After Stabilization?

[Webstral]

instituted the drought of Howling Wilderness was to keep things moving along for the purposes of adventuring. I ask this because when the population stabilizes, more or less, there will be a food regime in place sufficient to feed almost all of the people left in the nation. Obviously, this is a grotesque overgeneralization. Productivity and availability will vary wildly from one region to the next. Shortages will persist everywhere. Nevertheless, sans the drought there will be a rough equilibrium established by the end of 2000. Now what? This question applies everywhere, not just the US.

Obviously, one of the primary goals of cantonments everywhere will be to increase output without additional inputs of labor. As output per laborer increases, manpower can be freed for other tasks necessary for rebuilding on micro and macro scales. I have been thinking lately that one of the main goals of Manifest Destiny will be to move engineering and agricultural expertise between cantonments loyal to Milgov. MacArthur remarked that the Pacific War was an engineers’ war. Based on the numbers, he was right. There were more engineers in the Pacific than infantry. This makes me think that a sort of agricultural and engineering Special Forces will be needed for the US—indeed, for every recovering nation—even more than rifles. In the short term, shortages of manpower for combat can be made good with improved weapons and supply. In the long term, shortages can be made good by using improved agricultural techniques to free manpower from food production for combat duty.

These types of missions might be very interesting for a party more interested in playing their part as Special Operations types than go-it-your-own types. Getting needed experts to a given location can be an adventure all its own, if for some reason an airship isn’t available to do the job.

Other worthwhile missions might include tracking down leads on machinery Milgov needs for industrializing Colorado. Howling Wilderness states that Milgov is building industry from the ground up as resources allow. An airship that can haul 100 tons could bring a huge variety of useful machines to Colorado. The trick is knowing where they are and extracting them. The possibilities here are limitless.

[Targan]

Web, your post seems to start half way through a sentence. Now I'm burning with curiosity over what is missing!

There's one thing I don't understand about those who dislike the drought posited in Howling Wilderness and citing it as a major reason for not wanting to use HW in their campaigns. If you don't like the drought, have it end in 2002. HW only covers 2001. There's nothing set in stone to suggest that the drought is a permanent feature. Where I live we have periodic droughts. Some are short, some are long, but they all end eventually.

The climate change suggested in HW is most likely due to all the particulate matter thrown up into the atmosphere during the war. As the years go by it seems pretty obvious to me that the climate will continue to change. It may go back to much like it was before the war. That's up to each GM to decide, surely?

[Raellus]

Here in Tucson, we've technically been in a drought since 1999. It rained today. I think people misunderstand what a drought really is. It's like the folks that deny that the planet is warming because there's a big blizzard one winter. They're missing the forest for the trees.

I've thought a bit about what a limited nuclear war would do to global weather patterns. Cold War scientists warned of a nuclear winter in the event of a full-scale geothermal nuclear war. Clouds of dust and smoke would block out the sun and the surface temperature of the planet would drop precipitously. In the event of a more limited, piecemeal nuclear war as described in the T2K backstory, a significant amount of dust and smoke would be tossed up, but much less than the planet-blanketing amounts that would be required to cause and sustain a nuclear winter. What if the amount of dust and smoke from the T2K exchanges was enough to allow sunlight in, but not to allow heat/reflected light to escape, accelerating the "Greenhouse Effect" by several factors? This could cause a drought like that described in HW.

I like to take the middle ground and envision a planet ravaged by weird weather- sort of demi Nuclear Winter/Greenhouse Effect hybrid. Large migrating dust clouds could cool the climate in some regions, interfering with long-established air and water currents. At the same time, certain other regions would be bathed in almost constant sunshine. Combine this with the climate-alterating effects of disrupted air and water currents (e.g. El Nino/La Nina flip-flopping or one or both stopping, etc.), and precipitation in said sunny regions could be severely curtailed. A severe two-year regional drought, therefore, wouldn't be at all out of the question. In my Pirates of the Vistula PbP, I've got winter coming early to Poland, with the first heavy snow fall occuring in first few days of October.

I hope that I haven't strayed too far off topic here. To get back to your main point, Web, I agree that recovery-oriented missions would be an interesting basis for a campaign.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I've thought a bit about what a limited nuclear war would do to global weather patterns. Cold War scientists warned of a nuclear winter in the event of a full-scale geothermal nuclear war. Clouds of dust and smoke would block out the sun and the surface temperature of the planet would drop precipitously.

Broken data and bad models were used to "make" nuclear winter "work".

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/0...p-j-dolan.html

[Webstral]

My post was cut off. Weird. Serves me right for trusting that CTRL-A actually highlighted all the text. Not much was missed. I simply mused about the next thing after the stabilization of the food situation.

[Olefin]

If anything all the debris blown up into the atmosphere would cause more rain and snow, not less. And the problem with HW is so what if it ends in 2001 - as described basically the US would have had its population reduced below the level of any possible recovery in less than hundreds of years long before any crops would have been harvested in 2002.

The death toll from starvation and disease (millions of unburied bodies resulting from mass starvation deaths would have resulted in plague, typhus, you name it) from the drought as described basically would have ended all civilization in the US, most likely for any forseeable future, and definitely for so long that there is no way there is an American Arm in Twilight 2300AD. With that kind of death toll you would be lucky if the Dark Ages ended in the US before 2400 and we were back to what we had in 1776, let alone in space with faster than light ships.

Destroying the US like that is not furthering adventure in any way - unless what you want is to stop the game and pull out Aftermath instead and say lets play this now and just transfer over your characters.

As for US recovery without HW ever happening - have heard many people say without HW and Kidnapped then the US would recover too soon and be back to being powerful again and unbalance the game. Again I dont see that either - you are talking about a country split between three different power bases, plus with invaders in command of much of its Southwest and Alaska and with huge power generation and food distribution issues and with much of its infrastructure in ruins.

Thats a lot of work to do right there that could keep players busy with various missions for dozens of years. Heck just a drive the Mexicans out and begin the process of stabilizing the Southwest again campaign would keep a good GM busy for a long long time or a MilGov drive to conquer CivGov and reunite the country by force.

So ignoring HW and Kidnapped makes a lot of sense from both a playability aspect and also from having your characters actually trying to do more than simple survival.

And while simple survival is part of the game, so is recovery and trying to rebuild - if not then why was Reset part of the very first module and why did the Submarine Trilogy include the scientists with the knowledge to build cheap fusion reactors?

Now there is a good source of recovery missions- i.e. having characters having to gather the materials needed for those fusion reactors once the Corpus Christi gets back. They could be widely dispersed, in the hands of the New Americans (who may not know what they are sitting on) or even behind enemy lines in Texas or California.