Post-Apocalypse Thread

Doesn't matter. What makes it good or bad has nothing do with the choice. It's all in your presentation, and you're going to do a better job of presenting what you're more enthused about.

Road warrior is what we're using as the standard for gritty? Because those movies were utterly ridiculous.

youtube.com/watch?v=BC8FxxvXYTY

While I lean towards gritty and realistic, I like to include a bit more comfy elements into it. Something calming about minimal people are and no light pollution to fuck with a starry night sky.

Yeah, I'm a fan. The Fifty One tribes for life!

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There is a post-apocalytic setting I wanted to do but never had the chance.

The apocalypse is a soft apocalypse, similar to the fall of the Roman Empire. Our current civilisation collapsed. The technology that was lost was lost because it was uneconomic to maintain those technologies.

Hm. No massive collapse, but falling population (somehow) reached the point where maintaining an industrial society became impractical, possibly due to rising costs of actually making living in a city and powering everything, for Reasons. Of course, on the way down the population slide people did put some effort in to leave a better low-tech world - engineer a bunch of plants and low-tech medical solutions, for instance. Common weeds with leaves that make good antiseptic bandages and help wounds heal faster, widespread fireflies designed to not be a pain in the arse but to be easily captured (or farmed) and used as light sources, high-yield crops that practically grow themselves, fruit trees with colour-coded fruit that's delicious when it's red, if you leave it up it turns green and starts fermenting, and you have a nice fruit full of booze when it goes yellow. And the red fruit is also a hangover cure.

Basically engineer the world into a weird sort of hunter-gatherer paradise.

What inspired me was reading about how the technology to make (Roman) concrete lost. Apparently, concrete required volcanic. During the time of the Empire, it was easy and cheap to get access to this material. The romans also had the money to fund the big construction projects. When the Empire fell, the infastructure to provide the ash and the money was gone and the technology became irrevelant.

We have similar situation. A lot of our knowledge and our lifestyles are dependent on the presence of the global market. Now the collapse of that would cause for many things to become irrevelant but many things would still exist since they still would be profitable.

The problem I am facing is figuring out what caused the collapse. I could just call it "The Collapse" and be done with it but I feel like the nature of collapse would greatly effect what came after it.

Oil, its predicted that if we lose our current organization we would not be able to extract oil anymore, because of how deep the reserves are.
Even if we had the knowledge, a collapse would lead us to lack the gear and organization able to extract them again, because all the easily obtainable ones we have already squeezed dry.
Imagine a world without oil (everything that oil is used for: fuel, plastic, medicine, fertilizer, etc.) and voila, soft apocalypse.

True. True.

You still could find replacement for the uses of oil but it would be in smaller quantities. Biofuel. bio-plastic etc.

So you won't have the massive cargo ships since now you can only produce smaller quantities of biofuel. So the trade networks are local or small quantity/high value. That could work. Thank you.

Fair, i should have said more grounded, compared to Fallout.

The Mad Max movies have always been R-rated Wacky Races. Gritty is more The Road, and Snow Piercer.

This is basically what I used in my game, but it was supported with few solar flares and subsequent famines and plagues that ravaged Europe. And not only oil, but basically every raw material is imported from China, South America or Africa. With communication, navigation and trade routes down, it took only few years for developed European nations to eat themselves and bash each other with sticks and stones. Why would China want to sell steel plates to somebody who don't have anything to give them in return? They just went and silently annexed Africa to keep their food sources secured. Same with Russians who just dusted their soviet tier machines and with army of conscripts took every small Baltic nation.

Perfect soft apocalypse and place to replay my Ottoman wars scenarios, but with vz. 58, tanks and artillery.

Interesting twist on gritty post apocalypse is movie Hidden (2015)

Right now I'm running a post-apocalyptic fantasy game ala "Wizards" using the Anomalous Subsurface Environment. If you're not into OSR stuff, its a batshit insane megadungeon. I've got everything from Elves to Mutants to Cyborgs in the game and it's fun.

I just picked up the Umerican Survival Guide for DCC (it's the Crawling Under a Broken Moon zine put into one book) which is basically Thundarr meets Fallout. I cannot fucking wait to run it. I also helped kickstart MCC, tho the setting isn't as interesting to me as Umerica. It's more of the Gamma World "hunter-gatherer-tribes-after-the-fall" kinda thing.

I don't think I'd be very good at running a realistic post-apocalyptic setting, but I would certainly play in one.

Gonzo:
- Mad Max franchise
- A Boy and His Dog
- Waterworld
- Wizards
- Planet of the Apes 1 & 2
- Turbokid
- Hell Comes to Frogtown
- Tank Girl
- Desert Punk (anime)

Gritty:
- The Road
- Book of Eli
- The Survivalist
- The Postman
- Snowpiercer (still a little goofy)
- The Day After
- The Quiet Earth

Fuck you and your Mad Max ripoff. Fallout took nothing from your Kevin Costner ass.

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I’m a looking for a post apo system. I’m torn between Mutant Future (though I’m not a fan of the descending ac), Mutant Epoch and Other Dust. Any other suggestions?

Mutant Year Zero is really cool.

2nd'ing the Mutant: Year Zero system... As for systems in general you have:

15 Years Later
Aftermath
Atomic Highway
Crawling Under a Broken Moon
D20 Modern - Post Apoc stuff
Degenesis
Degenesis Rebirth
Fallout RPGs
Fuck Armageddon
Fragged Empire
Gamma World
Godless
Gurps
Hell on Earth - Lost Colony
Metamorphosis Alpha (Gamma World per-cursor)
Mutant Epoch
Mutant Future
Mutant: Year Zero
Numenera
Other Dust
Post Apocalyptic Hero
Ruinations
Savage Worlds
Scrappers
Sorcery & Super Science
The Dying Earth
The Rad-Hack
The Quiet Year
This is Not a Test
Wreck Age

Never heard of this one before - thanks. I'll have to look it up.

I will say I used D20 Modern for my Post-apocalypse campaign. It's... okay. Not great. It's a d20 system, so the good thing is that you can actually use a lot of D&D stuff from it if you want. Like I used a few monster manual critters in it, and it worked out really well as "mutants".

I'm going to shamelessly steal a few from D&D and elsewhere. My MYZ players have already heard rumors of a "Hooten-Bahr" mutant (i.e. an Owlbear).

Which critters did you use as mutants in your game if I may ask?

Posting my shill game.

The Author / Artist for that game is damn skippy prolific. I haven't played it, but it does look cool.

Let me dig out the monster manual real quick, but some I remember off the top of my head:

I used:
>Umberhulks
>Ghouls
>Chokers
>Hydra (used it once as a "god" for a tribe), worked great because it was nigh-unkillable by projectile weapons
>giant bugs (like spiders, also swarms)
>Darktentacles
>Dire animals like the Dire Elk (they even LOOK mutated)
>Fihyr (aberrations are great eldritch horrors, they all look like Centaurs from Fallout)
>Greenvise (killer venus flytrap)
>Hook horror
>Meenlock (I didn't make them particularly intelligent, they were basically stone-age savages
>Megapede, killed with a shit-tone of artillery
>Mudmaw (crocodile with tentacles)
>Phase wasp
>Rust Monsters (eats equipment real good, and makes sense to live in sewers/skyscrapers

A few other homebrews too. Usually I just drop the spell-like abilities unless that is their sole combat ability. But many D&D monsters have enough abilities AS IS that it's only fair to drop the supernatural stuff in a non-supernatural campaign. If you can justify it, then keep it (ie., phase wasp now shoots acid, the ghoul paralyzing touch is now a poison, the rust monster is still just a dick, the hydra is a super-charged mutant with insane regen).

Thanks! The Hydra idea would work for a swamp area I've got on my map. MYZ has a number of giant insects and harmful plants. But having more variety helps keep the players guessing about the nature of their opponents. As for the 'Rust Monster' - MYZ has 'Air Jellies' that don't harm flesh but will corrode metal gear quite well.

>not mentioning the real post apoc
>being that new

Yeah you wanna be like me, like like me

Candy-Gram!

The PCs: "Oh Shit! Land Shark!"

3rding Mutant: Year Zero.

It's got a great, quick system with a few nice complexities to make combat fun. Super gritty RAW, lots of great setting and adventure ideas/seeds. There's a bunch of supplements that add cool stuff, like Waterworld type island hopping zones, and Genlab Alpha which is a fenced in zoological park filled with animal mutant clans overseen by totalitarian robots.

OH, yes I forgot I use the Land Shark too. It's fucking great, no one expects the Land Shark.

For the swamp area I had, I used the Meenlocks as a tribe worsphiping the hydra, the hook horror, the hydra they narrowly avoided, the dark tentacles, the greenvise, and the mudmaw. Oh and the Umberhulk. Great sessions, was a lot of fun.

If you're looking to play a OSR/Rules-Light style post-apoc game, I made a homebrew called Ruinations based off LotFP with bits of Mutant Future (mutations) and DCC (mighty deed dice) thrown in the mix

>ruinations-rpg.tumblr.com/

I should specify, for the Land Shark I used the Bulette, which is heavily armored with a shit-ton of Damage Reduction. Which conveniently means it can shrug off anything that isn't a .50 BMG.

I like gritty sans grit.
WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERY POST APOCALYPTIC GAME TAKE PLACE IN A DESERT

can I do a gritty game in a forest setting?
a world given time to overgrow suburbia and the edges of cities.
storm drains flowing as secret rivers.

>Horizon Zero Dawn
my nigga

but DAMN the plot wrapped around the end of the world was so depressing it nearly turned my stomach...especially the fate of Project Zero-Dawn...

but that setting was fantastic. a little too techy for me to be fine running it, but only just.

>I like my apocalypses full of cannibal mutants, mad robots, and tall, statuesque, women with massive, brightly coloured, hair, and scrap-metal bikinis who call men 'man animals'.
you can have everything up to but excluding the "man-animals" bit in the aforementioned Horizon ZD setting

>Basically engineer the world into a weird sort of hunter-gatherer paradise.
I like this actually.

...watching Leverage lately (its coming off netflix in november)
a blight on all the worlds wheat(or all cereal grains as a whole). all of it. GONE.
that much of the worlds food gone in days would kill people, panic would set in . the economy would suddenly upset. food can still be produced, but a vast majority of it just, goes away.

BAM, apocalyptic economic collapse.

thats a little softer than global famine, BUT I like the idea of oil empires crumbling because people can't be fed to work.

>Snow Piercer.
man, fuck that movie was awful

I might resort to this just so I can have players that know how the system works.

Honestly, D20 modern can work. It really, really can. But you will probably need to shoe-horn a couple things in.

>stimpaks
Yup, I did it. I had too, D20 modern is... well, realistic healing compared to D&D. 1d8 HP per stimpak, could be used up to 5 times before being used up. However, players started spamming them, so "'stimpak overdose" became a thing. Granted, my post-apocalypse took place after a 2040's WW3, so you will have to adjust the tech as you want.

>weapons
You really have to mix it up. There simply isn't much progression in weapons IRL. Starting them with non-masterwork then moving them up to masterwork weapons can help a bit, like "old beaten AR15" isn't masterwork, but a new/perfectly preserved one is. You may have to homebrew some IED rules too, since players will presumably seek to craft a lot of those (mine did). Simple components are either ammonia nitrate (fertilizer) and fuel, or ammonia nitrate and aluminum powder (paint stores). Just a handy tip.

>Armor
This is actually a strength of the post apocalypse setting; no one cares if you are running around with a plate carrier, unlike real life. I personally prefer armor as Damage Reduction, but the only time I did that it didn't go super well, so ymmv.

>raiders
This is hard progression to conceptually explain. Why are some raiders weak, while others strong? Usually you can justify it by saying the weak raiders are splinter factions, or just less organized. I really like to make each raider faction unique; look at the vidya game RAGE for great examples of distinct raider factions.

As I mentioned earlier, it honestly is really nice to just pop open the monster manual and dump a "mutant" on them.

>HZD
muh gentleman of nubian decent. It's a really refreshing setting, horridly depressing how often do we see a true, 100% "they killed the world" apocalyse?? , and I'd love to run a game in it personally, just use breath weapon stats...

That’s a list! I’ll check them out thanks.

Well the book came out in 1985, I've never seen the movie but I am sure it does not compare at all.

I’ll check this out

>I might resort to this just so I can have players that know how the system works.

Go full fantasy, based on stuff like HZD and SMTIV.

Society's only just rebuilt to medieval stasis style, the land is full of ruins from the ancient empires before the collapse. And technology has become magic.
Think of a wizard as like Aloy, using her focus. Moving her hands around, muttering words, and then suddenly knowing something impossible, or figuring out a weakness in an enemy. Combined with various arcane relics (such as firearms), they can produce terrifying effects.

And of course, magic items are ancient relics of the precursors as well.

Instead of the usual orcs and goblins, you can throw your heroes up against things like Grimlocks or Quaggoths, the degenerate mutants of the wilderness.

The book and the movie have almost nothing to do with each other. (Unless I forgot a scene in the movie where The Postman has a conversation with an abandoned government AI, for instance.)

There's a scene like that in the book Eternity Road, where an AI for a metro is almost sentient, and asks to be shut down permanently.

>stimpak overdose
yeah, thats something they could almost put into fallout games as a "hardcore mode" feature

>weapons
orders of precision could stand in for grades of weapon.
damage remains the same, but accuracy over range increases, or reliability increases, or automatic fire actually works. all of that as order of craftsmanship increases. BUT if you go too high ammo becomes an issue, if you don't know what it is look up what "match-grade" ammo is. its the same caliber, and it fits in the same guns, but the difference can be STAGGERING.

>explosives.
TOO MUCH SHIT EXPLODES
for real, you can make bombs out of too many things. in an apocalypse where you have access to 1st(logs) 2nd(lumber) and 3rd(paper) order refined goods and up you have too many ways to make shit go boom. especially if there were any Burt Gummer types out there willing to keep hard-copy text-books about that stuff. the best you can hope for is making it really difficult, and/or catastrophic failure(and the loss of critical digits/extremities) becomes an option.

>armor
I have always been a fan of the "steel belted radial fullplate"
but its almost heavier than steel and mail with a better level of impact protection.
as to that thought, and especially in Europe. there are actually a LOT of people that know enough tanning to make leather gear, up to really high levels of quality, artisinal smiths too(I actually know one that specializes in charcoal forges and hand tool only constructions, he's a pretty cool dude). don't expect too many people in more than sheet-metal armor, but you can expect high quality hardware in a lot of places

also artisan enclaves
>tradesmen who keep their secrets, train loyal apprentices and keep things "in the family" with knowledge that valuable you can afford trade to keep guards, and pay for high walls, at least for a little while.
you could have the better armed guys be employed by or working with these organizations.

Dude book was epic, and most definitely not like the movie.

yeah, I went pretty /k/ with it (cuz I'm a cross boarder anyway).

As for IEDs, one of my party was OoC an EOD bomb squad guy. Let's just say I learned probably way more than I should about IED design, it was really great. I learned a few new uses for things. But for the sake of brevity and ease I mostly limited collection to Ammonia Nitrate and Fuel, with the caveat that if he said it could be used I'd allow it (because I'm not going to argue with a guy with 3 EOD deployments about whether something can and cannot be an IED).

We did the artisan secret thing, for a guy who was among the last surviving cyberwarfare guys, and another who was an old air force mechanic. It came in handy when they were trying to refurbish an F-16 to get it flying again for a faction, and when they were trying to hack into an ancient US supercomputer to get access to a cache of war material.

I think, in a weird way, it was cathartic to be the IED maniac for him. Like it was a way to use all that knowledge he gleaned offensively, instead of defensively. It got really sadistic, to the point that when some raiders tried to attack their home the scene looked like the result of a brainstorming session between the IRA, the Vietcong, the Taliban, Cobra, and ISIS.

...you know, this applies as a comparison I think...
youtube.com/watch?v=5TQARRckm6U

"do you actually know what a bomb like that does? because I do, intimately"

(You)
>raiders
treat it like raiders bands are each a separate party
knocking over a handful of people(like a party) might not be worth it to a large group of raiders or to a group of really GOOD raiders. not enough loot, swag or other goods. but as the party raises the quality of their shit, smaller raider parties become trivial, and better groups recognize how cool their stuff is, and try to take them down for it(better raider encounters). renown is another thing too, as the party gets better known people come out of the woodwork to try and take them out for reputational reasons

mutants are good, but they are inimical to certain settlements.

>how often do we see a true, {spoiler} apocalyse??
>how often do we see a true, GOOD {spoiler} apocalyse??
never seen one that has not raised so few questions
>running a game in it
what was that about breath weapons?

and that would be pretty cool but I'd worry about my characters trying to craft a way out of things, or else have them being 3-6 flavors of the same noble savage? I'd have to pull the "secret knowledge" cards on them to stop them from trying to do things...

>Go full fantasy, based on stuff like HZD
HZD wasn't really full fantasy though.
granted Aloy was a typical protagonist with similar levels of advancement above typical(but even THAT was well-done in the game)

>one of my party was OoC an EOD bomb squad guy.
okay, for real, I am so jelly right now...
I got an electrician, stenographer, teacher, and a furniture-mover.

>We did the artisan secret thing, for a guy who was among the last surviving cyberwarfare guys, and another who was an old air force mechanic.
so either they were REALLY REALLY OLD, cryostasis subjects, or passed down some really crazy shit "just in case"
>imagines the cyber-warfare guy passing down hacking like the tech-preists of mars
>muttered songs full of mnemonic devices makes that "secret tradesman" look and sound a lot more like a"raving lunatic"

>HZD wasn't really full fantasy though.

I dunno, You're playing a hero created by the goddess, in the hopes that you can defeat the demonic god of death, who plans to destroy the world by raising a long dead army who destroyed the world once before.

Sure, we know about things like AI, and the Faro Swarm, and so does Aloy. But it's still a good model for Post Apocalyptic/Post Post Apocalyptic Fantasy

fine, I'll concede the point...

but that GAIA component could have done a WAY BETTER job managing the cauldrons and designing things...

How would I make dark sun more like fallout, destiny, and barsoom? I want to make it more like like fantasy post apocalyptic. In fifth edition of course.

>more gritty realistic depiction
stone tools for people who cant get metal...

Oh they weren't like super-super-super old, it was some 70 years after the nuke war, so there were still a few super old guys petering about in high end settlements. One of them WAS cryogenically frozen though, the "ark" was supposed to wake him up when a command code would get sent, but his ark got damaged so the code never sent. The Air force mechanic dude really was old, but arguably the most important part about him was that he had his old credentials that the base still recognized (to let them get to some sweet F-16 parts, a few working JDAMs, and tooling).

Oh as far as breath weapons, there are the bloated flamethrower dragon things. If I was running it in 3.5/5e/4e, I'd just use a lot of the construct rules and give them breath weapons like similarly-leveled dragons. That's probably the easiest way to make an ad-hoc HZD robot.

The Watchers would get something like a Eldritch Blast of 2d6 or 2d8 (if I want them to be extra lethal), the dogs with the plasma cannons on top would get something similar but with the autofire trait (to hose down an area), the really big dog things would get a stronger version of that (2d12s), Deathbringers would get something like that too for their MGs, but then they'd get grenade launchers of like 6d6 and a rocket launcher of 8-10d6 depending on how sadistic I felt. Plus I'd be that DM who throws on some damage reduction, maybe some nerve gas (like the spell Darkness but with a damage effect) to deter people from getting super close.

It may sound harsh and a rough boss fight, but those bastards DID wipe out pretty much all life on earth

I see.
any body penalties for old man age?

any charisma penalties for stasis and being out of the loop locally?

>old but valid credentials
actually thats kind of fuck-awesome
its a good twist.

yeah, I still don't like the idea that a bunch of savages could take anything larger than the Scrapper-wolves at any numerical advantage. now I have to wonder if there could be easy stats for all the machines in d20 either for modern, 3.5e or 5e D&D. cause I could really get behind a primitives post-apocalypse game.

perhaps
so, instead of the farro-swarm it was like this. a group created a distant-planet terraforming system and fired it off at some planet. it glitched in the case of the setting planet, and HADESed the world at a just post-industrial level. enter the start of game one of the party is secretly a clone made in the mold of Aloy Rostchild, from there they all go on an adventure to stop the onset of a repeat destruction

what I wonder at is what other things the GAIA program might emulate in the process of terraforming

in HZD she took a liking to animalistic creations, horses, bulls, birds, etc.

but what did they do?
what did these machines do for the environment?
(actually knowing might help me in figuring what else might be inside such a machine, and allow me to limit what exactly the players might find gutting a machine)

what did she create for the oceans?

Yeah the body penalties were high, he had "VITAL NPC, DO NOT DROP, FRAGILE" pretty much taped to him. The other guy had a severe issue adjusting to the fact that his family was gone, etc., and gave the party a glimpse of ruined-America's glorious past and what WW3 was like, so when they finally hacked their way into the NORAD system (long story) and found that they could remote-launch a still-idle MIRV at China, they all did it out of spite. Note they werent generally murderhobos either, but hey I guess "i launched a nuke" was just too good to pass up.

Now as for fighting the robots, players would have to get creative with the approach. They are tough. They are deadly. There are plenty on monsters, like the Bulette, that easily fit the bill, just call them "robots" and call it a day. Anything that has decent Damage Reduction could easily get palette-swapped into robot-hood, since Damage Reduction usually involves impossibly-thick bone structure or insect chitin anyway, which is very analogous to metal armor. Eventually the party may get to a cache of pre-doom weapons that even the odds, but until then they will probably struggle.

>they all did it out of spite.
...was china still a thing at the time?
or did they just nuke the balls off a bunch of random apocalypse survivors?

>the struggle against robots/monsters
true thoughts.

and it might be fun to see if they take specialist roles, just to see what happens

Oh as for what they DO i have a few theories.

the Stags seem to grind up the Earth. Either they are collecting soil samples or tilling/seeding, or controlling root formation.

Watchers/scrappers MAY be a population control mechanism, to manage wildlife.

The fire-spitters may be a way to control the wildfire cycle. Some climates depend on that.

The T-rex things... not sure. HADES took over that, maybe? Or maybe they were used to corral or direct herd behaviors?

Elephant things- best guess is that they are engineers. Real elephants can move debris and alter streams, so these may have the same intent.

The birds may be used for arial imaging and helping to disperse seeds, much like real birds. They could also track environmental atmospheric data.

The long-neck tower dinos clearly are a GPS sorta thing, likely linking to all the other robots world wide, like cellular towers.

As for fish, you'd want something that monitors chemistry. Acidity and solute concentrations are critical to oceanic health.

They just sucker punched some Chinese survivors over in Shanghai out of spite 70 years after the war ended. It was a throwaway joke about a MIRV being on standby, and they escalated it. China was a literal non-factor in the campaign, other than the intro exposition of US vs China for ww3.

>WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERY POST APOCALYPTIC GAME TAKE PLACE IN A DESERT
I know, right? Mad Max (2) was set in Australia! It wasn't even nuked, in-setting! It already was like that, civilisation just collapsed after the rest of the world nuked itself! IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THAT BECAUSE IT'S POST-APOCALYPTic

(that said I do love the mad max a e s t h e t i c, it just doesn't suit everything and shouldn't be the whole of post-apoc style)

>the Stags
grazers
and about the only things I could identify the purpose of.

>Watchers
I think from their actions in game they identified things like damaged equipment and signaled danger to herds or summoned the Scrappers

>scrappers
its right there on the tin what they do

>fire spitter
hmmm, I hadn't thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense

>t-rexes
maybe a counter to any post-activation Farro-swarm remnants?

>elephants
where were there any elephants?

and that is how you go full chaotic-psychopath

yeah, deserts are cool sometimes, but I really like forests

and yet most of the post apocalypses I see are either deserts or dead decaying forests

The behemoth things. Rare, some people thought they looked more like Rhinos, i thotght they looked like elephants.

The longhorns and bulls im not sure of. Flattening fields? Preemptively making trails?

The Thunderbirds are probably an arial counter-FARRO thing too if the Trex is, there arent many other reasons to be so well armed. MAYBE they help influence weather and spark forest fires too, not sure.

And yeah it was a dick move to put it extremely mildly (nuking people at random that is).

REMAIN INDOORS

>And yeah it was a dick move to put it extremely mildly
...are you, like, British?

>As for fish, you'd want something that monitors chemistry. Acidity and solute concentrations are critical to oceanic health.
so jellyfish for monitoring.
great big whales for filtration and dispersion.
squid and octopoidal forms for species placement and coral farming
what could be the tide-pool caretakers I wonder
ray/skate forms for seeding and dispersing algae. in attempts to alter atmospheric gas levels

all of the above can even come in great big swarms/pods

>whales manage the chemical levels
>mecha-whalers hunt them for their valuable stocks of rare chemicals
>whaling, whaling never changes...

The wiki divides the machines into a couple of classes:
>Acquisition - Gathering resources, terraforming, and purifying. (Striders, Scrappers, Snapmaws, Grazers, etc.)
>Transport - Collect resources from the Acquisition class and transport it to their cradle. (Behemoths, Bellowbacks, Shell-Walkers)
>Recon - Help the Acquisition class detect resources (Watchers, Tallnecks)
>Combat - Destroy the threat to the other machines. Only appearing since the derangement. (Sawtooth, Stormbird, Thunderjaw)

So if going for an aquatic theme, you might have whale-based transport classes, shark-based combat classes, jellyfish recon class, or squid and crab based aquisition class machines.

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Im not British but it is hard to convey the surprise I had when the actually did it. I expected them, if anything, to try to disarm it or something because they had been a good non-murderhobo party up until then.

That sounds pretty solid if you are doing a coastal/island/Great Lakes campaign.

I love these, im a slut for Mad Max-esque cars

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These are making me want to run my idea for a Peasant/7 Samurai post-apocalypse campaign even more

>It is a very realistic and balanced setting

Yes, Hippy super-soldiers. Realistic.

DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE EVENT

George Powhatan was a great character and the book establishes that in the last years before the war all the crazy science fiction secret weapons were coming out into the open. Its not like there are hundreds of them running around, we see four of them and they themselves state that they think they are the last ones. I would love to play a character like George in a game, he seems like he would make a great twist on a standard "barbarian" type.

One of the most interesting parts of the book to me are the little bits and pieces of the years of conflict and then the war. I really liked how it was explained that even after World War 3 everything would have been able to be rebuilt, but it was the various ideological struggles after the war that tore society apart.

Don't forget GURPS: After the End!

Also Shotgun Diaries is pretty specialized and minimalist but I've had some great fun with it before.

Are those Bone knives?