Why the Maelstrom

My apologies for making my appearance, if it is not the proper the place, but I see an opportunity to speak about something that I've thought of, and I've chosen to take it.

In my own setting, the Maelstrom is a symptom, if a large one, of even more widespread and basic shift in the universe from one mode of functioning to another, specifically involving the nature of time, entropy, and information. On a human scale, the apparent effects were; first, all unprotected persons, other animals, and electronics had the vast swathes of their memories drained, second, those memories, as well as a simplistic, basal heuristic structure, coalesced into a self-directing, virtually omnipresent, in regards to the surface of the Earth, multipolar electromagnetic field, and third, and most mundane, the concentrations of charge created by the field strongly influenced the development of wind currents, creating functionally permanent electrical storms or droughts in places of particularly particularly positive or negative charge, respectively. Weird moves that involve the Maelstrom function either by using it as a medium for manipulation, such as with In-Brain Puppet Strings, tapping it for resources, especially information, such as generally opening your brain, which can also allow the Maelstrom to potentially plunder its contents, or Bonefeel, as a place to plant information, such as in certain uses of Augury, or in the rarer, more physical manifestations, as a nearly limitless source of energy.

How did your maelstrom come to be? This is kind of directed towards everyone.

Google went atmospheric, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Perfect information for everyone, everywhere, whenever they thought about it. Then when this turned out to be a terrible idea after all, someone released a virus that interfered with everyone's ability to access the cloud. The virus is the Maelstrom, which manifests as various forms of static and information decay. It turns out that the countermeasure was also a bad idea, as it does not limit itself merely to interfering with access to digital information, but information of any kind. Personality static, schizophrenia, and memory loss are common. The Maelstrom manifests atmospherically as well, as constantly-falling snow. Those who drink or eat the snow soon forget themselves.

Behind the Maelstrom, Google remains, helpful and informative, just waiting to tell the denizens of the Apocalypse all about home-grown biological weapons and the exact current location of everyone they've ever hated.

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This was from a game where our starting apocalypse-brainstorm consisted of: cold, urban, snow, radio static.

Those are some cool maelstroms!

I have no idea where our maelstrom came from. We haven't found out yet. I do know that the Apocalypse happened some time in our future / roughly in our timeline and the USA had declined into a stagnating third-world country, which explains why the local area is full of 2013-era technology like guns, ammo, cars, Happy Meal toys, etc., but there are some clearly higher-tech, albeit pre-Apocalypse things like violation gloves running around -- these are imports, the guns and cars are Made in the USA. The fact that some of these higher tech devices overlap with the maelstrom's capabilities suggest that maybe the maelstrom itself arose some time before the technological collapse... but all that is just guessing.

We also have a Touchstone who thinks he's a Quarantine (and possibly a replicant), but nothing on table so far establishes that he is what he thinks he is, and my suspicion is that it's a hallucination.

In one game I had the maelstrom seemed to compose of radio signals of the past. The Hocus followed the Rain God, which would send such cryptic messages as "Squalls coming from sou-southwest.  Small craft warning." The Hocus and his cult spent their time interpreting these messages. This was all the Hocus' idea.

Then the Hocus performed an Augury, and managed to catch the attention of another aspect of the Rain God. He had a short conversation with Amelia Earhart, who was running out of fuel of the Pacific on July 2, 1937. Of course, they both didn't really understand what the other person was talking about. Unbeknownst to the Hocus, the instability bleeding from the Augury caused the surrounding ruins to echo images and sounds of what it looked like before the apocalypse.

Later on the Savvyhead failed at an Augury-like device, and the resulting bleed caused a bunch of NPCs to experience the atomic bomb that had hit the city.