"What's YOUR Favorite Post Apocalyptic Gaming Scenario?" Topic

This is about actual miniature GAMING scenarios you have played and enjoyed most.

1) Your favorite PA gaming scenarios take place after a . . .

* Nuclear war;
* Asteroid/comet strike;
* Pandemic/Plague;
* Alien invasions – link ;
* Sudden drastic climate change (please specify);
* Robot takeover;
* Zombies; or
* Something else? (please specify)

2) How long after the apocalyptic event are your gaming scenarios? Just few years after (decades)? Or much, much longer, after a reconstruction period has begun (hundreds or thousands of years later)?

Thanks.

Dan
PS. Inspiring PA movies, books, etc.:
TMP link
link

After watching Hellboy II, I fancied doing a scenario based on Prince Nuada's plans.
All the fey folk attacking modern day communities. I'd leave out the Golden army or weaken them, as they are too "industrible".

Hopefully it would'nt end up as some sort of Shadowrun game!

I was always fond of the Twilight: 2000 millieu. It made sense, although some of the projected weapons were kinda fun. I loved the Abrams with the remote turret :)

Right now my current favorite is zombies using a blend of several inspirations- Romero's movies, Brooks' books, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, Zombieland, etc..

I've been GM-ing several variations of the same basic scenario since around March of 2008. Several groups of survivors with different agendas are surrounded by zombies and need to escape and possibly accomplish one or more goals. Survivors are grouped by archetypes and the game typically has 6-10 players. The game outcome is always different because of random events and player interactions.

I set my world a little in the future, in a time when solar space travel and colonization had already started. Then I pushed the apocalypse button. I wanted some of everything in my games and settled on a world that was sort of victim of "all of the above":

The initial destabilizing element was the asteroid strike. It wasn't the huge kill all of humanity type of thing. But large, broke up and resulted in several significant strikes.
This weakened economies, stretched military and emergency aid resources severely and provided a window of opportunity.

In short order (since opportunity presented itself), several wars started, ranging from very limited conventional conflicts to larger first world chaos that resulted in limited nuclear exchanges.

Some of the wars also incorporated the use of chemical and biological weapons, as well as, the theft of and/or accidental release of potential chemical and biological threats. This resulted in local exterminations, longer term limited bio-outbreaks, and much longer term damage to the environment, restricting food production and resulting in famine.

The development of atomic weapons at the end of WWII put us on the cosmic map, and brought about the observation of humanity by extra-terrestrial interests. As it turns out, FTL travel is usually discovered in the rapid technological expansion that takes place after a species gains access to the atom. The ETs began monitoring us at shortly after the end of the war, and a couple (rare) accidents occurred as it turned out that there was more than one watcher (it seems that we are near a boundary in space). The accident at Roswell was the first of two incidents that resulted in anomalous technological evolution on earth. Our technology out-paced our social evolution, making us an irresponsible and threatening species. The result has been infrequent intervention.

Unfortunately, some of our worst behavior has been in space. The moon colony is pretty safe, but Mars and several of the mining stations are like the old west. Space piracy has been a problem almost since the moment that civilian vessels were available, and there is little in the way of a policing body. It is rumored that there have even been a couple of attacks on ET vehicles.

In some instances, corporations have greater resources than nations, and as a result, there are both private and national armies. Sometimes they fight for a common goal, sometimes they don't. In some instances material resources are greater than manpower and this has brought about "automated policing systems". These range from immobile sentries to small robot armies. There have been some mistakes that have resulted in unfortunate accidents, and there are known to be some "feral" robots out there.

Some interesting mutations have resulted from nuclear attacks and laboratory experiments, though reports of "zombies" are rare, and generally considered as myth by most national and corporate groups. Still, the rumors persist amongst the more primitive tribes.

This is how I've justified having some of everything on my tabletop. To this point, I've only played a couple of corporate army vs scavenger type games to test rules.

zombies are on the top of my list but I have gamed and will game again:
not in any order
* Pandemic/Plague/zombie
* Alien invasions all kinds (into the looking glass is fun)
* Robot attack/takeover
* underworld/demon attack
* monster attacks all kinds
* and just all out after "The fall of man combat vs everything"
mostly as they start to just after

I agree with the Twilight:2000 comments. Global Meltdowns are fun environments to game in.

I like the tried and true "Cold War Gone Wrong" Nuclear Avalanche…
Having pockets of radiation in the landscape makes the very ground they walk on a threat.

Sure, there are ghouls and robots and mutants (Oh My!), but when they are scrounging for water, or lack basic plumbing and electricity, those are some of the best RPG scenarios.

Who'd have thought that being a firearms expert would be useless when you're dying of thirst?

The game I'm running takes place about 75 years after the bombs started lobbing. This gives people a chance to be third generation shelter dwellers, with a sense of history imparted by whatever media and stories they were sealed up with. This prevents them from feeling like they're "missing" a lot of context because… they're SUPPOSED to be missing all the context. It allows for re-discovery of the world as something brand new, not something that "Used to be this".

I like the world fromthe old Thundaar the Barbarian tv show. You could have pretty much anything, monsters, wizards, mutants, robots, zombies, moks.

Chuck

My various games are set to the heading of; New Trouble from Old New York.

It's necromunda, meets bladerunner, with zombies, robots, and aliens.

A world where corporations and mafia's have the power and the teaming masses struggle for day to day survival. It might be a wasteland outside the city but who can see it thru the smog.

Fallout.

Love the aesthetic.

Is this the "Twilight 2000" you guys are talking about? It is an RPG.

link

Or are you talking about a movie or novel?

Dan

A Thundarr type world would be my preference. Finding minis might be tough.

CC

WWII setting where the world's dead rise up and feed on the living and all sorts of other supernatural nastiest show their ugly heads. Now all the troops around the glob fight for a whole new reason, survival and to find a way back home. Just think you are an All American in Belgium in early '45 and the world has turn up and with no chain of command, supplies or will to fight for freedom all you and your pals want to do is survive and get back home to the good 'ol US of A. When the world turns to you have few friends and even fewer options.

Now that is a blast of a campaign. Actually made it to the middle of the Atlantic once but the Liberty Ship we stole ended up to be infested with some kind of critter and ate most of us. I was last see floating on a life boat with 2 other comrades.

Now that was post-apocalyptic!
Brian

In the mid 90s my small group got hooked on what we called "Snuff Hitler" Scenarios. It started out with a simple skirmish level game to ambush Hitlers Staff car that we played over and over again. Soon we expanded to add unusual variables to the scenario: Super Soldier Steve Rodgers, The Last Druid, Martians, and a Werewolf hit squad. Eventually the group split up and drifted apart.
A few years later Gamma World, the RPG, was rereleased and some of use drifted back to the group for a semi regular game. The setting was 250 years Post-Meteor-Nuclear War-Ensuing Pandemic….

A meteor was set to collide with China, so they launched attacks against the US and other locations in an attempt to seize habitable lands and evacuate some of the population. Nuclear war ensued but was eventually silenced by the Meteor strike. 50 years of winter later the Underground bunkers start opening only to find that the occupants have no immunities to the now wildly mutated virus strains.

…In this PA world civilization is starting to flourish and the first real empires since the fall are being founded. One would be Emperor was a villain we all came to call Cyborg-Hitler (he wasn't actually based on Hitler in any way, but between the speeches and an unfortunate bit of vandalism to the GM's sketch of the villain…)

Being a mixed group of hybrid RolePlayers and WarGamers we modeled all of our player characters. At the climax of the Campaign we all agreed to play the ending as a 3 part wargame.

1) Snuff Cyborg-Hitler – Skirmish level game to ambush and assassinate the villain. Small board, Stealth rules, limited number of rounds, etc…

2) Escape! – Gauntlet style game played down the length of an 8 foot table literally loaded with terrain. The GM kept a large pool of figures and each round he could place X number of them along either board edge ahead of us. As we progressed down the table he was also allowed to remove out of play figures from behind us to reinforce his horde so as not to run out of figures. Our goal was simply to reach the far end and alert the waiting friendly force of our success or failure. (This was a lot of fun, we ran it 4 times)

3) Attack!! – Friendly forces attempt to finish off the enemy forces while they are disorganized. This game was dependent on the outcome of the previous two games, which had also had a series of secret objectives the players were not aware of until the final stage. Standard massed attack scenario. Sadly this battle was a bit stunted by the large number of proxies used…we just didn't have the right type of figures in sufficient numbers.

Is this the "Twilight 2000" you guys are talking about? It is an RPG.

Yes it was a very cool set of rpgs back during the Cold War

I'm currently collecting stuff for a robot takeover during the 1950s

Fallout theme and a classic last stand with attackers twice the size of defenders or for novice gamers keep rolling for loses to return as fresh attackers.
played Space marines vs Orks rogue trader rules which was fun.

Also good survivors vs lawless scavengers last stand(I played a mutant version game using GoGos as they look great and the kids were more interested in it).Stalker and skank rules for this game.

need to try combat zone style next and mutants and deathrays with the kids too, but do not have these rulesets at the mo..

EDIT most importantly swap sides with opponent to really enjoy it.

Ah yes dreams of ruining the Earth…one of my favorite pass times…

Well it goes without saying that my favorite plan is already in use with my game setting, so I will go with choice #2:

pure science fiction ruin…I like the cascading failure of the delicate balance that keeps all the critical cups from overflowing…so environmental disaster on a global scale.

Only the most extreme places on Earth offer any hope of salvation…the stable dry plains of Antarctica, the highest stable mountains, deepest deserts, etc. because of the problems the panicked world's governments caused with misunderstandings, miscommunication, and missiles…most cities were destroyed.

So a series of environmental disasters creating floods, droughts, dust storms, chaotic weather, volcanoes, water table poisoning, etc. then the bombs.

A drastic reduction of people, plants, animals…

The remains of the day…now insert your portion of fantasy to flavor your science fiction.

You could go down a Thundarr road, Mad Max avenue, zombies, mutants, etc..

So I like a ruined Earth with a recovering setting…Mother Earth wiping the slate clean and giving the world a face lift.

I like a recent recovering world or a distant future where the end is the stuff of legend…I like mutants (of all kinds), not so much the zombie theme, and I like castes of people…feudalistic, most without, a few with…heroes are good guys and villains are bad guys…not the grey good guys who are mad dog killers armed to the teeth, set to kill…pretending to be good guys.

Zombies with a little bit of Road Warrior.

atm for me, has to be Borderlands

Borderlands?

Is than an RPG or an actual miniature game?

Thanks.

Dan

A PC Game Dan well worth playing for ideas

Is this the "Twilight 2000" you guys are talking about? It is an RPG.

Yes it was a very cool set of rpgs back during the Cold War

Recently updated as Twilight:2013.

To give a rough premise, Borderlands takes place on a wretched desert wasteland planet. Lots of sand dunes, high rock canyons, and heaps of stone.

The native life forms are aggressive sandworm-headed dogs, and ravenous flying tapeworms. Luckily there are tons of friendly criminals, prospectors, and opportunists that make lovely targets for your near limitless choice of firearms.

I've yet to see anyone play this as an RPG or miniatures game, since it's really a first person shooter with narrative to justify wasting a bunch of anarchist gangers.

There are alien relics buried in the sand, so it's not so much post apocalyptic, save for whatever form of apocalypse probably happened to those aliens. Still, it does have that bleak, alone, might = right feeling that corresponds to most post-civilization-collapse scenarios…

Post-nuclear war, about 200 years after – the world power is New Zealand, who have extended the Pax Orientiale over the world – the US, most of Europe, much of China and Russia are radioactive ruins occupied by mutants, South America and Africa are full of small kingdoms/republics, Canada is the home of vengeful horse nomads who collect ears, Australia is mostly a ruin with New Zealander colonies on the coasts

Lots of scope for battles big and small, plus you can use all the mutants you want

I figure WW2 in a Twilight:2000-Fallout setting with the ghouls,supermutants and a world messed up with the soldiers trying to get home or played in the USA.Course i guess thats why they have SOTR and Atomic Cafe out.

…and the Kiwis will inherit the Earth…actually I like it, bunches.

and the Kiwis will inherit the Earth

Similar to Poul Anderson's "Maori & Kith" cycle.

If I am going to game something that happens a couple of thousands of years later, it has to be Apes!!!

"May the Blessings of the Bomb Almighty, and the Fellowship of the Holy Fallout, descend upon us all. This day and forever more. Amen!"
- Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Dan

This Outer Limits episode ("Promised Land") takes place hundreds of years after an alien invasion:

YouTube link

I think it is the sequel to this (episode "The Camp"):

YouTube link

And there's another, "Rite of Passage", that also seems to take place hundreds of years after some unknown catastrophe:

YouTube link

Dan

I have a post-apocalyptic campaign that I have been using for close to fifteen years now. If you look really hard on the internet, you can find a snippet of a short story I wrote set in that world when I was 17 (which was…gasp…seventeen years ago!) called "Aftershocks."

The premise was that a deep sea tectonic shift that no one saw coming at all set off the "ring of fire," which in turn set off the madrid fault. Chaos, war, famine and the collapse of civilization followed. The game was set a hundred years after the fall. Here was the basic shake-down:

Most of the Americas, Asia and Africa were damaged beyond the capacity to support an industrial civilization. Those who survived did so by turning to primitivism. In America the only remnant of the once proud United States was the Allied States of Pacifica (ASP), which was based in Idaho, Montana, and Colorado. These were the heroes of the campaign, fighting to keep a spark of civilization alive. Their soldiers were known as "snakeheads" because of their green and brown uniforms (and the ASP acronym). The other group of good guys (though they rarely saw eye to eye with the ASP forces) was the League of Eight Nations, which was basically a bunch of Native Americans and European or African descent Americans who had "gone native," rejecting civilization as a failed experiment.

The big enemy was the Pan-European Coalition – the PEC, or as they are known to the ASPies, Peckerheads. Western Europe and the European Union mostly survived the quake, but was in such bad shape it collapsed into fascism. Believing America to be now empty, they had established a beachhead on the East Coast, and were attempting to recolonize the Americas. This did not sit well with either the Nations or the ASP, and so there was war. A lot of diplomacy as well, since the ASP had to fight the PEC on the Nation's territory.

After years of dipping in and out of this world, the storyline has gotten quite involved, with the PEC being finally defeated when forced to withdraw from the "New Colonies" by the need to deal with hordes of mutants pouring out of the former soviet states, which had largely been reduced to slag by US nukes in those confused early moments when the quake was mistaken for a Russian attack.

Is this the "Twilight 2000" you guys are talking about? It is an RPG.

Yes it was a very cool set of rpgs back during the Cold War

Recently updated as Twilight:2013.

Not really the same, the cool thing about T2k was the idea you might actually be living it one day.

Flowing the martian invasion in war of the worlds the martians in Britain die of the common cold but sadly the rest of the world is not so lucky and the martians develop a cure the world is then subjected. After many years of fighting most of Europe is liberated and the surviving people set there eyes on liberating America.

Gotta be Fallout. That's the ultimate post-apocalyptic setting in my book, and I'm astounded that it's never been moved to P&P and minis.

Cypher: Fan of Marvel Comic's Killraven, I take it? I love that series.

More discussion on this subject here:

TMP link

Dan

Well, since global warming seems to be the latest craze …

TMP link

Dan
ps. I'm surprised that no figure manufacturer has capitalized on that. This is the time to make suitable figures and boats!!!

@Gearhead. There is an RPG made back in the days of Fallout 2 that retained the tactical flavor and mechanics of that game. There have been mods made to fit other systems. It looks like it currently lives here.

link