Environmental Collapse in T2k

[Raellus]

Back in the early 1980s, Carl Sagan and other preeminent scientists popularized the nuclear winter theory. Thankfully, it wasn't tested. During the 1990s-early 2000s, the idea fell out of fashion as some among the new generation of scientists poked holes in it. Recently, it seems to have come back to the fore. In Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024), nuclear winter is once again (and rather convincingly, I might add) presented as the most likely long-term climatological effect of a nuclear war.

I recently read a history of the Vikings. Just prior to the dawn of the "Viking Age", during the middle of the 6th century A.D., there was a "nuclear winter" event believed to have been caused by 2-3 massive volcanic eruptions occurring within a few years of one another. This might have inspired the mythical Fimbulwinter- the "Mighty Winter" preceding the Armageddon-like Ragnarok of Norse mythology.

To make a long story short, IRL there was a pretty significant die-off in Scandanavia (50% of the total population, perhaps more) mostly due to crop failures caused by several years of reduced sunlight and lower average temperatures caused by huge quantities of volcanic particulates lingering in the upper atmosphere (an estimated 87 cubic kilometers!). This die-off, greater than that caused by the Black Death and the 30 Years War combined (!), led to the collapse of most social institutions in Scandanavia, resulting in, or greatly exacerbating, a period of warlordism, in which strongmen preyed on the weak and/or fought amongst each other for scarce resources.

This event, and similar massive volcanic eruptions, have generated short-term (several months to several years) of nuclear winter-like environmental conditions (sans radioactivity of course). These natural phenomenon lend credence to the nuclear winter theory posited by Sagan et al.

Then there's Howling Wilderness' treatment of environmental conditions brought on, or exacerbated, by the effects of multiple ground-burst nuclear detonations. HW takes the opposite tack, positing a mega-draught that, nevertheless, leads to large scale environmental collapse across much of the USA.

In a similar vein, the Mad Max post-apocalyptic world (caused, in large part, by nuclear warfare) presents a particularly dry world- at least, Down Under.

In either the Cold or the Dry post-apocalypses, the net effect is the same: Fewer natural resources, and much competition for same among the dwindling numbers of survivors.

Back to T2k, nearly two decades ago, I briefly played in a 1e PBeM, set in Poland, in which it was almost always raining- IIRC, the Ref explained that this climatological effect was caused by a mini-nuclear winter. The near constant rain- steady, but not particularly heavy- killed crops, caused localized flooding, and generally made life very difficult and uncomfortable for survivors. It was the grimmest T2k I've ever experienced.

Have any of you included or experienced aspects of nuclear winter- or other types of environmental collapse- in your T2k campaigns? How did you handle it? In what ways did environmental collapse affect the game world?

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[castlebravo92]

The mega drought was a fairly unrealistic contrivance to essentially destroy the U.S. to (IMHO) pave the way for France being the dominant superpower in Traveller:2300 / 2300 AD.

It's unrealistic because the US has several different major sources of water. Aquifers aren't going to deplete during a single dry season, coastal areas will still get rain - most of the Atlantic / Gulf region simply does not have the geographical features to not get rain and the Mississippi and it's tributaries span the largest continental water system in the world, which is partially fed by the Great Lakes. Now, if you ignore "mega-drought" and instead use "climate/weather upheaval", then it allows more wiggle room. Some areas are in drought, other areas are inundated, some areas get the Goldilox rain, but maybe those are the areas outside MilGov/CivGov/NA control and thus there is no organized large scale planting, etc.

Now, I realize that it was largely a contrivance to set the stage for 2300AD and explain why America wasn't the pre-imminent superpower for that setting, and it was probably thought up in a week or so under a deadline, but I've always ignored it. IIRC, the mega-drought was published around the same time GDW was publishing Traveler:TNE, and they were going through their "kill everyone" phase of RPG publishing.

The bottom line is, mechanization, inorganic fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and pesticides account for about a 5x increase in agriculture yields. Take away all that and not even have animal labor to fall back on (because what farms in America are configured to plow fields with oxen these days?) and you'll have a precipitous drop in population pretty quickly.

Incidentally, the US keeps around 12-24 months worth of grain, so we are also more than one bad harvest away from starvation. My head cannon to explain the fall 1998 collapse is that much of that food reserve was shipped to Europe during late 1997 and early 1998 to keep our European allies from starving given the earlier use of nukes and the larger disruptions to agriculture that would have happened by the war.

[Homer]

I always visualized the “last harvest” scene in Threads. The end of mechanized agriculture, modern food preservation and distribution infrastructure, and outright losses of skilled agriculturalists seem like they’d be more than sufficient to cause famine once any reserves are looted/exhausted/spoiled. The “Charlottesville” study touches on things like the early slaughter of livestock to preserve grain stocks, distribution issues and food riots, depletion of game, and the lack of capacity of post-industrial agriculture. Throw in disease, violence, exposure, died of wounds/radiation/acts of war, loss of medical care, and things like depressive suicide and there’s potential for a pretty hefty drop in population even without the mega-drought.

Like CastleBravo said, it’s pretty hard to see water sources drying up per Howling Wilderness. Having grown up in the ArkLaTex, even our drought years still had plenty of water around. Maybe short term variations in rainfall and temperature, but the idea of a continent wide drought seems like it’s not supported by the amount of damage done in the exchange. That said, areas that saw heavy combat, like Central Europe and China seem like they’d be devastated and hard put to produce sufficient food for even their depleted populations.

[Raellus]

I wonder why the 1e creative team decided to go with a megadrought in HW, instead of nuclear-winter, the latter being very much in vogue at the time it was written. Maybe it was precisely because nuclear-winter was so in vogue and they decided to zig instead of zag, to make T2k stand out?

Anyway, a megadrought makes even less sense given the high probability of a global cool-down due to massive clouds of particulates and smoke (caused by even limited nuclear warfare) in the upper atmosphere blocking out a significant amount of sunlight. Although, I suppose that such ash clouds could concentrate in certain areas and not others, leading to extreme variations in regional weather patterns. This might mean that Europe gets darker and colder whilst large parts of the USA get sunnier and hotter. This seems like quite a stretch, though, given how many nuclear strikes occurred on US soil.

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[Homer]

Yep- I think of the model of cooling caused by particulate matter as presented by “Medical Effects of Nuclear War”. Shortened growing seasons and smaller growing zones complicate the disruption of industrial agriculture, processing, and distribution. Interestingly for a mid-80s study, they point to unsanitary food processing, handling, and storage as a disease vector citing the growing dependency on prepackaged products and automated cleaning practices.

Growing up, we still had a kitchen garden, some fruit trees, chickens, and a few feeder pigs. That, game and wild gathered foods like poke salad and muscadines were all pretty routinely handled. We canned, smoked, dried, pickled, etc. My grandmother still made soap, candles, herbal medicines, and vinegar. Friends had cows for milk, and there were even people who still tanned hides, ran the occasional still, and quietly grew the five-leafed herb. At the time, we figured we were pretty self sufficient (“A Country Boy Can Survive” was an anthem to some folks). Even so, we were still dependent on industrial products- salt, feed, fuels, fertilizers, machinery, even seeds were all things we either couldn’t produce or couldn’t match in quantity or quality with store bought. Nobody plowed with mules, made black powder, or made the medications people depended on. There were a few steam powered mills still around, but they were fading.

With that in mind, I tend to think even a small drop in temperature coupled with the disruption inflicted by the attacks on petroleum and associated damage to transportation and production networks would be more than enough. Even as “self sufficient” as we were, we’d have been very quickly set back to an early 1800s level of existence without the supporting infrastructure that made such an existence possible. In less rural areas the effect would likely be even worse. Lack of basic knowledge in sanitation would feed sickness which in turn would breed more disease. I’m betting just the lack of soap and clean water would see quite a few people off. All of this would be exacerbated by lack of calories to perform the physical labor now required, seeing more die off until carrying capacity is reached. The idea of using food rations as a form of currency as in Krakow, makes eminent sense.

[Targan]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I wonder why the 1e creative team decided to go with a megadrought in HW, instead of nuclear-winter, the latter being very much in vogue at the time it was written. Maybe it was precisely because nuclear-winter was so in vogue and they decided to zig instead of zag, to make T2k stand out?

Pretty sure it was both. And Howling Wilderness explicitly addresses these issues (page 11):

The winters following the exchange were colder than average - that of 1997/98 was especially severe. For reasons not completely understood, however, the nuclear exchange seemed to have altered world rainfall patterns beginning in late 2000. The effects of this were catastrophic. The wheat-growing regions of the upper Midwest, upon which Civgov depended for its food, suffered a cold winter with almost no snowfall. The winter wheat crop, which depends upon the insulating effects of snow to protect the young plants from the cold, was devastated. To make matters worse, spring was abnormally dry over most of North and Central America.

It seems likely to me that while it was abnormally dry in those specified regions, there was a LOT more precipitation (and and/or snow) in others. For instance, again in Howling Wilderness (pages 44 & 45):

Rainfall conditions have remained pretty much unaltered in the Southwest. However, many of the rivers which flow from the north have all but dried up, and irrigation has become impossible. No real agriculture has been performed there since the Mexican occupation.

In the Pacific Northwest, the shift in rainfall has been the opposite from that in the rest of the country: an increase instead of a decrease. On some days it now seems like the rainfall at Seattle rivals that of the Orinoco basin, and the effect on agriculture has been deleterious, but not disastrously so.

[Homer]

A compounding issue for food production would be contamination of farmland and waterways. While much of the fallout would have decayed, and there were a large number of airbursts in CONUS, strikes on petroleum and other industries would also have released toxic industrial chemical plumes. For example, the strike on the Westlake refinery across from Lake Charles, LA, would have taken any TIC plume for the resulting fires across the farmlands of central Louisiana. It’s mostly corn and soybeans there, which are valuable agricultural and human feedstocks.

[Drgonzo2011]

In my game, I have fewer nukes being use and most of those that are, are either at sea or tactical weapons in China, India (an ally of the USSR in my modified 1e timeline) and Eastern Europe. However, EMP attacks are carried out on CONUS and the USSR. This, in turn, leads to a rapid breakdown not only of order, but also of all the support systems that modern society relies on. Everything from water treatment to the safety mechanisms needed to keep things like chemical plants from suffering catastrophic failures. This, in turn, leads to more localized ecological crises, but not the global ones posited by the game as written. I really wanted to avoid the Howling Wilderness/Mad Max environment for my game, while making things dire enough that if the players make the wrong decisions, things will get worse - but if they make the right decisions, the world - or their little part of it - can start to recover. I should note, that I try to run games that are less about shoot-em-ups and endless scavenger hunts and more about trying to recover from mankind's attempt at global suicide.

[Raellus]

A lot of T2k campaigns tend to relegate most macro-level game universe stuff to the background. PCs generally have a fairly narrow view of the world, as day-to-day survival is usually the most pressing concern. Regardless of whether or not your T2kU features global or large-region level environmental collapse, local environmental conditions can still affect the PCs' daily existence. In some ways, the local environment can act as an NPC, creating problems and, less frequently, opportunities, for PC parties. How has the environment factored into your gaming experience?

I ran a Pirates of the Vistula PbP for close to a decade. It's seems weird to me now, but I don't remember ever considering throwing a flooding event at my players (although I do recall describing the aftermath of past floods).

In T2k campaign set in 2030 Arkansas, the party was a unit of the State Guard sent to reestablish contact with state gov't outposts after a major hurricane, the PCs encountered a variety of storm-related damage.

I briefly ran a PbP set in New Mexico. It didn't last long enough for the environment to play any role, but I did intend for drought to affect the rural farming communities that the PCs were sent to assist.

Also the 4e core rules have a couple of environment-based random encounters- one involves a forest fire (I can't remember if it's natural, man-made, or cause-unspecified), and another a radioactive ash-fall.

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