What are some good locales for some S.T.A.L.K.E.R / Roadside Picnic style exclusion zones that aren't Chernobyl...

What are some good locales for some S.T.A.L.K.E.R / Roadside Picnic style exclusion zones that aren't Chernobyl? What sort of cultural differences would there be for exclusion zones in say, China, Brazil, Australia, or anywhere else? What sort of monsters or antagonistic forces?

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An Outback Zone...

The default would be a starchy dryness, every drop of water being precious. Even in thick bush you can see how faded all the vegetation is, struggling to use the water as efficiently as possible. The sun seems more intense than it should be, almost alien, reducing rather than aiding visibility. The desert is like walking on the surface of a rust-painted Moon.

After sunset, the bush comes alive. Noise and movement all around you, even a bit of moisture in the air if you're lucky, scrub and ghost-gums breaking up every direction into mirages. You feel like the whole land is watching you.

There'd probably be multiple kinds of blowouts - distant & surreal desert storms, dust devils writhing with unnatural life, maybe spectral bushfires?

IMHO an Evil Radioactive Kangaroo would just look retarded. Don't worry too much about real native fauna, just go weird and woolly. There's no real consensus on what bunyips or yowies should look like, after all.

Weapons would be way more limited than in the Soviet Union, but I guess that would depend upon what factions are present in the Zone

So instead of drinking you sniff petrol?

The official Stalker RPG has some blurbs about the other zones. It goes into detail about Zone France, as that is where it assumes the game to take place, and also has an appendix detailing Zone Japan.

I like the idea of travelling out of your way to try to stock up on water, only to find a 'bunyip' has made it's home in the waterhole.

>Zone France
>implying french nuclear plants will ever fail
hilarious

It's why I prefer the Roadside Picnic scenario of 'the visit'. It also lets you get particularly out there with some of the more alien things in the zone.

Depending on the faction you join...

"Hey bruddah you wan summadiss goostuff?"

Will fail after a couple more years of being maintained by Africans, Jean-Mouloud.

I think a polar region zone would be cool. Nuclear snow, wierd aurora effects, yetis, temperature management alongside health and and radiation...

As an aussie you have plenty of options for native fauna, lizards, scorpions, crocodiles, spiders, snakes, dingoes, falcons, hawks, not to mention the things in the ocean. Radiation wise all the venomous animals dont need to change at all. Maybe just make them more aggressive. The non venomous things can just become bigger and if youve seen a croc you know they'll be bloody big.

Water and fuel are vital. These are huge areas of desert we are talking about. If no fuel is available camels make good cross country pack animals. Towns are likely to be underground to avoid the harsh sun.

You could play to Dreamtime stories as well to give it that unique flavour.
> The Rainbow Serpent - an anomalous, strangely iridescent cylinder that according to bushranger myth can turn soil into water

Detroit.

Yea and all the myths and legends would predominately be Aborigine. Rainbow serpent is cool as though

>There's an abandoned mine in the Outback that's a perpetual battleground fought over by a team of mercenaries made up of a wisecracking Joisy boy with a shotgun, a Midwestern career soldier, a French spy, Australian snoipah, one-eyed black Scotsman, Russian machine gunner, Texan engineer, a seriously dreranged pyromaniac and an amoral German doctor

Original Zone from the novel was set in Canada

Zone from Burger Games' official Roadside Picnic RPG was set in France, with a splat for a Zone in Japan

Well, there's stalker books written that are set in a new Zone, created following a nuclear explosion in Afganistan.

"The story is set in 2014, eight years after the Zone came into existence around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and two years after the events in Call of Pripyat. In the book's alternative reality, terrorists detonate nuclear warheads in Kabul, Afghanistan. After a few years, rumor starts spreading about a New Zone having been created there. Because nuclear fall-out alone can not create a Zone, The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences sends an expedition into the New Zone to find out if its creation could be connected to another rift in the noosphere. The USSR's Afghan war is largely forgotten in the West, nonetheless it was the other dIsaster that had led to the downfall of the Soviet empire. Just like Chernobyl, it scarred the bodies and souls of a whole generation... Besides, the war in the 80's left so much Soviet [war] debris behind that many places there feel exactly like the Zone. "

I haven't been able to find them yet, if anyone has them i'd be much obliged.

Played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Fukushima game. Pretty fun. One hostile faction was a bunch of nationalist japanese who robbed and killed gaijin stalkers.

I'm brazilian but don't know S.T.A.L.K.E.R very much. Could you point what rules or principles an exclusion zone should have?

For example, does it always has to originate from nuclear powerplants going bad?

Monster depends on mutated wildlife only?

In Roadside Picnic the original source of the stalker subgenre the zones are sites that were ''visited' by advanced alien life. Because the aliens didn't interact with humans at all, were gone in no more than two days, and left an awful mess, scientists have theorised that the visit wasn't an attack, or an attempt to 'give' humanity a leg-up technologically, but instead more like a roadside picnic.

> "A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow."

In the game the Chernobyl incident is used to conceal advanced scientific experiments. After that they also go to shit, and then the real mess starts.

Literally anywhere would be great. You just need a trigger.
>Meteor, alien crash, dig site revealed something bad.
Island resort paradise-turned-hell. Deep forests. Metropolises. Tundras, deserts. Anything buddy.

Any New Englanders here? I'm struggling to think up what a New England Exclusion Zone might have other than thick forests, fallow fields, eerie coastlines and seasons that change from hour to hour.

Try thinking of something that's not normally found in New England.

I dont know why but I fucking love that passage. I practically remember every word even though I read that book shortly after the first STALKER game came out. It gives me chills.

Imagine how animals look at cars passing on the highway. Beaming lights, unlike anything else in the world, hurtling at impossible speeds down stone pathways in the middle of an otherwise normal forest. If you have to cross those stone paths, do it quickly or the last thing you'll experienc before your body is blown to pieces is a blinding light and a deafening, otherworldly screeching.

All I could find, sorry.

STALKER Southern Comfort
[see below].com/books/view/264776

Keeps thinking my post is spam, I'll keep trying to edit it until it posts... The website is smash words, all one word.
It has options for pdf, epub and mobi.

Looks like the same author did another Stalker book, 'Northern Passage' as well. Just click on his name to get there. I didn't download the files so I don't know if they even work, didn't think about that.

Good drivers?

Noice, thanks. They sound interesting and may help me flesh out my stalker RPG more.

How about a tropical jungle zone.

Low visibility all around, you can never know what lurks in the next 30 meters.
Exotic flora and fauna gives lots of possibilities for interesting mutants, they could also follow a sort of stealth theme in synergy with the low visibility and turn the entire thing into a sort of nightmarish version of the Vienam war.

Guerilla like beasts that disguise themselves as a cluster of trees and only spring to life when you are surrounded and anomalies that work like booby traps and tear you apart if you don't mind your step.

No idea about blowouts though, maybe because of the [rain] forest something weather related like an acid rain that only affects flesh but not plants.
You after the first few drips you have to scramble for a hiding place but so do potentially enemy Stalkers and mutants (who maybe developed their entire survival strategy around ambushing people and animals that seek for shelter during rain), not to forget that space is limited and do you really want to make an enemie of the fellow Stalker that occupies that one hiding spot by fighting with him over it or would you rather keep peace and look for another one? Either way the decision must be made quickly.

>STALKER Nam
oh hell no

Detroit

As you play you slowly realize that it isn't even a Zone but just a normal day in Detroit.

Jokes aside an entirely urban area could be cool, but I'm kind of struggling to come up with things to differentiate it from the already partially urban setting of the original games.

Perhaps factions could be gang themed, all with their own turf and gang colours that Stalkers wear visibly on their gear.
Stalker that don't wear colours are seen as free targets that no one cares about so there is a pressure for every Stalker to join one of the gangs.
The majority of Stalker would be the former citizens that stayed behind after their families evacuated to support them by hunting artifacts.

>the regular gangs took to artifact gathering to replace to lost funding of drugs/protection/whatever
Sounds pretty fun.

Yeah, that passage is seriously pretty great. I felt the same way reading it.

Canadafag giving Zone ideas for Canada:

>Zone Yukon
Snowblindness. Extremely limited shelter, fuel, and supplies. Temperatures that drop down below -50, and in the winter, nights that last for weeks. Sometimes you come upon tracks in the snow you don't recognize. Big ones. They seem to just start out of nowhere, progress a ways, and then stop completely, but you can't tell if that's because the snow has covered some of them, or if something else is at work. All anything has to do to hide is be white and be still. Sometimes people speak of seeing eerie lights moving below the ice. Blowouts could be super-blizzards, with winds that can snatch you off the ground and carry you away if you're not careful, and cold that can kill in moments if you can't find shelter- and good luck finding it. Even chinooks, usually pretty pleasant things in the places that get them, could be made eerie- imagine a hot wind suddenly blowing, the ice that covers the landscape visibly receding- and who knows what things are down there, trapped below it?

>Pacific Northwest coastline Zone
I feel like creepiness wise, this doesn't get nearly enough love. Constant rain, forests of colossal trees so close together they block out the sun, and enormously old, choked in moss and wrapped in dense undergrowth. Stony cliffs descending to iron-grey, rough ocean studded with hundreds of tiny rocky islands. Occasionally thick fog appears, and between the grey sky, the grey water, and the fog, it looks like the world just ends where the beach stops.

It's a setting that can be plenty eerie even without being a Zone. But if it was... imagine a blowout at sea when you're on an island or near shore, or it suddenly pouring down four feet of rain in ten minutes- rain that has a strange shimmer to it, and who knows what that is? Imagine the effects of a Zone on sea life, and going scuba diving for artifacts?

maybe a Maritimes Zone? among other things an anomaly that makes ghosts of the last battle at L'anse au Meadows between the Skraeling locals, and Leifr Ericksson's settlers.

Fukushima of course. Otaku who turned into tentacle mutants because they didn't want to leave their anime collection behind.

Don't forget the weird novel canon, where the hole in the Noosphere eventually opens to other dimensions and animates fucking robots.

>a new Zone, created following a nuclear explosion in Afganistan
I didn't know how much I wanted this until now.

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