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Originally Posted by Ursus Maior
That goes in the direction of my thinking as well. Texas will probably take decades to clear and clean up, but it would be an important project for the generation of T2K-millenials in the US, due to resources and LOCs across the Americas and the Gulf.
The drought seems extremely over-written. By that time, most survivors would likely have been relocated to arable lands or found themselves a plot to farm. The US would de-industrialize heavily, but small workshop industries would soon spring up in the newly found farming communities and nearby larger cities. The knowledge is still there and some of the tech-base and critical infrastructure as well. Rule of thumb might put the US at 150 million survivors in the early years of the 21st century. They would boom incredibly fast, probably generating the largest generation since the baby-boomers, due to available space, food and lack of social security. Infant mortality would be much higher, of course, but with local antibiotics and vaccine production (it's not that hard technically, if you know what you're doing), that'll be manageable as well.
It would be interesting to narrate, how the survivors incorporate the inevitable rise in misformed infants due to radiation damage to parental genomes. That could go very different, depending on the local community.
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IIRC, even as far back as ~1979 when the Office of Technology Assessment published "The Effects of Nuclear War", the Northeast US imported about 90% of their calories, so there would be a precipitous die off and/or population migration there. But not 90%. The Northeast actually has some decently productive agriculture potential, it just isn't economically competitive with 10,000+ acre agricorps in the Midwest at pumping out corn and wheat. And with the lights going out, the offices and factories closing, and no more welfare or social security payments and no more grocery stores, probably in the short run, pretty much everyone becomes a gardener, a farmer, a soldier/militia person, or a predator. Or dead.
A big determinant of any given locality's ability to arrest the slide into anarchy, starvation, and apocalypse would be the ability to procure enough food to sustain the population through to get the local harvest in...and the ability to get enough seeds to get a local harvest in. There would be lots of surplus labor available to hand till and weed fields.
I actually think for the US, the period between Dec 1997 and Nov 1998 is one of the most potentially narratively rich and under developed areas. There's a short lived period where things appear to be recovering a bit, but then the transportation system collapses and national government ceases and areas are left to their own devices.
This is where you see groups like the Texian Legion rise in East Texas (in my Head Canon, I have them being an amalgamation of the Texas State Guard, military "deserters" from the Red River Army Depot, biker gangs, and lead by a corrupt Sheriff - whose brother is a leader of a biker gang, forming up to "deal" with refugees streaming north from the Houston/Beaumont areas in the south, and Shreveport in the East). In the absence of Federal and state authority, other entities will spontaneously organize to defend what they have, or take what they need, or they will be victimized by groups that beat them to the punch. In most cases, this "spontaneous" organization will be on the skeleton or the structure of prior, pre-war organizations.
I'm also an "optimist" in the sense that I think most obviously predatory outfits would have a short life expectancy unless they were very well armed (i.e., the military could get away with it, for a while). If you look like a bandit, there will be a lot of frontier justice and shooting first and asking questions later, and there won't be any point taking prisoners if food supplies are already an issue. Of course, in some areas you might have a failure cascade that forces communities to become marauder to survive, but traditionally this type of unrest has been fairly uncommon historically even during widespread famine.
Also, the US has, on average, over a year's worth of grain already harvested. A famine in 1998 would be largely due to distribution not production issues, and would be a regional issue, not a national one - a lot of areas are self-sufficient from a calorie perspective.
All that being said, game would likely be hunted largely to extinction in the fist 3 months of a collapse scenario. Hunting should be much harder than it is in the rules.