What would survive?

[Brown Jenkin]

I keep thinking Thundar the Barbarian as I read this.

Some other interesting places to go exploring:

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Now here is a major dungeon if you want, who knows what will be inhabiting this massive man-made cave complex.

The Greenbriar Resort, West Virginia. Another major man-made cave system, this time to protect congress durring WWIII.

Crazy Horse memorial, South Dakota. Similar to mount rushmore only a giant Indian on a horse.

Hoover Dam, Nevada. While the dam may have collapsed, there will certainly be parts of this mammouth structure left. same goes for any other super dams

10,000 year clock, Nevada. They are currently building a giant clock that is to work for 10,000 years and placing it in a limestone cave in Nevada. Some cult could still be maintaining this ancient working artifact.

 

[Umbran]

Tunnels wouldn't survive very well either; erosion plus tectonic activity would collapse them sometime in that several thousand years.

There are quite a few areas that are pretty darned tectonically stable, that may well not see a major, structure destroying earthquake in the next 10,000 years. Cities in places like California would be at risk, but manyt other places would not be.

 

[Shard O'Glase]

10,000 years is a long time. I'm for mount rushmore still being there though signifigantly erroded.

There obviously is a big diff of opinion on the toughness of concreate and other moder building materials, so just go with what you want because don't think there is any right answer.

Personally I'd make it so a few buildings survived. Few enough to keep the wonder, but enough to remind the palyers this is a earth after the fall of man setting. One thing to consider is as magic came into the world some thing smay have been preserved with it, the past can be just as fasicnating to them as it is to some of us. So it very well may be more like 2-3000 years of englect for some places, where they then became preserved monmuments of the past.

 

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

To quote Bill Hicks from his album Dangerous:

"...Keith Richards is shooting heroin into his eyeball and still touring, allright - I'm getting mixed signals.
I picture nuclear war and two things surviving: Keith and bugs.
'Where'd everybody go? I saw a bright light and thought we were on...'"


In the introduction to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation he writes:

"During the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried that America's air defenses had become vulnerable to sabotage and attack. Cheyenne Mountain (Colorado) was chosen as the site for a top-secret, underground combat operations center. The mountain was hollowed out, and fifteen buildings, most of them tree stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. THe four-and-a-half acre undergound complex was designed to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Now officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the facility is entered through steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty-five tons each; they automatically swing shut in less than twenty seconds. The base is closed to the public, and a heavily armed quick response team guards against intruders. Pressurised air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout and biological weapons. The buildings are mounted on gigantic steel springs to ride out an earthquake or the blast wave of a thermonuclear strike. The hallways and staircases are painted slate gray, the ceilings are low, and there are combination locks on many of the doors. A narrow escape tunnel, entered through a metal hatch, twists and turns its way out of the mountain through solid rock. The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving little electric vansfrom one brightly lit cavern to another.

...has the capability to be self-sustaining for at least one month...it's generators can produce enough electricity to pwer a city the size of Tampa, Florida...underground reservoirs hold millions of gallons of water;workers sometimes traverse them in rowboats...has it's own underground fitness centre, medical clinic, a dentist's office, a barbershop, a chapel and a cafeteria

...Almost every night, a Domino's deliveryman winds his way up the lonely Cheyenne Mountain road, past the DEADLY FORCE AUTHORISED signs, past the security checkpoint at the entrance of the base, driving towards the heavily guarded North Portal, tucked behind chain link and barbed wire. Near the spot where the road heads straight into the mountainside, the deliveryman drops off his pizzas and collects his tip. And should Armaggeddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books and bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilisation - Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbecue Wings bones, and the red, white and blue of a Domino's Pizza Box." p.1-2

I did a quick Google search and found more information at https://www.cheyennemountain.af.mil/ and http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/milarticles/blnorad.htm

The book is also a fantastic read for the all-pervasive reach of the US's fast food giants.

 

[Poltergeist]

Blacktop roads found when digging, or perhaps even a few that have been uncovered and are now used as "roads" for horses and wagons.

Tupperware, that stuff survives anything.

 

[chilibean]

Has anyone read Empire of the East by Saberhagen? It's pretty cool, and the remnants of the nuclear war, well ... it's [they're] much worse than mere radiation ...

 

[s/LaSH]

I'd suggest taking into consideration overall geographical changes to the world. Sure, you wouldn't be able to tell from orbit...

... or would you? Go find a map of the world. Look at New Zealand, the North Island in particular. See that lake in the middle? It's quite obvious. Right, that's a volcano crater - not the mountain, that was much bigger and got blown up in the last eruption, just the top. Taupo (for so it is named) is thought to erupt every ten thousand years or so... the last time it happened, the Romans and Chinese wrote about unusually vivid sunsets for years. If that thing goes off again, you are looking at climate change, and if our science is right, your game stands a good chance of intersecting with the next big boom. Krakatoa and Thera were weaklings.

And of course there's a chance that parts of California would slide into the sea (or form an island); the Himalayas would be even taller (although not on the scale of kilometers, and the tops could well fall off - it happened to New Zealand's Mount Cook a couple of years ago, you might want to use that idea); Iceland would have many new islands growing up out of the sea; coral reefs might well form new islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans; Hawaii would probably have erupted and changed drastically; and Antarctica is always spitting out new icebergs that could end up in unusual places. That's just off the top of my head.

There was an interesting part in Stephen Baxter's Space (published a year or two ago) where an astronaut returns from far distant star systems only to find, much as he expected, that humanity's gone down the gurgler in various ways. He lands in Africa somewhere, and finds a local tyrant running quite a nice nation, with hot running water and stuff. It's powered by an underground nuclear waste dump, where slaves go to work. You don't need to understand it to use it.

And does anyone think China will still be around then? Maybe not cosmetically the China we know today, but looking into the Chambers Dictionary of World History I see 14 dynasties since 1766BC, not counting 'interregnums', 'periods', the pre-record-keeping Xia, the current regime, and eras described as plural dynasties. I think you'd still have some kind of China in ten thousand years, although it could be ruled by Tibetans, Mongols, Vietnamese or some bizarre foreign dynasty (as I always like to point out, Genghis Khan, that asian warlord, had green eyes and red hair).

 

[NarlethDrider]

This is an idea I've toyed around w/for a while---though from a gamma world point of view ----one of the fun things to do was mutating the standard races & critters to the point your pc's wont know what some of them are

At some point I'll be posting an art thread w/some of the creatures on it (which anyone can feel free to use the images---just dont claim it as your own-----its been a heifer getting over this many year 'not drawing' block ---its good to be in action again

Sorry, didnt mean to ramble on---its been a 15 hour workday & I'm still here

 

[X-ray Crossbow]

Interesting opinions here, folks...

and finds a local tyrant running quite a nice nation, with hot running water and stuff. It's powered by an underground nuclear waste dump, where slaves go to work

Sounds like Bartertown. [See: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome]

(as I always like to point out, Genghis Khan, that asian warlord, had green eyes and red hair).

And lo, an Irishman rules half the known world!