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Saitox
2011-07-14, 07:31 PM
Hi! The current campaign I am running with my group is a Darwin's World campaign that we have dubbed Blood Bonds: Tales of Twisted Earth. It is a post-apocalyptic game set a couple hundred years after the fall of man. I was wondering if others had played Darwin's World or any other post-apocalyptic rpg (including fallout video games of course :) ) and what their experiences were. Hopefully we can exchange some ideas with each other. Right now the PC's have just finished defending their home town from raiders when their original plan was to leave it in order to explore the Wasteland. I hope to hear everyone's experiences and ideas soon!

DabblerWizard
2011-07-14, 09:50 PM
Saitox, I'm not familiar with Darwin's World rpg, but I am fascinated by post-apocalyptic settings, and I have some experience playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

One set of questions I like to ponder with these settings include: what has thrived despite the aftermath, what is struggling to survive, and what is gone forever?

Those questions might involve ideas, people, weapons, technologies... etc.

A scenario that's been depicted by the Discovery Channel (in the US) involves a secondary catastrophic fallout from nuclear plants that are left unattended. It would be interesting to see how people survive or fight for sources of ENERGY.

Soylent Dave
2011-07-14, 10:22 PM
I'm currently writing a post-apocalyptic setting for a campaign my group will be starting in a little while, and I'm considering similar questions.

I'm keeping the specifics of the apocalypse and its aftermath vague - the apocalypse was caused by alien invasion (triggered in by events in a previous campaign), but we've moved things on a few hundred years so the specifics are pretty much legendary. This also allows us to nip back to the time of the actual invasion for another campaign, and find out what actually happened.

The campaign 'world' is basically Mesopotamia (and a bit of Saudi Arabia and Egypt), so I'll be using a fair bit of religious imagery in the factions (e.g. the main city in the area is New Babylon) and their version of history (i.e. the alien invasion gets translated into Armageddon as described in the Book of Revelation).

The tech level I *want* is medieval leaning towards renaissance - so relatively advanced technology is available (or has been reinvented), but it isn't commonplace. I'd also like there to be 'relics of the past' to be discovered and reverse engineered (or even used, on occasion)

But I'm not sure how believable / feasible this is - if we're smashing people down into pretty much the dark ages, is there going to be anything left for them to rebuild? Especially after a few centuries.

Is it just silly to expect there to be anything left of a city like Basrah, say? It'd be nice to have ruins of old cities knocking about, so that adventurous types have somewhere to go adventuring in... (I can always muck about with the timeline a bit, of course - nothing is really set in stone yet)

I'm also a bit vague about the factions I want in the area - I want a knightly order, because : cool.

I want a city-state (New Babylon) which hoards and recovers knowledge of the past (either for religious or scientific reasons - possibly both).

I definitely want another faction which wants to tear down New Babylon for biblical reasons (which I can base up in the mountains north of Iraq to isolate them a bit, keep them from culturally mixing with everyone else)

But some other ideas would definitely help.

Saitox
2011-07-15, 12:39 AM
Saitox, I'm not familiar with Darwin's World rpg, but I am fascinated by post-apocalyptic settings, and I have some experience playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

One set of questions I like to ponder with these settings include: what has thrived despite the aftermath, what is struggling to survive, and what is gone forever?

Those questions might involve ideas, people, weapons, technologies... etc.

A scenario that's been depicted by the Discovery Channel (in the US) involves a secondary catastrophic fallout from nuclear plants that are left unattended. It would be interesting to see how people survive or fight for sources of ENERGY.

Well the Twisted Earth setting of Darwin's World actually hosts places of all different technological levels and of course ideals. I haven't finished reading all the sourcebooks yet but since you are familiar with Fallout then yes there is a Brotherhood of Steel in Darwin's World called the Foundation. They are the remnants of an army company I believe from Massachusetts(not sure of the spelling sorry). They are the only ones in the Twisted Earth to have ready access to Ancient(what humans of today are called) technology. In the Foundation sourcebook it actually explains a few of their secret plots to restore a pure breed human race possibly by using eugenics and that they are now split into three different factions themselves. Oh and of course the iconic Power Armor.

To answer your question about what is thriving and what is struggling to survive I'm not all to sure how to answer that exactly haha. Aside from humanity trying to survive America is mainly a dessert with the a huge chunk of the center of America absolutely irradiated. Oh women too are struggling to survive. Fertility took a huge dive as well as womens rights. I'm not going to keep the lower fertility rate so much but the women as "furniture" as they like to call it I am keeping to see how the PC's will act.

Of course in the struggle to survive ideas and the people of the wasteland remain rather morally ambiguous except for a few select groups.

Weapons and technology the PC's started in a tribal town so for the most part they only have swords, shields, hide armor, and a breastplate aka license plates( the book actually shows this armor haha). Little by little I'm introducing them to guns. As for anything like cars and lasers they do exist. The people that do understand how to repair or even manufacture this technology is of course relatively scarce. But the height of human technology did include lasers, hovercraft, eugenics, and tesla cannons. They are just rare items.

I hope I was able to at least answer some of your questions. If not, I'm sorry. If you do have anymore I will try my best again to answer you.

Saitox
2011-07-15, 12:45 AM
I'm currently writing a post-apocalyptic setting for a campaign my group will be starting in a little while, and I'm considering similar questions.

I'm keeping the specifics of the apocalypse and its aftermath vague - the apocalypse was caused by alien invasion (triggered in by events in a previous campaign), but we've moved things on a few hundred years so the specifics are pretty much legendary. This also allows us to nip back to the time of the actual invasion for another campaign, and find out what actually happened.

The campaign 'world' is basically Mesopotamia (and a bit of Saudi Arabia and Egypt), so I'll be using a fair bit of religious imagery in the factions (e.g. the main city in the area is New Babylon) and their version of history (i.e. the alien invasion gets translated into Armageddon as described in the Book of Revelation).

The tech level I *want* is medieval leaning towards renaissance - so relatively advanced technology is available (or has been reinvented), but it isn't commonplace. I'd also like there to be 'relics of the past' to be discovered and reverse engineered (or even used, on occasion)

But I'm not sure how believable / feasible this is - if we're smashing people down into pretty much the dark ages, is there going to be anything left for them to rebuild? Especially after a few centuries.

Is it just silly to expect there to be anything left of a city like Basrah, say? It'd be nice to have ruins of old cities knocking about, so that adventurous types have somewhere to go adventuring in... (I can always muck about with the timeline a bit, of course - nothing is really set in stone yet)

I'm also a bit vague about the factions I want in the area - I want a knightly order, because : cool.

I want a city-state (New Babylon) which hoards and recovers knowledge of the past (either for religious or scientific reasons - possibly both).

I definitely want another faction which wants to tear down New Babylon for biblical reasons (which I can base up in the mountains north of Iraq to isolate them a bit, keep them from culturally mixing with everyone else)

But some other ideas would definitely help.

Apparently even a few hundred years after the fall of man teachings of how to build and maintain technology has been passed down to a few people here and there and survived.

I have a similar reason as to why the apocalypse happened with the aliens and all but I'm trying to take the influece of the D20 Apocalypse book that talk about the Spanthi I believe they are called. I still want them to play a role in my campaign. How are you're aliens going to be in the aftermath?

If you can find it the Darwin's World book THE LOST PARADISE has quite a bit about religious groups in the Twisted Earth including an entity known as Kali that is quite the fearsome lady ;)

RandomNPC
2011-07-17, 08:55 AM
Exodus was a game made to be Fallout D20, but when they started making fallout 3 they pulled the rights. So Glutton Creeper Games changes some pictures and names, and released it anyway. It's not perfectly balanced, but it's fun.

My group found out they like "This happens because of *Magic*" more than they like no-magic campaigns, so we changes back to D&D for a while, but Exodus is still fun.

Soylent Dave
2011-07-17, 12:22 PM
I have a similar reason as to why the apocalypse happened with the aliens and all but I'm trying to take the influece of the D20 Apocalypse book that talk about the Spanthi I believe they are called. I still want them to play a role in my campaign. How are you're aliens going to be in the aftermath?

I've nicked quite a few ideas from D20 apocalypse, it's a handy book to have around!

My aliens should be pretty easy to incorporate - our overarching campaign started out (7 years ago!) using the Stargate rules and some of the background (as in the TV series) - although over several campaigns and characters, we've departed quite a lot from the source (we wanted the Goa'uld to be a more credible threat than they are in the TV series... which ultimately led to an invasion of Earth which we didn't win (I blame the PCs)); I don't think we even saw a stargate in our last campaign...

The Goa'uld (the aliens in Stargate, if you're not familiar with the series) are effectively immortal, due in part to being parasites - and they have a bit of a god complex - so they should fit in nicely into a quasi-religious setting.

I'm actually turning the BBEG of our last few campaigns into the mainstream god of this one (although he's been sanitised quite a lot and basically merged with christian / muslim god in the process) - which I can only do if he and his army aren't around any more. I'll probably keep the exact reasons for him buggering off nice and vague (means there can be conflicting religious reasons about it, and also means we can revisit that part of the campaign setting in a later campaign and 'find out' what happened)

So the Goa'uld that are still knocking about on earth will be relatively few in number, and I can have them doing the usual 'setting themselves up as gods / leaders / demons' thing that they do (some more subtly than others) - which should provide plenty of cliché bad guy fodder, although some will have more complex goals than others (e.g. trying to find stargates / alien tech and escaping Earth vs. just trying to rule what's left of it)

Saitox
2011-07-17, 11:29 PM
Haha nice. I love Stargate....SG-1. Universe...not so much. And I really do love d20 apocalypse for ideas. How are you doing survival for your campaign? Do you take into account them eating food and drinking water? Or even...the dreaded radiation?! I hold it as a big deal in my games but so far only one character has been affected by "harmful" radiation. I try not to let eating creatures of the waste become some kind of death dealing hazard. There are of course irradiated creatures that will cause great harm but they haven't encountered any yet. They did encounter a half bird/half rat creature at the start of their adventure that we have forever dubbed as a brat. Was rather entertaining considering that one of the mutation defects of the teams "paladin" is actually a severe allergy to feathers. Haha. After killing it their friend friend(DMPC) turned it into brat jerky. MMM :)

Never heard of Exodus though. Heard about a Fallout D20 but did hear about it falling..out....yeah wow....moving on haha. Did it include mutations at all? In Darwin's World they have a section devoted completely to mutations and i think it works quite well since not only do you have to choose defects equivalent to the amount of mutations you have (and most are quite annoying) but roleplay-wise it is quite a social stigma. I am reminded always of the Star Trek remake where the Vulkan(not sure how its spelt since I'm not a Star Trek fan. Don't not like it. Just never got into it.) council talks of the young Spocks success despite his...."handicap".

Soylent Dave
2011-07-19, 06:32 PM
Haha nice. I love Stargate....SG-1. Universe...not so much. And I really do love d20 apocalypse for ideas. How are you doing survival for your campaign? Do you take into account them eating food and drinking water? Or even...the dreaded radiation?!

I'm still in the planning stages of this campaign, but we do tend to pay attention to food and water (or at least 'make sure that PCs are carrying enough food and water' - this campaign might be the first time they end up consistently requiring survival checks (or outright 'finding supplies' sessions) as it's a bit more 'wastelandy'.

Radiation I tend to treat as more of a barrier than anything else - there are bits of the world that are heavily radioactive, and so people don't go there (although knowing my players they will at some point decide to try it anyway...) - for this campaign the area around modern-day Israel is very heavily irradiated (which makes lots of very holy places very hard to get to, but also makes the Mediterranean pretty hard to reach, too - which is handy from a GMing perspective)

I'm contemplating playing around with clean and dirty sources of food and water (as in Fallout) - but with no magic anti-radiation pills it's likely that irradiating the characters would just resulting in a long, drawn out death (and I suspect my players would get a bit miffed...) - unless I can find a way of doing it that doesn't ultimately feel like a 'save or die slowly' situation (without also feeling like too much of a cop-out!), death by radiation sickness will very probably be something that only happens to other people (i.e. NPCs).

Definitely thinking of mutant / radio-active beasties because there's lots of fun to be had there (like with your 'brat' idea of mixing species!)