Looking to breathe some life into your post-apocalyptic world and make it a little bit different than your typical end of the world scenario? Well, look no further. This series will do just that.
“To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own.”*
If Pacific Rim taught me anything, it’s that I will pay a good deal of money to see giant robots punch giant monsters. And then Gareth Edwards released Godzilla in 2014 and I was again reminded of how much I enjoyed watching giant monsters on screen. But as I stated in another piece, I don’t feel they work particularly well on the table. Too often they become walking, city-destroying stacks of over-inflated hit points. However, I do still think that they have their time and their place. And one of those places is in destroying the world. It’s not a hard scenario to imagine – one or more creatures of titanic scale and power wreaking havoc on a world that was unprepared and unequipped for them. Or worse, two or more opposing creatures that fought each other for dominance, and the world was caught between them.
What does this new world look like? What powers did these creatures have? How long ago did they wreak their destruction? Are they dead or are they still around? These are all important questions that the GM needs to answer before starting a game. If the monsters are all dead and gone, then the focus of the game becomes one of rebuilding from the destruction and fallout caused by them. You’re going to have to figure out who and what these monsters were and what special abilities they may have had that could make things difficult for the PCs. Maybe one had acid blood and much of the world’s potable water was contaminated as it stalked across the land, its wounds bleeding into the lakes and rivers polluting them, or seeping into the soil and contaminating the ground water. Maybe one had fire breath so potent it razed the forests from the earth and scorched much of the soil, making it impossible to grow crops. Maybe one commanded the weather, changing the patterns, bringing cold where it never was, freak storms during calm times, and torrential rains that flooded out certain areas. There really is no limit to what you can do with this.
If the creatures are dead, answering what they were is a little bit less pressing of a matter – maybe the dragons rose up to destroy the world instead of commanding it. Maybe these were creations of the primordials, sent to the material plane to wreak their vengeance on the gods. Maybe they were simply creatures from another dimension that stumbled into our realm. Maybe they were aliens from another planet, à la the kaiju from Pacific Rim or Lavos from the video game Chrono Trigger. Whatever they are doesn’t really matter if they’re gone. It’s background material that can be used during the game.
However, if they’re still alive, the game becomes one of survival. How do you fight what you can’t kill? These things are massive and impossible to fight without proper equipment. Maybe the PCs are part of a program like the Pan Pacific Defense Corps in Pacific Rim and are able to stand against the monsters with suits of armor that are able to level the playing field and make them their equal. Or maybe they have access to special magic or technology that allows them some other way of fighting back. In this case the game takes on more of a classic action type of game. And if the rules have a way to support this style of play, it can be a lot of fun for some players. Just be aware of the dangers involved in that kind of scale.
Or maybe they can’t fight back. Maybe survival is their only choice. In this case the game becomes one of stealth, survival, and tension as they strive to find new places they can hole up and try to stay ahead of the monsters that are destroying their world while they search for ways to fight back. Maybe the monster isn’t the one that is necessarily destroying the world because it wants to, but is simply passing through, leaving parts of it behind that are then causing further destruction. The PCs are still going to need to handle the actual disease, but for the moment, they need to fight the symptoms. This can give you a more classical high action type of RPG adventure while still keeping the scale in check. The monster is capable of creating smaller monsters that terrorize and destroy the world that the PCs can fight against in order to begin to purify the world.
You also have to ask how the rest of the world reacts to these attacks. If the monsters are long dead and gone, then you’re probably going to have smaller communities with much of the existing infrastructure destroyed or otherwise damaged. If the monsters are still active, you have to decide how the rest of the world is choosing to combat them. Are they trying to defend the large cities with whatever conventional military forces they have? Are they evacuating the cities and sending their people to places with smaller population densities? How are they coordinating these evacuations or defenses and what are they doing about the probably destruction that these creatures are wreaking on their infrastructure. You could have entire adventures where the PCs are trying to hold out long enough against whatever is advancing on the city in order for it to be evacuated, or even defending a single bridge or train track or flight path.
This kind of apocalypse scenario can work in any setting in any genre – fantasy, modern, or science fiction. Modern is probably the strangest of these, but with the proper reasoning behind what these giant monsters are and where they came from it can be wildly successful. Just ask Godzilla.
*Pacific Rim, 2013
Ben Erickson
