Thursday 26 March 2020

The End of the World As We Know It

With the world in meltdown about a disease that may kill about 0.5-1% of the people who catch it, to use a commonly cited figure, it is worth reflecting that European diseases killed somewhere in the region of 60-90% of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas. Can you imagine what it must have been like to be an Andean native during the smallpox epidemic that struck shortly before Pizarro's arrival? Think of the generalised anxiety among the population now about COVID-19, give it a liberal dose of ignorance about the very concept of infectious diseases that can spread through breath or touch, and then multiply it by 50 or so.

And they still managed to have the wherewithal to fight a civil war - what's your excuse for sitting around all day watching Netflix?

This is not the apocalypse, or anything like it, but it does at least put one in mind of the concept. We are familiar with games set in post-apocalyptic settings, and we are familar with both post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic fiction. But I'm not sure I know of many game settings or games proper that take place during the end of the world or an apocalypse event - All Flesh Must Be Eaten, I suppose, but zombies have never really interested me very much. I prefer my apocalypses to be Dionysian in tone. Although I am also intrigued by what you might call the Nyarlathotepian Apocalypse, in which a travelling scientist/philosopher drives everybody insane by inflicting them with nightmares which mean they can never sleep again, with this in turn meaning that society very quickly declines into fatal insomnia. And I also have a deep, abiding love for the Donald Sutherland Invasian of the Body Snatchers - which, by a form of free association between late 70s/early 80s SF/horror flicks, then gives me the idea for the "Apocalypse of The Thing", in which the eponymous Thing somehow gets off Antarctica and is suddenly all over humanity like a cheap suit.

What is your favourite flavour of the apocalypse?

43 comments:

  1. For me, it's the fall of the Western Roman Empire - perhaps filtered through Victorian visions to cut out many of the continuities. The Huns are evocative here; ignore the fact that Aetius had lots of them in his 'Roman' army and concentrate on the idea of a terrible conquering tribe that melted away after destroying much of the known world. Perhaps add a dash of the Mongols too: "their only monuments were pyramids of skulls". You can keep the Germanic successor states largely as they were - but amp up all the fearful abandonment of imiperial cities ("the work of giants") and the new dwellings on the outskirts of the ruins (as in post-Roman Britain). And then accentuate the decadence of the Roman equivalents - so that fantastical follies and abandoned wizards' towers dot the landscape, and creatures bred for grotesque gladiatorial games still lurk in the dark places of the earth. That'll do the trick, I reckon.

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    1. In a Fantasy version, you can also have a world where the orcs, goblins and trolls stand for the barbarians, like a version of the Lord of the Rings in which Sauron actually won the war: everlasting blacks fumes block the sunlight, the Elfs have left, the dwarfs retreated under the mountains, locked the doors and throw away the key, and now humanity is left alone to fend off the oncoming hordes of monsters.

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    2. Maybe of interest - monsters standing in for barbarians-

      Clifford D. Simak wrote a novel in 1982: Where Evil Dwells.
      According to Wikipedia: "Adventurers seeking a lost fiancée and cathedral enter the Empty Lands, where even Roman Legions get slaughtered."
      I read it years ago and was kind of disappointed, but it had some OK D&D inspiration details - building a species-diverse and class-diverse party of people with various skills and innate abilities to accomplish a mission in the mythic wilderland beyond the Rhine and Danube.

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    3. Porphyre77 - that could almost be the Tale of Hurin's setting, I guess?

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  2. I'd have to say, plunging into an unexpected ice age has always had it's appeal, regardless if it's due to the Ring of Fire all lighting up at once or a supervolcano letting go.

    However, nothing beats the big old rock from space.

    All make for different challenges and good times!

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    1. Fire and Ice

      Some say the world will end in fire,
      Some say in ice.
      From what I’ve tasted of desire
      I hold with those who favor fire.
      But if it had to perish twice,
      I think I know enough of hate
      To say that for destruction ice
      Is also great
      And would suffice.
      - Robert Frost (1920)

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    2. Not exactly post-apocalyptic, although they are kind of - the Hellaconia novels are a must-read and vaguely in this vein.

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  3. The thing about games featuring an ongoing apocalypse is that many Players are likely to complain if their characters fall to something they cannot directly face in combat. They want to be out there, punching doom in the face.
    So real-world plagues and bacteria are off the table, unless you straight up declare all PCs are immune, but where's the fun in that?
    How can you resist Nyarlathotep's Sleepy Time tea? Can you shoot it with a gun?

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    1. Yeah, I completely agree about that. I think the only way you can make it work is to emphasise that it's about survival and not defeating the invisible doom. Or run the campaign in the aftermath of the invisible doom just after it has destroyed society but when it is no longer a physical threat.

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  4. I've had an idea for an apocalyptic, Yoon-Suin-like setting, but it's a mixture of Late Bronze Age cultures and creatures from the Permian Period. Both the Bronze Age and Permian came to sudden, mysterious, and brutal ends, so it seems like an appropriate match-up. Everything would be generated by random tables, but in addition to stuff like social circles and adventuring locations you roll to see what sort of apocalyptic event is happening in the area: barbarian invasions, pandemics, giant monsters, earthquakes, Dionysian cults, rebellious automatons, etc.

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    1. Permian creatures are a sadly under-utilised resource in fantasy gaming,

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  5. Oh, so many. I like pastoral post-post-apocalypses, like that glimpsed in Castle in the Sky. The Seventh Seal. A Canticle for Leibowitz is great for many reasons, but I like the cyclical depiction of apocalypses. Station Eleven would make a great pacifistic RPG (if it doesn't already exist), but I can't explain why I like it without spoilers. There's a lot to be said for quasi-apocalypses, like Y: The Last Man, where civilisation continues, albeit fundamentally altered. Also, your point about smallpox has me thinking about the RPG prospects for apocalyptic events elsewhere, e.g. the Mongols descent on China and the Middle East, the climate change-influenced collapse of Classical Mesoamerican cultures, a biblical flood.

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    1. Interesting what you say about Castle in the Sky. It never occurred to me to think of it as post-apocalyptic but you're right - it sort of is. Miyazaki is kind of into apocalypses, although it's not often mentioned. There's Nausicaa, of course, but Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky, Ponyo and even The Wind Rises have vaguely apocalypthic themes.

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    2. Ponyo is the most cheerful end-of-the-world film I have ever seen.

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  6. I think the main difficulty of running a game DURING the apocalypse is that it puts a lot of pressure on the GM to make the world dynamic, and preferably dynamic in unpredictable but still plausible ways. If there's no "steady state" to build genre conventions around, it's hard to get players and GM on the same page. One PC is a suburban housewife; another is Lord Humongous; a third is a radioactive psychic stoat out of Gamma World. Each character makes sense at a different point on the apocalypse timeline.

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    1. Good point. This reminds me that I have still to write a post on pressure on the GM, which I promised to another commenter recently.

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    2. The other challenge is to make the world "unpredictable but still plausible" while still ensuring that player choices matter. If everything is random and chaotic I can imagine players getting frustrated.

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  7. I like *The Death of Grass* 1956.

    Often, thoughtful apocalyptic fiction need only rely on presenting the environment and then plausibly unfolding the consequences as for example with the Romero trilogy. But this book has a pretty good story too. Unmistakably English, well written, slightly preferable to Day of the Triffids.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/941731.The_Death_of_Grass

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  8. I've got a thing for Rapture style apocalypses. On the subject "The Taking" by Dean Koontz is a fast, fun read. Stay healthy, man.

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    1. What's the name of that Christian rapture-based SF series?

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  9. Imagine in the old days thinking your particular God was angry, really angry, and being unable to do anything to appease them. Wondering why the guy you thought was really religious smited like everyone else. Sketchy times.

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    1. Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" captured that really well.

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  10. I've always liked the idea of two (or more?) competing apocalypses just sort of coming around at the same time. Things we couldn't hope to fight off on our own, but if they duke it out between each other we might just stand a chance. like, robot uprising happens the same week as a zombification plague, robots spend all their time fighting the zombies and humanity (mostly) just huddles off on the sidelines.

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    1. This is the plot of every Godzilla movie, I think. Also Kerouac's Doctor Sax, upon failing to exorcise the Great World Snake but having it carried off by the Bird of Heaven: "I'll be damned! The universe disposes of its own evil!"

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    2. Maybe coronavirus and economic collapse could have a duel.

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  11. I like the micro-apocalypse of small seemingly stable environments with hidden underlying fragilities. The ancient noble household in its gothic castle where a lingering feud gets out of hand bringing everyone & everything down, the small isolated tribe set in its ways that gets upturned when something from the outside finally intrudes, that sort of thing.

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    1. Gormenghast as post-apocalyptic fiction?

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  12. My understanding of Shadow of the Demon Lord is that it takes place in a fantasy world that is undergoing an apocalypse, with the titular Demon Lord about to make his appearance.

    While the mohawks and motorbikes of the later Mad Max films offer an alluring apocalypse, I'm also quite fond of the setting of the first film, in which things have collapsed but it's almost as if society hasn't quite caught on yet. There is still a police force, there are shops and petrol stations, people still live in normal houses as opposed to fortified compounds, and so on. The world has passed beyond the tipping point, but it hasn't yet fallen.

    The Rover from 2014 offers a similar vision. It must be an Australian thing.

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    1. I sort of assume that living outside of a major city in Australia is more or less like living in one of those films. Like maybe Miller wasn't doing science fiction until the second film. (I'm joking, but the first Mad Max does very much resemble a typical 70s exploitation "biker gang" film without any sci-fi elements, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw_biker_film.)

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    2. The problem with Australia is it's full of Australians. (I am just kidding, Australian readers.)

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  13. I like environmental apocalypses. Desertification and sudden Ice Ages are a common tropes there, but since the "summer" of 2017 I am toying with the idea of an "eternal autumn rains" style apocalypse.

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    1. There is a short story by Ray Bradbury that speaks to that. I think it might just be called "The Rain"? Worth checking out.

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  14. I recently started thinking about an idea for a setting where the core conceit is that the players are eventually going to turn into world-destroying grotesque monsters which trigger the apocalypse, and they receive evidence of this over time and must grapple with it. The form of the monster might be intentionally vague or develop over time as a meta-game, like every time a character levels up their end form takes on new details, but I imagine them as vaguely eldritch or biblical or cronenbergian. It would sort of be a metaphor for the self-induced problems in the world like climate change, or the global ignorance, greed, and cowardice that allowed and continues to allow Coronavirus to propagate, and the like. If the characters refuse to accept or acknowledge what they will become, they only exacerbate the apocalypse, whereas if they come to terms with it and try to make hard and proactive change at personal cost, they may be able to mitigate the damage, but there is no escaping the inevitable.

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    1. I feel like that it the kind of thing that might work better as a novel than a game?

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  15. "Favorite" in terms of what I've done most often in play: self-replicating ooze - it's like an undead apocalypse and an alien invasion rolled into one!

    "Favorite" in terms of what I find the most fun: I've got a longing to try a DOOM-inspired "Hell on Earth" apocalypse one day. I've done it on small cases of just damning a city or a valley or the like, but never as a global event.

    Minor quibble: based on death rate in completed cases to date, separated by country, COVID-19 does get into that pre-Columbian disease range in certain areas (UK and USA being most notable as they're also top-10 in total number of cases), though this admittedly goes beyond considering the disease itself.

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    1. On the subject of DOOM, was Duke Nuke'em also a post-apocalyptic setting?

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  16. Ooh, I just remembers this RPG:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Steel

    "The game is set in 2349 on an isolated human populated planet called Rhand which has just suffered a devastating attack by an alien race called the Spectrals. In addition to bombardment from space, the Spectrals released a virus onto the planet which rendered some 80% of the population into dangerous sociopaths. The Spectral warship then crashed into the planet's surface causing further widespread destruction. Society has stopped functioning and the survivors are competing viciously with each other and the remaining Spectrals for the essentials of life."



    So alien invasion + virus pandemic, I think it fits the bill of "RPG during an ongoing apocalypse". I used to own it; it was maybe the most ridiculously crunchy system I'd ever seen. 200 pages of rules, 99% of which were for adjudicating the effects of a single bullet impact. You know the type. I think they eventually made a license Aliens game using the same engine.

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    1. For sheer Wagnerian vastness, I've always liked the idea of The Day after Ragnarok: the Nazis summon the Midgard Serpent in 1945, at which point the Atom Bomb is dropped on it. The world survived, but there's a great big serpent lying across Europe and North Africa.

      https://www.atomicovermindstore.com/collections/the-day-after-ragnarok/products/the-day-after-ragnarok

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  17. I prefer the shadow of an apocalypse casting a long impression over the survivors who got away:

    The ruined earth that briefly gets returned to in Cowboy Bebop, as punctuation in the middle of a story where spacefaring mankind has been chugging along without a central home world.

    Wall-E where humanity is barely aware of the desolation they left behind since becoming lazy and complacent space tourists on an indefinite pleasure cruise.

    Doctor Who, and the Hitchhikers' Guide when future humans watch with hedonistic voyeurism as a ruined earth explodes or is consumed by the sun, millennia after they got away from the direct impact of the damage our species wrought.

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  18. Ballard's apocalypses are my favourite, being that they focus on internal landscapes--- strange ecstasies arising from unthinkable physical context. The frozen processes of The Crystal World are a particular favourite, as are the devolutionary dreams of it's predecessor, The Drowned World (probably more gameable). Personal favourites remain The Terminal Beach and Atrocity Exhibition--- the liminal state between pre and post apocalypse, is intoxicatingly described. Landscapes and characters, bleed into one another; are explored. Truly beautiful ends to worlds, ripe with possibilities.

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    1. I am supervising somebody who is writing a PhD about Ballard. I will tell him to think about this comment.

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  19. Oh, and now I'm reminded of Earthdawn, which is post-post-apocalypse, with the survivors of the Horror invasion emerging from their bunkers to explore the world left behind now that the Horrors have moved on.

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    1. Oh yeah, I forgot about Earthdawn. Played that quite a bit as a teenager.

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