Favorite post-apocolyptic scenario.

[druid91]

So whats your favorite post-apocalyptic scenario from manga, books, or movies?
EDIT: I knew I had forgotten something. adding video games to the list.

I like King of thorn It doesn't just have another zombie filled desert wasteland it has a thorny jungle filled with dinosaurs and a disease that turns you to clay, well unless you have a good imagination and don't mind killing something or someone.

[Demon 997]

Has to be the Change from the emberverse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series) basically all modern tech (internal combustion, gunpowder, electricity, steam, nuclear, etc) fails. Unsurprising 99% of humanity dies and the rest go to a kind of odd post medieval society. Set in Oregon.

[Eldan]

Gamma World. It's just so silly. To quote one of my players:

"Who knew radioactivity actually turned you into a two-headed, lightning-breathing wolfman!"

[Brewdude]

The Road Warrior.

Period.

[factotum]

If you'd like to extend your criteria to video games, I'd go with Fallout. I just like that it's both an alternative history as well as a post-apocalyptic future!

[Serpentine]

Lets see now...
Mad Max is pretty cool.
Not quite post-apocalyptic, I think, but Day of the Triffids is simple, reasonably realistic, and quite scary.
Same author, Chrysalids. It's implied that there was some sort of massive nuclear war, but that's quite far in the past. Now, the society is obsessed with eliminating even the slightest suggestion of (radiation-induced) mutation - of which, it seems, psychic ability is one. Not much of a spoiler, butit turns out that isolated communities all have their own ideas of what exactly a "pure human" should look like.
Finally, a couple of Australian ones: Taronga, where (I think) a nuclear holocaust (predictably) has destroyed civilisation as we know it. More psychic abilities (animal empath, this time), and a community using Taronga Zoo as a fortress. There's another one I've read, but I can't remember it's name... It could almost be a sequel to Taronga, though, set centuries or millenia later. Legends talk about how the blasphemous construction (Sydney Harbour Bridge) was destroyed (a la Tower of Babel, iirc) by the giant bird-god/monster "Nookleer" or something like that. Enclosed "civilisation" devoted to keeping out sub-human "muties" (or something), ultra-religious, books contradicting accepted history are destroyed but then the protaganist find a whole library's worth of them, that sort of thing.

edit: Oh! Z for Zachariah. About a girl trapped on her farm in a valley protected by the disaster that has ravaged the outside world. Then a strange besuited man arrives...
The best/worst thing about it is the author died before it was published, and noone knows whether it's finished...

[Seonor]

The Greatwinter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatwinter) books and the Gumn: Battle Angel Alita manga are my favorites.

[GolemsVoice]

First of all: Fallout. It has everything needed for a serious-but-not-too-serious world, and is lovingly designed and full of humor and tragedy side by side. It never gets too goofy, but it never sinks into endless depression. I really like how they stress that YOUR actions can ahve an impact. In a fragile world without real structure, one touch can bring great blessings, or can make the feeble societies tumble down.

For really serious post-apocalypse: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and specially the video game here. While the novel it's based on is very good, I actually like the video-game world better. What's best about it is the sheer mysteriousness of it all. They don't need to explain everything, and that gives the Zone an intense sense of strangeness. Plus, I just like the loneliness of the place, the desolate ruins of both the Soviet empire, and civilisation.

[Coplantor]

Dark Sun. The best DnD setting ever, yeah, you have the zombie filled desert, so lets flee to the nearest city!

WRONG!
There you can be abused by local templars, BACK TO THE WILD!

Oh no! Desert Raiders! TO THE CIY!
FFFFFF, a wizard! TO THE WILD!
Halflings? DAMMIT! TO THE CITY!
Elven mafia? TO THE WILD!
This place seems nice, an oasis, a few green spots ans OMG A DRUID!

LETS GET ANYWHERE!

GHA! IT'S A FREAKING DRAGON GOD KING! RUN! RUN!

[Satyr]

It doesn't get any better than the German RPG DeGenesis (http://www.endzeit-europa.de/). Asteroid impact, scary and very alien posthumans (the Homo Degenesis), ruins and all kinds of conflicts... and very impressive artwork.

It is also free.

[Eerie]

The world without us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us). My favorite post-apocalyptic scenario. Probably because it`s the most pure.

[JonestheSpy]

My hands down favorite is the world of Six String Samurai (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfTWYP4bE28). Mad Max meets the Wizard of Oz as told by Wolfman Jack. When the Russians bombed the U.S. in 1957, one bit of civilization in the desert southwest when Elvis became King of Lost Vegas. Now it's forty years later and the King is dead, and rock and roll warriors trek across the wasteland to become the new King, battling barbarians, bowlers, cannibal suburbanites, underground mutants, and Death himself, who wants Vegas to fall and civilization vanish altogether.

Really fun, but with a serious undercurrent of melancholy. And the best soundtrack of any apocalypse, hands down.

[golentan]

A Canticle for Leibowitz. For trying to be actually accurate rather than going "Oh Noes, Civilization gone, only desert and bandits and no farming!"

[Platinum_Mongoose]

If you'd like to extend your criteria to video games, I'd go with Fallout. I just like that it's both an alternative history as well as a post-apocalyptic future!

If that's your thing, check out Deadlands: Hell On Earth. Alternate history from 1863 on.

Granted, it's a roleplaying game rather than a video game, but on this forum I doubt that's much of a problem. :)

[Weezer]

I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, it's set ~10 years after the apocalypse (theres a kid who never knew pre-apocalyptic earth). It's very dark and depressing, featuring canabalism, theft, murder and starvation and was very, very good.

[Daze]

Still a zombie apocalypse fan generally, but we've already had some threads on that recently...

How about "The Stand" by Stephen King? Now thats an apocalyptic world with some potential. Everyone (almost) is dead, but all the stuff is still laying around.
Other then some clean-up and burial duty, that actually sounds not too bad. :smallwink:

[Gadora]

In books, I'd have to go with the Mistborn trilogy.

[Geiger Counter]

What would of happened if they didn't stop the merging of all dimensions in time at the end of season 5 of Buffy.

[chiasaur11]

Not sure about favorite, but I find Half Life 2 and the episodes fine myself.

Messy, nasty, but still advancing techwise, and not inevitably doomed.

I do like when some degree of victory seems possible.

[Otogi]

Seconding Gamma World FTW

[Cubey]

It technically belongs here, so...

Tengen Toppa Gurren LAGANN!

[Eldan]

Seconding Gamma World FTW

Hmm. Gamma World might make a nice chat-based one-shot, really. It's silly, and I don't think I could run a long campaign in it and keep it interesting (others might), but for a short, non-serious game, it would be great.

[Fin]

How about "The Stand" by Stephen King

Officially seconding this, mostly because the concept of 99.4% of the human race being wiped out by what is essentially a hardcore version of the flu is not too far from being plausible.

[Thane of Fife]

"In the year 1994, from out of space, comes a run-away planet, hurtling between the earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin.

2000 years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old, a world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhAobPugvsk)."


How can you not love that?

[nanobot_swarm]

"In the year 1994, from out of space, comes a run-away planet, hurtling between the earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin.

2000 years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old, a world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhAobPugvsk)."


How can you not love that?

LORDS OF LIGHT, that was one of the best cartoons ever, I still try to watch episodes of it on boomerrang. Therefore I shall agree to this.
The world of Wizards is a pretty good one too.

[Selrahc]

Alpha Complex. That's where our friend the Computer lives.

[SurlySeraph]

There's no way I can pick just one, but of the ones that haven't been mentioned yet I most like near-future high-plausibility scenarios, like in Twilight 2013 and various survivalist fiction.

Oh, and mutant zombies.

[golentan]

There's no way I can pick just one, but of the ones that haven't been mentioned yet I most like near-future high-plausibility scenarios, like in Twilight 2013 and various survivalist fiction.

Oh, and mutant zombies.

And twilight 2013 is awesome because it leads to Traveller 2300, which is an awesome place (at least when you're not being shot by the bug-aliens-whose-name-I-strongly-suspect-would-be-censored-by-board-filters). I'd love to get a crack at some of the biology there.

[TheThan]

Yor, Hunter from the future (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PWaJ6URRU0)

he is the man! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q39f4YzK6sU)

[Raiki]

I have to third The Stand. After reading the director's cut where someone almost gets, well...killed in a very not nice way, because he spills a can of coors and "They're not making any more of that [stuff] you know!" I found a new appreciation for the book (which I had written off as not-so-good before).

Also, the Mistborn trilogy is in fact one of the better post-op worlds I've seen. The story could get a bit hokey sometimes (rarely), but the world itself was excellently thought out and quite enjoyable.

~R~

[Geiger Counter]

korgoth of barbaria
look it up on youtube

[Otogi]

Yor, Hunter from the future (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PWaJ6URRU0)

he is the man! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q39f4YzK6sU)

Okay, now I'm not sure what everybody, including myself, was thinking when they skipped over the apocalyptic goldmine!

[Lost Demiurge]

Hm. First one I ever encountered was the book called "Alas, Babylon." Awesome scenario, though the science behind it has probably changed since then so it might not be realistic anymore. It's pretty basic, but there's a general feeling of hope throughout, and it FEELS realistic. It was written in the 50's, and it shows, but in a good way.

Second one is Fallout, third is STALKER, both for reasons already enumerated in this thread.

Fourth up is Doomsday... Man, that was an awesome movie! Totally a popcorn flick, but so much of an 80's action homage that most people generally don't care.