three such arks in the novels: a replica of the Queen Mary cruise liner, an inter-stellar colony ship, and a deep-sea arcology.

I think that these arks Baxter envisaged are interesting, and the deep-sea arcology essential to continuing survival of the human species, at least in the short term, but I think there would be other, better ways of surviving such a catastrophe, and the world that resulted from human efforts to survive would make an excellent setting for a post-apocalyptic water world campaign, perhaps played with d20 modern or some version of Stars Without Number. Particularly, I imagine that the post-flood world would be dotted with what I think of as pelagic kingdoms, remnants of pre-flood societies that had taken to arcologies floating on the ocean, but linked to deep-sea arcologies that serve as industrial and resource extraction centres. The effort of building these arcologies in the two generations over which the flood submerged the land would mean that they were tiny compared to their pre-flood societies, and many people in attempting to escape the flood would make their own societies – on rafts and ships and old oil rigs and all manner of makeshift homes – and in the eras after the flood these societies would slowly drift across the globe, creating whole new settings and strange encounters. Furthermore, the strange weather and new ecologies of a submerged earth, and unexpected remnants of the old world, would create mysterious and intriguing adventure scenarios and settings. In the next few posts I will describe what I think would be some of the more interesting elements of this world, but starting today I will describe the main remnants of modern civilization in the post-flood world: the Pelagic Kingdoms.

Pelagic Kingdoms

These central kingdoms of the flooded earth would be the lynchpins of human survival in the post-apocalyptic world, because they would have solved the three problems that inevitably beset any attempt to create a sustainable human society in a world without land. These three problems are access to natural resources, energy, and diversity of food supply.  In Baxter’s novels human society fails to solve these problems fully, instead fleeing to a new world where they can find the resources they need or settling into a remnant city on the sea floor, where they can survive but never prosper.

I think that in the era leading up to the flood the biggest societies on earth would solve these problems, though the pressing time scale and the challenges of adaptation mean they would not do it well and only a tiny percentage of their population would escape the flood into these official post-flood kingdoms. To rescue one’s society in such an era of social, economic and ecological collapse, with rapidly diminishing physical territory and resources, would only be possible for the largest, wealthiest and technologically advanced societies. This is because to do so they would need to simultaneously create floating arcologies and a functioning deep-sea city, capable of existing permanently at 4-6 km beneath the surface, but able to extract resources from the sea bed and ship them to the surface to exchange for food with the arcologies. The result of this would be the new, pelagic kingdoms of the US, Europe and China/India – kingdoms composed not so much of physical territory as of a large number of scattered, floating islands orbiting just one or two seabed mining communities.

The Arcologies of the Pelagic Kingdoms

As society realized that the flood was going to consume the earth, they would move to desperate measures. Old ships would be turned into floating apartment blocks and set free to drift, dependent on the diminishing land for food and increasingly needing to grow their own in rooftop gardens or fish for their sustenance; some of these arcologies would be set up as research centres or industrial towns, to continue producing the needs of a rapidly shrinking population base. As the situation became more desperate, governments would realize the need to build specialized arcologies rather than converting ships – with increasing numbers of their own internally displaced populations needing to be accommodated in a shrinking territory, they would realize that they needed to start building land on top of the sea. Thus would begin the project of building real arcologies, purpose-designed to float like oil rigs but cover the area of small towns. Whatever size technology enabled, they would begin to build, far enough away from the encroaching flood to be completed in time to rise with the sea waters when they came. These arcologies would be designed to be at least partially self-contained, proof against storms and the ocean salt but containing in their centre at least some small farms, intensive agriculture of some kind, power plants, and even manufactories. These arcologies, once they floated, would be populated with the elite of the old world and left to drift amongst the converted hulks and jury-rigged floating hamlets of a previous generation. They would trade with each other, try their best to feed themselves and their fellows, as they circled the diminishing landscape of their old nation. Perhaps some, equipped with deep sea salvage equipment, would mine the abandoned cities of the old world for ever scarcer resources.

The Deep-Sea Manufactories

Once it became obvious that the land was going to be forever extinguished, the problem of sustaining these arcologies beyond the next two generations would obviously present itself. How can one repair a solar panel without sand? How can one supply a nuclear fission plant without uranium? Obviously the only realistic solution is to build a deep-sea mining base, somewhere with resources that can be harvested. Such a base would perhaps be built entirely underground, with just a few carefully-constructed entranceways to allow ships in and out. It might be built in the last high points of the nation – the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas or the Alps – with docks carved into mountain sides and deep mine shafts stretching far enough down to give access to the key requirements of industrial society. These undersea bases would be designed to include manufacturies, so that crucial engineering equipment could be built, ore smelted, and perhaps even ships repaired. Robotic machines would travel far into the old world under the sea, scavenging the remaining organic detritus of the old earth, or digging up mud from the new seabeds to transport to the surface as soil for the arcologies. Perhaps they would build huge wave-power generators in the valleys of their old mountain ranges, entirely robotically made and controlled, to ensure that the world would have energy even after the uranium ran out.

Society and Survival in the Pelagic Kingdoms

The social order in the pelagic kingdoms would be harsh, built around keeping strict authoritarian control over population growth and resource use. Those people who floated out to sea in the first hulks, crammed together like prisoners in apartment blocks that offer little better opportunity than survival, would soon come to be judged as an expendable burden on the dwindling resources of their nation; even once the purpose-built arcologies floated and the undersea manufactories began to function, these people would be seen as a burden, first to suffer calorie restrictions as arable land disappeared, last to be allowed to breed, always required to do the hardest and nastiest work. They would spend much of their lives without energy, would be moved from hulk to hulk as the need arose and treated as a slave population in a world of harsh demands. These would be the slums of the floating world, where everyone vied for a chance to get out to one of the arcologies or to a specialist dormitory ship – one that sat near a resource zone or had some industrial or defense or cultural function. Otherwise the only work on these ships would be security, fishing, and farming shellfish or seaweed in the area around the ship.

On the arcologies, life would be better, but still tough. Some arcologies might have a specialized industrial or farming purpose, others might play a mixed role providing energy, education and housing. These arcologies, being purpose built, would also be able to host proper docks and shipping, perhaps enabling them to trade between countries and with occasional visitors and develop a little real wealth. But even the largest arcology using the most advanced genetically engineered crops would only be able to grow a small amount of food, of which the entire surplus would be needed to keep the dormitory ships alive and functioning; life here might be better but it would still be harsh, and some of the chemical or industrial arcologies could be hellish indeed. In the world after the flood, no one would be allowed to rebel against their lot – find a way out, or be ground under.

Despite the harsh life in the arcologies, these would be the wealthiest and the best places on the planet, and through their combination of resource extraction, limited agriculture, and energy production, the Pelagic Kingdoms would form the central component of the human race’s recovery from its near-extinction. Everyone else living outside of these kingdoms would view them with only three goals in mind: to live in them, to trade with them, or to raid them. In such a world the Kingdoms would always be seeking adventurers – as would their enemies. It would be this world that player characters would interact with – performing dubious missions for the masters of the arcologies, fighting raiders, or raiding them for specialized goods that make the difference between death and survival for the less fortunate peoples of the flood. These Pelagic Kingdoms would also hire adventurers to scour the ocean world hunting out old resources and finding new trade opportunities. In my future posts I will describe some of the other communities that live on the world ocean, how they survive and the adventuring opportunities they might offer.

 

Problems with Rechargeable Actions in WFRP3

I GM’d Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 3rd Edition (WFRP3) on the weekend for a group of three players. It was my first time GMing in 18 months, the first time I have ever GM’d WFRP3 in English (up until now it has been Japanese). It was actually the first time I had GMd in English in 3 years, and because I was dropped into the role at the last minute I rehashed a session I’d previously run for Pathfinder, Strange Doings in the Steam Mountains (also last run in Japanese). A few notes about the session below, but first I thought I’d mention a problem I ran into with WFRP3′s system of rechargeable action cards, which is kind of obvious once you run into it but which I hadn’t thought about ahead and which if unresolved threatens to completely undermine the atmosphere of Warhammer worlds.

How to handle rechargeable healing spells outside of combat?

One of the PCs in Saturday’s adventure was a wizard of the Jade order, a kind of druid-like magician. One of his spells, The Gift of Life, is a healing spell that can be used in combat to heal (roughly) up to 4 wounds and (possibly) one critical wound, if successful. In combat it is quite balanced: it requires enough power to require a wizard to be at equilibrium to use it, it has a recharge value of 4 so can effectively only be used every 3 rounds, and its difficulty increases rapidly if one is engaged with a melee opponent or critically wounded. In the weekend’s first battle the main beneficiary of this was the wizard himself, who hid behind a secret door to heal himself, stepped out to fight, got wounded again, and ducked back behind the door to heal again. When the battle finished, he was still on half hit points and thus one hit away from death.

The problem arose after the combat ended, when the wizard was then able to heal himself, wait for the recharge, cast again, and keep going until himself and the rest of the party were fully healed. There is no daily limit on spell-casting, so there is no reason for him not to do this. Worse still, the spell offers the chance to heal critical wounds – the essential basis of WFRP3′s inbuilt deadliness – so if used continuously out of combat it essentially offers the party a way to regenerate completely after every encounter. Without it, WFRP3 is a very dangerous setting – without any healing, the wizard would have died in this battle, and the entire party would have been in dire straits after the second battle, when they went up against two steam Mephits. So the spell itself is quite a useful spell for ameliorating an otherwise extremely dangerous system. But how to prevent the recharge function from largely eliminating the threat in WFRP3? On Saturday night I allowed the wizard to fully heal himself and cast the spell once on every wounded party member, but obviously this is an arbitrary system, so I need to find a way to limit the spell and to put general limits on recharge effects outside of combat encounters.

I think there are a couple of ways to do this:

• Implied daily limits: one option is to only allow any spell to be used once in between encounters. If one assumes about three encounters in a day and a spell being used at most twice per encounter, this gives an implied daily spell use limit of about nine times per day, without actually stating a limit. This is completely arbitrary – there’s no reason why a wizard should be able to cast a spell three times in the span of a combat but only once in the following three hours – but it solves the problem, and not just for healing spells
• Actual daily limits: Another option – which could be good for limiting wizard spell use anyway – would be to put actual daily limits on how much a spell can be used. One way to do this would be to say each spell can only be used a number of times equal to the wizard’s willpower plus their rank, minus the spell’s recharge time. Gift of Life, with a recharge of four, would thus only be usable twice a day by the party’s wizard in this adventure. Magic dart – with a recharge of 0 – would be usable six times a day, which is a handy limit considering that Magic Dart is a nasty spell. This would also give more reason for a wizard to choose non-spell action cards, especially support cards which can sometimes function similarly to spells but using skills. The same tokens used to track recharges could easily be adapted to tracking the number of times a spell has been used. I think this goes against the feeling of WFRP3, however
• Wound-specific limits: The option I think I’m going to settle on is to use wound-specific limits. That is, any one PC can only successfully cast a heal spell on any one set of wounds once. The recipient of the healing must then go out and get wounded again before they can enjoy the same person’s healing again. I think I will extend this to healing draughts as well, and will make it caster-, rather than spell-specific. In this case, the wizard can cast Gift of Life on a party member (sucessfully) out of combat once; the result of this roll represents the limit of the caster’s ability to tend to the given injuries. Then, when the healed PC goes back into combat and incurs another set of wounds, the caster can heal them again with Gift of Life or a different spell. The PC can separately consume their own healing draught (once), and other spell casters can try to heal that PC, plus any PC with first aid training can also attempt to attend to the injured PC’s wounds – but only once each. This approach to healing is consistent with the rules for the First Aid skill, which can only be applied once by each PC on each PC. It doesn’t limit the number of times a day the spell can be used through magical theory, but through the limitations of the particular injuries each recipient of the spell has suffered. I think this is more consistent with the feeling of WFRP3 rules, and, given that healing spells are quite weak, doesn’t prevent them being used freely in combat (provided the recipient is receiving fresh wounds).

Any of these solutions will work for healing spells, but the last solution may prove insufficient if the problem arises in other types of spell (item identification, teleportation, that sort of thing). I think this is a weakness of the rechargeable-action-card system, but it’s better to house rule it away than to ditch the system, because rechargeable action cards are a lot of fun in combat.

Another minor problem of WFRP3

It may be in the GM’s Toolkit (which I don’t own) but it seems to me that the designers of WFRP3 have put a lot of thought into the rules and how to work them, but haven’t put much thought into how to put all of it together when preparing adventures. With all the actions spread over cards in multiple packs, it’s really hard to work out how to organize e.g. a set of monster statistics for three separate encounters and how to keep track of monster actions for groups of monsters. If I have three separate types of monster in one encounter I have to gather together lots of cards from different locations and then keep them together with clips or folders or bags or something, then somehow return them to their original location when I’m done. I guess there are specialized card holders for this sort of thing, but in preparing for this adventure I had to make my own monsters (the gnome thieves) and find a way to lay them out together and manage them. I don’t feel that this has been settled in the rulesets I have – tips and advice would be appreciated! Also juggling monsters’ special actions in combat requires a lot of experience and attention, since you’re potentially managing several different monsters of several different types all with their own unique (and repeated) action cards. Also basic cards – block, parry and dodge – aren’t available in monster statblocks, so you have to track them in your head. Stat blocks need to be designed in a way that is as practical as the character sheet, and I don’t think they are.

Adventuring in the steam mountains

The adventure itself was fun and straightforward, getting halfway through before our 3 hour room slot was up. My aim is to use this adventure as an intro to a possible sandbox campaign in a small part of a larger world. I vaguely envisaged this world being Japanese-ish (continuing the onsen theme) but without much emphasis on any particular culture to start with, and I thought I’d let the players’ actions and decisions guide the introduction to the world. I also didn’t envisage it being in the Warhammer milieu per se (though undoubtedly given my inclinations, there’ll be a healthy dose of satanism, steampunk and dark powers).

The PCs were:

• A Dwarven Troll-Slayer: Dwarves, it appears, are black-skinned and clean-shaven, though the Troll-slayer class retains its outcast status from Warhammer
• An Elven Scout: Elves, it appears, are very tall (>2m), extremely skinny, and generally consistent with their European heritage
• A Human Wizard: the human was skinny, pale, always cold, with spikey hair in a faint blue tone. So it appears that the default humans of the area are anime-standard

I haven’t decided yet whether the elf or the dwarf were travellers from far away, or if the steam mountains are on the border of three regions. I am tending towards the latter – borders mean lawless areas and strife after all. The onsen resort itself was an Australian-style rural estate, suggesting 18th-century level of building technology, so I’m wondering if the setting will be an 18th-century style semi-arid location, similar to that of Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword. Steam trains are an excellent addition to any setting, so it could be a good plan to set it in or on the cusp of the steam era.

Finally, it appears that gnomes are a bunch of greasy, tattooed criminal bastards, good at technology but sewer-mouthed and immoral. Kind of like East London gangsters, but shorter (if that’s possible). But that could just be because the only gnomes anyone will ever meet are a criminal gang from a single city, so it could be just an unfortunate stereotype – I haven’t decided on that yet.

I’m not sure, in any case, if I’ll get a chance to continue this adventure into a campaign, but if I do let’s see if I can have an orientalist outback pre-Victorian steampunk adventure with racially deterministic gnomes, and WFRP 3 rules. Sounds like fun!

 

Campaign Setting: Shadowrun in a Time of Default

Shadowrun is suited to campaign settings rife with economic corruption, the desperate and abandoned poor, powerful corporations who control the social fabric, shady underworld groups and street gangs in conflict. Sounds rather like a vision of Greece after the default, if you were to chuck in a bit of magic. So let’s do that! And what better way to do it than through a resurgent Greek mythical pantheon. And, for that matter, if Greece’s default were to drag Europe down, we would also see Italy and Ireland fall into chaos – and what do they have in common but a history rich in pantheism and magic? How would we construct such a near-future shadowrun campaign?

In comments to my previous post, Paul tried to describe a worst case scenario for Greek default:

Greece comes up to a pay day for the public sector and has no money to pay in. They issue IOUs. The public service goes in strike shutting down hospitals. A run on the banks begins and everyone withdraws their money in Euro. The banks collapse. No medicine is being imported into the country or moved to hospitals. Petrol imports stop and the prices go through the roof, preventing the transport of food and other critical supplies. The entire economy locks up because no one can get to work. Farms lie fallow or with harvests rotting in them because farmers can’t use their equipment. Food and potentially power/water shortages start to hit major cities leading to rioting. The police haven’t been paid or fed so they join in. The damage to property and life is massive. Refugees head to neighbouring countries. Eventually international aid arrives, food and petrol shipments unlock the ability to provide basic necessities of life but medical support remains at the level provided via international aid (i.e. broken bones are treated, people with cancer aren’t going to get drugs worth more than tens of dollars – which I believe is most of them). Restarting the economy from this situation is chaos, it’s basically shut down and had spiralling cascades of defaults.

Now let’s suppose that Greece has a pantheon of sleeping gods, but they were roused by some mischievous figure in one of the resistance movements (New Dawn sound like contenders, but anyone will do). They see a country in chaos and desperate for a guiding hand, so they start letting their magic seep out again. How could they have been roused, and what would the implications be for Greece and Europe? I have a few ideas …

Witch Hunter Rebekka

In this version of the campaign, the PCs are members of a top-secret Greek government organization that was tasked with keeping supernatural threats under control, like the organization from Witch Hunter Robin or Double Cross 3. Unfortunately, their organization was abolished as part of the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank, and they suddenly find themselves unemployed in a world where the supernatural is suddenly given a free hand. Perhaps they embark on a solo quest to find out what’s really happening, or maybe they set themselves up in some seedy downtown office and start selling their services to corporations and gangsters who have discovered that the dark side is coming for them. And during this maybe they notice a pattern. Perhaps there are other, similar organizations throughout Europe, and as Europe unravels in the wake of Greece’s chaos those organizations too get shut down or worse.

An orthodox priest, a banker and a schoolgirl walk into the Parthenon …

Perhaps the secret organizations working to protect Europe are not government run, but maintained instead by the churches. In Greece this means the Greek Orthodox church… so what do they do if they are approached by a banker, who does a sideline in hacking, who has discovered evidence that something behind the trouble was planned – that much of Europe’s chaos was actually schemed up by some sinister cabal that saw a chance to create chaos in Italy, Greece and Ireland at the same time. The mechanism is economic collapse, but the goal is to revive old, dark gods – the pagan gods of Ireland and the Southern Mediterranean that the more modern churches drove out. So who do they turn to? A motley group of PCs who have special powers and a can-do attitude, perhaps drawn from the many warring street clans and gangs that have sprung up in the chaos of the default and the political struggles that followed.

A conspiracy of bankers

Of course! What else? We all know that the major banks are servants of satan – let’s make it official! Perhaps the whole economic collapse was engineered to create the kind of chaos necessary to create space for new gods, to generate new, radical and subvertible political movements, and to force the collapse of the secret bulwarks that the Europeans have established against the dark powers that used to rule Europe. Perhaps European history is a long story of dark powers manipulating politics, and the modern European Union was a post-war project to try and drive them out of society and politics. It was working fine – until someone had the silly idea of setting up a common currency. Then the dark powers saw that they could use mundane, financial means to tear the entire European project down, along with all its political and cultural movements against the kind of chaos on which the dark powers depend for their success.

This whole conspiracy would take place in the halls of power, in the boardrooms of banks and sinister organizations, would be traced through emails and secret meetings and currency transfers through shady swiss bank accounts. It’s the perfect conspiracy for a couple of street hackers to slowly track down and unravel in the course of their dubious work – running in the shadows of the corporations, they find a deeper, darker conspiracy at play than mere political corruption … and all of it focused on unleashing old powers long forced down by the church, the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. We all know that our enlightened, materialistic world view depends on the special social order made possible by wealth and the absence of war and political conflict. What better way to unravel it than to engineer economic chaos, poverty and political disruption in the heartland of the old gods – Greece!

A New Dawn for the Gods

Another possible campaign would involve not a conspiracy of bankers, but a conspiracy of radicals. In this campaign, political movements proliferate after the default. Some of them are very violent and become popular very quickly, and as Greece slides into poverty and political paralysis the conflict between these street gangs explodes. Many are also connected to criminal groups and also to ethnic groups – Macedonians and Albanians, Turks and African migrants, for example. Many of them are easily infiltrated by people with authoritarian tendencies, and one of them – probably New Dawn, but others could be imagined – is soon overtaken by a man with special powers, a descendant of one of the Greek gods whose powers have revealed themselves during the chaos. He begins to impel his movement towards the revitalization of the gods, and as other gangs see it they also begin looking for new powers to fight with – perhaps they begin to research alchemy, or bring their ancient gods from across the sea. The PCs, investigating minor crimes as adventurers in the post-default chaos, suddenly begin to discover hints that people are dragging up bigger powers than they have ever seen before, and realize that the street-fighting and political conflict is taking on a religious flavour – with the gods returning to the world as the fervour increases. The fevered political environment of a country in chaos and conflict is a perfect place for new powers to emerge, or old powers to revitalize themselves.

Exploring the Genesis

Shadowrun is set after the cataclysmic events that changed the world. Those events are history, and their effects taken for granted in the Shadowrun setting. But I’m fascinated by how they could have come about, and what the world would have been like when magic was being unleashed. Perhaps an imagined economic and social cataclysm in Europe is a good way to construct those events, and gives us a chance to run an adventure right at the time of the genesis of the world Shadowrun takes for granted. I’ve always imagined that such a catastrophe would not necessarily be a physical one, but some kind of cultural and social upheaval that made gaps through which magic and gods could flow. Catastrophic economic problems and social conflict in Europe offer just such a setting. From something completely mundane like a run on some banks, to dragons ruling the sky … could you run a campaign all the way from beginning to end, and create the world of Shadowrun from whole cloth?

 

 

Modern Industrial Archaeology at Battleship Island, Nagasaki

Battleship Island

Battleship Island is an abandoned island in Nagasaki, that for some years was the most densely populated island on Earth. It was abandoned over a 3 month period in the 1970s, so most of the buildings were left intact, with even some possessions still inside. The island built up over 200 years for the sole purpose of undersea coal-mining: it hosts two mineshafts that go about a kilometre underground and branch out in a network under the sea. Because the island is too far from the mainland for commuting, a community built up around the mines. At its peak this community included schools at all grades, a cinema, pharmacy, clinic and city hall. The island is only about 500m long and 150m wide, so the community was densely packed, and by the 40s the island was so heavily built up that it resembled a battleship – hence the name, gunkanshima (軍艦島), although the island’s official name is Hashima (端島).

While I was in Nagasaki presenting my HIV model, I took a trip to gunkanshima. It’s a fascinating place in its own right and, I think, for people interested in role-playing settings, could make an excellent adventure setting. Some kind of Meiji-era Outland-style detective story springs to mind, or a Cthulhu-in-the-mineshafts post-WW2 horror story. So here are some pictures and background to give a feel for the place, as both a fine example of modern industrial archaeology and a potential adventure setting – and an excellent zombie survival spot. Also, if you’re in Nagasaki this is an excellent afternoon trip, so I’ll give a few pointers on how to get there at the end.

The Island from the tennis-court end

It takes about an hour to get to the island from Nagasaki harbour, with a brief stop at Takashima to look at a diorama of Battleship Island and visit a museum of coal-mining in the area. This is interesting for its depiction of coal mining through the ages, and its excellent three dimensional cut-away models of the mineshafts under the islands. Here you can get a sense of what a claustrophobic and grim world coal-mining was during the era of the island’s existence, and why the setting is ripe for cthulhoid fantasies. The guide will also give you an explanation of what it was like to live on the island (he grew up there) and set a kind of stern tone of things-that-are-gone that I think is quite helpful for appreciating the decay on the island itself.

The view from the coal-loading side

The boat approaches the island from the coal-mining side, so you see the flat (Eastern?) side of the island with the apartments and schools of the tennis court end on your right, and the shrine just visible at the top of the island. The parts most visible from this approach are the most intact; once you land you can see a lot more rubble.

Coal-processor remnants

From the pier it is possible to see the stilts that used to hold the coal conveyor belt, and which once ran through piles of coal. The buildings in the distance are the old schools: elementary school at the bottom and high school further up, with the top floors devoted to a gym of some kind. From this the proximity of the residents to their only source of employment – and the reason for the island’s whole existence – is pretty clear. As someone who lived in the shadows (literally) of a lead smelter in a one-industry town, I can imagine the importance this industrial infrastructure had on the island – everyone who lived here was either directly working in the mines, or there purely to provide services to those who were. It’s a town that must have closed down as soon as coal mining stopped, and the Japanese economy shifted rapidly away from coal in the 1960s and 1970s, so it was inevitable. In fact the whole island was owned by Mitsubishi – so when they closed it no one had a choice, and everyone had to move out in a very short time. There are apparently still apartments with their televisions left behind, and other markers of residential habitation still stuck on walls or doors.

Coal miners' baths (left) and pit head (far right)

Further to the south are the pit head and coal mining facilities. The miners bathed in heated sea water, and for much of the history of the island everyone experienced strict water rationing – no fresh water could be used for anything except drinking and food preparation until a pipe was laid from the mainland in the 50s. There were also no private bathing facilities – the apartments were linked to public baths that everyone shared (a very common Japanese practice even now in towns like Beppu, where for example there is a guesthouse for foreigners that doesn’t have its own bathrooms but expects guests to use the local public bathhouse). The building at the top of the above picture held a rainwater trap, I think, and a pipe leads down the hill to the apartments. The lighthouse was added after the island was abandoned, since before then it gave enough light from human habitation not to need its own lighthouse.

The view from the swimming pool

On the western side of the island from these facilities are more apartments, pictured here with a building whose purpose I don’t know (left, foreground). This picture was taken from near the swimming pool, which was a salt water pool filled directly from the sea. The whole island is surrounded by sea walls to protect it from storms but during typhoons these walls are insufficient – on the tour you will be shown photos of waves crashing over the building in the foreground, and residents of the apartment blocks looking down on the storm from the roofs of their homes. All of the apartments in Battleship Island had gardens on their rooftops, because although greenery is visible in these pictures there was none when the island was in use – the green you see here is a recent, natural addition. For the residents the only chance to appreciate elements other than stone and water was the time in the rooftop gardens.

Battleship Island's eastern side

This photo, taken on the return to the ship, shows the island in more perspective. The block in the middle is the second pit head; the building on the hillside is another apartment, possibly containing the city office. The vista stretching away from the foreground is of the coal processing facilities with the school in the background. What you see here is the work of 40 years of typhoons and storms and salt water. Most of this area was reclaimed from the sea in the first half of the 20th century; I guess by the last half of this century it will be reclaimed by the sea, unless someone decides to preserve the island in perfect form. As it is the whole place is a dangerous place, an we all had to stay very carefully inside the fenced off areas, and once the sea has had another 40 years to work its destructive way through the reclaimed areas I guess the island will become unvisitable.

Industry abandoned: the remains of the coal loading dock

The island is in many respects a kind of microcosm of Japan’s industrial history – it grew as Japan’s economy grew, and its economic and physical fate were determined by the powerful economic forces shaping Japanese society; as a result its demographic development mimicked that of Japan as a whole. Our guide showed us a magazine article from the 1960s, when Battleship Island was the most heavily populated place on earth, asking “Is this the future of Japan?” Now it is deserted and crumbling, a fate that will undoubtedly come to many other Japanese towns of similar size. As a model of the way industrial societies grow and decline this island is a powerful example, and an extreme example as well of the way that access to resources shapes the physical and cultural landscape. This isn’t the only such example in Japan – Shimane’s Iwami Ginzan is an abandoned silver mine in a slowly fading rural area that harkens back to the time when Japan was the richest country in the world because of its silver resources. They are long gone, and Shimane is now famous for its religious heritage and its crumbling seaside towns, and not much else.

If you visit Nagasaki I strongly recommend a visit to the island. You will also get a nice overview of Nagasaki’s working harbour, and see some of the scenery in the peninsula, during your trip. I booked my trip with Takashima Kaijo, which at time of writing does 9am and 14:00pm departures for 3 hour round trips, and employs a guide who used to live on the Island. It’s all in Japanese, but they have an English pamphlet that gives you the crucial information you need and some nice pictures. The staff speak enough English to get you on the ship – you need to sign a disclaimer and pay 4300 yen (about $43) for the trip (not refundable if the weather is too harsh to get onto the island). The conditions are described on their website in English, too.  Their office is a little distance from the main harbour terminal, but their website has a map and you can find other cruise companies in the terminal if you don’t want to take the risk. They can take up to 210 people, so if you go during a busy time it will be a bit crowded; you probably need to be prepared for a fairly regimented style of tourism but it’s not too cloying (but don’t take photos while the guide is talking – he’ll get angry). You get about 15 minutes to take photos and wander around and since you can’t leave the confines of the viewing area this is more than enough. The staff are very sweet and accommodating, overall. The ship also stops at Yojima, which apparently has an onsen (hot spring) and hotels, so if you wanted you could make a nice couple of days by booking into an onsen hotel in Yojima and making the trip to Gunkanjima a side trip (about an hour shorter from Yojima).

Finally, it should be recognized that Gunkanjima is a heritage site and as such a little respect should be shown: as the guide says, to us it’s a pile of rubble but to him it’s his hometown (実家). So don’t go breaking their rules because you think they’re silly, or get worked up because they wouldn’t land on the island and you lost 4000 yen. Also, if you are planning to go to Nagasaki I think this week – the 24th – 30th – is probably best because it coincides with the tall ship festival, which is quite a nice harbourside event. This season the weather is a little unpredictable, but I think it’s clearing up for the end of spring, so if you are in Japan in late April Nagasaki could be worth the effort. And if you’re in Nagasaki at any time, Battleship Island is a great afternoon trip, well worth the money and of interest to anyone who is interested in history or a little urban exploring.

 

A Space Opera Mega-dungeon Under Old Earth?

I’m reading Stephen Hunt’s Six Against the Stars at the moment, I’m only two chapters in and it has already descended into Hunt’s trademark rollicking flow of happenstance encounters, but it’s got a very nice idea for an adventure setting that I don’t think I’ve seen before. The story starts on a far future Earth, its history full of wars and environmental troubles, whose present inhabitants seem not really to fully understand the world they live on or its history. Beneath the earth is the “World Below,” which sounds a lot like a kind of far future Underdark. As our hero runs through it, we have it described thus:

In the heyday of the conflict age, the empire had hollowed out the Earth and refilled it with underground factories and cities, keeping the surface as a park that was only seen by the imperial court.

Some of these subterranean continents had caved in, but others had failed more gradually, only to be reclaimed by the flotsam of the ancient Earth – criminals, slaves, rogue androids, rebels, computer viruses which had become self aware, feral genetically engineered creatures which had broken their own behavioral programming. As the core was abandoned, the pets and toys of the merchant palaces became inbred in bizarre and unanticipated ways, sharing genes and self-splicing where run-down shaping technology lay derelict. They preyed on the safaris that ventured from above. Self-cleaning floors that had learnt to secrete acid to paralyze rodents, drink dispensers which could spray superheated water when threatened, wild herds of protein blocks that had grown armour and gored unwary travellers.

Like much of Hunt’s work, the idea is slightly comic or carnivalesque, but also rich with ideas for adventure settings and a kind of space opera or shadowrun-styled megadungeon. Instead of Aboleths we have ancient AIs residing in abandoned research factories; in place of Mimics, vending machines. Perhaps self-aware cleaning droids float through the corridors like robotic Beholders, and old abandoned tanks or other war machines function like golems and dragons. Were the world above to be fashioned as a post-shadowrun collapse society (perhaps akin to the society from the Amtrak Wars novels?) then the World Below would be a treasure trove of ancient items, and access points that still functioned would be hotly contested by the tribal powers of the surface – or avoided at all costs. Perhaps then some elves would have migrated to the World Below, so it would even have its own stock of shadowrun-styled Drow.

This would be a great setting for a campaign – a post-apocalyptic shadowrun future on the Great Plains of the USA, with a mad max styled surface world where adventurers attempt to enrich themselves and their communities by plundering the World Below. Perhaps more civilized folk use its surface ways as secret routes to attack their neighbours, or to cross deserts and wastelands. Bandits set up kingdoms, and all the rebels and renegades of the surface world flee to the World Below to make their uncertain future. It would be particularly fun to adventure in such a kingdom using Shadowrun, or one of the simpler space opera style systems like Stars Without Number. If you want dungeoneering with a mixture of savagery and high space opera, perhaps Stephen Hunt’s World Below is the perfect place to go looking for adventure …

 

Choice of Cars After the Zombie Apocalypse

Not exactly the last of the Interceptors, but...

It’s the little things that can do you in, and watching The Walking Dead recently I noticed that the group have made some serious mistakes in choice of vehicle for their road trip. Who is responsible for their vehicular management? That sanctimonious old meddler, Dale, of course. They really need to start viewing him as “just another mouth to feed.” Here is why they have made bad vehicle choices, and what I consider to be good choices for the zombie apocalypse road trip.

The Winnebago, the hi-tech liability and the chopper

The Walking Dead‘s group drive across America in a Winnebago camper van, a couple of urban runabouts and a Harley Davidson. Three of their four vehicles are bad choices: the Winnebago, the modern urban runabout, and the Harley. Their overall group transport strategy is flawed because the Winnebago is carrying too heavy a load and they haven’t built in any redundancy to account for it. Specific reasons for the flaws in each vehicle are easily identified.

The Winnebago

This is the big mistake in the road trip plan. The Winnebago has many flaws:

• It carries too much material, which means that if it breaks down in a high-risk area (near a town or an obviously infected area) the group won’t have time to empty it before they need to move on. They’ll have to leave a lot of important gear behind if they’re in a hurry, because they have too much stashed in one vehicle
• It’s not manoeuvrable, so when they reach traffic jams or narrow roads they have to go around. Worse still, if they see trouble ahead and need to turn around in a hurry, they need to do a three point turn rather than a u-turn. To avoid this they need to stay on large, wide roads which are likely to be heavily infested.
• It’s inefficient, so that despite its large size it only really carries a couple of passengers and beds. As a hospital vehicle it’s little better than a normal van, but it also carries less people than a mini bus. Furthermore, all the heavy fittings and camping style are simply a waste of space. They won’t use the toilet, and they could get by perfectly well with camp chairs rather than heavy fixed tables. All this stuff is taking up space and using fuel but providing little comfort. As a source of shelter it’s not large enough for the whole group, yet the whole group is constrained in road choice by its size
• It’s noisy and has high wind resistance, meaning it draws attention to the group and uses a lot of fuel. Fuel efficiency may not be a long-term issue in a world depleted of competition, but in moving between gas stations and fuel sources it is crucial. If you’re going to use a heavy, fuel inefficient vehicle you need good reason
• It’s heavy: hard to push out of the road, hard to replace wheels

The worst case scenarios involving the Winnebago arise from the combination of its lack of manoeuvrability and its excessive storage usage. On a narrow road, if the group see zombie trouble up ahead they will need to turn the Winnebago around, running the risk that it will get bogged off-road. This could potentially trap other cars between the Winnebago and the zombie horde, meaning loss of those cars too. But even if this doesn’t happen, bogging the vehicle down will mean having to empty it into the other cars. This will take a long time, and as the zombies approach the group will have to choose to abandon large amounts of stuff. This wouldn’t happen if that stuff had been distributed between more, smaller vehicles.

The urban runabout

The group also has a green hatchback, quite modern, that is probably highly fuel efficient, comfortable, reliable and quiet. This is overall a good choice of vehicle, but it has a significant downside: it’s too modern. Modern cars can’t be easily repaired by unskilled users, and often require computer diagnostics and specialist service centres, sometimes affiliated with the company that sells the car. Also, parts are often specific to the car and can’t be scavenged. This means that any breakdown more serious than a simple puncture will put the car out of action. That’s fine if your group has significant redundancy, but the group in the Walking Dead don’t have this luxury.

The Harley Davidson

The Harley is probably a good idea for long road trips – I get the impression that these bikes are designed for comfort in long journeys. It also has the potential to carry a rider fairly comfortably on pillion, and carry a small amount of luggage, so is a good survival tool. But it suffers from the drawback that all motorbikes do: it’s uncovered, so dangerous. However, it lacks the advantages of other smaller bikes: it doesn’t have the speed, manoeuvrability and acceleration of a road bike, nor does it have the off road capabilities of an off-road bike. It’s also likely to be noisy and less fuel efficient than other bikes. What’s its use? If it is to be used for long range reconnaissance, a road bike – extremely fast, highly manoeuvrable and quieter – would be a better option, since it will be able to travel far ahead of the group in a short time, and escape any trouble. If short-range off-road scouting is necessary, then a standard farm bike would be better. This can be used to get through partially-obstructed regions (e.g. old road blocks and traffic jams) easily, is highly manoeuvrable so can be turned around quickly to escape sudden gangs of zombies, and can go off-road to investigate old houses and farms. In the hands of an experienced motor-crosser it can even potentially go over some obstacles, though at high risk. A Harley is only good for open-road cruising. But you can do that much, much more safely in a car, which at least has the advantage of seat belts.

The problem of redundancy and overloading

Another significant problem arises for this group from the combination of lack of redundancy and overloading of the Winnebago. If the Winnebago breaks down irreparably, the group will need to move all the stuff out of it into just two urban runabouts, which also need to transport all the people in the group. Short of the obvious solution – shooting Dale for the sanctimonious moralizing loser that he is and using his seat for storage – the group is going to face a hard choice between supplies and people, because their two small cars won’t have enough room for both. This choice is going to probably have to be made in a hurry, and will lead to the loss of a significant amount of important material. If one of the other runabouts dies, the problem is not so severe but they will be immediately forced to hunt for a new car, even if the only locally available cars are in very dangerous settings. They have no choice in this – if one of their runabouts fails and then the Winnebago breaks down in a dangerous place, they won’t have sufficient capacity to take the whole group to safety and will have to repair the Winnebago under pressure. Bad move.

Furthermore, lack of small vehicles means they don’t have the ability to circle the vehicles at night – not a perfect defense tactic but an important part of safe camping techniques. And of course, they don’t have a spare vehicle to use to block a street or set alight as a barrier.

The ideal road trip strategy

Cars offer the benefits of mobility, shelter and security. However, on a road trip one runs the risk of becoming stranded between locations with no source of supplies, so the key to any safe zombie apocalypse road trip is redundancy. Ideally you need lots of small cars with the following properties:

• Fuel efficiency
• Good storage space
• Manoeuvrable
• Easily pushed, for jump-starting or getting out of the way
• Disposable
• Easily accessible (four doors!)
• Readily accessible spare parts

The thought of hooning along post-apocalyptic open roads in a Nissan Fairlady may appeal, but it has very few advantages. The group should choose cars that meet most of the above conditions, and ideally some of these vehicles should be able to be used as excess storage spaces, shelters, or hospital vehicles. Thus a good combination would be VW kombi vans (for space, shelter and repairability) or similar vans, four-door utilities (for storage and convertability), and older four-door hatchbacks. For the utes, ideally they would be the sort of ute that gets used as a “technical” by somali warlords – so an older Toyota or Subaru, something reliable and trustworthy that can use parts from any old car and can itself be cannibalized.

The group should have more vehicles than it needs to carry all its materials and all its people, and some of them (the kombi vans) should be sufficient to provide shelter and security in a pinch (bad weather, sudden unexpected zombie onset). All of them should be able to turn easily to get out of trouble, and be pushable by two adults. All the vehicles should carry enough supplies to be self-sufficient for a short time: basic materials for the engine (pipe, radiator, spark plug, battery, jump cables); a couple of days’ food; water; fuel; basic medical supplies. This means that if any one vehicle needs to be abandoned its contents can be stripped out quickly and moved to another vehicle, but can also be abandoned un-stripped without catastrophic loss of vital materials. All back seats should be left empty and the doors unlocked, for rapid transfer of people from broken cars in an emergency. The utes can be used to carry excess material that isn’t so important and can be dumped where necessary; the utes can also be used as emergency evacuation vehicles or even ambulances where things go wrong. All vehicles should be given a priority (High, Medium or Low) and this should be painted on bonnet and doors so that everyone knows which vehicle to head for if not all vehicles can be saved. The group should travel at the optimal speed for fuel efficiency, well spaced out, and stop regularly to rest and check maps – you never know when you might need to turn around, so it’s good for everyone in the group to be aware of potential hazards in the road behind. All vehicles should be driven with at most 2 people in them (to ensure redundancy) and single occupancy vehicles should be avoided – it’s not fuel efficient and it opens the risk of loss of communication. Ideally some kind of radio contact should be maintained between vehicles – hourly checking in, regular reports, etc.

All vehicles should also be fitted with a usable sharp piercing implement such as a sharpened iron spike by every door, so that zombies that break through window glass can be dealt with easily. When driving, everyone should wear seat belts – what’s the point of surviving the apocalypse only to die in a low-velocity car crash? Or worse, survive but be put down like a dog by your comrades because of a lack of suitable medical equipment to handle serious injuries… Finally, motorbikes should only be used if the group really sees a need for single-person reconnaissance. Otherwise they’re a dangerous luxury vehicle that should be avoided.

I think if a group follows these principles it will be able to survive longer on the open road and escape from even quite dangerous and pressing situations without significant lives or material. As it stands the group in The Walking Dead are one breakdown away from either losing a significant load of supplies and/or having to abandon people; or becoming lunch. Don’t make their mistakes, and instead adopt an industrial design approach to your post-apocalyptic convoy: share the load-bearing and ensure redundancy.

A note on the zombie road-trip of the future

As the world shifts to a low-carbon future, cars are going to become electric. In the further future they may even become robot driven. This means that sometime in the far future, the apocalypse will see a collapse from a much higher-tech society than we have now, to a much lower-tech society, with no pause in the Mad Max zone. Isn’t that interesting?

 

 

 

The Magic of the Hajj

Magnetism, by Ahmed Mater

The campaign setting I am currently playing in, Punjar, has a vaguely middle Eastern subtext, with the city of our adventures presented as a chaotic, slightly exotic free state of souks and temples, such as western readers might associate with somewhere in pre-modern Oman or Turkey. While gaming there I try to hold in my head images such as the opening scenes of The Exorcist, though obviously (unlike the priest of that ill-omened scene) my character is a local who understands what is happening around him (and might even understand the meaning of the statue he dug up, if he could make the Arcana check!)

Simultaneously with my entry into this world of bazaars, brothels and giant barking toads, the British Museum has opened what looks like a fascinating exhibition on the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca that constitutes one of the five pillars of the faith. The Guardian has an interesting review, with links to some of the artists involved (one of the artists’ pictures is on the top of this post). The review certainly makes this exhibition sound like a masterpiece of the curator’s craft: it combines historical documents, objects and art with modern art, video of some of the scenes of the Hajj, old news footage, and modern diaries and spoken accounts of people’s pilgrimages. The review makes reference equally to high art and the diary of a North London schoolgirl. It also appears to show something of the complex relationship between Britain and its ex-colonies in South Asia.

I’m not in London now so I can’t visit things like this anymore (though sometimes the British Museum’s exhibitions end up in Japan), but it looks like something that would be well worth visiting for those living in London. This exhibition also hints at the complex and fascinating campaign setting that the Islamic world offers to enterprising GMs. Obviously most of us, as outsiders to that world, can only really hope to present a cheap simulacrum of that world (like, say, Punjar) but even a very shallow investigation of the world of Islamic art, history and culture would no doubt throw up a wide range of interesting and exciting adventure settings. I’ve no doubt, too, that the political context of almost any period in Islamic history – from the time of the prophet onward – would be easily as challenging as those of the Victorian era. Also playing on the opposite side of the nations of the Great Game – e.g. as Afghan adventurers during the Russian and British interventions there in the 19th century, or as adventurers in any city of the Middle East during the Crusades – could be a lot of fun.  The breadth of the Islamic world, which ranges from modern-day England to 12th century Indonesia, and the diversity of its cultures, offers a plethora of settings, and the Hajj is the classic opening scene (“the adventure starts with the PCs on a routine mission, guarding a rich merchant on his pilgrimage to Mecca”). In fact, it could be like Monkey, with the entire campaign occurring on the journey to the Hajj. You set off from somewhere in India at level 1, and 8 months and 20 levels later you arrive in Mecca. Your ultimate mission, of course, is the pilgrimage itself. But in the face of a hazardous journey over a whole continent, can you even keep the faith that you set off in service of? Or, in the words from one piece in the exhibition: “Are you leaving as you had come?”