Shadowrun after the bomb

[spasheridan]

Post apocalyptic shadowrun always appealed to me. In fact, most post apocalyptic settings appeal to me. Must be from growing up in the 80's. I've got a new campaign to run and I'm putting it in shadowrun world after the bomb. After lots of bombs in fact. I'm thinking lower powered shadowrun, that fits with the desolate wasteland theme. I'm still piecing the campaign rules together and I thought I'd see if there are any good suggestions to help me fill it out.

I'm thinking 300 points with reduced availability for chargen. THis leads me to thinking magic should have a cap as well to make it on an even footing with reduced tech. Any thoughts on this?

I'm also trying to come up with a good mechanic for dealing with magic fallout and background count issues - while the normal SR BG rules work, they seem a bit clunky if the players are constantly running into them. Any thoughts on this?

I'm also trying to think of a good alternate cash system... I don't want to make the world that barren, players will not be scrounging for EVERY bullet... but they will have to scavange for stuff. This really throws off the tech vs magic balance, the phys adept can karma up to his next level of wired reflexes but the mundane is going to be hard pressed to find a deltaware clinic to get his wired reflexes installed... thoughts on this from a balance perspective?

I'm going to populate the world with lots of infected, that seems to fit. Of course there will be bandits in football helmets and hockey masks. What other awesome monsters should stalk the land? Radiation spirits? Deathclaws? I'm thinking 5 - 10 years after the bombs fall, not 100...

Thanks in advance!

[Ancient History]

Once upon a time we were going to release Shadowrun: Bugworld as an April Fools joke - the surviving metahuman cities are owned outright by the megacorps, while the bugs fight over possession of city-sized hives. In between are war-decimated wastes (the "barrens") full of free towns, bug cults, and "maggots" - player character hybrid metahumans/insect spirits.

[Ganbare Gincun]

I've got a new campaign to run and I'm putting it in shadowrun world after the bomb. After lots of bombs in fact.

What do you envision as being the cause of the nuclear war? A rogue AI getting a hold of nukes Skynet-style? An act of desperation to destroy the Horrors once and for all? Corporate wars taken a step too far? Did all of the space stations get taken out as well?

[Orca]

Devil rats. Maybe with collective minds & magic to start making them a threat.

Ghouls and shedim, of course.

Radiation spirits may exist, but toxic animal/plant/man spirits sound like a more common threat.

[Neurosis]

I love post-apocalyptic and I love Shadowrun but I think combining them ruins them.

Of course then again I ran...SOMETHING...that was essentially more or less set in the Seventh World, or what (wasn't) left of the Sixth after the Horrors came. Which was not totally dissimilar.

But it was (literally) indescribably weird and hence should not be talked about.

[spasheridan]

Ganbare-

Ares, in typical overreaction style, decided to cleanse an infestation. The infestation spread, the corps retreated to the sky. The bombs fell and most of the cities started to glow. The infestation was a combo of mad AI and mass produced blood spirits possessing people and warmachines, as well as a great brain chip that turns people into bio drones after a short procedure.. very borgish.

Nuclear winter set in, crops failed, monsters roamed and ... well, the story tells itself.

SO - high tech enclaves in orbit. Hated by the survivors on the planet. A now slow war between the remains of the mega corps and the evil they started the war against.

Players are not involved in the big story, they're in the staying alive business. It takes a big bite out of the contacts / lifestyle / staying under the radar aspect of SR, but if you like Pink Mohawk this just lets you run wild. I'm interested in getting the balance right between the magic and the mundanes, to keep all the players feeling like they're in the zone.

[Neurosis]

Well one thing I can think of immediately is that the world would being nuked would DEFINITELY create a Background Count.

So there's your built-in magic nerf and it's 100% fluff appropriate.

[Otakusensei]

Devil rats. Maybe with collective minds & magic to start making them a threat.

Ghouls and shedim, of course.

Radiation spirits may exist, but toxic animal/plant/man spirits sound like a more common threat.

Devilrat... King? I don't know how that just clicked, but I just figured out what my players are doing this Thursday.

[Ancient History]

That was going to be a real thing; the idea was seven demon rats had formed arat king and were basically coordinating the devil rats in Karlsruhe. Including the flying ones.

[Neurosis]

what the fuck on so many levels what the fuck

[Ganbare Gincun]

So Devil Rats present a threat, provoke a nuke response, someone else fires off a nuke on their own (maybe the first nuke went hit the wrong target?), the whole world is blasted with nuclear hellfire for two hours, and then we find out the Devil Rats survived and are now thriving in the apocalypse?

And the Horrors never show up because there aren't enough people left to generate sweet, delicious suffering. So they go to the Forgotten Realms or somewhere else instead.

[CatharzGodfoot]

You could play an interesting corporate espionage IN SPAAAAACE game with this setting as well. Space stations slowly falling apart after the terrestrial infrastructure that supported them; small wars fought over lunar resources, comets with high water content, and the remaining bits of nuclear fuel.

[K]

I think Shadowrun probably works better if the popualtion takes a nosedive by about four or five billion people.

I mean, arcologys are already self-contained environments and societies, so you can just have badlands everywhere and Shadowrun plays the same.

Magic and high tech are actually more on an equal footing, because "having access to ritual materials and spells" is as much of a character perk as "having access to cyberware and guns." It's that one comes from a primitive tribe living in the mountains or something, and the other comes from an arcology, but each requires special contacts.

So the corp mage character type goes away, but otherwise things are pretty much the same.

So you don't need to change any rules at all, just some maps.

[Surgo]

A buddy of mine ran a Shadowrun game set in a Fallout 3 style wasteland. I'll see if I can get him here to comment on his experiences.

[Blasted]

With all the 50s schtick or a more modern flavor?

[TheFlatline]

In Shadowrun lore, nukes have a funny way of not working the way people think they're gonna work. If memory serves, a bunch of nukes flew at one point and then just disappeared, Chicago got nuked but it didn't fix things the way they wanted it to, etc etc... Something to keep in mind with the backstory.

Also, nukes are dirty, they destroy lots of shit, and their destruction radius is kind of minor compared to the amount of radiation they leave for a half million years. Might I suggest neutron bombs for heavily populated areas? Lots and lots of killing, not so much damage to structures and armored vehicles. Plus, the radiation isn't as long-lasting.

[K]

Also, nukes are dirty, they destroy lots of shit, and their destruction radius is kind of minor compared to the amount of radiation they leave for a half million years. Might I suggest neutron bombs for heavily populated areas? Lots and lots of killing, not so much damage to structures and armored vehicles. Plus, the radiation isn't as long-lasting.

I'll one up you and suggest super-plague. That way there is a reason why arcologies and magic tribes survived and everyone else who survived went went Road Warrior with everything just laying around.

The tribes had magic cures, and the arcologies were sealed away. The rest died in the plague or the food riots and unrest that followed.

Once civilization was stripped away, the critters could just expand into the wildernesses.

[Username17]

If you're going post apoc with Shadowrun you have to ask yourself whether you are doing Battle Angel, Road Warrior, Evangelion, or Resident Evil. All of those can work, but it's different kinds of apocalypses and more importantly still: it's different kinds of ways to interact with the apocalyptic landscape. In Battle Angel the world has been devastated and society has collapsed, but the new society is growing up in the junkyards of the corporate biotech old world, and people have cybernetic arms even if they can't afford food. In Evangelion, magical calamity has destroyed most of the planet, and everyone is huddling together in a protective arcology filled with super tech and the most powerful sorcerers mankind has left. In Mad Max, the world is literally burnt, and people roam around cobbling together new devices from scavenged bits of metal. In Resident Evil, the world is depopulated but the stuff is still mostly just sitting there - so people are running through empty cities grabbing and using fully functional stuff to fight monsters with.

It's a very different feel. Just because the 6th world ends in bitterness doesn't mean that the rest of things are plotted out for you. Just off the top of my head, we got the following apocalypses:

• Horrors. Everyone who jerks it to Earthdawn expects this one. You have the monsters from Evangelion coming to castigate metahumanity, and you have new steddings that are straight up the Geofront Arcology from Tokyo-3 in Evangelion. The world outside has seas that have been turned to blood and madness demons that harrow anyone who ventures out without a suit.
• Nuclear Bombs. It's 80s, but so is SR. Someone threw a nuclear war and everyone came. Everything was set on fire and you run through the ruins of things like you were playing the Fallout tabletop RPG. Also, there are some Corps, national governments, and secret societies that survived in Vaults. Like Fallout except that there is a fucking reason why each of the Vaults is radically different.
• Deadly Virus. VITAS-IX is the end. It takes 6 hours for someone infected to become infectious and about 4 weeks for the symptoms to become visible. And there is no cure. 28 days after the first people became ill, the population of the planet had been reduced by 95%. Yes, break out the 28 Days Later soundtrack, because the PCs are waking up in a hospital in a city that has been allowed to go almost completely feral. Everything is pretty much still standing, but there isn't near enough people to supply the labor and know-how to keep everything running. Almost everything is "free" in that there is physically so much more land and goods than there are people that ownership no longer has value.
• Environmental Catastrophe. Moar volcanoes? Maybe huge tidal waves? Global warming? Sudden Ice Age? Whatever it was, it made the cities uninhabitable, and surviving people are fleeing to refugee camps that look like the camp in District 9. Parts of the old cities are still there, and there is incredibly valuable shit in them, so going off an adventuring in them may sound like a better deal than living in a camp hoping to get enough canned food to not die.
• Bug World. Different Hives want different things, and have different relations with humans. But the point is that enough Hives came over that the world is basically theirs now. Some Hives make deals with people who become Flesh Forms and go on with their lives while fighting for the hives they swore their souls too. Others just eat people and turn them into True Forms. Some people have figured out anti-astral methods of retaining their humanity. But the bottom line is that the nations of the world are now things like "Hive Kax'thakl" and not "Pueblo Corporate Council" and whatever side the PCs are on, that reality is not changing.
• Vampire Overlords. Vampires murder people in a retail fashion, which is something that I have gone on record as saying is a strategy that is incapable of meaning jack shit to the overall population of humans. But they also have the ability to create a new serial killer every day who is in turn also capable of creating a new serial killer every day. And so on. There's a 3 day lag time, so in reality it's mod-3 Fibonacci and not a straight daily doubling, but the real point is that if the vampires really go to war, they can exponent themselves up to a number of serial killers that can murder all the metahumans in a very achievable amount of time. Obvious parallels could be made to Daybreakers or Ultraviolet, but I suggest not doing that. You're better going to any of a million alternate future sci-fi pieces where the Third Reich Won or some similar setup where the world is run by evil Romanian super men who throw people into deathcamps. Hell, V For Vendetta is a pretty apt piece of source material for this.

And that's just off the top of my head.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Nuclear Bombs. It's 80s, but so is SR. Someone threw a nuclear war and everyone came. Everything was set on fire and you run through the ruins of things like you were playing the Fallout tabletop RPG. Also, there are some Corps, national governments, and secret societies that survived in Vaults. Like Fallout except that there is a fucking reason why each of the Vaults is radically different.

Well, in Fallout1 and 2, the Vaults actually weren't all that different from each other. At least, they were not supposed to be.
In Fallout3, they were used in a big experiment and because of this were all set up similarly but with differences in stuff they were being outfitted with.

And what, no mentioning of the Terminator Post Apoc World? For shame!
What with Cyborgs and Cyberzombies and transhumanists and mad riggers and AI's and Technomancers around, this would be a viable future too . .

And of course, there's the grey goo post apoc, which would be feasible due to nanotech spreading in SR4. But i don't think there would be anything left after that one . . not sure how this would actually work out . .
IF it works out at all that something is left, it's probably closer to the Star Trek Borg than anything else . .

[TheFlatline]

Ah yes the gray goo scenario. That would be an interesting setting, in that you could have *anything*, literally anything that you could desire... if you could just control the fucking nanites.

[Stahlseele]

Technically, you could have several smaller factions of nanites fighting against each other in a bid for power and ressources . . Employing organic Units of meat filled with water because these can not be predicted/controlled by other nanites . .
And how to control nanites?
either be a technomancer or a good hacker or an AI.
but you would have to fight what ever else is controlling them at the moment.
and overwrite their want for self replication and ressource gathering . .

[Username17]

Living in Gray Goo world is like being in an Atlus game. There are these nano-factory regions that are constantly producing stuff. But if you go there, you'll die. Unless you do the completely arbitrary thing that keeps the nanites from murdering you.

So literally you "unlock" a "dungeon" that has completely random architecture,and is full of arbitrary treasure. Like you'd have a dungeon where all the drops are shoes or guns. And you'd play each level with a Final Fntasy Tactics style set of "laws" in place about what equipment you had to use and what abilities were off limits, and if you broke those laws you would explode into red mist and have to make a new character.

To go to the power armor factory, you have to unlock it by finding out that the production nanites won't instagib people whose blood Chromium count is above a certain level, but the defense nanites will purge anyone they detect using Ares style weaponry or magic. Then there are various rogue robots that you just plain have to fight, and the treasure drops are basically all power armor an fuel cells.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Power armor and Fuel Cells and Gauss Rifles and Laser Pistols ^^

[TheFlatline]

Living in Gray Goo world is like being in an Atlus game. There are these nano-factory regions that are constantly producing stuff. But if you go there, you'll die. Unless you do the completely arbitrary thing that keeps the nanites from murdering you.

So literally you "unlock" a "dungeon" that has completely random architecture,and is full of arbitrary treasure. Like you'd have a dungeon where all the drops are shoes or guns. And you'd play each level with a Final Fntasy Tactics style set of "laws" in place about what equipment you had to use and what abilities were off limits, and if you broke those laws you would explode into red mist and have to make a new character.

To go to the power armor factory, you have to unlock it by finding out that the production nanites won't instagib people whose blood Chromium count is above a certain level, but the defense nanites will purge anyone they detect using Ares style weaponry or magic. Then there are various rogue robots that you just plain have to fight, and the treasure drops are basically all power armor an fuel cells.

-Username17

I could completely dig a well designed RPG or a Descent-style boardgame that did this. It'd be a blast to play.

[Vebyast]

So literally you "unlock" a "dungeon" that has completely random architecture,and is full of arbitrary treasure. Like you'd have a dungeon where all the drops are shoes or guns. And you'd play each level with a Final Fntasy Tactics style set of "laws" in place about what equipment you had to use and what abilities were off limits, and if you broke those laws you would explode into red mist and have to make a new character.

Do want. Do you take requests?