Post Apocalyptic Worldbuilding

So I've been wanting to worldbuild a full apocalyptic wasteland of sorts but I want to hear other ideas. Because as of now I only got a few base ideas for the wasteland.

It's a typical wasteland setting of sorts, end of the world came about from nuclear weapons, large war of course from before the end. But I am not certain what the war was about.

I'm thinking a Robot War at it's base. But as for why the robot war and why it ended in nuclear fallout, that I need a bit more help on.

Well... you can use nuclear weapons for EMPs. Not terribly tactical but eh. Though the robots could've launched them since they'd effect the pitiful meatsacks more severely.

Is your wasteland based in a real location (whether the characters in-universe know it or not)?

Well yeah the wasteland is in a real location. Lot of fun to be had with settlements made out of the ruins of Pittsburg steel works.

And the robots aren't typical drones, many of them have personalities of their own and many are still around after the war.

The nuclear armageddon was the end of the war itself and now people don't really care about huckets of bolts or meatbags.

War is so 1980's: All the cool people are using ecological collapse now.

But war. War never changes.

In all seriousness what would you suggest instead of a war.

I had an idea for an Azathoth-level of Eldritch Abomination causing a global cataclysm.

That'd work if the setting wasn't Science Fiction and more fantasy based.

It's why I went with a Nuclear war, what better way for a classic desert apocalypse?

Maybe this Nuclear War caused the world's oceans to dry up and replace it with nothing but dry land and sandy deserts. Water is incredibly scarce and even a cup of it is worth pounds of gold-or whatever 'money' would be here.

That'd be interesting to do. Something along those lines.

There's a problem with this. The energy needed to not merely boil off the Earth's oceans (which cover most of the planet I might remind you) but to disassociate enough of the hydrogen so it can escape in to space is enough to completely sterilise the planet, assuming you didn't just liquefy the crust in the process.

A Wizard did it. :v

But seriously, maybe instead of the water being dried up, most water is contaminated and virtually poisonous, acidic, can cause mutations, or something. Thus, finding pure drinking water-or even having the ability to purify the water-would be a blessing and valuable.

edited 25th May '15 1:02:15 AM by HydraGem

That could then explain the desert setting, as people might be purposefully heading into the desert to get away from the nasty rain or whatever. Don't know if this would work.

That's interesting. Irradiated water with worries about it either killing you or mutating you.

Perhaps there are isolated communities, with working water purifiers and they are under constant threat from bandits and mutants.

Personally, my favourite flavour of post-apocalyptica is the kind where the actual cause of the apocalypse is left up to the imagination.

I have a setting on the backburner where Earth has been radically changed by "the Event". What the Event was, what its effects were, or whether the world that came before was even our world in the first place would be left extremely vague. The point being that it gives me the freedom to just throw out whatever crazy adventures I feel like, in whatever weird remixed environments that I want.

Case in point: my first story in the setting involves a tiger-woman tech-scavenger, living in the Kingdom of Brittany, which is stricken by a series of droughts. To relieve his country, the prince of Brittany sends our heroine on a quest to find the legendary Skysland, a vast flying island built by the Olders before the Event, and believed to still be airborne somewhere over the Channel. The Skysland has waterfalls flowing over the side, but the prince has enough recovered Older knowledge to know that the island should have run dry long ago. He reckons there must be some kind of water-making device on the island, so he sends our heroine to find it and bring it back, in the hopes that it can save his parched kingdom.

Alright, so hint it was a nuclear robot war but never outright state it. Might be a issue as it was a recent event.

Well, my point was that you don't necessarily need to explain what happened, if the story set in the world After The End is compelling enough. You can just bullshit it. Drop some cryptic hints here and there to Iron Birds and Sun Bombs, and leave it up to the reader to filter out the truth.

After all, if society was ever dumped back to the dark ages, then there would be a serious lack of reliable communication or historical records. A person could easily go their entire life without hearing a shred of truth about the apocalypse. People living a hundred miles apart could have radically different ideas about the past, and how to interpret it.

It really comes down to what you want from your story, though. I like the idea of freewheeling adventure in a world that's not quite our own, where overall consistency isn't terribly important, so my worldbuilding reflects that. But if you wanted to really dig into what would actually happen in an apocalypse scenario, then by all means go for it.

edited 26th May '15 3:36:17 AM by Tungsten74

Yeah I like to make really consistent worlds.

I did figure out something though. The end of the world did knock out global communications, which helped the surviving robots to become their own individuals, without the hive mind in there many were faced with their own devices.

As a result many of them became essentially people and like humans try to find their own place in life.

I'm reminded of Gundam Seed a bit, where the Plant factions tossed around nuclear fission jammers and forced Earth to rely on other forms of fuel.

Same thing here. Earth got hit by an asteroid storm somehow, and they consisted of materials that naturally interfere with non-shielded communications. This knocked out most digitally-stored information and history (or possibly just made it impossible to access), and also makes prolonged exposure fatal to non-shielded robots (though raw humans can survive it just fine). That way, you have another extreme environment for your characters to survive.

Making a form of radiation fatal to robots is a interesting idea. Good idea Deus.

So we got regular radiation pockets for normal humans and radio interference pockets lethal to the machines.

Perhaps the Asteroid was human made and tossed down before the nukes were launched.

What about this: in the war, the machine where just one, at strong AI who control everything, when the war end somehow his mind breaks and the machine are just let them to rot, some of them gain some short of personality: some of them are very basic, other cant barely graps one emotion at time and other are pretty much human with some quirks

Also you can put this as a belief, the idea tha robot think they came in the fort of a great mother(or father...or none) who "die" to shared is mind into every being in the world.

And of course, one piece of the original AI is still there....wating its time

My idea is that a grey goo disaster ravages much of mankind and is only stopped by bombarding hotspots with salted bombs. The remnants of civilization, still possibly wielding the very nanotech that doomed them all, scramble for the last bits of uncontaminated land. However, aside from a few possible exceptions, they all succumb to societal collapse, leaving behind their war machines to kill anything in sight that aren't their long dead masters. Or something like that.

I think I got the gist. And I had already noted that the Robots were linked up through a hive mind during the war and after that without the hive mind they became their own people. But the Robot Religion is a nice idea.

Already got a setting where mankind is long gone and it's creations rome the desert remains of the planet. I even made it a game on Tg chan. However nanotech, a lost forbidden technology that is extremely dangerous.

edited 28th May '15 3:58:28 AM by EchoingSilence

I wasn't suggesting humanity was gone, just that most of the danger comes from feral bots as opposed to a unified AI menace.

Hm. Perhaps some feral bots. Akin to the human bandits and raiders typical in apocalyptic fiction.

So, what kind of weapons can you imagine being salvaged after the end of the world?

How about Power armor could you see Power armor in use?