Thread: New America
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Old 12-01-2022, 07:22 AM
castlebravo92 castlebravo92 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ToughOmbres View Post
Very well reasoned and thought out. My "we've brought firepower, some basic foodstuffs and we're moving on" mindset seems to be applicable only through the unravelling phase.
A great deal of it would involve the personality of unit commanders as well I suspect.
Not to be disagreeable, but I could rationalize your scenario through any of the post-attack phases, including the false recovery.

Using v2 definitions, you can look at pre-TDM America as essentially 99% organized (there are some inner city neighborhoods riven by gang violence that would qualify as insular though).

In the immediate post-attack phase, it would still be mostly organized, except for the areas that were attacked, or areas that fell into civil disorder out of panic from expected attacks. But...some areas fell into disorder, and never recovered, which means they would progress very rapidly from independent, to insular, terrorized, anarchy, and devastated. This is how I picture the communities immediately adjacent to urban areas where the population decides on a mass exodus. A little farming town of 1,000 people, 20 miles down the road, is going to get overwhelmed by 100,000 people passing through. People on foot will steal vehicles, hungry/starving people will break into homes and kill livestock for food. A town that size might have 3 to 5 cops (if you throw in some Sheriff's deputies), maybe a third of the population could and would be willing to handle a gun to defend the town, and the town (and the outlying farms) would cover too much territory for that few of people to defend against a horde of refugees, and most townspeople probably wouldn't be willing to murder refugees (at least, not in the beginning), and the horde of refugees would be the human shields inadvertently hiding/protecting the desperate and/or evil people that are going to steal your car, your food, your guns, kill your livestock, and maybe murder your family.

So early on in the first few weeks after the attack, maybe the group's mission is to go into a recently nuked city to recover some VIP or some special asset. In order to do that, the group has to swim upstream going against the tide of human migration, and maybe along the way help restore order to small communities they pass through.

Post-attack: mostly organized, with some pockets of terrorized/anarchy/devastated.

False recovery: mostly organized, with the pockets of terrorized/anarchy/devastated retreating.

Unravelling: Mostly organized has given way to mostly de facto independent. In this phase, helping communities stand up on their own with a little bit of aid (here's a few M16EZ kits, you need to form a militia, any ex-military or swat? congats, you are the militia commander, here's a RF40 that you can use to request help with), before moving on to the next crisis area or the next part of the mission.

Collapse: organized areas only exist in pockets, a lot of independent areas are progressing through the insular/terrorized/anarchy/devastated phases. The government would still go about trying to prop up communities ("We're not retreating, we're advancing in a different direction"), but the problems have at this point completely overwhelmed resources. We're in free fall, but flapping our arms desperately to fly or slow the fall (that's where the player group comes in). Meanwhile, other military units are stripping areas clean of assets as they withdraw to whatever organized areas remain.

I should point out here that necessity is a harsh mistress. Most of us are the heroes or protagonists in the story of our lives. But in the story of someone else's life, we may be the villain. Using the retreating military unit in Texas scenario again, those cows are lost to the farmer no matter what. If the US military doesn't take them, then the Mexican or Soviet military will, or if not them, the Texian Legion or some other strong marauder group that won't be bringing peace, justice, and the American way to the area. But the farmer won't see the theoretical group in the future taking or killing his livestock, he'll see the US army doing it, so the US army becomes the villain (again, if he survives, but if he survives, it likely be despite the US army, not because of them).

In the collapse phase though, there would still be investment in communities, but it would be fewer communities, smaller investments, and more strategic as we approach hitting the ground level, which would form the basis of re-organization.

In economic terms, the end of the collapse can be seen as the effective exhaustion of pre-attack capital stores, where "capital" are the durable goods that are used as the inputs to make other goods and capital production and expenditure has largely reached equilibrium. Net new capital will have to be built the good old fashioned way (largely with labor as the primary input), but this new capital can be the carrot that pulls independent communities back into the CivGov, MilGov, or New American orbit...by pre-TDM standards, it's going to be paltry. Instead of a pallet of survival rations or MREs, it might be a couple of 50 gallon drums of seeds. Instead of a 20 kw generator and a tank of diesel, it might be a spool of copper wire and some instructions on how to build a 3-phase generator assuming you have a working motor.

The recovery phase (really, a series of phases, as there are likely to be regressions and set backs) you see the re-advancement of civilization into Indian country, and the same things would still happen, but assets would be mostly increasing in terms of availability and complexity/sophistication (maybe as industry is stood back up in Colorado, we're able to expand support to newly manufactured M16s and newly manufactured ammo instead of ammo that's been reloaded on the same brass 15 times and is a 50-50 case failure dice roll).

So, the TL/DR version is I don't see your player scenario ever going away if you don't want it to. Your players don't have to be the units stripping the land bare. But they might have to convince the same people 2 years later they aren't returning to do more of the same.
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