Has anyone played shadowrun in a post-apocalypse setting. Better yet, has anyone run shadowrun in this setting. I'm going to GM in this setting soon and would like some comments on what the world would be like. Corparation, dragon, runner attitudes in the new world. Also, I'm going to be running it in a Rifts-like setting ( BUT NOT IN RIFTS! Mostly because the system is horrible.) So any suggestions on cool locations and NPC types would be appreciated...

Harlequin's Back or there is the classic adjustment of Planet of the Apes

Don't forget that there will not be pocket secretaries. There will be Pip-boys instead.

Also, the only megacorp worth talking about is Vault-tech.

Don't forget Fallout and Fallout 2. A the final run of the sage could be to find a G.E.C.K.

Harleys not bad. I wanted to mention that I figure dragons wouldn't view (meta)humans as play things anymore because the're a real life threatening creature. So the ones left would be trying to erase or subjugate humanity.There couldn't be many left. I don't want this to turn into a dragon hunting game. (And what PC could live through a dragon hunting game anyways?)

Fallout! Thats good material.

As for dragon populations: most dragons laired in locations at least as safe as a Vault-tech Luxury City Vault with fortifications. So don't expect many to die from the nukes.

You could have a few dragons who chose to let some population of humans hide in their (secondary) lairs in exchange for their servitude and that of 2/3 (rounded up) of their descendants. The other 1/3 (rounded down) is encouraged to either willingly enter servitude or search for other sparks of civilization.

Toss in ghouls, mutants, and the occasional godzilla footprint and you have yourself a setting.

I've thrown around a post-apocalyptic Shadowrun game in the past, but never made much headway in putting a game together. An environment with limited resources has a certain appeal. Players would start to think things over before they unload that last clip of ammo that they had to trade everything they owned for. You would also have to have a Bartertown that is run by dwarf named Masterblaster, that's a given.

As far as settings, it would probably depend on how long after the bombs drop and what cities did not get a direct hit. Early on, I could see Seattle or most cities ruled over by warlords who are continually at war. Runners could work for one of these warlords or just show up in town and get first hand knowledge of how visitors are treated or welcomed if they have the right skills. I could see powerful mages or shamans with their own domains (Think the war wizards from Thundarr the Barbarian for this one).

I think the key factor in a game like this is the players will always be in need of something that loads of nuyen will no longer buy them. Whether it's weapons, ammo, or that much need replacement part for that 10 year old cyber limb that tends to freeze up a lot in combat, bartering will become a primary skill and your players will always be thinking of what they can trade that latest acquired item for.

That's a setting with some great story potential. There's a few obvious changes because of it of course. Cybered characters are at a *dis*advantage, because in shadowrun, cyberware needs regular miantiinance. which would be increasingly more difficult to find. For a real laugh, let someone start with as much beta and detla grade ware as they like. Only beta or detla ware grade clinics and hospitals can service their ware, how many do you expect to see operating?

Reading through the comments about dragons in a post-apocalyptic world, I'm reminded of the movie Reign of Fire. Ignoring anyone's opinion of the film, that might make a very interesting alternate Shadowrun setting.

I remember that a long ago (that is, atleast one or two forum versions ago ) someone posted his "Rude Awakening" alternate setting, that had the Lone Eagle incident as its point of divergance from the Cannon timeline. In this version, it did hit, and caused an all-out nuclear war between the USA and Russia. If you could track down this post, it might provide you with interesting information on this subject.

This has been bantered back and forth with people doing a number of the quickie conversions.

Super-mutants = trolls
Stimpacks = suped up nano-healers, one shot use

And so on.

I don't know of anyone who's actually run it, but unless the characters are based in a town, expect combat to be kept to a minimum. Biotech doesn't help when you're in the middle of nowhere and let's face it, random mutant scorpion encounters just suck.

Geckos are worse.

-Siege

You can get some good inspiration without looking far. Bug City. The CZ has a lot of those elements. Restricted resources, warlords, radioactive areas, etc. The Chicago CZ is a mini apocalypse. With bugs.

Don't forget about all the Manawarps that would be cauesd from the nukes.

But you guys fail to see that nukes do not work in the shadowrun universe. they just simply don't. Everytime a nuke has come up in the fiction of background it has always failed to detonate. So there for Shadowrun will never be a post apocolyps world like Rifts or mad max

As the background count clearly demonstrates, the Cermak Blast went off.

~J

If you really want an idea of what Shadowrun could be like post-apocalypse, allow me to make a suggestion.

Look at the game Tribe 8, by Dream Pod 9, who did Jovian Chronicles, Heavy Gear, Gear Kreig, and the upcoming Core Command.

Tribe 8 at DP9.com

The long and the short of it is that in the future, mankind's world gets shattered by a bunch of extradimensional beings called Z'bri, which are basically the Horrors. They come through, and the dimensional gates which let them through seal them off from their home, driving them totally nuts. So they set about enslaving humanity and doing horrible things to them and feeding off of pain and misery, ala Earthdawn. Humans set off a buncha nukes (which they don't explicity SAY, but becomes apparent in expansion books when you find radioactive, glass-bottomed lakes surrounded by remnants of cities) and the world is plunged into the dark ages. Cue forward a couple hundred years, some humans break free of the Z'bri, and decide taking the world back would be a good idea.

It's just about the best RPG nobody's ever played.

Cermak worked, but it was weird IIRC. Didn't it only blast a small area, when it should have been a full force nuke?

I knew there was something funky about it, just couldn't remember what it was. How 'odd' was it?

When Cermak went off inside a hive at the peak of a giant investiture ceremony while enclosed in wards and barriers of incredible power, its 5-kiloton warhead was restricted to a blast zone in the hundreds of meters (an unrestricted blast would have widespread damage out to over 1 kilometer). The resulting radiation fallout ends somewhere near the 1 kilometer radius range, while the actual mana warp (background count 6+) doesn't start until closer to 500 meters from ground zero.

Ok the proof. The nuke launched by the Vatacun in Black Madonna never went off. The one in chicago did not work as planned or to the best of my knowledge did not go off. But there is one more but I cant remember the where and when.

I think the point is that nukes need to have very strong wards and enchantments to make them go off. Mmmm.... Winternight...

Nope unfortunatly Bug City was one of the books when I was playing 2nd ed that never got around to picking up. As for the bug spirit thing I feel its something that 3rd ed should just move away from. I never really liked the way it was dealt with in UB, not saying that it was not a good book or idea its just that I really didnt care for it.

Uh. I was referencing the fact that the Cermak Blast was a huge friggin' nuke contained by magical forces!

I mean, we only just talked about it on the previous page.

<smacks tanka on the nose with a rolled up newspaper>

Down boy! No need to get uppity.

Feh. I just get a slight bit peeved by people who don't read posts between their own posts. Seems kind of silly, as most of the time their questions are answered then.

So, why does fusion work? Why does any fission work?

Why?

If nukes don't go off, why is it that the base particle activity which creates all the fun effects of a nuke work just fine?

it's magic. ooooOOOOOooooo.

It works, but not well. See all the meltdowns that happened around the Awakening.

~J

so with the whole 'nukes not working' thing, my first GM many winters ago told me that the dragons caused it somehow... I took his word as the gospel truth, but now after reading a little bit have seen nothing to support it. But at the time, he said that somehow harmful nuclear reaction (ie bombs) would no longer work on account of some magic. I think his explanation for the Cermack bomb working was that it was shielded from the nullifying magic by all the wards and things in place where it was detonated.... It sounded all right to me, but again: it was probably just my GMs BS.

I doubt it, but it's possible. Who got the production notes for Bug City?

~J

In the interests of returning this thread to the original topic, I will point to the Atomic/Magic page, courtesy of the excellent Ancient History. That is where we discover that there are lots of meltdowns, Isreal nukes the hell out of Libya, the Lone Eagle missile doesn't go off, Cermak does, and Shiawase patents cold fusion. In all, fission, at least, no longer works as we once thought it did, leaving the door open for a nuclear apocalypse, especially if the corps go to war and launch along with everyone else.

That's actually an interesting scenario. Have the megacorps start it, possibly leading to a "evil, nuclear-overlord corporations vs everyone else" situation.

Fission does work (they built a fission plant on top of Glow City's old one), but there was a "reaction" to the Awakening. There was no mention of a second reaction during the Comet. We also know the Saeder-Krupp and Ares have stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and they wouldn't if they didn't work.

Israel also nuked Libya 8 years before the Awakening...

Kanada makes the most cogent point yet: Why would megas and nations keep nukes if they were useless?

More to the subject at hand, it's possible that nuclear blasts could open astral rifts similar to those created by the Aurora Borealis. Where these rifts lead would be anyone guess. We also know that Toxic and/or Mutated Salamanders (Spirits of the Flames) spontaneously manifest around Trinity and other nuclear weapons test sites. And we know that a cult called the Atomic Kiva has a leader that claims to follow the totem of Atom.

Depending on the extent of destruction and the timeline, I see an end to society as it has ever been know. The people* that remain will have armies of robots under their control which they use to squander the remaining resources of Earth in order to build their space fleets. Most of the megacorporations will have drifting colonies, like giant hives exploiting the asteroid belt. Mars and Europa will be the new battlefields in search water, clean water. Magic will be unstable everywhere, but usable (just dangerously so). Parasites.

* Their minds supplemented by AI and merged into vast machines, these mechlords control their armies directly; riggers who's thoughts bring down storms of fire. Once the nukes have been used there's no reason not to keep using them, micobombs the size of cigarette that can level what we might call a city, but to them is only an oil rig.

The humanists will use genetic manipulation to create half breeds immune to radiation. They battle the mechlords using the twisted magic and cobbled technologies. Existence is all that matters, they feed on the leftovers that the machines consider unprofitable to harvest. Toxics.

Who says that a post-apocalyptic setting has to be caused by nukes? Sure, nukes are the most classical of causes, but there are bioweapons (work VERY WELL in Shadowrun), astroids, socio-economic breakdowns, mass-scale conventional wars, and, ofcourse, the magical causes - Winternight, Horrors, Bugs and others.

Crimson - because those things are too much fun to keep around, just in case they do work. A single nuke represents a lot of time, money and effort to just toss out.

Joel - I don't think you can count Winternight as a strictly magical threat since they are trying to bring about a nuclear winter with...well...nukes.

-Siege

Whatever

I don't know if anyone realizes this, but Nukes require constant maintainence and are very expensive to just "keep around".

Why would countries and corporations have them around when it would be less expensive to dismantle them? Unless of course they're just sitting around gathering dust, then that'd be a good reason why they're not detonating properly.

And if they ever start working again, it would be even more expensive to rebuild and re-arm.

Nukes have been the "ultimate weapons" for a long time before the Awakening. Most people in a position to use a nuke are probably highly reluctant to give up what used to be the biggest stick on the block.

-Siege

What do you mean by 'constant maintenance'? As far as I know, all you have to do is replace the deuterium every few years, and all that does is increase the explosive power, not create it.

Plus, inside missiles and shielded silos, the radiation is contained...something it wouldn't be if they dismantled them, and then they'd have to put all that Plutonium 239 somewhere... it just doesn't disappear when you dismantle the bombs.

Keep in mind that I think that nukes still work, if not as predictably as they once did, but:

If you were a mega, and you had nukes, and they stopped working, and you got rid of them, would you let that be known?

~J