Societal Collapse

One of the primary motivators of the “Back To Nature” types in the early Seventies was the belief that Western Civilization was going to collapse under its own weight. Society was hitting near-Roman levels of decadence and fans of Edward Gibbons were certain that Welfare & Prime Time were the new Bread & Circuses. A subset of this crowd was mindful of the original Rome’s Visigoth problem, added some modern-day pilums to their preparations, and became the first “survivalists”. Doesn’t seem like much of a game setting, though. How can the machine grinding slowly to a stop make for thrilling adventures? Sounds pretty boring, right?

“On the roads, it was a White Line Nightmare…”

Mel Gibson’s bank accounts would politely beg to disagree. The movie “Mad Max” was set near the tail end of just such a collapse. The courts were useless, the citizens were apathetic, and the cops were becoming little more than leather-clad vigilantes. With no law enforcement, the economy began to grind to a halt as interstate shipping was choked off by the gangs. This can be transplanted to any comparatively desolate location that has access to some nearby city to base the PCs out of. The Texas Panhandle. The Jersey Barrens. Tony Hillerman fans could run such a game with the PCs operating out of Shiprock having the Navajo Tribal Police in the role of The Bronze, with Joe Leaphorn as FiFi and Jim Chee as Max.

Another way of working this would be to have the PCs to be down on their luck in a dying city. As Jerry Pournelle will tell you, no country is more than three meals from a revolution. A modern city has little in the way of food reserves. If the grain trains don’t roll, then people get hungry. Unlike the Economic Collapse scenario where the PC might not have the money to buy food, in this case there’s no food to buy with that money. (A much nastier situation…) At full population, a typical American city has about a 2-3 day supply of food on store shelves and in warehouses. Perhaps a bit less nowadays, given the use of “just in time” shipping. This sort of consideration is the basis of the open road scenarios in Car Wars. “You have to get these trailers full of canned goods to Cincinnati, or folks are going to starve!” Or the PCs could be in Cinci the day when only half the trucks make it, causing food riots to break out.

This is another setting that you can use to torture gun-bunnies. With supply-chain disruptions like this, ammo that has to be special ordered is going to evaporate pretty quickly. In generic terms, special ammo types (match grade, hot loads, frangible bullets, AP, uncommon calibers) just aren’t going to be available very often and either hollowpoints (for handguns & military calibers) or FMJ (for hunting rifle calibers) are going to be scarce. They won’t be irreplaceable, as things haven’t gotten that bad yet, but they’ll have to think hard before just opening up on folks with their preferred wonder-weapon.

It's the end of the world as we know it (and I rolled a crit)

A whimper or a bang?

(This somewhat rehashes one of my “World Creation Made Easy” columns in the now defunct e-zine “The RPG Times”)

Post Apocalypse settings have long been popular with gamers. At the time that RPGs were beginning, Survivalism was quite the hot topic. Originally, the bugbear was societal, economic, and/or environmental collapse. (Decline & Fall, Stagflation, & Silent Spring) Then in the 1980s & ‘90s, thoughts turned to nuclear war and pandemics. (WWIII & Achoo!) By the late ‘90s, technological collapse came into fashion, along with concern over a few celestial near misses. (Y2K & ELE) Now we seem to have come full circle, with post 2000 election shenanigans, new environmental concerns, and terrorism combined with nuclear proliferation. (2nd US Civil War, Global Warming, & Binny-Boy’s Got The Bomb) Natural disasters have long been a “rational” explanation for preparations (Katrina), but very few of those qualify for ETOTWAWKI. (A Yellowstone Eruption or New Madrid Quake could do it, though) Some possible disaster scenarios are too outré or too controversial for polite discussion. If you’re planning to survive Zombies, the return of the Great Old Ones, or invaders from Mars, folks will think you’re even more of a nut. If you’ve based your planning around what to do the day the Welfare checks bounce, you’re probably a racist nut. (Braiiins!, Fhtagn!, Ulla!, & Helter Skelter!)

The main question for the GM is did things end with a whimper or a bang. Take a look around your PA setting. Is the scenery mainly plies of scorched rubble and heaps of skulls? Then things ended with a bang. If things are more-or-less intact, then it ended with a whimper. Bang is the default for this sort of thing. It has the advantage (from the GM’s point of view) of scarcity. If the local Wal-Mart is a pile of twisted rubble, then the players can’t just stroll around picking up batteries, common types of ammo, and cheap hiking boots. Of course the slower “Whimper” settings will result in the stores having been picked clean before The End, but that just relocates the goods to hundreds of smaller caches instead of it being concentrated. With a Bang, those goods are far scarcer and a brick of .22 Long Rifle ammo is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Some supplies, such as ammo, pharmaceuticals, & canned goods, are going to be used up very quickly. They are consumables, useful, and are mostly out of production after The End. Several of them have pretty finite shelf lives even under good conditions. In the case of ammo, there might be some low-level production from folks with reloading gear, but you can only get so many uses out of the brass casings, and the supply of primers will also be a limiting factor. Some calibers which are very common now will become rather scarce as they aren’t made in a format that’s reloadable. The .22 & .17 rimfires cannot be reloaded due to the rimfire priming system, nor can the Russian-made 7.62x39mm ammo which has been flooding the market the last decade due to their beridan primed steel cases. Ironically, the AR-15 may outlast the much more rugged AK-47 clones because we use boxer primed brass cases for our 5.56x45mm ammo. The AK may be in better working order, but that doesn’t mean much without any ammo for it… The stereotype of crossbow wielding maniacs might not be too far fetched, though the mohawks & ass-less chaps are strictly optional.

As the mood strikes, I’ll be expanding on the particular settings named in the parentheticals above. As a general guideline, though, here’s how they break down as to Whimper vs. Bang.

Whimper
Decline & Fall
Stagflation
Silent Spring
Achoo!
Global Warming
Braiiins!

Bang
WWIII
ELE
2nd US Civil War
Ulla!
Yellowstone Eruption

Either
New Madrid Quake
Fhtagn!
Helter-Skelter!