Campaign Toybox
The Story: By the time we knew it wasn’t a comet, or even anything natural, it was already within the orbit of Jupiter, and picking up speed. It didn’t collide with us, though – it did something worse. It parked itself inside the orbit of Mercury – a long thin oblong – and began to grow, or rather build. It didn’t take much longer for scientist to make a very good guess at what it was doing: it was building a Dyson sphere: a gigantic constructed globe which would entirely encircle the sun, and thus contain its power. That power would then no doubt trigger some further purpose. Meanwhile, without the sun, Earth and everything on it would die.
The automated construction seemed to be happening faster than anyone could have imagined, swallowing up all the matter it could find and turning it into steel. Once it was clear it was building a sphere that would destroy the earth, there was only one question left that mattered: how long? The answer was terrible: about a year. Enough time to get a mission together, but not enough time to get out there and stop it. What does that leave? Escape is impossible, the space program can’t support it. The only option is trying to find a way to survive a whole new world of darkness. Geothermal and nuclear energy, hydroponic food…and the assured knowledge that no matter how hard we work, 99% of the human race will still die…
Style and Structure: The point of near-future SF is to help us confront the horrors of our own age – our great and terrible, earth-spanning, geopolitical horrors. Once upon a time, that was nuclear war. Now, the fear is environmental destruction, and the terrifying thought that maybe, just maybe, with all our political dithering and compromises, we have left change far too late, that all the talk of catastrophic environmental shutdown coming soon might finally get a real arrival date. Sure, it could get preachy, but only if you do it wrong. It’s about fear. And fear – what your players fear – makes for great horror games.
Time limits also make for good games, and good horror games. How you pace it is up to you, but a hard time limit, tracked by a literal deathclock running in the sky above, will keep everyone on their toes and ensure your campaign has a solid, clear end point. Yes, it’s a downer ending which they can’t control, and players may baulk at that, but Call of Cthulhu meets the same criteria. The question in both games is how you go out. And in this one, there may be a chance to turn things around, and there is a definite chance to determine what kind of world is left behind. That’s the key to this whole concept: make sure that whoever the players are playing, they are in control. They are making the big decisions and literally determining the fate – the future – of the world.
PCs and NPCs: Watch any disaster film and you’ll see that although these kinds of crises funnel through hundreds of people in reality, that doesn’t make a good film. Your players should likewise forgive the narrative convenience that casts them in a truly central role. One of them should probably be the President of the United States, of course, or an appropriate equivalent. Don’t let the US get away with running the show if you don’t want to of course, whether for parochial reasons (like where your gaming group live) or realistic ones (the world’s resources and power bases are much more scattered now than they were fifty or even thirty years ago).
Politicians will not be the only ones making big calls in such a scenario. Astronauts will be consulted. Scientists will be advising. Corporate supremos and banking moguls will be called into judge finances. And nothing of this magnitude gets done these days without a three-ring-circus of spin, from both sides. And if it’s on TV, it could even involve celebrities or celebrities for a day. Maybe a simple amateur astronomer and middle-school science teacher deduces the Dyson sphere answer before anybody else. Next thing she knows she’s in the White House making calls she can barely understand – but there’s just not enough time to get a new face on the issue that the public can relate to.
Your PCs will guide you to your NPCs. It’s a political campaign in every sense; what your NPCs need to be are people your PCs will argue with. Arguments are important, they are key. Very few people are going to fight in the war room, to paraphrase George C. Scott, so the drama will be in who believes what and how well they make their arguments and present their plans.
Plots and Villains: There are a lot of ways this could go wrong. The first is turning the whole thing into a hypothetical puzzle or an exercise in setting building – ie the whole thing is the players unemotionally sitting around making their plans. They certainly deserve more than just game time – they have a year after all – but if that’s all they get, it’ll be a dull afternoon, not a campaign to remember. You absolutely need to construct episodes and scenes around each part of their plan or each key decision they need to make. Now, those kinds of scenes won’t work if the players are all just advisors, because then the GM will just pick those ideas anyway. Nor will they work if the PCs are just decision makers, because they’ll just ask the GM which idea sounds best to their character. What you want is to make some of the players decision makers and some advisors and some different advisors or on different issues. Party unity is great, but it would kill a game like this dead.
Of course, it doesn’t have to all be inter-party conflict. You always want to get those players allied against outsider advisers or stakeholders. They are your villains, even when they are well intentioned. Sometimes they’ll need to be removed, or out-maneouvered, sometimes there will have to be compromises. There will always be compromises. Your villain, truly is the situation. Don’t make the players hate you by making it suddenly get worse – it’s bad enough to start with – but do keep the pressure on. Panic is going to start. Riots are certain. Wars are likely. Some horrible horrible things are going to happen. Don’t revel in them either. The players will do that in their own imaginations. Stick to the facts. They’re also bad enough.
Sources: 2012 was a terrible movie but a textbook example of how to tie disparate stories and characters together, and the major episodes of such a massive disaster plot. Much the same goes for The Day After Tomorrow and the recent Day The Earth Stood Still (the original was great). Another, better film where the disaster couldn’t be stopped was Deep Impact. It came out at the same time as Armageddon and if your players want to go blow up the sphere in similar style, let them – it makes a great action-packed palette cleanser to the boardroom fencing first course. Similar desperate missions to stop the apocalypse appear in the awful The Core and the fantastic Sunshine. Alien invasion films end up in a different place but the early acts are useful keystones, and recently we saw Battle Los Angeles, War of the Worlds and Skyline. For what the world might look like in the darkness, don’t miss the super Monsters, WALL-E or The Day After, the film that, legend has it, convinced Reagan to end the Cold War. Going back to earlier fears like nuclear war and before that, germ warfare, will also prove fruitful – check out Dr Strangelove, The Omega Man, or On the Beach, or When the Wind Blows, and if you get into disease and pathogens, you can also include a lot of zombie films. Note that these are all films, not TV series: nobody likes the end of the world for longer than two hours (unless you count Stephen King’s The Stand). Take the hint King didn’t, and keep this campaign nice and short.
RPGs: Despite the name, Evernight won’t be much use. There aren’t many disaster RPGs that I know of, in fact. The excellent Shock would work because it focuses on a massive change to the social and political climate. Greg Stolze’s Executive Decision is free and perfect for political arguments, although it needs a lot of work to frame its scenarios. If you want arguments and different goals going into things, Smallville is an excellent choice. As mentioned above, zombie films make a good model, so you might want to check out All Flesh Must Be Eaten or the War of the Dead campaign. Supers have also dealt with big changes, check out e-Collapse, Grim War and Progenitor, all also by Stolze. Speaking of superheroes, for being political movers and shakers, Aberrant had some good ideas as did many of those Stolze games. Stolze really is leading the field here, and he’s very alone: our movies and TV shows are filled with disasters and political head-kickers, but not our RPGs. Designers out there: get on that.
