MadNES I – Whatever Happened to the World?
NES Concept
The world as we knew it ended about a decade ago, all that heralded its end was a bright glow against the horizon, then the power died, the water stopped and in the morning all that could be seen of the sun was a dirty smudge a pale pasty yellow glow hidden behind a dark grey sky. People looking all over the country that morning must have seen what first looked like a thin layer of black snow, some remarked that it looked picturesque worryingly for some, it wasn’t snow it was ash. The day never brightened, the sky was grey and the light was so weak that the day became grey as well, the night well it continued to be as dark as ever.
The world began rapidly to collapse, the authorities some claim struggled to restore order but most never saw them, local officials knew nothing more than you, what is clear is that they failed. The power in a few places flickered back to life briefly, in some areas it stayed on for a while, but the TV’s didn’t work all that people could get out of them was static, radios scanning the airwaves might sometimes pick up hints of foreign languages spoken in other countries, heck they might have even been our authorities trying to talk to us but nobody could make that call, the static was to bad. People sat in their homes until they exhausted the food they had often only three days worth in some rare cases longer. They stood around the empty supermarkets and restaurants even after it was clear that they no longer had food available most had run out in the first days panic buying. The old currency was worthless, new currency had to be found and desperate people were willing to pay anything to secure a mere day more of succour.
No single factor stopped the authorities the mass of factors overwhelmed them. Policemen were unable to deal with the rash of burglaries and theft that broke out. The regular military had other ways of dealing with the problems, but they couldn’t be everywhere in the country, most acts of early lawlessness went unpunished. It was simply beyond the authority’s ability to deal with the sheer numbers of starving people in most cases, including themselves. The problem was magnified by an inexplicable collapse of any semblanche of central authority; many military units received only one set of orders before their superiors went silent. Reports were sketchy, a soldier in passing might be heard to mention to his comrades of whole regions of the country laid waste, tree flattened and fires burning. Many now looked to the skies at the black palls of smoke that in some areas stretched as far as the eye could see with a newfound degree of understanding. Some people speculated in the intervening years that these flattened areas represented a separate disaster from the first, noting that the characteristic fires were seen a few days after the greyness descended. They came to be known as Witch-fires and the few survivors who reached them learned to avoid them... why well there are rumours.
Those in the cities fled first, food troubles hit them first, chaos erupted and no amount of “justice” could stop it. Severed road networks, power plants that didn’t work, water pumps that didn’t run because of the blackout, were the initial things blamed but on a simpler level those who could have supplied the cities were instead thinking with a part of the brain so seldom used before it happened, the bit that demands survival. The fleeing masses thinking with brains that were conditioned before it happened naturally went down the Highways and major roads fleeing somewhere anywhere, some thought of distant relatives in the country who might help them or though that maybe that somewhere it hadn’t happened, many didn't know where they were headed but they went nonetheless anywhere.
The first towns along the routes of the fleeing masses, had the best chance of fending them of, they of course still had the means of repelling them with force, that was before the force that most could exert was down to what they could fashion with their hands. Being shot didn’t break up the masses; there was a more terrible option that truly chilled them to the bone, for amongst the sheep their will always be wolves. The first people knew of this new terror was finding the ashes of cooking fires with what looked like human bones in them and someone in horror might notice that a friend or loved one had vanished… people in a flight of fancy of the old world might mutter to themselves about “zombies” of course the “zombies” had a more terrestrial origin, other people. People began to band together, this succeeded in most cases, the fleeing rabble began to organize, of course the sheep sometimes harbour wolves, and it only took one wolf slipping away to inform his pack about the whereabouts of the flock to create problems. The people for the most part abandoned the main roads, they were no longer safe, but as the prey moved on the hunters followed, so eventually most roads became unsafe. Eventually many of the sheep changed into wolves, or at least vultures…
What you know:
Most people are dead, plague, starvation and each other have wrecked havoc on the populace, the survivors are noticing increasingly that they amount of people they might hazard across has been declining.
Most of the terrain has long been picked clean after a decade, animals are dead, only those animals that feed on the deceased or could attack survivors lived and even they have begun to become rarer as people have become rarer, acid rain falls in bouts, the vegetation is dead with massive fires raging in the relatively dry summer while during the winter the smell of rot is omnipresent, the temperature has dropped how much well that’s up to you, the water is full of ash drinkable but only with care, fungus is the only thing that is flourishing in this rotting world and even that is dying as the nutrients are exhausted.
NES Rules:
Basically you will play a survivor, whether you choose to group up or not is entirely up to you, you will start out in the country, there will be no map posted unless you find one and it will likely not be accurate. This NES encourages stories, however I would prefer if you tried to keep away from driving the plot if you will, the plot will unfold as I want it to, but feel free to write about past experiences and what your character might have learnt to help them after the disaster. Also feel free to expand your characters background, when events have appeared feel free to write about them I encourage it. Stories about trying to find goods from plot devices I have established are welcome, of course I will say if they succeed or not.
To illustrate the point:
You will need to think in detail about situations when you are foraging, you will need to be opportunistic and methodical.
If for instance I gave you a situation with an abandoned Gas Station, with two pumps, a simple glass front with a single counter, and an old repair shed. You can of course check the main tanks which sit under the pumps and supply it, more than likely they have been pumped dry along time ago. If you were to enquire as to what is in the repair shed I might answer, a tool box, two old trestle work benches and a couple of cans which are full of what could be water. Of course the obvious candidates have been looted, the tool box is empty and the trestle work benches have nothing on them however with a careful search you might decide to check the dirty looking water, and guess what it isn’t only water, you manage to siphon of a vaguely lumpy substance, that when you light it appears to burn…
Another example would be if you were to walk into a Gun Shop, naturally the shop has been ransacked, however if one of you decides to spend some time investigating it you might find out after moving a counter a loan .22 bullet that rolled under the counter at some stage. Of course figuring out what you can use it for is up to you.
People will of occasionally present themselves, I will provide a brief of the person, this might give a hint of what the person is or was and other useful snippets you might pick up, a distinguishing mark might hold some secret meaning. I will then depending on circumstances present a transcript of the person’s story, what they are asking for or what they are offering. The players will of course be allowed to cross-examine the person to check their reliability.
Of course time is of the essence, I will make calls about the time taken to search something or do something. You must think of the most efficient means of using your time to find the essentials of life. I will be flexible if you can come up with a reason why I should be.
Profession: You will be able to choose a profession, you could be a doctor or a soldier or a biologist or a poet or whatever. This will give you special knowledge in things that relate to your chosen profession, a doctor will be able to split a broken arm, be able to understand if drugs you have found are still useable and the like. A soldier might be able to figure out a way of using the .22 bullet in a 9mm handgun or at least taking the primer out and gunpowder out and putting it into a 9mm bullet. A biologist might be able to tell you what fungus is edible and what is a poison…
Hobbies: You will be able to choose hobbies, what you choose is up to you, but keep in mind this being a sports shooter might not be terribly useful in a world where guns are rare and bullets are almost non-existent. It might however help you at least to fumble to make a snare…
Interests: Interests is a harder category to define, you might be interested in reading but never have had a book collection. Interests will be perhaps the most random ability, a person with an interest in reading might happen to flick through a sodden book and find hidden in the middle something useful…
Group: Your group you will form in the early days, I’m assuming you will all start in the same general geographic region and I will once you have founded your group have you meet up.
Inventory: Your inventory will be blank for the moment it will be your job to tell me what you managed to grab during the early days, be aware a decade has passed.
Clothing: Clothing is important, the cold, rain, lack of sunlight mean you are constantly wet and cold and constant hunger makes that worse, a good pair of boots is the difference between cutting your foot on something sharp in your shoe, not noticing because its numb from the cold and getting an infection you cant fight of. You will be assumed to start of in a multiple layers of what once resembled clothes now they are just rags.
Physical Condition: Your physical condition will cover your general health as has a relationship to your hunger; I will note injuries in it. If you break your foot you will have it listed and likely have a note saying you cannot walk without assistance let alone forage.
Hunger: Hunger is always around in this NES, the human body can endure a lot, but go to long without out it and you will die simple. Prolonged starvation will weaken you and you will not be able to fight back if attacked like could normally do and you probably cannot run as fast.
Template for your survivor:
Name: [insert your name here]
Profession: [you may have 1]
Hobbies: [you may have 3]
Interests: [you may have 2]
Group: [leave blank]
Inventory: [leave blank]
Clothing: [leave blank]
Physical Condition: [leave blank]
Hunger: [leave blank]
Final Notes: There will be no cavalry arriving, there will be no “we stumbled on a secret military base” unless you have put the hard leg work into it. I do realise this is similar in theme to germanicus’s NES, however I have taken a different focus, micro as opposed to macro. This was originally going to be a zombie survivor NES but I wanted to test my concept first.
If anyone could show me a NES that had a similar concept so I could check my rules against it and try to anticipate any problems please do. I wrote these rules without any knowledge of previous attempts so hopefully they should hold up.
Special thanks to PL and the poor Mods and NESers who have had to put up with my penchant for destruction.
NES Concept
The world as we knew it ended about a decade ago, all that heralded its end was a bright glow against the horizon, then the power died, the water stopped and in the morning all that could be seen of the sun was a dirty smudge a pale pasty yellow glow hidden behind a dark grey sky. People looking all over the country that morning must have seen what first looked like a thin layer of black snow, some remarked that it looked picturesque worryingly for some, it wasn’t snow it was ash. The day never brightened, the sky was grey and the light was so weak that the day became grey as well, the night well it continued to be as dark as ever.
The world began rapidly to collapse, the authorities some claim struggled to restore order but most never saw them, local officials knew nothing more than you, what is clear is that they failed. The power in a few places flickered back to life briefly, in some areas it stayed on for a while, but the TV’s didn’t work all that people could get out of them was static, radios scanning the airwaves might sometimes pick up hints of foreign languages spoken in other countries, heck they might have even been our authorities trying to talk to us but nobody could make that call, the static was to bad. People sat in their homes until they exhausted the food they had often only three days worth in some rare cases longer. They stood around the empty supermarkets and restaurants even after it was clear that they no longer had food available most had run out in the first days panic buying. The old currency was worthless, new currency had to be found and desperate people were willing to pay anything to secure a mere day more of succour.
No single factor stopped the authorities the mass of factors overwhelmed them. Policemen were unable to deal with the rash of burglaries and theft that broke out. The regular military had other ways of dealing with the problems, but they couldn’t be everywhere in the country, most acts of early lawlessness went unpunished. It was simply beyond the authority’s ability to deal with the sheer numbers of starving people in most cases, including themselves. The problem was magnified by an inexplicable collapse of any semblanche of central authority; many military units received only one set of orders before their superiors went silent. Reports were sketchy, a soldier in passing might be heard to mention to his comrades of whole regions of the country laid waste, tree flattened and fires burning. Many now looked to the skies at the black palls of smoke that in some areas stretched as far as the eye could see with a newfound degree of understanding. Some people speculated in the intervening years that these flattened areas represented a separate disaster from the first, noting that the characteristic fires were seen a few days after the greyness descended. They came to be known as Witch-fires and the few survivors who reached them learned to avoid them... why well there are rumours.
Those in the cities fled first, food troubles hit them first, chaos erupted and no amount of “justice” could stop it. Severed road networks, power plants that didn’t work, water pumps that didn’t run because of the blackout, were the initial things blamed but on a simpler level those who could have supplied the cities were instead thinking with a part of the brain so seldom used before it happened, the bit that demands survival. The fleeing masses thinking with brains that were conditioned before it happened naturally went down the Highways and major roads fleeing somewhere anywhere, some thought of distant relatives in the country who might help them or though that maybe that somewhere it hadn’t happened, many didn't know where they were headed but they went nonetheless anywhere.
The first towns along the routes of the fleeing masses, had the best chance of fending them of, they of course still had the means of repelling them with force, that was before the force that most could exert was down to what they could fashion with their hands. Being shot didn’t break up the masses; there was a more terrible option that truly chilled them to the bone, for amongst the sheep their will always be wolves. The first people knew of this new terror was finding the ashes of cooking fires with what looked like human bones in them and someone in horror might notice that a friend or loved one had vanished… people in a flight of fancy of the old world might mutter to themselves about “zombies” of course the “zombies” had a more terrestrial origin, other people. People began to band together, this succeeded in most cases, the fleeing rabble began to organize, of course the sheep sometimes harbour wolves, and it only took one wolf slipping away to inform his pack about the whereabouts of the flock to create problems. The people for the most part abandoned the main roads, they were no longer safe, but as the prey moved on the hunters followed, so eventually most roads became unsafe. Eventually many of the sheep changed into wolves, or at least vultures…
What you know:
Most people are dead, plague, starvation and each other have wrecked havoc on the populace, the survivors are noticing increasingly that they amount of people they might hazard across has been declining.
Most of the terrain has long been picked clean after a decade, animals are dead, only those animals that feed on the deceased or could attack survivors lived and even they have begun to become rarer as people have become rarer, acid rain falls in bouts, the vegetation is dead with massive fires raging in the relatively dry summer while during the winter the smell of rot is omnipresent, the temperature has dropped how much well that’s up to you, the water is full of ash drinkable but only with care, fungus is the only thing that is flourishing in this rotting world and even that is dying as the nutrients are exhausted.
NES Rules:
Basically you will play a survivor, whether you choose to group up or not is entirely up to you, you will start out in the country, there will be no map posted unless you find one and it will likely not be accurate. This NES encourages stories, however I would prefer if you tried to keep away from driving the plot if you will, the plot will unfold as I want it to, but feel free to write about past experiences and what your character might have learnt to help them after the disaster. Also feel free to expand your characters background, when events have appeared feel free to write about them I encourage it. Stories about trying to find goods from plot devices I have established are welcome, of course I will say if they succeed or not.
To illustrate the point:
You will need to think in detail about situations when you are foraging, you will need to be opportunistic and methodical.
If for instance I gave you a situation with an abandoned Gas Station, with two pumps, a simple glass front with a single counter, and an old repair shed. You can of course check the main tanks which sit under the pumps and supply it, more than likely they have been pumped dry along time ago. If you were to enquire as to what is in the repair shed I might answer, a tool box, two old trestle work benches and a couple of cans which are full of what could be water. Of course the obvious candidates have been looted, the tool box is empty and the trestle work benches have nothing on them however with a careful search you might decide to check the dirty looking water, and guess what it isn’t only water, you manage to siphon of a vaguely lumpy substance, that when you light it appears to burn…
Another example would be if you were to walk into a Gun Shop, naturally the shop has been ransacked, however if one of you decides to spend some time investigating it you might find out after moving a counter a loan .22 bullet that rolled under the counter at some stage. Of course figuring out what you can use it for is up to you.
People will of occasionally present themselves, I will provide a brief of the person, this might give a hint of what the person is or was and other useful snippets you might pick up, a distinguishing mark might hold some secret meaning. I will then depending on circumstances present a transcript of the person’s story, what they are asking for or what they are offering. The players will of course be allowed to cross-examine the person to check their reliability.
Of course time is of the essence, I will make calls about the time taken to search something or do something. You must think of the most efficient means of using your time to find the essentials of life. I will be flexible if you can come up with a reason why I should be.
Profession: You will be able to choose a profession, you could be a doctor or a soldier or a biologist or a poet or whatever. This will give you special knowledge in things that relate to your chosen profession, a doctor will be able to split a broken arm, be able to understand if drugs you have found are still useable and the like. A soldier might be able to figure out a way of using the .22 bullet in a 9mm handgun or at least taking the primer out and gunpowder out and putting it into a 9mm bullet. A biologist might be able to tell you what fungus is edible and what is a poison…
Hobbies: You will be able to choose hobbies, what you choose is up to you, but keep in mind this being a sports shooter might not be terribly useful in a world where guns are rare and bullets are almost non-existent. It might however help you at least to fumble to make a snare…
Interests: Interests is a harder category to define, you might be interested in reading but never have had a book collection. Interests will be perhaps the most random ability, a person with an interest in reading might happen to flick through a sodden book and find hidden in the middle something useful…
Group: Your group you will form in the early days, I’m assuming you will all start in the same general geographic region and I will once you have founded your group have you meet up.
Inventory: Your inventory will be blank for the moment it will be your job to tell me what you managed to grab during the early days, be aware a decade has passed.
Clothing: Clothing is important, the cold, rain, lack of sunlight mean you are constantly wet and cold and constant hunger makes that worse, a good pair of boots is the difference between cutting your foot on something sharp in your shoe, not noticing because its numb from the cold and getting an infection you cant fight of. You will be assumed to start of in a multiple layers of what once resembled clothes now they are just rags.
Physical Condition: Your physical condition will cover your general health as has a relationship to your hunger; I will note injuries in it. If you break your foot you will have it listed and likely have a note saying you cannot walk without assistance let alone forage.
Hunger: Hunger is always around in this NES, the human body can endure a lot, but go to long without out it and you will die simple. Prolonged starvation will weaken you and you will not be able to fight back if attacked like could normally do and you probably cannot run as fast.
Template for your survivor:
Name: [insert your name here]
Profession: [you may have 1]
Hobbies: [you may have 3]
Interests: [you may have 2]
Group: [leave blank]
Inventory: [leave blank]
Clothing: [leave blank]
Physical Condition: [leave blank]
Hunger: [leave blank]
Final Notes: There will be no cavalry arriving, there will be no “we stumbled on a secret military base” unless you have put the hard leg work into it. I do realise this is similar in theme to germanicus’s NES, however I have taken a different focus, micro as opposed to macro. This was originally going to be a zombie survivor NES but I wanted to test my concept first.
If anyone could show me a NES that had a similar concept so I could check my rules against it and try to anticipate any problems please do. I wrote these rules without any knowledge of previous attempts so hopefully they should hold up.
Special thanks to PL and the poor Mods and NESers who have had to put up with my penchant for destruction.
Stats: 
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