In the Dark

Do your hardholds have electricity? What's it like when it gets dark? Or does it get dark? Is there always a weird glow in the sky? What kind of weird shit happens when the sun goes away?

I was thinking about that weather clip that Bret posted, and that got me thinking about what it was like before gaslight when night came around. It's easy for me to forget, considering where I live.

Any freaky night-related moves in your games? If you're still outside the hardhold walls when the sun goes down, roll+?

Oh, great thinking. When I moved from the middle of the country upstate to downtown, the first thing I noticed was that it never gets dark. Not really.

The thing is, unless it's overcast, you don't get total darkness in areas without electricity and street lights either. When your eyes adjust you can make out a great deal under moon and starlight. If it is overcast, though, you're in trouble.

Dark is a scary time. A great time for scary moves in an apocalypse world.

I spent a couple of years in northern Ghana, in a town called Tamale.  Sometimes the power would be cut for a couple of days, and there were frequent brownouts in the early evening.  At night, you'd see a few rich people houses with their own inverter system lit up, they looked like little islands in what's an otherwise sea of darkness.  

There might be a few flickering dots here and there where people have lit things like kerosene lamps, or flashlights, and sometimes larger glows of cookfires in back yards.  But mostly a lot of black, with tiny bits of light.  

Because of that, you'd tend to see a lot more of the sky. It's amazing how much more of the starlight is visible without all the lights on the ground.

I remembered in Tamale where a lot of the bars would hook up Christmas lights to a car battery, so that people would know where the bars were in the darkened streets. I incorporated that into Roverville for my Gamma Road game, the flickering Christmas lights kind of a security rope around the hostile darkness around them. 

Alison's Alley had spotty lights rigged to solar generators on the roof, but not everyone had power, for sure.

The Luxor seems to have some power - maybe gas-powered? It's big enough to have it's own solar stuff going on, what with the desert and all. There's been reference to the lack of power - no elevators except the one Keeler has a key to, no electric locks on doors, that sort of thing.

Gas-powered generators run the Antenna in our Hold.  I don't know if anyone else has power, but I sure as shit do.  Hard work keeping the thing fueled, though.

Hi all,
Just got AW so taking it and all the existing forum threads in.

In terms of powering a landhold, you're going to need expertise, fuel and assorted crap to convert that fuel into electricity. While generators seem the easy solution, you'll need firstly the generator and then an ongoing supply of fuel that you have to either obtain from outside sources or create yourself (which requires more expertise and assorted crap - so to speak). With a bit of ingenuity windmills are the post-apocalyptic future. Free fuel and all you do really need is assorted crap that's lying around.
John

In the stuff that's shaping in my head, it's windmills, yeah.

I like the look of the windmills in Borderlands.

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/103/1030605/borderlands-20091001024009599_640w.jpg

They have that poorly maintained look. I can see a savvyhead pulling down a big wind turbine like that and reinstalling it right next to the hardhold, with sheets of metal welded on, etc.

Same lad, but a cracking photo showing the rough-and-ready approach that'd be prevalent in a post apocalyptic world.
John

Steam Town is built around a geothermal power plant modeled on the ones at The Geysers in California. Only the Steamers know how it works and they've formed a cult-like society around the plant. They use the power to charge batteries and distill something into a mystery liquid called "juice" that works in vehicles. So they can effectively trade power for goods and services even though there's no transmission network for the electricity. People also found that they can get a buzz from sniffing juice fumes. The Plant is the focus of an entire front.

The best way to get light in the Apocalypse is to light something on fire. There's lots of flammable stuff lying around. Like, for example, the suburbs.

Man, nothing pisses off those namby-pamby dogooders like warming yourselves by a bonfire made out of the corpses of your enemies. PROVEN BY ACTUAL PLAY.

Curious if anybody knows enough about tidal generation to know if it'd be anything like viable for one of those 'inland ocean' sunken-city type AWs. I'm not any kind of engineer, but I understand that sort of thing exists at least in theory, and it just seems like a cool idea...

-JC

Tidal generators can work fine, but they need frequent maintenance due to the being immersed in water and heavy moving parts. A few experimental ones exist today, but I don't think anyone has one working commercially yet.

In game, if you had a savvyhead on call, tidal power generation would be great. If not, the chances of it still working after 50 years are pretty slim.

Note that you'd get less power from them in an inland sea/lake, unless it's big enough to have large tides.

In my apocalypse world there are... 4 real sources of electricity. 1) Gas (really bio-diesel) powered generators.  These are used for shorter periods of time to power heavy equipment.  2) Waterwheels.  Our holding is on and around a very large river, so waterwheels that either turn turbines to generate electricity or that pull a huge chain that non-moving pieces of machinery can attach to run seems like a no-brainer.  3) Windmills.  My apocalypse world is a dreary, rainy place with frequent thunderstorms.  There's pretty much always at least a little wind.

These three are pretty common.  The waterwheels and windmills can be maintained and repaired by a lot of people.  Less people would know how to fix or build a new gas generator, but the PC savvyhead could certainly handle it without any difficulty.

We've also mentioned, but not really done much with, mysterious capacitors attached to the holdings many, many lightning rods.