The city is dead, and has been for some time.
A vast, mazelike corpse of concrete and steel.
Haunted by ghosts and what might have been.
Most residents died with it, but not all of them.
Those that survived live life as best they can.
Some explore the city, looking for a way out.
What do they find?
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Rolled 12 (1d100)
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>Silicon warrens, plesh-formed, crawling with Silicon Imps
>Pools and ponds and lakes formed around leaky plumbing and broken water mains, rushing downward in cascades and waterfalls to flood streets, basements and sublevels.
>A columned hall, long and tall, in which the malfunctioning lighting is constantly flickering on and off, throwing far more shadows against the walls than there are explorers.
>Old post boxes, in which the explorers can find old letters and parcels from before the city's death, as well as new correspondence and supply caches left by other explorers.
Could be a nice mixture of comfy and spooky.
Those still alive live in small villages on rooftops and parks, growing crops. They go down into the city to gather supplies, or interact with any of the advanced control systems still working.
Of course to travel to other communities they have to go down to street level and worm your way through the maze of buildings , some of them collapsed. Some autonomous robots are still working, cleaning and repairing things, but otherwise its pretty quiet. Almost peaceful in a way. There is a slight sense of unease in some places, like you are being watched. And then of course there are rumors of travelers heading out never to be seen again...
I could imagine the villages being in parks and in the exposed upper levels, places where the sun reaches and where clean water has pooled up. They lead simple lives, growing up in the ruins of their forebears, leading lives steeped in legends and folktales about what haunts the dead city around them.
I can imagine that the predominate moods while exploring the ruins would be sadness and unease, punctuated by the occasional pang of joy when discovering a cache or place of wonder, or a spike of terror when confronted with a horrific scene or running afoul of some evil spirit.
>A radio operator has given the explorers a number of signal repeaters and has asked that they be set up at any high vantage points they find as the travel to boost her broadcast across the city.
>When the rains fall heavy but gently upon the city, folk sometimes claim to see the outlines of invisible children playing out in the storm, and sometimes find small, wet footprints tracked about after.
>In villages and along heavily-traveled routes, folk have established shrines to their forebears in which they've places offerings like toys and snack foods and old money to ease their suffering and ask for protection.
>When searching a subway tunnel system for a way to bypass a particularly big collapse, the explorers become aware that someone or something is following them, whistling quietly in the dark.
>A famous trading hub and bazaar has been built up in the middle of a huge five-way intersection has become a literal crossroads of goods and cultures over the course of the generations.
>As they travel deeper into the ruins, explorers often begin to experience dreams and visions of the dead city as it was in its golden age which can bewitch but also teach the dreamer secrets.
>"The Whistler"
>A common urban legend amongst explorers and their children describes an entity known as "The Whistler" that inhabits tunnels, subways and other dark enclosed spaces. It is said that he takes to following travelers, whistling a soft song from just beyond their lamplight. Some folks say that he's malign and that his whistling is meant to unnerve those he follows, causing them to make mistakes and lose themselves in the darkness. Other folks say that he's merely lonely and is seeking companionship from those he comes across for a time.
>Nobody knows where the half-decayed food that stocks the convenience stores comes from...
>No matter how much you take, it's always the same next time you come back... chocolate bars turned white and crumbly with age, rusted but still mostly good cans of coke in the long-failed fridges, newspapers from a time gone by.
>It's not like anyone has been able to grow any food since whatever the fuck happened back then, even the most talented gardener among us was simply unable to grow a single seed. At least until he died of an infected splinter in his leg, the poor bastard.
>The worst part is, every year we live in this inescapable city, the food is slowly getting more decayed, closer to how it should be after all this time... it's like when a tree dies, it still remains as dead wood for a while, but after a time the wood is eaten away by time and fungus.
>Our expeditions have all failed, the last one got to thirty kilometres beyond the original city limits and it was still towers as far as the eye could see... even climbing the tallest buildings, it's still buildings all the way to the horizon.
> There is no hope in this corpse city, only trudging existence.
>Different villages in different sections of the dead city have different cultures and different qualities of life based on who lived there before the collapse and how much technology they managed to keep.
>Explorers will very rarely come across sealed rooms deep within buildings that have somehow remained perfectly whole and preserved, out of place and out of time with the rest of the dead city around it.
>Along one of the major trading routes there is a particular shop run by an old, pre-collapse automatron that is willing to exchange useful exploring supplies for pre-collapse trinkets and treasures.
>A popular urban legend amongst the youth is that there is a group of masked children that live out in the ruins who sometimes kidnap village kids to play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with.
>The dead city is so large that no one living within its husk has ever heard of anyone who has actually managed to reach the outside, and many consider the outside to be a myth or fairytale.
>The explorers become lost in one particular neighborhood and constantly find themselves returning again and again to the same distinctive landmark, no matter how long or far they walk.
This.
I highly recommend reading Delaney 's Dhalgren. It is amazing and deals with this setup.
>After months of traveling, the explorers reach the edge of dead city where it falls away into an impossibly vast and sunlit sea that no one had expected and that no one was prepared to cross.
>One particularly strikingly dressed mannequin appears to be following the explorers on their journey across the ruins, seeming to point out hidden caches and routes through the wreckage.
>In certain sections of the dead city where the wind between buildings is strongest, glass-falls are not uncommon as old windows break into millions of glittering knives that cascade downward.
>Ocassionally explorers catch anomalous broadcasts on their portable radios, eerie messages composed of old audio clips spliced together into pleas, warnings or sometimes even conversations.
>Through the city runs a great canal.
>Once it might have served a purpose, carrying water to the sea, but now it lays still, a putrid smell comes from the infested liquid.
>The canal is too broad to swim, or to build a bridge. Old bridges from the before time still stand, a decent enough number of them at least.
>However, these bridges make great chokepoints or places for ambush for desperate raiders.
>Still they're the only way to reach the island, where the library can be found.
>One particularly tech-savvy and industrious group has managed to rehabilitate a section of the old subway system and have used it to connect a string of prosperous settlements together.
>While spending the night inside a tall building, the explorers catch a glimpse of something huge and blacker than the night outside pass slowly by the window, letting out a sound like a deep, unsettling sigh.
>Slowly but surely, the larger parks in the midst of the dead city have returned to nature, reflecting the many different biomes that the megalopolis traverses as it spans the nations and the globe.
>the sea, too, is part of the city
>there are decaying piers with rusting ferries still waiting for passengers after all these years, accessible by a ticket from the Transit Authority
Though old and rusty, these ferries are automated and ready to go, if the explorers are brave enough to go aboard.
Someone wanna toss this in the urban unease archive at some point?
>Numerous cults have sprung up after the city's death as various groups latched onto or obsessed over different aspects of the pre-collapse city, some more wholesome and benevolent than others.
>While investigating one particular building, the explorers discover a staircase that appears to descend forever, or at least so very deep that reaching the bottom is impossible.
>The city wasn't just built on the surface
>It was also delved deep beneath the earth, in a series of cavernous sub-levels
>There is city down here too, which never sees the sun
>Some areas are flooded, forming vast black seas
>Others have collapsed, level crushing level, leaving immense gulfs in the dark
>In some areas the surface-level has fallen down, allowing sunlight to enter through great holes in the ceiling
>To access the bottom, explorers must either find a way to power up the few still-functioning elevators from the surface
>Try their luck clambering down through one of the sinkholes
>Or spend days walking down miles and miles of rusty, rickety stairs
Noone allows themselves to be near ground level at night. Whatever might lurk in the great hab-blocks and factories is preferable to the darkness between the towers
Who could ever hold skin so cold, hiding flesh and wire? Only half awake, doubting all the choices I make, feeling the heat, but never the fire.
I know it's too hot outside to run. I'll wait until the midnight hour, when the buildings block the sun.
I can't hide from fate, but I know I don't have time to wait. When the shadows cross my eyes, I feel closer to my demise.
>"Dont let yourself be seen by the surveillance cametas which still work"
>"Always be off the streets by Sundown"
>"If you hear police sirens, hide"
>"Otherwise the Lawmen will find you"
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>The pit, a large are under the city
>No one knows how deep it goes, at least no one left alive today
>It is said that vast caches of lost technology lies at the bottom, but there is no way down.
A few weeks ago someone posted an idea for a megacity controlled by an AI that segregated everyone by their monetary worth and forcibly kept out the poor people. At first it was a great place for rich people to live, but then a glitch happened and hyperinflation made everyone "poor" in the eyes of the AI, so suddenly no humans were allowed in the city and all the robots were actively working to keep it that way.
So, Blame pretty much?
Enough copper wire to retire.
my first thoughy
I wouldn't know
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I love it. Sort of like the underdark, but full of creatures wandering amidst miles and miles of urban decay and lost, futuristic technology.
>most inhabitants of the city hsve taken to the skies as the ground grows increasingly dangerous - many fear whatever evil it is will crawl up the buildings
>rusted pre-collapse flying trawlers made with irreplacable engines and what seems like anti-grav technology, salvaged crop dusters and helicopters, even crude hot air balloons and zepplins with solar panels hung on their sides- all are used to keep contact between rooftop communities, or to support peoples who have abandoned a life on the surface, even to the level of religious zealotry
Please don't let this thread die. Here, I'll give it a shot.
>What was once a collective of convenience of feral cats has become a massive pack. As unfriendly as innumerable, these strays have laid claim to an entire suburban block.
I've got a fun one.
>The reason the city is infinite and world-spanning is because humans designed nanobots to construct new structures based on organically developed arcitechtural plans
>Unfortunately the "stop" code had an error and a solution could not be developed in time
>Vast swathes of forest, sea and land were overtaken by the obsessive nanites and turned into gray city scapes
>Very quickly the biosphere died and starvation set in: the die-back meant only a few humans could survive despite hundreds of miles of "habitable" structures
>The darkest tales say not a single inch of the world is uncovered by skyscrapers
>This is all we have. Someday we will run out of food, as well.
>If only we had been more patient.
Is this on suptg or is it a PDF or something?
Isn't this the premise of "Blame!"?
A more interesting concept would be that the city isn't infinite, just constantly reshaping as the nanobot's consume and rebuild sections when they're unoccupied.
Alternatively, the city was built up from ground level, with successive generations building roofs over the older parts, until the lowest levels became uninhabitable and were abandoned. What people think is the "surface" of the city is actually its "penthouse" level, and is several miles above the original ground-level
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I had no idea this existed, exciting.
>"The Gunshot" A 2-metre wide hole that punches through nearly 5 kilometres of buildings, the suspected origin point is a long-destroyed tower, and the trajectory slowly curves upwards with the curvature of the planet before disappearing into the sky
>"Overseer" A name given to the sudden rush of radio static that warns of incoming danger, this phenomenon occurs over an extremely large arewa, but cuts off without warning Overseer is a benevolent emergent AI watching explorers through ancient CCTV, maybe if you find a node you can communicate with it
>"The forest" An all-glass building that has turned into a wild greenhouse after the collapse, lots of stuff grows here, seemingly without soil to grow on, but beware of the wildlife, and the more aggressive plants
>The explorers discover a tower or other structure rising up far above the other ruins and decide to scale it to the top in order to get a good look at the dead city spreading out in all directions around them. The view is daunting.
>While traveling with a large trade caravan, the explorers pass through a section of the city covered in huge banks of rolling fog, in which the traders and caravaners seem to be disappearing one, after another, after another.
>The explorers come across an older woman, another explorer like themselves, making a solo journey across the dead city. She's proves to be pleasant company, sharing her camp as well as information about the area.
>A broad intersection between buildings has collapsed and flooded, creating a deep, dark lake that blocks the explorers' intended route through the ruins and gives the impression that something below the water is watching them.
>The explorers come upon a village that has been completely deserted, but happily find a notice explaining that the residents had been invited to live in a larger town and that scavengers are welcome to anything they left behind.
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Cool. I like how inexplicable "The Gunshot" is and how the "Overseer" tries to use available means to convey warnings without being able to communicate explicitly.
>As the city grew, it enclosed a gigantic lake within it that now serves as the home of a culture that earns its livelihood by fishing and ferrying people and goods up and down the waterways that radiate out from the lake.
>Over the course of their journey, the explorers will sometimes come across prophetic messages that seem to have been left specifically for them in pre-collapse advertisements, broken signage and old graffiti.
>There is a section of the city referred to as "The Shades" in which a vast collapse of the area's sub-levels has forced all the buildings to lean inward against one another, creating a huge, deeply shadowed vault.
>While running low on food or hopelessly lost, various explorers claim to have been approached by an impossibly large dog with the face of a woman who then led them to sustenance or toward the nearest village.
>Several times a year, folk report seeing large formations of metal flying machines soaring far, far, far overhead, trailing lines of thin white cloud through the sky. Radio communication is always a little garbled and strange when they pass.
They've grown meaner over time, and smarter too.
Well, there's always a way down. It's the coming up again part that is tricky.
>Eventually, they make it to the edge of the city. They find that it isn't infinite, instead space-bending technology has been used to make it seem that way from the inside. Actually the city has been quarantined after a catastrophic plague ripped through it, wiping out 99% of the population. It has remained isolated for generations for fear that the survivors are merely immune carriers. The society outside has suffered a technological collapse and can no longer safely study the disease, at least not reliably, and no one wants to risk it getting out.
