Post-apocalyptic setting

There is no evidence that human activities have had any meaningful effect on the climate.

That doesn't mean the climate cannot change

...

>Gamma ray bursts
>Bioengineered zombie mold
>AI going full Eclipse Phase but without the retarded commie shit
>People turning into barbarians because we have a gas shortage.
>All fine
>Global warming
>"Woah now that's a little too out there."

Ok so here is one completely scientifically possible

>Begging of a new Ice age, circa 1 million years from present
>Northern hemisphere becomes uninhabitable along with the Southernmost part of the southern hemisphere.
>Displacement of populations cause massive influx of people into the equator region that is still hot enough to comfortably support life
>Equator not being able to support all people leads to resource wars, which leads to breakdown of most governments, leading humanity into a new feudal age.

It makes sense in a realism perspective if you look at the cyclic nature of ice ages which generally begin right after global warming stops.

>Begging of a new Ice age, circa 1 million years from present

user, pic related walked the Earth less than a million years ago. Do you honestly expect Earth to be the only settled world in a 1000, let alone 1000*1000 years in the future???
Nobody can even begin to guess what the state off afairs will be in a 100 years, let alone ONE. FUCKING. MILLION years from now, but I'm pretty sure the post-post-post-human cyberbrain AI won't have difficulties dealing with a little bit of fucking ice.

>Implying humans will still be around a million years from now

I don't know about you, user, but I'm pretty damn determined to not die and so far I'm doing great.

>post-apocalyptic setting
>no bicycles
What's your excuse?

The apocalypse was caused by the destruction of pi.

Don't reply to trolls, retard.

It's not actually a post apocalypse. It's a failed colonization attempt. The ancient ruins are actually frontier spacer tech that eventually got overtaken by alien flora and fauna. Oh, and there are alien flora and fauna.

The world is by and large kind of desert-y because the terraforming attempt didn't take.

Fellow britfag here.
>all the towns and villages around me would now become states
I don't think you understand how much ground a single polity with 19thC tech can hold. Protip: all the way to fucking India.
Those with military power now will shitstomp industrial areas into powerbases and bootstrap back to blackpowder cartridges, minimum. After that, it's unification war time, and the strong will roll up the weak. Your villages will hold up against the Sheffield Regular Army for approx one long afternoon.
Coincidentally, military tech is usually well-shielded and robust regarding EMP risks, doubly so the stuff in mothballs. That's not even counting deliberate emergency stockpiles for EWar scenarios.

Eh, you are in that age range where you can low key want to die and live basically forever.

Hell, it's what Kurt Vonnegut did.

>muh realism

jesus fuck can't you guys just stop playing rpgs altogether?

I'm suuuuuure you'll be the one who doesn't die user. You're very special.

>implying OP plays

What? You guys actually play without a definite cause for the Apocalypse?

>What's a realistic, or at the very least, plausible apocalypse that can create a post-apocalyptic society, and what would said society plausible look like? /pol/, please don't distribute red pills like they're XTC pills at a rave. Keep it down a little.

I'd say that actually grandaddy nuclear isn't that bad of an idea, especially if it happened before the collapse of the URSS. Cars aren't that complicated, and why the fuck not? Petrol IS still extracted. Or we converted to biofuel.

Regions of the world like Europe are basically fallout Somalia, but there is no real "lost tech". The new superpower might be a shittier Brasil but it knows how to make vehicles and shit.

>tough most probably not worlddesert

If needs be, have nuclear + a metric shitload of epidemies that were even worse for total human population.

This would make for a great humorous fantasy/sci-fi novel/world. Just imagine all the mundane shit that would change just because there are no circles/wheels.

>URSS
>Petrol
France is cute! CUTE!

> pls no redpills
> bluepill retardation from TLOU being good or realistic to lolnihilism pops up all over the thread

> humanity at the brink of extinction
> half the population is gay
> protagonist has the opportunity to create a cure and save all of civilization but decides to save a dyke instead

Here's your (You), my bitter lonely friend

How about a psycho high-school girl brainwashing a bunch of young prodigies to destroy the entire planet? That sounds realistic.

Whenever the world as we know it ends, will it be in a well-written, interesting manner?

The Cuban Missile Crisis played out differently.

...

I dunno. Howzabout... An unprecedented Coronal Mass Ejection slaps smack dab on Earth. Normally just capable of frying electronics, this one has enough spare particles and energy to not just throw everything back to the stone age, but pretty much flash sears the planet. Folks who aren't working in pretty deep complexes are pretty much either boiled alive or roasted in the planetwide infernos. Not enough to destroy the entire biosphere of the planet, it nonetheless reduces everything to the good-ol Madmaxian climate we're familiar with.

Dunno the deeper science behind it, but that sounds demi-plausible to me.

flat tire

...

How long has it been since the catastrophic event OP? The prevalence of industry will strongly depend on this. Just after a society crashing event and continuing for months/a few years there will still be abundant gasoline and in some areas electricity until hydroelectric dams fail out from lack of regular maintenance and nuclear reactors run out of fuel and start cooling off.
Bikes as in bicycles would definitely be prominent, because they can be build with relatively low technology and are exceedingly useful if gasoline isn't readily available, and can even be converted into ghetto motorcycles with engineering skills that even a highschool student could learn.
Society would absolutely fracture along either class or racial lines, depending on the social dynamics of your fictional pre-apocalypse society. Eventually though the power will reside with those people who can provide the basic requirements for life like food, water, protection from other people and predators, and protection from the environment.
It would be a cold desert, or swamp, assuming enough ash and soot is ejected into the upper atmosphere. Runaway vulcanism caused by a severe asteroid impact could also result in the global winter scenario, as would high yield nuclear weapons detonated with the specific intent of hurling huge clouds of material high into the sky.

>XTC

Is this the way kiddos spell it nowadays? In my day we called it ecstasy, or just E. This is just fucking cringy

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>The party travels the wasteland in search of the rumored machine city, said to house prewar technology and wonders that could revitalize the devastated planet
>Frequently come into conflict with other treasure seekers, and the occasional roaming murder droid
>Eventually manage to piece together the location, scrabble enough tech together to hack their way in, fight through the automated security and finally reach the inner sanctum
>Then, a voice over the intercom
"Oh my god, would you idiots please stop wrecking our garage."
>Party is abruptly faced with the actual, advanced, functional defenses and is immediately subdued and brought to what is basically a hastily put together interrogation room/lounge area
>Turns out nearly all the robots have been gone for decades
>The random murder droids are just mindless husks put together by crazed tinkerers wanting disposable soldiers and not actually knowing how to control them
>They real robot society flew off to live in giant space colonies after humanity panicked at the machines gaining awareness and deciding to govern themselves, and dropped bombs everywhere until the robots all but yanked the triggers out of their hands
>This secretive outpost is run by a robot skeleton crew that keeps an eye on the Earth and shuts down anyone who gets too close to setting off more global annihilation, in the hopes of humanity eventually getting its collective head out of its ass and growing into a real civilization again
>The outpost crew view the whole assignment as an exasperating punitive duty

>cringy
Hi r*ddit

This is a great one. Ideally you'd keep that hidden from the players as long as possible. The alien life would just be passed off as mutations, and they probably wouldn't suspect anything was weird until they found files on a half junked computer with star charts and ftl jump calculations or something.

Here's mine:
Humans obtained Star Trek level tech but then got bored. They became shut ins, jacking off to holodeck porn or living the perfect holo narcissistic lives. Eventually, the tech breaks down due to no maintanence and no one bothering to learn anything. The survivors are well, something like the people on the Survivor reality show times 1000 in terms of mindset and behavior. How will they survive while backstabbing everyone for attention and resources?

...

I can't take all the credit, I'm stealing a lot of it from kenshi.
I fucking love anything that lets me play a bugman with a katana.

The best post-apocalyptic settings introduce the supernatural or fictional elements into it to explain why the world is so fucked up.

Fallout has nukes but radiation and mutation do not function like real nukes so its practically supernatural.

Zombie apocalypses are good too, as it also explains why people are still struggling to survive years later.

I'm also a fan of magic, alien, or psychic holocausts as well- the whole world now much different.

Also I guarantee you that all the major superpowers have a plan in case something like this happens.

I'm going to ignore the politcs for a second because there's something I really need to know. Does meme just mean "A thing what a person dunn said on the interwebs" now? I keep hearing it used to describe basically everything now.

Yeah, well something something gay frogs something something the earth is flat something something jewish lizardman illuminati.

The word has basically lost all meaning, yes.

I always thought that show Revolution did a pretty good job at it

Theres no more room in hell following a massive traditional war sparked off by tensions in the middle East caused by peak oil happening earlier than expected. This causes shitloads of ghosts to start popping up and causinf trouble. After a few years of ghostly chaos people start figuring out how to power a generator with the tormented soul of a captured ghost and now post apocalyptic screampunks wage motor war across the ruins of the world, fighting over burial grounds and against their angry inhabitants for precious ectoplasm to keep the engines running.

user, can you really not see the advantages of playing a more realistic setting or why people would derive fun from it?

I'd say 'stealing' but I've already got a setting like this.

I love how Metro does it, because a lot of the shit that's going down doesn't work from our modern understanding of science. Nobody really has the time to research anomalies and stuff either, because they're busy trying to form stable self-sufficient societies.

There's all sorts of theories as to why there are weird mutants and anomalous horrors, but none of them get definitively proven through the novels. Even the protagonist is vulnerable to CO poisoning and sleep deprivation and an overactive imagination.

For all we know the Dark Ones are space aliens and the Metro is purgatory. Half the things you hear are folk tales and superstitions on par with "toast lands butter side down" and "limes stop you catching scurvy."

Where the fuck are you lookimg where post-apocalyptic media isn't either zombies or (possibly nuclear) war?

Those are the worst post apocalypse settings. If you want to handwave that much, it's better to just go with the explanation found in the Road (movie; I actually haven't read the book) or Wool, for example. There, it's just "something happened and now everything is fucked up" and no further explanation given. Creating a true mystery, instead of just "hurr durr it was zombies/pseudoscience/ghosts from another dimension"

>everyone loses their sense of fashion
That already happened tho.

I like going the other way. The apocalypse is so unbelievably removed from common sense and conception as to explain why society has regressed or been altered to the point of absurdity.
>fey return to Earth, make contact with human beings
>A war ensues for unknown reasons
>The fey retreat into the Otherworld
>Humanity invades briefly, before nuking the absolute fuck out of everything on the other side of the portal, destroying it in the process
>Years pass
>The PCs play as remnants of the invasion force in the Otherworld, interacting with a magical wasteland populated by what remains of the faerie population
In this case, the PCs were just trying to get to the other portal (the Winter Gate) to escape back to Earth.

...

Veeky Forums had an interesting thread about mass clinical depression causing an apocalypse some time ago.

I've wondered when we'll get around to using induced clinical depression as a torture technique. We've got to be at least halfway there.

Between this, Evangelion, Nausicaa/Shuna and Saikano, Japs have some really damn good ideas how to make post-apocalyptic settings actually interesting beyond the old "Fear of the Bomb" trope.

What was the cause of YKK's apocalypse again?

To be fair, limes can be a major help in not getting scurvy.

It's never actually explained, as far as I remember. It is obvious that the ocean levels are continuously rising, threatening to eventually swallow almost entirety of Japanese habitable regions.
That said, it's further implied that something else also happened, presumably killing of majority of population, but it's never said what exactly it was. It's actually most likely the population decline, rather than the rising sea levels that are the true reason why humanity has given up. Similar in Jinrui was Suitai-shimashita.

My personal favorite causes of societal and civilizational collapses in real world history:

Çatalhöyük and early neolithic societies of Anatolia.
Early neolithic urban sprawl estimated to house upwards of 10 000 people around 7500-5000 BC. Died out because of goats, causing the civilization in the region revert to simple tribe-based hunting-and-gathering for another 1000 years or more.

Angkor Wat and the decline of Khmer Empire
Now here is a fun case. Apparently, Angkor Wat was mainly ruined by the fact that over thousand of years, water erroded stone-clad bottom of their advanced irrigation systems, amd the younger Khmer engineers had no idea how to fix it, resulting in an agrarian collapse.

So yeah.
It seems that historically, it's going to be some silly shit that causes agriculture to fuck up that is going to dissolve great civilizations.

From a campaign we had a long time ago
>An "evil" goddess from a fantasy world arrives, having been freshly chased off by the heroes
>Decides Earth looks just right
>Starts adding fantasy elements like monsters and magic
>Literally one day everyone wakes up knowing how to cast at least 5 different spells, each person gets a random selection of spells, some people get up to 15. Basically everyone is now a sorcerer.
>Absolute chaos as every fight turns potentially lethal and riots destroy entire cities with thousands dead as some dipshit inevitably casts fireball or chainlightning into a crowd and retaliations begin
>Prisons being emptied by people knowing teleport or destroyed by overeager guards
>Also there are fucking monsters prowling around from forests to alleyways

Also,so that most of technology would be wiped out it would require more than one solar flare of biblical scale.

You know, since half of the earth's surface will be turned away from the sun when it hits. That nighttime half will hafe the entire planet between itself and the initial flare.

>Single solar flare make bad apocalyptic scenarios.

>18th-19th century tech means devolving to city states
>Literal world-wide empires existed in the 19th century
Dumb.

>Died out because of goats
This doesn't feel like a full explanation to me.

Yo̗u̘̥͘r̻͍̠̠͜ ̜͔͕̥m̻͙͕̥̝i̤͚͕͖͇͖n̻͉̜̦̞d̪ ̷͉̟̤̳i̶̜̹̩ͅs̢̼͉͚ ̦̣͈͓͘ͅu̖͖͜n̵̼͉͕p̮̩͜ṛ͔̜̬̞̼e̝̳̭͓̰̙͝p͜a͔̼̖̠͝r̵̫̠̫̯e͙̬͎̬͉d͖̖ ̯͖̘͉̖foͅr̷̭͙̙ͅ ̨͎͇̤͎̬t̸͍̹̠̺̣̟h̸̩̦͎͇̖͎ͅe̳͓͔̻ͅͅ ̙͉͉̟̗̟̕f͔̪̗̣͔u̦̳̦̠͢l̸͖̻̼̫̙l̮̥ ͈t̮̫͇̭́ͅͅr͇u͟t̨̯̩͇̼h͙̹͎̩͕̭̳.̭͇͈̱͓̠̜

That is because you never played Dwarf Fortress.
Actually the real cause seemed to be just a lack of lumber and fuel. Which was caused by heavy reliance on goats in their economy. The problem with goats is that the little fuckers can eat tree saplings, causing havoc in the local tree systems replentishment rates. Goats eat the saplings, that means no new trees grow, that means that once you run out of already existing wood, you are fucked. It's actually that basic. Might sound boring,
but it was enough to cause an advanced urban society to revert back pre-pottery hunters and gatherers.

two things:
a) this seems cool but sadly there's something big in the way of a global EMP blast. The globe.
The night side of the planet would have the whole earth to shield it from the sun, and especially at the equator this would be more than enough.
Whatmore, large scale electronics would not burn through, so mechanical power generation like water dams and wind turbines and whatnot would all still very much work, and so would lightbulbs and such. Only microelectronics would become unusable from sparking.
old cars would see a comeback if their ignition is not microcontroller dependent.
Trafos would most likely be dead but they would be relatively easy to manufacture and nonconnected stockpiles might be enough to restore power to critical manufacturing sites which could take care of the rest.
More important would be the fact that most trucks would not work and thus food transport would immediately break down.

>or we would get over it (black death)

This is basically the point of any decent PA setting though. Being part of that recovery.

>hurr electronics don't work anymore means we'll turn into madmax

fucking retard. Have you never heard of the industrial revolution? We'll just revert back to that instead, while using whatever is left of current tech. Plus all the advancements in materials science and production techniques since the 19th century aren't just gonna vanish

The 19th century had like 6 billion fewer people, and large sail navies.

I just want to pat the sides of a fat goat.

No touching.

The b) was a lot of electronics still being intact

As a side note precisely because of this the airforce one is EMP resistant and some server farms and trafos are built into farraday cages precisely because we are overdue for another large scale emp blast which last happened in 1890 i think which today would knock us back to... 1890.

>6 billion fewer people
Just like how after an apocalypse there will be fewer people.
>large sail navies
Boats can never be built again? Lol okay cool.

So the answer wasn't a simplified "because goats" it was a failure to control their livestock and replenish their resources. Which makes more sense than just saying "cuz goats lol"

Cars don't need oil to run - it's not hard to remake them to run on green gas (which you could get from pileing corpsese into a barel and collecting the gas that they give out into a tank) or into electricity (and having a simple wind turbine out of old generator)

But what about the other side of the planet?

Oh, ok. Thanks for the explanation
I got the explanation, it's all good now. No need to belabor the issue.

>censoring it
Hi Tumblr

My wargame setting is humans had a collective psychic field but when the population started hitting 15 billion, the Earth couldn't contain all that psionic energy so released it in an event called the Cataclysm, which killed 9/10 people and caused magic to be a thing by resonating with the still oversaturated psychic field of the Earth. They defaulted to a fiefdom style rule, where the Reapers that could use magic ruled over their commoners and drained their psychic energy to make themselves immortal and enslaving other Reapers so there's no rebellion.

If you want the slightly more boring but plausible scenario. At least for the places that were not directly hit by an asteroid look at war zones. Syria is a good example.

Once central authority broke down, infrastructure, health services, social security all became irratic and non existent in certain areas. Society started breaking apart but things and organizations filled the void for better or worst.

The Hezbollahs/ISIS/Ethnic Tribal militias would vary by local flavour and conditions but theyre the type of people who will be enforcing order as things break apart. In America large tracts of the midwest, mountain ranges and swamp lands will have their own pickup truck militias. Some will earnestly protect their own reverting to a modern feudalism. Others will more likely degenerate to bandit kings and extortion rackets.

Any government that survives will be holed up in crumbling city strongholds that send armies to secure farmland and trade routes. Life in these enclaves will be shit but relatively safe and secure.

How about an apocalypse where a separation from all population pressures renders natural selection obsolete and people withdraw further and further from each other into their own little boxes indulging in their bizarre fantasies while they're governments slowly strip away their rights until the majority of the human population is reduced to oblivious subservient cattle?

Thanks Indiana, now all our bridges will fall down.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Because that's called a "dystopia," not an "apocalypse." Apocalypses are flashier than that. You could have that be the beginning of a kind of apocalypse, or an impetus for one (say some rebel group gets their hands on the nuclear arsenal and decides the only way to end this gov't is to blow it up), but it isn't one yet.

So any cyberpunk setting?

THE FUTURE IS NOW

Reading tip: Station Eleven

Also, I have to pay for my pills. I wish dealers would shove it down my throat like /pol/ does

You ever watch Threads? It's a fairly realistic depiction of what would happen if Sheffield (among other places) got nuked. It's fairly bleak

One badass retired Starfleet Command Master Chief whips everyone into shape and becomes their leader.

Hey, it happened on the real Survivor.

I've put some thought into a "post-Great War" apocalyptic setting before. Imagine if World War I had simply never stopped. The trench-warfare of Western Europe gradually expanded to cover the entirety of the continent as the Central Powers gradually shelled and gassed France off the map and slowly but surely advanced on Russia. The USA's involvement simply poured more men into the meat-grinder. New and more dangerous chemical weapons were developed as the war slogged on, and soon enough the majority of Europe, Western Russia, and the Middle East became toxic hell-holes where no one can live without advanced protective equipment. Fighting only escalates as nations become more insular and fanatical. The human population is reaching lows that haven't been seen since pre-history. The UK becomes a nearly-impenetrable island fortress populated by inbred soldier-citizens struggling to survive the constant bombardment from the shores of France. Remnants of the American Expeditionary Forces have formed militaristic tribes based out of disabled airships that keep them just above the thick fog of toxic chemicals below, sending heavily-armed scavenger teams to the ground in search of supplies. Some whisper of horribly deformed, blister-covered men who not only survive them toxic clouds, but thrive in them.

Across the sea, North America has been swallowed by a Dust Bowl that dwarfs the one of our timeline. Infrastructure and government has broken down as surely as agriculture, leaving a vast wasteland where America's heartland formerly stood. All that remains are shantytowns on the coast, remote Canadian villages, and the Republic of Mexico that has long since started turning away refugees with bullets.

Africa, now free of its European shackles, has dissolved into a thousand warlords and petty kingdoms vying for power. The further south you go, the more stable things become.

East Asia is now more or less a warzone between the Empire of Japan and China.

...

>being this bluepilled
>forgetting about the time Ice Age humans burned large swaths of forest in Europe to make hunting easier
>Europe historically had less forests because of this
>or the time humans nearly wiped out the American bison, which contributed heavily to the Dust Bowl
>or that there are literal islands made of trash in the ocean now