The End...

[BC Jarhead]

Some thoughts on 'The End..." for my campaign world.

It was a series of catastrophic events that eventually pushed the worlds civilization over the edge and on to the brink of extinction.

It started with a world wide wave of natural disasters; megathrust earthquakes, tsumanis, tornado cluster outbreaks, volcanic eruptions and hurricane swarms. The after-effects of this natural disaster wave were food-shortages, lack of fresh water, and unheralded pandemics. With every sovereign state in the world being effected and there not being enough resources to help all the affected regions there was dissent between the world's major industrialized democracies with each becoming less and less cooperative and they all began hoarding their supplies for their own use.

This dissent eventually led to an extensive war to dominate what resources were left in the world. It's not known who launched the first long-range ballistic missile but that first launch triggered a full-scale nuclear war which involved all the members of the "Nuclear Club".

This major nuclear exchange caused the death of over a hundred million people within hours and permanent damage to most complex life on the planet, Earth's ecosystems, and the global climate. The nuclear winter that followed added to the catastrophe and brought about the near extinction of the human race leaving only a handful of survivors, most living in remote areas.

These survivors have had to learn how to live in a twisted new World. One that has unusual and sometimes deadly weather patterns, pockets of radiated ruins, far scattered regions of civilization, and a lexicon of mutated plants and animals - the most horrible of which are the "Ghouls", those unfortunate victims of radiation that at one time were living people but when caught in the heavy radiation after the war, instead of dying outright, became the walking dead.

[Owen E Oulton]

I centred my EOTWAWKI around Y2K, followed by 2012 to take out any surviving spaceborne infrastructrure, with a couple of alien incidents thrown in. Toss in a little cryptozoology (Bigfoot) and fallout from government and other experiments screwed up by Y2K, and things are royally messed up, but not irrecognisable. 2012 accounts for any odd atmospheric disturbances a la Damnation Alley.