Xathan's Brain Now - Eschaton and Casus Belli

[Steerpike]

Well, I was going to make it close to the ancient near and middle east, but that's because I hadn't considered the classic post apocalyptic Mad Max style outback overload with a Judeo-Christian fantasy, which is so cool I now really need to sit down and completely rethink the entire setting because holy god that mental image is awesome.

I did a Biblical post-apocalypse game once set after the world ended in a quasi-cyberpunk near-future. It was a solo game and the PC was War, the rider from Revelations, though his steed was a souped up motorbike (I don't think either of us had read Good Omens yet). There were a lot of vampires (spawn of Cain), cults, witches, and areas where a Danteesque Hell was seeping through into the world, so you'd be riding through Nevada and suddenly you'd be plunged into the Grove of Suicides or the frigid plains of Cocytus. Was kind of a blast. If we'd kept playing the plan was to eventually kill God and Satan both I think. It was all very Preacher meets Dark Tower.

[HippopotamusDundee]

Well, I was going to make it close to the ancient near and middle east, but that's because I hadn't considered the classic post apocalyptic Mad Max style outback overload with a Judeo-Christian fantasy, which is so cool I now really need to sit down and completely rethink the entire setting because holy god that mental image is awesome. :P

Go and read Apocalypse World (if you haven't already) while you're working on your Max-Max-themed madness - it is dripping with inspiration (and incidentally has a hella-cool system), and you will thank me for it.

[Xathan]

Hahaha, amazing. Or what about doing BOTH? Maybe a part of the apocalypse-event involved the mashing together of peoples from cultures of wildly differing development levels, so you can have your Samsons and Humunguses all running around the same crazily dangerous desert full of ruins - ruins of both oil refineries and ziggurats.

That...that is all kinds of awesome. I think I have to do this thing. Or at least debate it. Part of the idea behind Eschaton was to go a bit more "classic low tech fantasy, on the edges of sword and sorcery" than I usually do, but man, that idea is so cool. Maybe do a "worlds collide" thing in a literal sense, where a dieselpunk world was slammed into Eschaton as part of the apocalypse. Of course, I'd need to find a world to collide....

*eye Casus Belli menacingly*

I did a Biblical post-apocalypse game once set after the world ended in a quasi-cyberpunk near-future. It was a solo game and the PC was War, the rider from Revelations, though his steed was a souped up motorbike (I don't think either of us had read Good Omens yet). There were a lot of vampires (spawn of Cain), cults, witches, and areas where a Danteesque Hell was seeping through into the world, so you'd be riding through Nevada and suddenly you'd be plunged into the Grove of Suicides or the frigid plains of Cocytus. Was kind of a blast. If we'd kept playing the plan was to eventually kill God and Satan both I think. It was all very Preacher meets Dark Tower.

Is this posted somewhere? Because I want to read the setting notes from this so badly. It sounds like 18 different kinds of awesome!

Go and read Apocalypse World (if you haven't already) while you're working on your Max-Max-themed madness - it is dripping with inspiration (and incidentally has a hella-cool system), and you will thank me for it.

I've heard a number of good things about Apocalypse World. No one has ever bothered to mentioned it was actually Mad-Max-esque. My friends obviously do not know me as well as I thought they did, because you just sold me on the system.

[LD]

Xathan-
If you search "Angellic Creatures" in my Godsmack setting, I also had a little venture into the land of the Biblical Apocalyptic WWII... http://www.thecbg.org/index.php/topic,68604.html

[Rhamnousia]

I was doing some idle thinking about Casus Belli today and came up with a couple of ideas for alternate nation-states if you ever decide to do anything with it in the future.

First, the reunification of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and other parts of northern South America into the Neo-Bolivarian country of Gran Colombia. It's a dieselpunk setting and they're sitting on some of the world's largest petrochemical fields, so unification and mass military mobilization was key if they wanted to resist being inevitably re-colonized by a fuel-hungry foreign power as conflicts heated up. By they lacked the huge industrial base of Britain or the United States, so instead, they've invested heavily in "wet technologies" and much of their forces now consist of engineered organisms and biological hybrids enhanced with mechanical implants. Obviously, there's a lot of social tension between the military establishment and the Catholic Church about the armies of mutant cyborgs guarding their borders.

Second, I was originally thinking that China would've broken up by this point, but it'd be more interesting to see it resist Communist overthrow and persist as the Republic of China (and not just because I love their beautiful stupid five-color flag). Better leadership and assistance from whatever version of Germany exists in this world gave them the strength to repel Japanese imperialist aggression in World War II and then really set the Pacific ablaze when they counterattacked in World War III. With World War IV on the horizon, Republican China is a dominant cultural power and a military force to be reckoned with, but it's suffering deep internal divisions: its armies are commanded by regional commanders instead of a central government and the shared threat of war with the Soviets and/or Japanese might be the only thing staving of a military uprising.

The global situation seems perfect for the formation of one of my favorite tropes: pirate nations. In places like the Swiss Alps and the Hindu Kush, you have collectives of dispossessed rogues armed with salvaged or stolen military technology forming anarchic collectives to pillage and raid the skies above neighboring countries, cunningly weaving across national borders to avoid pursuers.

Various extra-orbital space installations launched before and during the Third World War were left abandoned by their home nations and were forced to band together for survival. The extreme pressures of space survival have forged them into an ultra-militaristic fascist polyglot culture of eugenically-modified mutants totally adapted for life in low-gravity, low-oxygen environments. On the rare instances they do make landfall (encounters that are always hostile), they are restricted to bulky, mechanized suits that can support their elongated frames and prevent oxygen poisoning.