I need an apocalypse

[Bauglir]

The comet: at some point a comet struck the planet, throwing up a dust cloud and causing a second ice age. Glaciers swept across the planet wiping out everything in their path. Somewhere, deep under the ice lay the lab where the virus had been developed and it was only as the ice finally started to melt that the survivors began to change...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Do you really need a "local" ancient civilization, or an earthlike planet?

Maybe the planet is only a small colony that had an "Umbrella" R&D facility. They tested the virus, it failed, they bombed the colony and never came back, ignoring potential survivors or the primitve inhabitants of the planet. (They wouldn`t be able to leave the world anyway, so why care...)

 

[diaglo]

the new race fled their home planet either after the nuclear war or to escape the virus.

they were placed in suspended animation for easy travel.

only the children were sent. the adults had all succumbed to the illness. it is age dependent.

the ship(s) landed on a safe planet. and droids took care of them. eventually the droids ran out of juice and ceased to work.

the humans grew older and no virus was detected. the history was glossed over and soon forgot. as none of them were old enough to remember or care of the old ways.


sometime in the future ... a single survivor or his mutated offspring of the virus (and now also a carrier) finally tracks down the naive population...


edit: the droids were given instructions never to reveal the old home. they didn't want the children to be exposed.

 

[glass]

Good idea. I could place the industrialized nations near the equator. That should take care of most high technology. Deserts are really good in buring ruins.

Also the temperature could have gone down again so that big parts of the deserts became inhabitable again, but the ruins are still buried deep under them.
That should give the PCs enough dungeons to explore.

Or you could go the other way: nuclear winter.

Most of the major industrial centres were at the cooler latitudes. As the temperature dropped, cool became arctic and the people moved towards the equator. After the nuclear winter, some of old areas are inhabitable again (although well mangled) while the further norther are still burried under the ice.

Of course, all that extra ice means less liquid water to go round, so you still get deserts if you want 'em.


glass.

 

[Zappo]

I designed the overall concepts of a similar campaign setting once, though I never got around to playing it. The world starts out as a near-future or cyberpunkish tech level (pervasive computer usage, advanced medicine and agriculture, bionic implants, private space travel). The "disaster" involved a fast, progressive malfunctioning of all technology, coupled with the appearance of supernatural events and creatures.

The world was severely overcrowded, and when modern chemical-based agriculture stopped yielding good crops, history's most catastrophic famine struck. When medicines stopped working, pestilences which the human body forgot how to defeat swept the land. All of this led to widespread war - which wasn't as bad as it could have been, thanks to ultra-modern weapons malfunctioning, but still a world war nonetheless. At a certain point, power plants stopped working and the world was basically left with middle-age level tech. Towards the end of the process, the advanced alloys and cements used to build lost their super-strong properties, causing skyscrapers to collapse and evacuation of all large cities.

Now, the campaign starts a half thousand years after all of this, which normally wouldn't be enough to really forget the past (even considering the mass death, and really not having time for schools). However, in a society well after the informatic revolution, lots of people didn't even learn how to write by hand. The vast majority of books were on computer systems and were destroyed by the mysterious catastrophe. As a result, after two or three centuries of having to literally struggle to survive, and several generations of men who have never seen anything more sophisticated than a crossbow, the technological advances of the past were relegated to myth ("my granddad was told by his granddad that we could fly without wings once!").

In the setting, I also had elves and dwarves in the tech age. Dwarven knowledge of the past is way more accurate than humans' and there are a few of them that were actually alive "back then". They haven't adapted quite as well to the new world, but they are still faring better than elves. Lots and lots of elves not only were alive "back then", but they were actually rather used to the technological lifestyle and are still wondering what the hell happened.

I'd like to run this campaign sooner or later.

 

[Pielorinho]

You could use the apocalypse I used in my unfinished Great American Novel, since it'd dovetail nicely with what you already have:

Grasses can be highly invasive weeds for farmers, and there are herbicides designed specifically to destroy grasses while leaving non-grass plants intact. So far we're in reality.

A major company creates a bacterium that produces the pesticide, and that can only live for three life-cycles. It's cheaper to use than the herbicide itself, and it can be used on "organic" farms, and it's safe because of the reduced reproductive rate.

Except that it crosses DNA with another bacterium and loses its lifecycle limit. And spreads.

Virtually all of the world's food supply is based on grasses. Wheat, rice, corn--all wiped out by this bacterium.

Mass starvation ensues. Cities empty. Wars erupt over the last bits of food. Eventually, hunter-gatherer societies are the only viable social structure: without grains, agriculture is no longer efficient.

How's that?

Daniel

 

[Ghostknight]

Or how about this- the first generation affected by the virus exhibited extreme violence. Massive riots resulted in the destruction of much of the world's infrastructure. As people adjusted to the effects of the violence, anti-science rioting took over. People destroyed books, computers, schematics, anything that could be identified as being technological in origin. the anti-science rioting lasted a while, but even that has now been forgotten, along with the civilisation spawned from the evils of science!

 

[tm80401]

An easy way to do it is to put the campaign in a 3rd world area, like central Africa, east Asia or even Central America.

In the backwoods of those areas, things havent changed much and most of the tech is what has been used there for centuries. Getting rid of all the signs of technology is only a problem if there has been industrialization for a long period.

If you want to use North America, set it in the Appalacian mountains or in another extremely rural area of the country.

 

[Tilla the Hun (work)]

Hmm...

To borrow a plot from a book I've read - would that be acceptable?

It seems like there's this major organization buried in the Russian government (rather like our NSA, or other, more secret, organizations like the National Defense Council) that came up with a master plan to kill all inferior races on the planet (yes, they were racist). They designed a genetically engineered piggy-backed virus that was no more harmful than the common cold. See, a piggy backed virus is actually two. One is attached to the other. In this case, the second, non-active, one buried inside the other was actually an incredibly deadly virus that would incubate for about 2-3 weeks, then cause death in less than 20 seconds. The first, active, one was a variant of the common cold, with it's mutative capability reduced - it would not mutate unless exposed to a very specific band of radiation. After exposing it at local airports, they estimated about 2 years for the virus to spread all around the world.

That specific band of radiation was caused by nuclear explosions in the air above the major continents. They really only needed a couple such for the virus to mutate and for the lethalality to activate. They buried themselves in a very deep bunker, isolated from the world.

3 Weeks later - the world was dead. The plot line diverges here from what you would want, but then, in the end, it comes back to the second half of what you might need...

Turns out they didn't think their plan was foolproof - it only had a 99% likelihood of exterminating all higher-order life forms (read anything that had a central nervous system of a sufficient complexity and some piece of the brain that only existed in primates - sorry monkeys!, but what an awesome cure for AIDS Not! ). So they had a Plan B - A doomsday device in orbit. Nominally a space station, it was actually a titanic, heavily armored, planet busting nuclear bomb programmed to deploy if it did not continue to receive the deadmans signal from the deep bunker (deadman signal = signal only transmittable by live person). The opposition (from the part that doesn't apply) scrambled to try and stop this, or take shelter, which probably wouldn't survive.

Now the ending of the book doesn't match what you want (the opposition defuses the bomb during re-entry), however, with a slight 'what if' variation, assume the bomb hits, but for less than total destruction of the earth (the books 'best case' scenario for the 'what if the bomb hits' question)

500' rise in sea level + 1000' tsunami hitting every coastline in the atlantic and a 100-500' one in the pacific (bomb aimed to detonate at 50m above midatlantic ridge). Nuclear winter for 20-50 years, followed by a subsequent ice age (too much smuck in the atmosphere for sunlight to penetrate) that drops sea levels by over 1000 feet, and only neaves small, narrow bands of livable land near the equator. Ice age to last for 5 to 10 thousand years, during which levels of technology wouldn't support populations in excess of 100'000 for the first coupla hundred years, followed by an expansion of livable land as the ice began to retreat a little bit as the debris settled out of the atmosphere.

For your purposes, just play with the numbers a little bit. It's not quite a true nuclear holocaust, but close enough. Survivors would make it a legend, and point out the 'moving stars' in the sky, and the occaisional 'God Gift' of falling satellites to their children. I'd think it'd take more than 100 years, but it wouldn't take more than 2 generations before the 'old ones' drifted into complete myth.

You'd have some mutations from the virus (remember 99%?) and some from the nuclear winter. Let the elves come out, dwarves return, etc. as humans return to a more primitive lifestyle that doesn't necessarily exclude them. Let technology be incredibly anathemic to the humans, to the point of fanaticism.



Does that help?

 

[sparxmith]

The Vorlons vs. the Shadows

If you're a B5 fan, then I have a great idea for you. (And if you're not a B5 fan, shame on you! But B5 is short of Babylon 5. It was a 5 year television series that detailed a war between 2 super technological races, and how that war affected humans and the other similar races. Fantastic stuff--you should consider becoming a fan.)

Anyways, the idea is this. The virus mutates some people so much that they become pure psionic creatures, i.e. made up solely of energy. However, different strains create two different races. One race is in favor of establishing a new world order based upon their new abilities and the concepts of Order. The second group believes that mankind has been given a chance to be free from opression finally and opposes any types of stucture. The two groups go to war. During their warfare, anyone not of these two groups becomes in on way or another, a victim of the war. One of the "Shadow's" first acts is to release nano-technology that disassembles any type of semi-conductor and any metal that is made up of more than X% carbon (where X is equal to the point at which industrial grade alloys are created.) This prevented any "mortals" from aiding either side. Only those of serious power are able to fight. Now, reduced to a different battle, the two groups go for each others throats. Centuries pass while the war rages on.


Eventually, the two races leave the planet. Their deeds remain in myths of Gods Vs. Titans, Angels Vs. Demons, etc. But nobody was able to preserve the history or technology of the pre-war civilization.

That leaves you where you want to start your campaign. Enjoy!

--Sparxmith