Suggest me some "different" apocalypse :)

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Re: Suggest me some "different" apocalypse :)
« Reply #15 on: June 30, 2014, 08:27:08 PM »
2 characters are done, a Grotesque (friend with the cannibals) and a Faceless (friend with the normal humans who are secretly selling their childs to the cannibals, but he also has a life debt with the grotesque). The other 2 players will pick their characters in 2 days.

Re: Suggest me some "different" apocalypse :)
« Reply #16 on: July 01, 2014, 02:26:18 AM »
I'm always a fan of bio-punk settings ever since I read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi and playing  Bioshock.

So here's the premise. People have perfected cloning first with animals and much later with humans. Genetic modifications is common place. At first it's practical: disease resistances for AIDS ridden populations in Africa, Japan's population problem is fixable through cloning. People start modifying animals and creating pets cheshire cats, chimeras, and miniature extinct species like dodos and wooly mammoths . Eventually specially designed "Kaiju" are made to fight in a modern day coliseum. Perhaps this leads to military made monsters who knows but Jurassic Park's cautionary tale wasn't heeded and now the end of the world is populated with dragons, and other fantastic fauna/flora.

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« Last Edit: July 01, 2014, 02:47:36 AM by Ampersand »

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DannyK

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Re: Suggest me some "different" apocalypse :)
« Reply #17 on: August 22, 2014, 02:01:00 AM »
I've been thinking lately of a couple of  interesting ones:

-One is inspired by New Wave Science Fiction -- the characters find themselves in a biological landscape, everything around them is some kind of tissue or organ, only impossibly large and baroque.  There's a huge 3D space of twisty little passages with a constant wind blowing in and out to represent the lungs, for example; somewhere else, there's an endless forest of trees crackling with lightning, representing the brain.  The rivers are full of giant blood cells and deadly antibodies.  Anyone who falls into the heart is liable to be washed away and find themselves in desolate landscapes without any human presence at all. I'd run this in a heartbeat, but I can't figure out where to take it from there -- whose body is it, and what are the PC's doing there? 

--Another is inspired by the cool Dungeon World setting, Inverse World, where everybody lives on floating rocks above a golden sun, and the rain comes up from below, then drips back again.  Inverse World is a setting where things just work like that, but I really like the idea of playing in a setting where the apocalypse was gravity suddenly reversing -- most of the people and animals were outside, behaving normally when gravity failed and they took the long fall.  Some lucky people were inside or on the underside of rocks or in airships or could fly, and so some small fraction of the population survived to colonize what were formerly the barren undersides of the worlds, eternally in darkness since the sun is now below them.  (This is actually part of the Inverted World setting -- farmers grow crops that hang down from the underside of floating rocks, since that's the only part of the land that has both sunlight and rain.  Being a farmer is dangerous work.)

Some of the planetoids and floating islands themselves broke up under the strain, shattering into dust and dangerous flying meteors.  Hell, maybe most of civilization once lived on some great floating continents, most of which have now shattered.  But if you've got ship, you could cruise along the underside of a dead land, cautiously climbing out into upside-down towers and buildings that still somehow cling to bedrock, looking for treasure and daring the wrath of the insane, cannabilistic apes who have colonized the inverted ruins....
I'd probably have the PCs come from either a dying little rock in the fringes, or an ancient airship left over from the Great Breakdown, constantly in need of repairs, constantly moving through the wreckage like a steampunk version of Battlestar Galactica.

By the way, I have a severe phobia of falling, so this is the scariest possible Apocalypse for me... your mileage may vary.

Re: Suggest me some "different" apocalypse :)
« Reply #18 on: August 23, 2014, 02:09:32 PM »
I've been reading Chuck Wendig's Under the Empyrean Sky which has the rich on floating cities above a land completely overrun with a genetically modified corn strain that can't be eaten; it's used for fuel and building material (plastic).

So there's sun and golden waves of grain, but it's completely post-apocalyptic.

Everyone's starving and diseased on the land, and the economy is shot to hell (they use "ace notes" which I think are playing cards), no one has any guns, fruit and vegetables are a rare, unseen commodity, and the corn sometimes cause pollen storms.

The main character is totally an Operator who has a crew that pilots a hover-skiff scavenging and sometimes stealing. There's a chapter where they meet a hoarder (the local merchant). And there's plot twist that could lead to brainers...

Re: Suggest me some "different" apocalypse :)
« Reply #19 on: September 09, 2014, 02:00:48 PM »
Really off the wall here, but....

For some reason (who knows why, its AW) everything is water. The Earth, atmosphere, SPACE ITSELF is filled with water. Towns float  above the planet or are burrowed in, water pressure is low enough you can swim anywhere with scuba gear (If you're going to fill up space with water, you might as well let characters swim  and not worry about water pressure). With a big enough sub you can even travel to the moon and such, if you can navigate to it. Side effects of having an ocean be your world: Sea Monsters, pirates, sea mines, Dolphin Kingdoms, extreme care being taken to not shoot a hole in the submarine while boarding, and of course: more sea monsters.