Stand Still. Stay Silent

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thx

Dunno about it but the setting is cool yeah, and open enough so could definitely be used as material.

That's exactly why I'm looking into it. Most settings my group hands me are to locked down or small to really do much with it. I already have a few ideas of what could happen. It will depend on what nationalities my group wants to play since each of the five approach things very differently. Starting off it will probably be either an expedition into Europe / England for lost knowledge or they will be assigned to a a previously unknown settlement of survivors and will have to protect it and explore / cleanse the surrounding area.

Could also be set to retrieve what seemed to be a successful knowledge hunter team. While everything seemed to be surprisingly ok so far, they suddenly stopped responding. Your guys are sent to see what's up since at this point they were close to the mainland, and only find one or two survivors. You manage to "convince them" to show you were they "dropped" the cargo they were bringing back, only to ends up surrounded yourself.
Guess the two npcs get gutted and your guys have to survive and eventually bring back whatever they can.
If they're still alive at this point jam their vehicle for a good measure and send them to retrieve parts to repair it, while maybe still defending their main settlement from random troll waves before finally allowing them to come back to the mainland.

Guess as a mecaninc infection immunity should be "buyable" while you create your character but you get pretty bad maluses, to encourage people to play dangerously for better stats.

>Guess as a mecaninc infection immunity should be "buyable" while you create your character but you get pretty bad maluses, to encourage people to play dangerously for better stats.

That's a way to do it I was going to do a flat roll based on the immunity %'s given. Pick what nationality and then you roll a d100 in front of me for immunity.

>Could also be set to retrieve what seemed to be a successful knowledge hunter team.
That sounds like a great adventure to throw in. Even set it up so that that team came with them to the settlement and just got the short end of the straw to be the team mostly going out. That way the players build up a relationship with them and gives a reason why they have a treasure map of hot spots and interesting locations.

The only reason I want to do the %'s is that I really want to play with the infection mechanic and how the PC's come to terms with their inevitable death and what they do with the time they still have. I don't want to offer a way for the whole group to be immune.

>Even set it up so that that team came with them to the settlement and just got the short end of the straw to be the team mostly going out. That way the players build up a relationship with them and gives a reason why they have a treasure map of hot spots and interesting locations.
Good idea. Your team could begin to cleanse the area ( ) while waiting for the other team to come back. After a few days without news, your hierarchy orders you to take up the mantle, leaving your cleansing job half-assed.
In the eventual "retrieve parts and fend off waves" part, the way you can spot foes could depend on the way your team handled the initial cleansing job.

Yeah, fit the roulette aspect of "either you're good, either you're shaking in fear everytime you have to go out".

>leaving your cleansing job half-assed.

Perfect for a surprise troll attack. Have an unknown waterway / cave system under the area that was thought to be clear then once the peasants move to start prepping the land for farming have them spring out. Perfect to start creating disention in the town

>We were FINE! before they came!
>They lied and said we were safe and now X and Y and Z are dead!

>Perfect for a surprise troll attack. Have an unknown waterway / cave system under the area that was thought to be clear then once the peasants move to start prepping the land for farming have them spring out. Perfect to start creating disention in the town
Especially if your team tries to warn people/their hierarchy that the job isn't done thorough and should be compleated to be sure. Yet still end up as the scapegoats.
Could force them into hiding/pressing forward into the unknown, hoping to find something good enough to buy their way back into civilisation.

Well as these two pages show. They are really pretty strict about the whole thing. Most military folk aren't ever allowed to return to safe and cleansed civilization. Those that do are in sterile rooms for at a minimum two weeks.

So if both the tentative government and the town they are in turn on them its going to be a shit fuck. Look at for how cut off some of these places are.

Talking this out more I think that yeah I am gonna run it because the potential for role playing the characters is pretty damn good with these kinds of possibilities.

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Here is where my autism-sense starts to tingle.

Indeed. In a time maneer it wouldn't work unless you use an ellipse, maybe showing newspaper pieces related to the problem to your player instead of hammering them with a long-ass explanation.

Or the waves thingy.

Whats wrong with it? Cats having a link to the divine / magical / spirits is in many cultures and beliefs. This is a setting where the Norse gods are real and Odin is a force on the world again.

It stays pretty tame;
They find one cat by accident, but he's not trained and only ever sense shit a few seconds before it goes down.
So far it wasn't enough to spare them.

What do you mean?

You sound like someone that's read the comic. Anything come up later on that would be important for a DM? I just started reading it tonight and taking notes

Well you could do fake newspapers pages, or even articles purposely badly cut out of a newspapers and pass them around while you kinda explain that you're moving forward.

I do. I haven't been rereading it in a long time so i probably forgot some important things.
Buta s far as things go:
Some trolls appear to have been able to live underwater. I have no idea if that's common, But since i figured that waters were mostly safe, this one was a surprise. It was also able to move a bit on the ground, but not so well.
Like said in the mage page, some are able to see spirits. That's extremely important since some spirits, while moving slowly,
are able to kill, or repurpose things on touch.
You don't want to go straight into a spirit pack.
They can't tank light well though.
Extremely powerful mages are able to manifest their powers over a really long distance, but it takes a massive toll on them.
Could be used for a npc character i guess.
Might seems obvious, but of course most books would be ruined by the time they spent being unattended. Some will still be fine,
but depending on the conditions, scavengers will end up disappointed, more than once.
Especially since they have no idea what's in the book since most can't read for shit and they'll end up taking useless crap with them.
Mages are the real deal, by the way. They're extremely efficient and can communicate between them while sleeping if they know the way. Using too much power fuck them up though, but still. They're strong. Even an untrained icelandic mage's runes are kinda useful if he tries his best while scribing them, even if he has no idea what to write and ends up with useless scribbles. So a confirmed one might be pretty efficient, especially since he can just prepare some before shit goes sour.

Oh you mean for time moving forward. Yeah I knew that would be a problem since there would be long breaks in time before interesting stuff happened.

The spirits will be fun. Are there any technological ways or well non mage ways to detect them?

>Well as these two pages show. They are really pretty strict about the whole thing. Most military folk aren't ever allowed to return to safe and cleansed civilization.

These two pages are from early in the story when world was just going to shit.

Later on they got procedures for quarantine etc going pretty smoothly.

Oh cool how far in is it? Can you share the pages or say what those procedures are?

>Are there any technological ways or well non mage ways to detect them?
No technology, only mages and cats. Or if you see one of the characters having a spaz before dying.

I just read the whole thing about a month back. Really excellent worldbuilding.

My friends and I did a very brief game that I did a homebrew system for, just to try my hand at it. It seemed to be alright, but we didn't run it for very long. You can tell, because there's not a lot of core systems (like experience and advancement).

docs.google.com/document/d/1V4Cbm5u4-MEJMqGJYXKh7S9WWbToR-dOQp_YbqkkpNs/edit?usp=sharing

IIRC two weeks quarantine to enter truly safe zones like iceland or sweden's island capital since there's a lot of non-immune people there. If you're infected it'll show up by then.
In the setting when you're immune, it means that - no chance of infection.

Can't remember the pages, but it's when they arrive in sweden's capital .

I would recommend taking a weekend to read up to date. It is really a good story.

Looked it up for you user,
sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=121
and the next few pages.

Thanks bros. I'm doing that to Probably going to read all of it this weekend and settle on a system and run it all by my players before getting into the real nitty gritty.

>the only remainder of Denmark is Bornholm

Truly this is the end.

Like, I'm a great fan of SSSS but I'm not sure I'd necessarily aim to run it. It's the sort of game that begs for a narrative heavy system because simulating the way that things work would be an absolute chore, but if you run it narrative heavy it's no longer really any different from the usual "post apoc dungeoneering" sort of vibe you have from a lot of games these days, which doesn't really do it justice. I mean, the whole "there is a party member who will become incurably ill and possibly some sort of horrid ayy lmao if they get so much as scratched" would be the one difference at that point.

I think, as shitty and dichotomous as is, it's probably the only way to add much needed spice to the game. Makes it a bit more Dark Heresy ish I guess. That's really the sort of vibe you'd need to strive for, for all that the SSSS setting has people being much less dickish to each other than in the Imperium.

If I'm nordic I would totally buy that poster and be smug that the rest of the world is "not worth mentioning"

>Ship goes into lock down
>Armors up
>Red lights everywhere
>Cat gets mad at people for talking

How far do these cats go? I'm all for magical companions but telling humans to shut the fuck up is a huge level of intelligence I wasn't expecting.

Except for the australian empire
Also, I like how they completely forgot about greenland and the faroes

No more than that, we haven't seen any trained cat since. This one is probably a A_rank to be able to do crazy stuff like that.

I'm assuming the setting works on a "what we know" basis which centers around the Nordic countries, for all we know there could be people war off doing their own thing with ancient deities, like survivors on New Zealand giving praise to Tūmatauenga or whatever. I can understand Greenland not having been contacted, it's actually pretty damned far, and the settlements are few and far between, so they would have to go sailing up and down a loooooong coastline to find any survivors if there are any. There's also the issue if the rampant alcoholism, drug and child abuse combined with a large dependence on supplies from outside Greenland. Even without monsters, Greenland is gonna be a horrible shit show.

dafuq
Hi fellow aussie user?

I kind want to know what happens to the swiss in their mountain hideouts too.

Maybe just a simple training of "if danger sensed, eliminate noise" + "hiss at humans to warn them"

I wonder when Scandinavians will figure out that large cats such as tigers would make good troll hunters and launch expedition to find and capture them for military purposes.

or it might regress into Vindland Saga level of epicness.

that's if any is left alive.
Some of the monsters seem a bit much for tigers to handle too.

>Tigers

That seems pretty far away. Its been 90 years and they are just now kinda sorta willing to go a little bit a ways from their cities. Would be neat for a scout seeing if there is other civilizations left from India or something. I'm actually really interested in the rest of the world. Even England and Ireland. They are both islands. I wonder how bad off they are.

I can dig that. Its a shame that there isn't another trained cat later on for me to see how far they go though.

I'd imagine an early die off, with many then choosing to grab doge and go innaice.

Sure they didn't survive in European zoo but there are might be Benghal or Siberian Tigers alive. If they are magically gifted like regular cats in this setting they should be able to handle anything short of giants.

looks like the japari bus

there are giant-sized monsters out there though
not sure how well benghal tigers last against indian elephants and a horde of monkeys

I wonder if by some magick marsupials are also immune and we'd have patrol platypuses and shit down under patrolling against dropbears

Iceland survives because they close borders. Maybe Madagascar?

You can see a few more trained cats in a few more panels doing stuff.

>Iceland survives because they close borders
Unlike other possible pandemic survivors they have General Winter on their side to kill the infected.

>elephants
Maybe there are giant infected elephants roaming dead European cities fused with infected monkeys

I wonder what that would even look like.

>absolute gibberish
SAD CAT

They should just weed it out ans stop teaching it to get rid of it because it is so different.

Nah, dat shit causes revolts.
Just make Icelandic mandatory education for everyone, like how nowadays most europeans speak English.

So Canada is fucked, eh?
I could see why they added it in, but I would concur that a language that different then your own would cause massive problems. Still made me chuckle with the gibberish part and the sad cat.

That's what I meant. Right now its mandatory to learn all or most of them for secondary education. They should just drop it. It will die off on its own.

I'm only on page 138 and one character can only speak Finnish and there are already huge language problems. So far he is also a mage and the best athletically by far. Cant wait to see him running in to camp screaming about trolls and everyone just looking at him like he is stupid.

This and Mortal Engines have been on my list of settings to use for a long ass time now. Haven't really gotten the chance yet, but a few of my players are massive post-apocalypse fans so with some luck it wont be long.

>Icelandic
>greatly resembles the old Norse spoken by ancient vikings
Nope. No. Nein. Njet. Dropped. Fucking droppd.

This is fucking middle schooler levels of "I have no idea about what I'm talking about but I'll just do it anyway."

Not gonna lie I love how the monsters look. I cant wait to discribe these things.

They seem to have modern enough ships that Greenland can't be that far or dangerous to sail to.

>even as a cat sweden looks like a condescending holier than thou know it all

10/10

Man magic is some serious shit. Full control of the weather is insane. I wonder how they figured out magic was a thing that exists now.

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They have enough problems getting a 5-man scouting crew approved, going as far as greenland aint happening anytime soon.

I am actually wondering about the technology though; I don't think there's many semiconductor foundries surviving if at all, which means all their technology would have regressed to early 80's at best.

also holy shit dat cat-tank runs for weeks without any refueling stop.

Think it's a pretty common belief even among Scandies that Icelandic or Faroese is closest to old Norse out of the Nordic languages.

Well in the page I just read only the militaries have cars since they have so much trouble forging new parts. They have civilian radio, streetlights and all that though. I think its not that they cant make them its just that they cant make much of them after all they build a rail system and fucking CHAINSAW TRAINS. So I think its just a production size problem.

A.....RE.....YOU.......LE....SS.......WEA...K....
THIS TIME?

I love this series. It's like Attack on Titan but actually good.

To further elaborate, I'd be tempted to make your choice of race from the stuff in carry % chances of XYZ rather than straight up bonuses or penalties. You can still end up with some useless fuck who is just there for reasons.

As other people have mentioned, it's probably an A-grade cat, which means it was specially bred and trained from birth in a facility specifically designed for the training of cats in useful behaviours for dealing with the infection. Considering dogs can be trained to shake, training a cat to shush is pretty feasible.

I should be really clear that it doesn't actually take very long to selectively breed animals for stuff like (the appearance of) intelligence and specific hunting behaviours from what we know experimentally, both from that fox domestication experiment and from the history of dog breeds. Grade A cats are likely an entirely different subspecies of feline to anything that exists today, in the same way that a Greyhound, Mastiff, Shar-pei, Basenji or Husky are all very distinct from one another physically *and* mentally due to their different roles they've been bred for.

There's good reason that the rest of the world is unmentioned though. It's true that the infection has jammed radio communications somehow, which is a fairly impressive feat that prevents isolated places that might somehow have survived, like Greenland or the backwoods of Alaska and Canada, from being contacted, the majority of the world can probably be assumed destroyed. This absolutely includes New Zealand and Aus.

I see that the point of view is seen from the Nordic countries, but is the rest of the world alive? I'm reading that some anons are talking about an Australian empire, but what of the Americas? Any Asian countries? Is Africa still the hellish nightmare as usual?

Disregard my question, by the time a posted it, the user above me already answered.

>It's true that the infection has jammed radio communications somehow

No shit? But they just said they have civy radio stations for music and stuff. Is it set up so that after X miles it just fizzles off into nothing?

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Yeah I have no doubt that there are machine shops, university labs, etc left in iceland at the very least. Just thinking about really niche, specialised manufacture like semiconductor, aerospace, oil refineries, heavy industry etc.

That reminds me, I wonder why there's no mention of aerial surveillance. We got from wright flyer to Boeing 747 in less than 90 years, surely they can make some baloons or propeller planes to scout around?

No idea I've been wondering that as well. With so much hostility on the ground why not just fly?

There are a few major geographic considerations to make something safe from the silence:
- The warmer the climate, the more active the infected are (We don't know how they'd respond to deserts though, they may not survive so well in dry heat, so that is one possibility.)
- Relatively low traffic to minimise the earliest traffic of the infected before the contagion was recognised. In this respect, New Zealand MIGHT be okay, but its certainly much more likely to see infection than the spots alluded to in SSSS. For the sake of memeing, Madagascar is probably doing okay at this point as well.
- Geographic barriers to prevent the early to mid infection traffic, and later to prevent the arrival of one single Beast or Troll dooming the entire country. The more separate islands, the better. This is the point where I expect a lot of the world's backwaters would die off even after achieving isolation from the infection. All it takes is one infected dolphin to skitter its way ashore and the wildlife on the island is now transmitting the infection actively as vermin beasts. New Zealand has an active rat population, for instance, so only the smallest islands could practicably be kept clear. Australia, much as the sheer distances involved can be very isolating, would eventually be covered in vermin beasts everywhere because almost the whole ecology is made up of mammals. You could argue small mercies like Emus being unable to be infected, but there are a LOT of Kangaroos, and they can cover a lot of distance. You might be able to set up some kind of bunker town out in the middle of nowhere, but you'll never, ever reclaim any more of the country than you can build an electrified wall around, and that probably means dying of thirst and starvation if you hit four digit population in your settlement.

- Frosts. To kill off the infected and limit their activities, but also limit the activities of local animals that are just waiting to become carriers of the infection.

>The average Finn

It's a common misconception you mean. None of the modern Nordic languages are closer to Old Norse than any of the others. Icelandic only sometimes appear to be because our primary sources on Old Norse are written in Old Icelandic and West Norse (both of which we know differ greatly from modern Icelandic regardless). It would be like comparing the modern Nordic languages to only Old Swedish and East Norse (of which we have far less preserved sources than West Norse) and conclude that Swedish and Danish are closer to Old Norse than their relatives.

Not to mention the many differences that do exist between our accounts of Old Norse and modern Icelandic, in particular as far as pronounciation goes. Icelandic doesn't preserve the vowel y for example, nor do they retain the long a/o sound and instead pronounce it similarily to how the vowel in dog in some English dialects is pronounced dawg.

God these things are terrifying.

Giant elephant turned upside down resting on the bed of dozens bloated monkeys, it walks on its hands

Yeah, homolust is pretty terrifying

>Just thinking about really niche, specialised manufacture like semiconductor, aerospace, oil refineries, heavy industry etc
Nokia is probably the most popular phone in the world

Aussie have a lot of marsupials, not exactly mammals. Whether they are immune or not depends on how the story goes.

Are there no rodents in Nordic?

>I refuse to give up my image of strayan roo patrols against dropbears.

>It's true that the infection has jammed radio communications somehow, which is a fairly impressive feat that prevents isolated places that might somehow have survived
It's probably related to evil spirits activity. Maybe mages could breach the isolation and contact survivors in other regions if there are any of them.

Forgot about knife guy's arm. Ouch.

Well that's one way to hold a bridge and stay safe at the same time.

Sounds like something out of a junji ito manga

You'll see when you read, but basically the infected themselves are all actively transmitting radio signals at a very low strength, once you get into a densely infected area that combines into a deafening amount of chatter, to the point that you need a mage to clear the airwaves enough to send or receive transmissions. Theoretically with enough mundane power behind your transmission you could just blast through them and overpower the "white noise" (if only it was just white noise), but a backpack mounted or even tank mounted unit doesn't have the sort of juice necessary to do so.

Anyway, with this in mind, the only people in the southern hemisphere who could certainly be doing completely okay as we understand it are say, the Falklands, maybe even some areas in the south of Chile. Their ability to collaborate in any way with the Nords? Negligible. Their relevance? Probably near nothing as well, they wouldn't be anywhere near as well set up as the Nords are.

New Zealand might survive in some form, but not anything like the New Zealand we know, and they probably don't "own" the entire place. They would most likely have to burn down entire islands, possibly multiple times. I'm not convinced they have the resources to do that.

For sure, magic probably does work elsewhere! But it's not powerful enough to save people from a completely untenable practical environment, there's not many mages and each mage can't do magic very often, and there's little cause to expect that to be hugely different elsewhere.