Post Apocalyptic- 2 — Transcription

This month, we are taking a look at what happens after it's all over, because it turns out it's not over after it's all over.

In fact, there's rich loam, a rich storytelling loam that lives in the space between this civilisation ending and the next one pulling itself up by its bootstraps.

This app we are going to dig into the extremely fertile.

Some would say even overdone genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.

And I feel like this was a lot more popular a few years ago when it was fun to fantasise about things ending.

And I feel like it's had a little bit of a, maybe a little bit of a, what's the opposite of a resurgence?

We're still here.

It's also not Planet of the Apes, which spoilers, was Earth all along, but we're not so far.

I know, right?

It's not so far in the future that like something else has grown up that is like equally complex and sure there are ruins of the the ancient civilisation that was us, but there's there's an equally sort of burgeoning one that has sprung up in its place.

Yeah, I think that's really the important bit is like whether it is the grandparents in the encampment, telltales of the before times because they were there, or it was, you know, 6 months ago and things are just really beginning to pull ourselves together.

You know, we've been camped out in a shopping mall for 6 months, but it's time to venture forth, like, either way, the before times are still in living memory, there's still lots of stuff from the before times around, and, you know, it's still very much relevant, but they are also the before times, and there was a, there is a before it and after, and it's now very much after, and it's not during.

It's a very temporary order.

Like the daily grind of like waking up and tending the vegetable patch and checking all the, you know, border fences has become boring.

Yeah, I mean, the whole point of reestablishing some sense of order is so that we can immediately disrupt it.

Yeah, so we've had everything and nothing new has yet begun, we're awkwardly in between.

Things have settled down a little but not properly stable.

Yeah, exactly.

We can delve into, I guess, a bit what that looks like in a sec, but before we get too much into what, yeah, what those shapes of things actually look like, what are your, what's your, like, reading list?

What's the stuff that inspired this or that we've distilled this from?

I think that's wise for a lot of people.

I really enjoyed it, but it does not end pleasantly.

Station 11, I think, is an interesting one that follows a band of like travelling performers, who put on plays, I'm pretty sure it was Shakespeare's been a few years since I read it.

But it's kind of like this, like we're keeping this knowledge from the before times alive, but in a very old school kind of a way, and that gives them their, I guess, excuse to wander around and see things and people join the group and leave the group and this kind of stuff.

I think the other one that I, again, a few years since I read it, but really sticks in my head as a, like, an icon of the genre is The Postman by David Brinn, where a bloke who has been happily living his one-man survivor life for years in a shack in the woods, stumbles across the uniform of a United States postal service worker.

Uh, complete with like hat and mailbag, and he puts it on, and then initially just to stay warm because it's a quality jacket, one assumes.

And then wanders across post-apocalyptic America and people start giving him mail and they start telling him like, oh, I heard a rumour that like, you know, there's still people alive at this place and like, can you see if, you know, there's anyone that I, if you can find this person who I knew from before in this place, like, can you give them this letter, can you let them know that I made it?

So people start like giving him letters, um, and he sort of noodles his way across the US, delivering mail, and, you know, at a certain point, I'm pretty sure he's like, I'm not, you know, I'm not actually a poster worker.

I think there's others as well.

That's a classic of the genre, has vampires in the...

interesting.

Day of the Triffords, another one where it seems to just bad things happen to Britain.

But I think, yeah, the one that you mentioned that I think is, again, parodies, I think are really good at showing us where the tropes are because they make them really obvious.

Yeah.

And then after that disruption, we are back on essentially on the road. Because I think really what we're trying to do in these bits of fiction is we are trying to take a road trip in quote marks, but also often literally across the post-apocalyptic landscape and a lot of the joy in for us as viewers or readers is in like seeing these familiar things become decrepit, become dangerous, to see how different types of people have adapted, to see the different ways that people might survive, to, I guess, get really philosophical, like what are the trade-offs that you make to survive.

You know, some places will not go back on their morals, but it means that they, they have to be really brutal about like, you know, not letting people into the community because like we only, we can only let people in if they have enough, have enough food for them and other places will go into like slavery.

So we've got this whole interesting, like, what will these various communities and survivors do to survive?

But really what we're doing is taking a road trip across our destroyed landscape. And so we need a couple of things for that.

We need some kind of like inciting action, I think, we need something that is either going to push our heroes out of their comfort zone or pull them out.

Um, so either, you know, zombies finally break into the community and it's all over, um, and we're on the run again, or I heard a rumour that over the, like, over on the other side of the lesbia reel, usually the US, somewhere on the opposite coast of the US, there is a cure, a, you know, someone has reestablished the federal government as delivering mail again.

We're just looking for the last Twinkie.

Like, again, I think that's just a really beautiful, like, it's always looking for something and in Zombieland, it is the last Twinkie.

Like, it doesn't have to be this huge thing, but something is either pushing or pulling our protagonist out into the world, and then most of the content of the, you know, thing that we're watching or reading or listening to or playing is not in our cosy little safe zone.

It is out in the world.

I think this is literally, is it, is it Tallahassee?

Like, this is literally his line that his little speech about Twinkies.

So I think when you, and I think this is a matter of taste, I think, as a matter of choice.

When you make the enemy, aliens or zombies or whatever, then the focus will very much become that thing avoiding that thing fighting that thing.

It's it's fighting aliens, killing zombies, avoiding the robots, like, and that's great.

I think at one end you've got zombieland where it's like, the, the zombies look like, you know, prop zombies, because they are, and at the other end you have the road where it's like, okay, everyone has, has died, and the only thing out here that's going to kill you is another person.

They will murder you and your child to take your can of beans.

Do we trust them initially, but then they betray us.

Are we going to betray them?

And so on is so outwards for all of the communities that you come across.

Do they actually want you to join?

Are they just trying to like bring you in to use you as slaves?

Like, you actually get to explore what happens to people after the end rather than it being about fighting zombies? And I think there is some merit to that, but I think it's a matter of taste.

I think there are reasons to do both.

We are not playing fallout shelter.

It's tempting to do that, but I'm going to blow your mind here.

There is a perfect game for that and you shouldn't try and do one in the other.

It is a like, I think slideshow or like edging into montage of like interesting ways that things have fallen apart is kind of our meat.

Right?

And so we get to turn these like mundane things into interesting challenges, kind of the way we did with when we talked about Toy Story.

It's like being small makes things that are every day into big challenges.

I think there's a big opportunity here to be like, well, I'm going to take a walk around my neighbourhood and like, 1st of all, maybe appreciate the fact that my neighbourhood is not very walkable.

But then on the flip side, right, like our locks on our houses depend solely really on the social contract that we don't smash windows and like, okay, well, suddenly houses are not the safe hazens that we're kind of used to thinking of them as because they've all got great big, you know, glass windows up the front and that's just too easy to smash through.

So, like, what actually does shelter look like in this scenario?

So there's there's all of this interesting stuff you can pull out just from like, all I did was look out the window, right?

Like, the street, the houses, all of this stuff becomes fodder for you to try and like, see how it would break or work differently if the society and all of the stuff that comes with the society, you know, the infrastructure, the electricity, the, the, the services all stopped being there.

that kind of is your like world building set up kind of session 0 because you can get through.

And then everyone does have a shared understanding of the community and a kind of a tie to it.

Yeah, so I think the environment, environmental hazards are one really big thing that we see a lot of in the media, and that's how, like, yeah, that is exactly what you're talking about, is like what happens when the bridge isn't maintained, what happens when the supermarket, you know, runs out of power and food.

Actually, I think another really interesting piece of media to look at in that context is frost punk.

Do you want to put them in school so that they can become engineers, which does have like a long-term payoff, or you can put them to work running the giant heater that stops your town from freezing and like send the children to the mines to shovel coal, and like that gives you a more immediate boost.

And like absolute spoilers, but at the end it hits you with a sucker punch where it writes a little narrative based on all of the choices that you made.

So it's like, we had no choice but to enslave the children to keep the heaters burning.

Um, and so it writes out your story in prose as like, how did you justify this as the end credits roll?

I'm like, far out.

That's bleak.

But like, that's, that's kind of the opportunity that you've got, right?

Showcase, showcase all these like other, other horrible places where they, like they've made different moral choices to you.

We've got to start.

We've got a, you know, I think, a pretty good structure for a middle, which is these hazards along the way.

play because there is always more stuff out there to go and get.

There's always...

And I think that's really important because there are things like the road, where it is bleak, and it does not end happily, it all ends very badly for everybody, and like, that's where I draw the line, right?

I'm like, I'm happy to have awkward, you know, have it all be about like staring the horror that is humanity in the face, but I draw the line at like everyone dies and game over.

There are things in this genre that have happy or at least conclusive endings and those are the ones that we.

All right, so those sound like some really solid ingredients.

They are what drives us to take the risk of leaving the settlement in the 1st place and they're also exactly the kind of thing, you know, we were talking about kicks before and how, you know, what do we use to kick the plot along if there's no zombies to show up and burst through the door?

I think this is one of them, I think.

We need to, like, we need to do something to get resources.

I think we also then immediately run into the classic problem of like, if you're going to let people run out of resources, you cannot let that end the game.

Right?

Like it's it's the classic you can't blow up the spaceship because then the game is over problem.

It's like, we can't starve to death on the highway because that's not what the game is about.

We still do have to be able to find resources somewhere we need to have a good backup plan prepped for where the players might find resources.

you've got a couple of choices in each direction and it's not like we go 4 kilometres north.

And so I think just to like go back to the 1st thing we said about, you know, there's a goal that's kicking out of foam.

I think if you are doing a hex goal, but you know, or a hex crawl, but you know where you're going on the map, then you might as well just be doing a point crawl because there's really no incentive to go off the track.

So if you are going to do a hexcrawl, if you think your players would find that fun, if they like stuff that's a little bit more granular, if they really like that survival-y aspect, if you really want to do that.

explore, to find, you know, we've heard a rumour that there's medicine, but we don't know where it is, if you want to lean into that aspect of it a bit more.

You've got to not tell them where the goal is, right?

Whereas I think if you're doing a point crawl.

You want to be like, I have heard that someone has got a cure in town and we know where town is and it's like 5 days journey away and we're going to go there and get the thing that we need and come back.

So either one per node in our little like tree or one per hex on our map, we can put some kind of environmental hazard, we can put some kind of survivor related hazard, or we can put even just like something interesting that has decayed and become fun to explore in the end times, right?

Like, they don't have to be devoid of content, but like not everything has to be either a hazard from other people or a hazard from the environment.

Like, some things can just be like, literally the stuff we were talking about.

It's like, here is an, here is a thing from the world that would not last when the systems around it collapsed and we can just plop that in there is an interesting thing for the players to spend some time with without necessarily having to make it a hazard.

And that is good because it means not every hex is a danger.

Not every point is like heart stopping, you know, terror going into a new hex.

It's like, all we have done is put together a hex grid or a point grid with interesting locations. Plus, we know we have some kind of constrained resource thing where we don't have bottomless resources and don't have bottomless, like, carrying capacity. And suddenly something that was set dressing, we've just walked past an abandoned power station.

Oh, I wonder if there's any like valuable copper in there.

Suddenly that can become a really interesting moment that is not conflict, but it's like, how much is this really rare thing from the old world worth to our community?

Do we have a use for it?

I think it is important to have just for the like, to make it a fun game and not just bookkeeping.

You've got to have some things that are relatively abundant.

right?

Like, I think the way to do it is to just not mention it.

Like, we don't care about clothing.

whereas like, if you want it to be about, if you want to play with this, like, okay, well, we are going to have to take, we, you know, all the water out in the wild is tainted, so we got to take, take water with us, and then the purification tablets are a big deal, like, okay, but you can't also have them worrying about freezing to death from not carrying enough clothes and not having bullets and not having food and not having petrol and not having this and like, you've got to pick a couple of things to matter.

Because you can imagine a version of the thing where it's like, we care really deeply about, you know, making sure that you pack appropriately and and you know it's going to get cold at night, so you got to pack something warm.

And then you just don't mention drinking water.

And you just kind of take that as, given a normal notice if you don't point it out, right?

Yeah, so it's like, oh, well, I don't want to go get more water because I would run out of food and fuel and bullets.

that yes, that is what would happen in a real end of the world scenario.

And if you can't make it an interesting decision, then don't make it a decision, it just happens.

It's like, hey, we get to skip some miles today.

We've got a map, whether symbolic or literal, we have an idea of what our abundances and scarcities are.

Okay.

And I think I have one constraint and I don't know how to satisfy it because it doesn't fit with my usual recommendations.

I want the option of playing this in the modern day.

I think it's really hard to do post-apocalyptic fantasy.

don't think it's impossible.

It's a little bit diablo-ey.

Some things take up one slot, some things take up 2 slots and there's a bit of joy in like arranging them on your sheet.

And when the game master gives you something, they hand you a little cardboard square and you've got to try and fit it into your bag and that kind of stuff.

And then the magic system is magic spells are physical items which take up a slot in your backpack and also once flipped over.

It's just a beautifully tactile game.

Once they're flipped over, once they're kind of expended, there's a little quest that you have to go on or a task you have to do to recharge them.

I think Apocalypse World probably...

That's okay.

It's our show and if they don't like it, people can go start their own.

I would probably tend more one shot, I think, than you one.

probably go.

I think you would be running the walking dead and I would be running Zombieland, right?

I think it's a fertile structure for doing some interesting like set.

Yeah, I think there's one where like the world ends at the start of the game when you sit down and so you have to describe, it's not post-apocalyptic.

It's more apocalyptic, but like, the world ends as you sit down to play the game and then you play out like, how would you survive using just like what's in your pockets at the table?

Like, it's, it's interesting, like, that, yeah, they diverge at the point where the game starts and you're, you're playing yourself in this scenario.

I'm like, that's the thing I've always wanted to try.

Yeah, really scratches that the other half of this game's itch, which is not the road trip.

It's the the little...

Post, it's now post post-apocalypse.

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us there and let us know how you, if and how you would run your post-apocalyptic game.

That's all we got for you this month.