Pop.demographics of not-RIFTS N.America with not-stupid #'s

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat May 16, 2015 9:24 am

As much RIFTS is a jawesome setting about post-post apocalypse humanity rediscovering lost technology and re-establishing civilization, its numbers get all over the place with things like the advanced technology kingdom of North America having more suits of power armor than it has citizens and more terminator robots than there are threats in North America to sic 'em on. They also have supersonic aircraft but do things like send tanks and infantry to scout out unknown territories, and I have no idea what the logistics are of feeding populations, getting electricity, and what it takes to have an operational robot vehicle building factory.

I don't want "you can sneak tank destroying lasers up your ass" so the scale of weapons I have in mind is more like Masamune Shirow's Appleseed/Ghost in the Shell where cased ammunition is the norm and laser weapons don't get smaller than bazooka sized. So digging an AK47 out of the rubble is not optimal but you can still deal some damage with it.

Here's my shot at laying down the skeleton for creating not-RIFTS North America setting:

Population
Divided into tiers that also inform the player what kind of adventures they can go on in this setting. A band of PC's can indeed cross multiple tiers, such as AK47 armed wilderness nomads making their way to the high-tech capital city for the first time, or a war party from a magical kingdom sent to destroy bandits using flying power armor roving in the wilderness.

Tier 0: Wilderness, ruins, no permanent human settlement
-"Here be dragons" random encounter table land
-Sometimes the terrain is just not suitable to drive your battle tank/mobile home through and you need to explore on foot.
-PC's may have to venture here to find necromancer's castles or to plunder the ruins of a buried city for archaeotech
-Tell stories like Tokyo Jungle, Oregon Trail

Tier 1: frontier lands, town pop. in the 100's-1,000's
-Not every community is named and most are too small to show on a continental scale map, game masters can be expected to create their own
-communities are isolated, rely on brave postmen or wandering PC's traveling through dirt trails for outside knowledge
-Bandits/desperate townsfolk will kill you over food/fuel/car
-NPC's are largely 'mortals'
-Tell stories like Mad Max, Fist of the North Star, most of Fallout, Nausicaa

Tier 2: cities and fiefdoms populated by 1,000's-100,000's
-settlements show up on the map, most have minimal descriptions with some being detailed in adventure modules
-Getting fuel for your mobile home/science lab/bunker and cyber-docs keep the militia's bionics in working order
-Railways, highways, and possibly flight routes keep things connected
-PC's are expected to run into NPC's with as much tech/magical augmentation as them, if not more
-Tell stories like Battle Angel Alita's scrapyard, Fallout, "the necromancer's army marches on the kingdom!", the wizardry games where a city is built around exavating dangerous ruins, Nausicaa in the valley of wind, Naruto ninja villages

Tier 3: Nations of advanced technology & magical kingdoms with pop. measured in millions
-Every city is detailed, their sub-districts are as detailed as tier 2 settlement descriptions, a GM making up their own city would be a big deal that wouldn't fit into the metaplot
-Tier 3 capitals + tier 2 states form empires
-Tell stories like Ghost in the Shell/ESWAT in Appleseed, BAA in Tiphares, Lords of Waterdeep, FF7 Midgar

Food, resources, energy
This is where I have a lot of questions. What kind of energy sources makes sense for a post-post apocalypse setting? I'm thinking that the tier 3 tech civilizations can have restored scifi power reactions at their heart while tier 2's can get buy with scifi solar/wind/hydro/geo, while tier 1 would be lucky if they had a working wind farm and largely go without reliable electricity. The magical equivalent would be gigantic mana trees, ley line nexus's and so on.

One of the nice details I liked in Battle Angel Alta is how the scrapyard and Tiphares get food from factory-farms, so threatening their tier 3 territory involved attacking the tier 2 territories they connnect to. Then Tiphares can send their tier3 cyborg soldiers to go kill tier2 wasteland warriors.

But what exactly should the numbers be for this sort of thing? I could hand wave it but getting a realistic number of how much food can be generated in factory-farm conditions to feed X population of city dudes would be nice.

Travel & Communication (and its limitations)
They do get around satellite communication by saying there's a field of debris orbiting the earth that shreds everything, so that's helpful in creating isolation. But then the Coalition has supersonic transports that can send an army anywhere in NA within 6 hours.

I figure I can take the feeling of isolation further and borrow Gundam's minovsky particles idea, their sci fi fusion reactors installed in battleships and mobile suits send out particles that jam radio waves. It makes for more individually heroic combat and prevents the dark lord's castle from just being bombarded by ICBM's, encouraging stories where your cyborg jedi can have laser sword duels with demon kings. This also encourages more 'hard connections', because having tubes coming out of your neck and attached to your electronics is cool imagery. It makes for civilization being more tightly clustered as fiber optics cables can be cut by wandering monsters/assholes if there's not enough of a government presence around to guard them.

The question of limiting rapid transportation is still up in the air though. I want a setting where there's flying power armor, but I also want a setting where the civilization that can manufacture flying power armor can't just send passenger jets across the continent casually.

Some ideas I have include...
- It pisses off flying monsters like air elementals and dragons so they purposefully destroy aircraft
-There's supernatural storms rocking the Americas at any given time so safely crossing a vast distance is incredibly dangerous (so PC's can attempt it as an adventure)
-Mysterious pre-apocalypse satellite weapon system destroys anything flying over a certain atmosphere.

Any other ideas or problems with the above?

Filling in the hexgrids of post-post-Apocalypse North America
The final question in mind is how much "here be dragons" and "great mana tree" hex's can you fit in north America while maintaining a sense of 'points of light'? I figure major considerations are...

"PC's can come from here" civilizations
-high tech Shinra kingdom ruled by people with corporate titles such as President
-High fantasy kingdom using royal titles that live in a giant tree
-Numerous tier 2 and 3 settlements that have relationships with the above mentioned major civilizations or are hidden ninja villages

"PC's can kill these guys without feeling particularly guilty" civilizations
-Some kind of demonic force
-"Here be tyranids", or should that be saved for a future expansion book as North America only has so much room...
-"Sea of Corruption" ala Nausicaa filled with dangerous wildlife, though some PC's can know a greater truth and stop Shinra from burning down the forest and causing an ohmu stampede
-lots of tier 0 wasteland hex's with whatever kind of monsters you can think of, and some road warrior gangs too

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sat May 16, 2015 6:21 pm

Shutting down overland flight is tricky. Maybe take a page out of history and bring back the Sound Barrier Goblin. There's literally a malevolent entity that prevents supersonic flight.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat May 16, 2015 7:04 pm

The title made me think this was a spam thread.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun May 17, 2015 12:22 am

Due to magic, the space in the atmosphere is now hyperbolic, such that the higher up you are, the longer it takes to go places.

Thus, high-altitude supersonic flying transports get places about as fast as horse-drawn wagons, while low-altitude supersonic flying transports are comparable to rails... but they're vulnerable to getting shot down from the ground, and are much easier to detect than tanks.

Various large, fragile structures can be built that negate this effect on a small scale, but you can't support that in the wilderness.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 17, 2015 1:24 am

Back when I played Rifts, the non-existence of space ships and really even much flight tech was explained as there being some kind alien force shooting down everything that reached a certain height.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun May 17, 2015 2:13 am

Except they totally had jets and flying mechs that could go supersonic. There was no good reasons offered why areas were not well surveilled.

Space flight was ruled out due to possible orbital weapons and enough space debris that would just tear things to bits. Mutants in Orbit or some later book probably says more on it, but I never read that book.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun May 17, 2015 2:23 am

Prak wrote:Back when I played Rifts, the non-existence of space ships and really even much flight tech was explained as there being some kind alien force shooting down everything that reached a certain height.

It was actually a large number of high-end kill sats, not aliens, blanketing the planet in an attempt to quarantine it. Mutants in Orbit covers this for the most part.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun May 17, 2015 2:32 am

With the hyperbolic space thing... I have no idea what that means for satellites and space missions, honestly. I'm having trouble picturing it.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun May 17, 2015 3:10 am

Timeless Space from Sluggy Freelance webcomic, maintained by Uncle Time.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Sun May 17, 2015 1:42 pm

erik wrote:Except they totally had jets and flying mechs that could go supersonic. There was no good reasons offered why areas were not well surveilled.

Space flight was ruled out due to possible orbital weapons and enough space debris that would just tear things to bits. Mutants in Orbit or some later book probably says more on it, but I never read that book.

It seems like you could work with that, though. Say that there are stealthed kill-sats in orbit with orders to destroy hostile aircraft (anything without the proper IFF codes, which no one has anymore). There isn't always a kill-sat overhead, and even if there is, it may take it a while to decide a given aircraft is enough of a threat to shoot at. However, once a kill-sat decides to shoot at something, it's destroyed or at least crippled enough to force an immediate landing.

I'm eyeballing some values here, but say a small (less than 5 tons) plane can reliable fly around 350 mph below 1 mile above ground level for about an hour before attracting the attention of a kill-sat. Each doubling of weight, speed, or altitude reduces the time it takes to be noticed by a factor of 3, so an F-15 (weight 20 tons) flying at mach 1 at a height of 4 miles will be detected and destroyed in 15 seconds. The kill-sats remember an individual aircraft for about 4 hours, so you can't safely fly for 55 minute, land for 5 minutes, and then take off again: you have to wait a full 4 hours.

That lets an advanced city-state have an air patrol in a roughly 150 mile radius, but leaves plenty of open spaces away from the high tech societies. Advanced PCs with a small plane can travel ~2000 miles/day, so you can have continent hopping adventures if you want. No one gets to ferry very much stuff in a plane - 5 tons is ~10 passengers, roughly a UH-60 Blackhawk.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun May 17, 2015 2:14 pm

Energy
Solar-powered steam-based electricity generators are tech from the 1930's. If you have salt, which is where you have the seashore and some sun, you can make the modern versions with the big heat stores and efficient steam turbines for 24/7 generation.

Hydro's cheaper, and Wind can really only support a hydro or fossil base, cut back your average fuel use. All three renewable types have strong site preferences.

With energy and water, you can make all the food you like. Hydroponics, you can make fertiliser from air and dust if you've got enough energy to waste.

Flight and comms
Supersonic flight is incredibly energy-costly. Any powered flight is to some extent, but if you're concerned for overall energy budgets in any way, then the best bet for controlling flight is to stay under the radar of the big boys and they'll have no cause to waste fuel looking for you. An energy-limited no-orbit society will revert to blimps for surveillance, which are mostly limited by weather conditions. They'll still need radio to communicate for support calls or they won't go far either, and radio can be disrupted beyond line-of-sight.

Comms lines without satellite through hostile territory would be permanently under repair. Even unmanaged trees will rapidly ruin any hard lines, let alone the weather. Automated sentries can guard them, but automated cable-cutters will also exist.

With unlimited energy, from magic-fusion or whatever, they can build modern rockets with modern warheads (or better) and everything on earth is within a few minutes of complete annihilation. MAD would reign, proxy wars in the low-energy states a standard. Embassies full of intrigue and plots, waiting for the coded mail to arrive, unsure of which parts of your code they've broken.

Civilisation
Points of Light settings are just that. There's some points on the map where it's nice and everything else is a monster of the week to be investigated and shot, in whichever order suits. Like Star Trek TOS, only you're crossing into central-west Kansas instead of warping to another star system.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun May 17, 2015 3:31 pm

Mlangsdorf, you could do that but it would have to be widely known that this happens and have a disclaimer on every flying robot or jet because they would be destroyed constantly. Really there would be little point to building the supersonic jets or even jets at all.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sun May 17, 2015 6:17 pm

Yes, erik, that's the objective. We want a tech level that allows flying power armor, but circumstances that prevent supersonic flight.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 17, 2015 6:45 pm

I'd probably, at least in my games, make the kill sats AI, and people have forgotten. Most people only hear the Sat ask for IFF code, and then say they will be destroyed if they do no land in X seconds, so they assume it's a recording.

The objective at that point would be to allow players to pick up or guess that they're AI, so they could try to bargain, because as much as RPGs aren't storytelling, people do enjoy getting "No shit, there I was" stories out of it.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun May 17, 2015 10:01 pm

Doh, I came in with Prak's post and was just thinking about Rifts as it was, not Ogre's post (which I mostly skimmed and treated as a demographics thing rather than a total rewrite). I was still thinking of from a Rifts perspective how many power armors become obsolete.

I have committed the sin of missing the thread's context and shall suck a barrel of cocks.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun May 17, 2015 10:35 pm

erik wrote:Doh, I came in with Prak's post and was just thinking about Rifts as it was, not Ogre's post (which I mostly skimmed and treated as a demographics thing rather than a total rewrite). I was still thinking of from a Rifts perspective how many power armors become obsolete.

I have committed the sin of missing the thread's context and shall suck a barrel of cocks.

Here's a bag's worth.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sun May 17, 2015 10:48 pm

Here you are, sir.

Also, "here be an unstoppable force of man eaters" should definitely be a separate supplement. If you want a massive siege, have a T3 city's fancy wall fail and the standard wasteland nasties swarm the horizon.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed May 20, 2015 5:18 pm

Killer satellites seems the way to go, targeting everything above a certain altitude and speed. Their backstory would be a network of pre-apocalypse weapons that were activated during the end of human civilization. I can imagine an exotic way of executing someone is strapping them to a rocket and launching it straight up to be detroyed. Lasers as the standard kill-sat weapon with railguns being used for larger targets. It also becomes a neat 'end game' ability for your hacker PC's to be able to temporarily take control of a killsat and laser their foes. Discovering the IFF codes are also a powerful 'treasure' to seek out and fight over.

Super destructive electrical/wind/fire storms, territorial dragons and wind elementals then threaten non-supersonic low flying aircraft.

Also, "here be an unstoppable force of man eaters" should definitely be a separate supplement. If you want a massive siege, have a T3 city's fancy wall fail and the standard wasteland nasties swarm the horizon.

Tyranids, Daemons, Invids, Skynet and so on all work as "suddenly they came" hordes of villains you can gun down without needing to think about it. Probably not all at once or spread across the earth in some way so future worldbooks have badguys to kill guilt free too.

I like the scale Battle Angel Alita (Gunnm) is at, and figure it's a good model for what kind of territory a tier 3 city controls. The Scrapyard (with Tiphares suspended above it) is where Kansas City used to be. Rails connect the Scrapyard to other settlements, notably Factory Farms (along rivers) that provide for the city.

600 miles (8 hour drive on paved road) west is a ruined city (Denver Colorado). The Barjack road-warrior style gang of cyborgs controls a territory roughly the size of Kansas:

A tier 3 city for the East Coast, West Coast, and somewhere in Canada seems like a good spread. Leaving the center of the US as "here be dragons" territory also increases the isolation, though the Great Lakes are a good place for human settlement and some thematic magical stuff.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Wed May 20, 2015 5:48 pm

How much do you want to rip-off Rifts? Do you want the option of a paranoid storyline in which humans are brainwashed into fighting enemies who are (secret reveal!) also humans (either humans in-the-robots, or humans who are in league with monsters, or with beings that you thought were NOT humans but actually are?), sort of a RahXephon type thing?

Ripping off more from Rifts, if you keep the genocidal anti-magic stance of the major human settlements, you can also have the great lakes region be peopled by wizards who have invisible vs. dragons or magical dragon repellent or something.

I always thought that concept had legs (hell, Ralph Bakshi's Wizards has basically the same premise), and as a *scenario series* the Coalition War campaign is actually pretty good, rising above the weaknesses of the setting while unfortunately exposing the weaknesses in the rules. Those would benefit from an OSSR, actually.

EDITED TO FIX A TYPO THAT MADE MY PARENTHETICAL NONSENSE

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Fri May 22, 2015 8:00 pm

I don't want "you can sneak tank destroying lasers up your ass" so the scale of weapons I have in mind is more like Masamune Shirow's Appleseed/Ghost in the Shell where cased ammunition is the norm and laser weapons don't get smaller than bazooka sized

To me this is less "not-RIFTS" and more just kind of "not RIFTS". The absolutely bugshit bananas tech level contributing to the overall bugshit bananas power level is kind of key to RIFTS' identity in my opinion.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri May 22, 2015 9:38 pm

DrPraetor wrote:How much do you want to rip-off Rifts?

Just the "super high tech human civilization ends in cataclysm, civilization rebuilds itself with points of light in a world full of monsters with splat books conveniently organized by continent/regions of the world" part. So it's more like drawing from the same inspiration of 80's sci fi anime + D&D. If you're interested here's my thoughts on doing things different than RIFTS:

Magic and psychic powers are the same thing (RIFT's "Potential Psychic Energy" to power magic and "Inner Strength Points" to power Psychic powers while in Japan chi is PPE but in China chi is ISP is... silliness) So more like 40k's warp and Naruto's Chakra where reading minds and shooting fire from your face draws from the same power source.

Megadamage weapons that you can sneak up your rectum that will vaporize humans and blue whales in a single squirt are right out. Man portable weapons are the likes of Masamune Shirow works in that it's mostly gunpowder propelled bullets. If a laser weapon is small enough to hide up your butt it's going to be very short ranged and deal derringer levels of damage. Military use laser weapons would be more like an anti-armor weapon and bulky, requiring large external power supplies ala Akira:

pew pew

So having a centuries old AK47 you dug out of a necropolis is still useful, just not optimal.

RIFTS also kind of obviously has the Coalition States as the future-Nazi skull faced badguys and Tolkeen as the goodguys named after a beloved fantasy author ...but then they did a 180 with Tolkeen summoning baby-eating demons to fight the CS who got a book called Heroes of Humanity and that was jarring to many fans. I want to avoid that kind of situation and just have all 3 major powers be more driven by self interests that put them at odds with one another at times, but still stable enough that you can have a party made up of people from different powers adventuring together in the frontier to fight tyranidaemons.