Underground town: http://www.neatorama.com/2014/07/06/Everyone-in-This-Bizarre-Australian-Town-Lives-Underground/#!bDet3c

Very much enjoying it so far!

I've heard ROL.net is good for forum based...

I heard "abandoned 50 years ago" and immediately had to go look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27509955

The interviewed guy makes the point that it's looking into a "future with no humans" too (c:

more pictures here (and all across Google):
http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/north-brother-island-riverside-hospital.html

The Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright film "The World's End" features an apocalypse that could nicely set up a campaign. Can't say much more without spoilers...

So, we've had two sessions.

My cast is: Mr Smith the Battlebabe, Oz the Savvyhead, Doc the Angel and Pallor the Brainer.

None of them have any crew, staff, followers or vehicles.

They hang out at Oz's scrapyard called "The Shire". I was feeling a little "uh-oh" about this - as I didn't want to tell them they had to be near other people, but then one of them when asked "What do you do all day?" said "Hang out in the bar?"

So, we have a bar. They called The Melted Bottle. They told me it's run by a guy named Gabe. Gabe gets Oz to repair his still, employs Smith as security.

Partway through further Following Them Around they invent a barman called Shaky Dave and then make a lot of fun of him.

I'd been drawing the buildings on a flipchart pad in the middle of the table. So I asked what was off the page in each direction. North is more inner-city urban ruins - skyscrapers and malls, controlled by an Alpha Wolf called Inch and his Boys who hasn't stomped them because he lacks the manpower so far to spread that far. South-west is what was once a wide river, and is now a canyon with fluorescent sludge in it, called "The Gash". South east is what they call "The Waste" - where the two guys that go hunting come out of to sell them meat.

Good point, I said, what do you have locally?

Water, they said, if it's rained recently. Food we have to trade in (though Doc immediately laid claim to a stash of tinned meals in a bunker he found but didn't secure), but those two guys are pretty regular. What do they want from you?

Well, patching up from Doc, truck repairs from Oz, extra muscle sometimes from Smith, but mainly they want the alcohol from the bar.

Yup, turns out everyone coming in is doing so to trade at, and mainly with, a bar the PCs don't run.

I'd stopped worrying about not being able to find conflict by then.

Because they'd made no attempt to suggest any perimeters or security for the area I had a biker turn up and cause trouble as their first day. Smith had a problem with just doing it - a lot of his moves were like:
"Okay, I tell him to calm down"
"He's not calm and he's bringing a gun up."
"I stick my gun in his face first."
"Are you going aggro?"
"Yes, well, I just want him to drop his gun."
"And if he doesn't?"
"I say to him "There's no need for this!""

Which lead to me then letting the Biker survive more Harm than I should have let him. The session ended with him in a coma (as the Doc rushed to save him) and Oz discovering the bike panniers were full of cured human meat. (Hadn't planned on it, but then found myself saying it so that's what the story demanded)

Between sessions I wrote down that there was a Meat Cult in addition to Inch's Boys, but for each of the Fronts I had trouble thinking up more than one threat. Added to this that I was thinking of the Melted Bottle as the home front - Gabe and Dave weren't threats, just people. I tried to write up the Meat Cult and Inch's Boys as the two fronts but other than "Alpha Wolf" and "Hive Queen" didn't find inspiration. I didn't want to over-populate them.

On the day of the second session, three weeks later I suddenly realised. The Home Front isn't the Bottle. The Bottle is a Front proper.

Second session we were down one (Pallor's player was sick) so I decided to concentrate on just that. The Melted Bottle itself is a Maze(Gabe is its Keeper), Alcohol is a Condition and Shaky Dave is a Mutant. He wants respect, and to take over the bar, but now these shits have arrived and given him this derogatory nickname, taken his job (I decided that as Smith named the NPC, he also in-game did so).

Dave rigged a grenade on the stairs Smith's place after Smith got freebies from Ace, one of the girls Tum Tum runs from the bar (he pays Pallor to keep them in line). Dave had also been training the giant rats (with the clacking bone eyelids) having been sold some pheromones by Persons Unknown. The hunters who sell meat haven't turned up recently (I may have them on a Countdown by next session) and some new arrival (because: no borders, no patrols) have parked their car over the hatch to Doc's stash of food (because he said it was still in the bunker and that that wasn't where he lived).

At the beginning of the session they were all "Man, I'm glad that creepy fuck Pallor isn't here" and by the end of it they had switched to: "I hate to say this but it'd be really useful if we could just read his mind, wouldn't it?"

They rolled really badly a lot, and I had to take breaks to think up things other than "Well, the grenade isn't defused; 4 harm" as that was getting old.

They also had to deal with an angry mob who thought Oz was the one setting grenade traps to get at Smith. That was resolved when, while defusing one, Oz and Smith had such a bickering row (all wonderfully IC) that now most of the locals assume they're actually a couple.

People got too drunk and had fights around them, security was negelcted, giant rats attacked people, they took half the session to work out Shaky Dave was making moves against them (though they worry he's acting on Gabe's orders, which interests me) and a spectacular fail when attempting to throw a bottle of pheromones from behind cover at a sniper resulted in Oz being drenched in the stuff and having to wrestle one in the street.

We had to end on that cliffhanger, so next time we'll finish the gun battle and then skip ahead to allow people to heal.

I'm planning on having the Meat Cult as a combination of Hive Queen warlord (the cultists themselves) and Affliction, having been lightbulbed on the forum about that just now. Inch and Boys might not make an appearance for a while, as it's been stated several times that they're further away than the Gash. And I need to create a home front so I can put the Rats in it, or decide if they're part of the Gash Front.

I do wish they'd called it something else... oh well!

When creating my fronts, I envisioned a cannibal-cult that spreads among the hardholds, encouraging people to "stop raping the land for corn" and eat other cult members instead. I classified this practice as sacrifice, and used it to engage my players with great success

That's fascinating and useful - I've had trouble thinking up threats for some of my fronts, and one of them is a similar cult. Sure, the cult themselves are the gang part of a Hive Queen, but what other threats did they pose? I was thinking I'd have to flesh (ahem) them out with lots of other NPCs to be named threats, but was wondering what made them distinct from the Cult.

But Afflication:Sacrifice (or delusion) gives me what I need. The Cult's threats aren't just the actual fully signed up members, it's also the spread of their beliefs. And that's much harder to tackle... (c:

Thank you!

Roleplaying in a fictional setting is one thing, but thinking it'd be fun to play as (low-powered but look at the Harm rules vs. NPCs) superheroes in an existing area of great deprivation could be described as incredibly tasteless, yes?

I'd be worried that I'd be accused of cultural approriation at the very least and called an out-and-out racist by my friends if I suggested such a thing.

Yes, "witch [are] doctors buying albino parts as spell reagents" but that's not a fun piece of colourful fokelore for us to wonder the die-roll implications of. That's documented people in our world (and not in a previous century, but today and tomorrow) kidnapping, murdering and butchering children for financial gain.

Obviously I can't speak for what your group would find socially acceptable though.