Where are you going, where have you been.

Whew, long absence. Where have I been for 4 months? Well, work got crazy, and my gaming attention has been taken up by several games that aren't Apocalithic. I have ADHD, whaddaya want from me? 

What's more important is where the game is going. And it's coming along OK. I've got a tentative skill list, a character creation system, and a fairly good idea about how communities work and how you alter them. But what's really got me psyched about the game again is the system I'm working on for places. Using the Fate fractal, we're obviously going to represent the environment as a character. But what will that character look like? This is especially important because Apocalithic aims to have a lot more player vs environment than the standard tabletop RPG, and the environment is the GM's primary character. I think every GM knows the joy of drawing a map, so I wanted making the region the game takes place in more like drawing a map than stating a character. To that aim, regions in apocalithic consist of Sites and Paths. 

A Site is a distinct location. Perhaps it's the tribe's winter camp, or a windy canyon, or the ruins of a town. The point is that it has something to distinguish itself. Size-wise, a site needs to be large enough to hold an entire community. So a single clearing wouldn't be a site, but a valley could be. Sites are where things happen. So you can start your Region by coming up with the basic idea for a few interesting sites. 

Sites are described by their Aspects, Complexity track, Resources, and Fate point pool. 

The core aspects are the site's Biome, which roughly describes the landscape and ecosystem, the Landmark, which is the feature that defines the site, and the Trouble. Like any other Fate character Sites have a trouble. A site may also have more aspects, but not too many. You don't want to overload your site, keep it simple. Site aspects are scene aspects on any scene taking place at that site. 

The site's complexity is a measure of how interconnected the ecosystem is, how many checks and balances it contains, and thus how resilient it is. The higher this number, the harder altering the site will be. The value of this is equal to the number of aspects the site has. 

Resources are the site's skills. They are Water, Vegetable, Animal, Mineral, and Salvage. These are the base difficulties players are up against when searching for these types of resources. Thus, the lower the value, the more of that resource is easily found at that site. Rare resources would raise these difficulties. If a site has an abundance of a specific resource, this would be an aspect like Herds of Deer or Silver Mine. 

Finally, the site has it's own pool of Fate points. This is the GM's pool for any scene taking place there. I'm still working on the numbers here, but the idea is to relate it to the resources. Either you have a pool of points to buy up the resource values, and anything you don't spend is your Environmental pool, or the resources start out high, but each point you reduce them by gives you a fate point for the pool. I'm leaning toward the latter as being more intuitive. Mostly I'm trying to just let the GM pick stats instead of having to crunch numbers. 

Sites are connected to each other by Paths. Every site has 1 to 3 paths that connect them to other sites. Path are a lot simpler stat-wise. They simply have a Distance, which is how many victories you need to tally when taking that path to reach the end,  a Difficulty, which is the target number used on checks to take that path, and an Aspect that describes what kind of path it is, like Quiet Forest Trail or Raging White Water Rapids. This aspect will usually suggest what sort of skills are appropriate to the check, such as athletics, boating, whatever might be appropriate. 

So creating your Region starts with a single site, likely the site where the tribe is currently camped at. Then you draw one or more paths away from that site. Now at the end of each of those paths will be another site. Decide what's there, and give those sites some aspects and stats. Those sites will have paths coming off them, possibly connecting to each other, possibly connecting to other sites. Draw out as many sites and paths as you need to create the region you want, but don't forget to leave the ends of some paths undefined. You won't know where those go until the players go down them. 

At the start of any Apocalithic game, the player's tribe will be newcomers to the region. This is a world in flux, after all, and letting the players start settled in would rob them of that exploration goodness. Some Tribes will be the settling type. They'll pick a nice site and make that the location of their community. They'll get to have all kinds of stories about clearing the land, building community projects like walls or wells, and the like. They'll get to add or alter site aspects, resource values, maybe even create new paths.  Other tribes will be Nomadic, following the paths from site to site. Even they'll leave their mark on the places they stay. The system should work well for either playstyle. 

Apocalithic: Tribe Creation

That picture you have of the Lone Survivor, who wanders the post-apocalyptic landscape with a leather jacket and a dog kicking ass and taking names? Forget him. He died the first time he caught a cold, and his dog ate his corpse before running off to join a pack. In the feral future, no one survives without a Tribe. Your Tribe cares for you when you are sick, shares food with you when you can't find any, and provides you with companionship so you don't go painting faces on volleyballs. In return, a Tribe expects you to pull your weight, abide by the rules, and generally play nice with others in the tribe.

So whether you like it or not, every character in Apocalithic belongs to a Tribe, even the so called loners. The default assumption is that all the players are part of the same Tribe. This gives everyone a reason to cooperate right off the bat. It's possible to make characters who aren't part of the same tribe, but doing so robs you of the best parts of the game. Because in Apocalithic we put the same emphasis on advancing your tribe that many other RPGs place on advancing your characters. Much of the game revolves around improving your shared Tribe.

(A note before reading ahead: Apocalithic uses the Stuntless rules, and Tribal change contests use the Moving the Goalpost variant.)
 

Tribal Traits

In FATE parlance, your tribe is an Extra shared by certain characters. The most important tribe will be the one the PCs all share. Belonging to a community requires and aspect that states your membership, and every character, even NPCs, will have one such membership aspect on their character sheet. Of course, that aspect can also state a few other things about your character, such as "Chief of the water people" or "Village idiot of Springville." 

 The Tribe itself has Tribal Aspects, which every member of the tribe inherits through their membership aspect. These aspects may be invoked or compelled as if the character themselves possessed the aspect. These aspects may sometimes be locked in for effect, but doing so costs the character a point of refresh as normal.  The decision to lock in an aspect and what effect is granted, is left to the character. 

Unfortunately, you have to take the bad along with the good, and each community has three consequence slots. These might get used in any conflict involving the community. 

Additionally, a community has a Complexity rating, equal to the number of tribal aspects it currently has. This rating is used when organizing your community, which will be discussed later on. 

Tribes don't have their own skills because tribes don't participate in contests or conflicts. Even conflicts between tribes are played out on the personal scale of it's members, because tribes are small enough that it's always personal. If the tribe is known for being particularly skilled, that's an aspect. 

For the same reason, Tribes don't have any sort of stress track. There are no tribal-scale conflicts, and any sort of harm the tribe can come to is represented by consequences. 

Community Building:

Core Concept:

The most important Tribe in the game is the one the players belong to. To design this community, get all the players together and start talking. What kind of community are you interested in? A hunter/gatherer tribe that follows the wild cattle across the plains? A group of horse warriors descended from Biker gangs? A bunch of librarian/farmers preserving books only a few of them can read? Try to get a loose group consensus about the kind of tribe you're going to create. This is your core concept, and it guides the rest of community creation. This will be your tribe's first aspect, so sum it up in a short phrase. If this also gives your tribe it's name, so much the better.

This is probably the hard part, because you're stretching your imagination to think about how people might live in the future after industrial civilization is gone. The iconic communities provide a good starting point for such thinking. You can look to apocalyptic fiction for ideas, but remember that we're well past the actual collapse. You could take a group and imagine what they might be a century later. You might imagine some society from history that interests you, like the Native American plains tribes or the romanov gypsies, and figure how you might find a similar society in the future. You could also grab a subculture from the present day, perhaps even one you belong to, and imagine how they might survive and change in the collapse. They key to this process is having an open mind. With communication and travel more difficult after the collapse, Global society is gone. In it's place are thousands of local communities, each in contact with only a few others nearby. Each society will have the opportunity to get very different from the past and from each other.

Your idea doesn't have to be too detailed, a basic concept is enough to get started. You'll flesh it out as you go through the creation process, evolving the idea as you go.

For my Iconic community, I want something that hits the core of the game, that screams “Transhuman primitivism.” I also admit to wanting to take a friendly jab at the online community of primitivists. So I'm thinking of a group of people living like neolithic Native American hunter/gatherers, but who keep nanite cultures in jars. These nanites make solar-powered smartphones that form their own network, and the community uses them to coordinate. They've got a tribal version of facebook, a map of good hunting and gathering places they update in realtime, and a localized version of wikipedia. So Neolithic hunter/gatherers with wireless internet, that's my core concept. I sum it up as Children of the Web, decide that the spider is their totem mark, and I've got the first tribal aspect. I decide to most members lock it in to add computer use to the Lore skill of every child of the web. 

Trouble

Like other characters, Tribes have their problems. These might be external, such as a war with a neighboring tribe or a drought that makes getting food a problem. It might be an internal problem, like a lack of skilled healers or two quarreling families. Maybe it's simply a common character flaw among your members, like "stubborn as a mule." Whatever it is, it's the greatest problem facing your community today. Name it and make it an aspect.

Like any character's trouble, make sure it's meaty and not easily solved. This problem should be a major driver of the plot, either because the players are confronting it directly or because it's making achieving their other goal harder. It's also much like the "setting issues" aspects of the core game, and benefits from the same advice. 

The children of the Web have one major issue: They spend all day playing with their comms and sometimes ignore their other chores.  They aren't going to starve to death from lack of hunting, but it sure makes organizing help for large tasks difficult. I call this tendency Comm Addiction. 

Other Aspects

In addition to the core concept and trouble,  each player at the table (including the GM) may add one aspect to the community. These aspects may be anything that further define the community, such as a well known specialty, relationships with other communities, or other problems facing your community (the GM's favorite thing to add, in fact.) Since each gets to pick an aspect, each player should have something about the community they like. Of course, each aspect you add also increases your community's complexity rating. For this reason a player can choose not to add an aspect if they don't want to. 

When choosing aspects for your community, think about what benefit you are giving community members. Are you adding a restricted trapping to a skill? Are you giving a bonus to a commonly used skill? Are you granting access to a resource that might otherwise be difficult to come by? Or are you giving members a way to earn beads by granting a compel-able aspect? Are you doing more than one of these? Is the effect of the aspect flexible or does it always grant the same bonus?

These aspects are going to further flesh out your community. Give special attention to answering the following questions

• How does your community get food, water, and shelter? Are they hunter/gatherers? Fishermen? Farmers? Herders? Your primary source of sustenance has a great effect on your culture, determining if you're settled or nomadic, and showing up across your art and crafts in both material and subject. 
• What Taboos does your Tribe have? What is forbidden? What is required? 
• What rituals does your tribe go through to mark important passages through life?
• What has your tribe preserved from the past?
• What sort of relationships does your tribe have with it's neighbors? Are they friendly, or antagonistic? Do they regularly trade? 
• What skills does the body of your tribe possess? Are you well known as the best weavers for a thousand miles? Have you preserved the secret of metalwork? 

The Children of the Web have several other Aspects. Their primary source of food is hunting dear in coordinated groups, and they respect the Spirit of Brother Dear in every part of their culture. The tribe also carefully tends to the Ancestor Jars, which contain Nanite cultures that produce the comms they all possess. Most members lock this aspect to provide themselves with a Comm. Finally, the tribe maintains a friendly relationship with a nearby murder of Corven Friends, who help scout for the tribe in exchange for handmade tools they can't produce themselves. 

Faces:
Your tribe isn't just a list of aspects you inherit. It's also a group of people, who all share a culture, and economy, and a commitment to the tribe. They live together, work together, and deal with problems together. The tribe is a gestalt of the people who make it up, and you can't interact with the tribe except through it's people.

Faces are people in your tribe who exemplify one of the Tribal Aspects. They aren't the only characters that are part of your tribe, but they are important lynchpins of the community, the people that hold it together and make it function. Faces populate your tribe with interesting, motivated people to serve as allies and opposition to the player characters. They may be an important leader in the community, a troublemaker, or simply a definitively average member of the group, but they stand out as the person who has the most invested in that aspect.

Each tribal aspect gets it's own Face. Everyone participates when creating faces, not just the GM. This is everyone's tribe, after all. And if you have more than one good idea for a Face, go ahead and introduce them all! Each aspect needs at least one face, but nothing prevents you from having more than one face for an aspect.

Start by naming the character and giving a brief description of their place in the tribe. This core concept will suggest aspects during character creation later, most importantly describing their relationship with their community. This should put them in a position to represent their aspect well. The aspect “hidebound elders” would be well represented by someone with the concept “Obstinant chief of the tribe,” and when creating the character you'll have the aspects “Chief of the Tribe” and probably “Obstinant.” The same aspect could just as well be represented by a Shaman hung up on keeping the old ways, or the old woman everyone calls Auntie. It would not be well represented by a rebellious youth, even if he is defined by his opposition to the aspect. That character may exist in the tribe, but he's not a face.

Now ask yourself what motivates the character. Why do they represent their aspect, and what do they want? This is important because the purpose of the Faces is to provide allies and opposition for the PCs. In order to know which of those they'll be, we need to know what they want and what they are protecting. Then when the players start shaking up the Status Quo, they'll react appropriately. And if the players don't shake the status quo, your faces should be more than happy to do so, and the players can react.

For starters, a Face will want to protect the aspect they represent. If anything threatens to alter or remove the aspect they represent, they'll fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. Motivations may extend beyond that, however. The following stock formulas may help you arrive at additional motivations.

• The Face wishes to expand their interests at the expense of another. 
• The Face wants someone else to do something they don't want to do. 
• The Face wants something that belongs to someone else, who doesn't want to give it up 
• The Face wants to stop someone else from doing something they plan to do. 

The general idea is that these motivations should elicit conflict. Faces for different aspects may have conflicting motivations, or they may conflict with others outside the tribe. The best conflicts are those that directly involve the PCs. Therefore you may wish to alter motivations during character creation, or wait until after character creation to flesh out your faces.

In our Tribal community, we have the aspects Spirit of Brother Deer and Comm Addiction. Both aspects need Faces. Spirit of Brother Deer is represented by a wise elder, named Leaping Stag but usually called Antlers. Antlers is past his own prime hunting years, but excels at teaching tracking, archery, and the proper ways to respect the spirit of your prey. Almost all the current hunters have been trained by him. He wants to make sure his knowledge is passed on to the next generations, but he also has an additional motivation; He wants the younger ones to stop using their comms to slack off so much. He'd rather they spent more time practicing the hunt and honoring the spirits, instead of playing silly games and updating their blogs.

Meanwhile, Comm Addiction is represented by Stalking Wolf. Stalking Wolf is a layabout with little motivation to do anything but play various games on his Comm. He's got the tribe's high score on all the games, and considers that a meaningful accomplishment. He's not motivated by much other than the desire to play all day, despite being in his twenties. However, he can be very eloquent when it comes to convincing others to see things his way, especially if it gives him more time to play, and some of the younger generation admire him for his gaming skill. He'll fight any attempt by Antlers to limit the amount of time people spend online. So even without the PCs getting involved we already have a conflict brewing.

Complexity and Integrating Change.

A large part of Apocalithic is growing and changing your tribe. You'll have an opportunity to change aspects of your tribe at major milestones. However, this isn't as easy as changing or adding an aspect and moving on. Communities have a certain inertia, a resistance to change that makes it hard to progress. This is represented by a tribe's complexity rating, which is equal to the number of tribal aspects it possesses. 

Adding, changing, or removing a Tribal aspect requires an extended contest. The opposition to change is usually the Face of the aspect being challenged. If simply want to add an aspect, the GM will find a character in the tribe who will oppose this change. Usually the players will be spearheading change, but sometimes the players may be the ones fighting to preserve an aspect! Characters will compete to win the tribe over through whatever sort of contest you can devise, usually some sort of debate or other political activity to convince others to your side. 

Like any other contest, both sides describe their action and make opposed rolls, then tally victories. The first side to achieve a number of victories equal to the tribe's complexity rating wins the contest. If the active party wins, then they get to make the change to the aspect they desired. If the conservative side wins, no change takes place. 

However, if you lose, you don't have to lose graciously. So long as they were within 3 victories of the winner, the loser may chose to inflict a consequence on the community. If within 3 victories, this is a minor consequence. If within 2 victories, it's moderate, and if they were only one victory shy, it's major. This represents the difficulty the opposition causes the tribe in integrating the new aspect, or the rebellious feelings of those who wanted change but didn't get it. Once a consequence has been proposed, the winner has the option of going through with the change, or backing down to avoid the consequence. 

Apocalithic: Introduction

So I've hinted a bit around a FATE game I'm working on involving hunter gatherers. This is my little pet project, and pretty much every hack I come up with in one way or another is meant for use with this game. I figure I should probably share the concept early, then, so that my rules ideas can be understood in the context of the game they're meant to support.

Apocalithic is a game about tribal cultures developing in the ruins of a collapsed post-singularity society. It takes the two most extreme visions of our future: that of a runaway technological singularity and that of a collapse back to the stone age, and fuses them into a single setting. It's our world's future, where the projections of both hopeful post-humanists and fearful collapse survivalists were born out at the same time. Apocalithic is about the lasting consequences our society will leave on the world after it's gone, and about the new societies that will grow into the space we vacate.

The setting of Apocalithic rests on a foundation of 3 “posts”: Post-Human, Post-Industrial, and Post-Apocalypse. Lets take them one at a time.

Post-Human:

People in the future can be a lot different than humans today. During the fall, a great deal of genetic tinkering went on with the Human Genome. Many of these traits were heritable, and the selection pressure from the collapse also increased the population's general fitness. As a baseline, humans are notably faster, stronger, smarter and tougher than their civilized ancestors. Even more exotic traits, such as oddly colored hair, night vision, claws, gills, even tails are not unheard of. Most don't even remember that these traits were engineered.

Humanity made up for centuries of extinctions with decades of genetic tampering, creating thousands of new species almost by accident. These almost immediately went feral and became key to the regrowth of the natural world. These range from the fantastic, such as the color changing cheshire cats, to simple yet profoundly important like the plastic eating bacteria. Many animals were “uplifted” to human-like intelligence. Most notable in North America are the Tannunaki, raccoons with opposable thumbs, and the Corven, ravenlike birds who can speak.

Finally, not all of this new life is what we might traditionally call life. Nanites, for example, are just another part of the ecosystem, albeit one with a strange habit of building consumer electronics out of sand and sunlight. Sometimes you'll also find larger robots, built during the last phases of industrialism, that are still operational. Every year more and more succumb to lack of maintenance, but enough survive that the sight of one is a notable but not unknown event. They tend to maintain large solar-powered computer systems that supposedly store the uploaded minds of the ancestors.

Post-Industrial: 

This word has two meanings, both of which apply to Apocalithic. The first meaning is a world without factories and assembly lines. Nearly every item in the future is hand crafted, usually by it's user or a member of their Tribe. They're mostly made from local materials, gathered by hand by the the same person making it. The village economy is the engine of production.

The second meaning of Post-Industrial is a synonym for Post-scarcity economics. While things your community cannot produce themselves are hard to come by, those things your community can produce locally are essentially free. Within the communities that have persevered, sharing with member in good standing is a survival skill honed through generations of hard times. So while futurists envisioned post-scarcity as the result of cornucopia machines, the inhabitants of the Rust Age achieve it by having a sharply limited definition of the word “Need.” All a person really needs are a sharp knife, the clothes on their back, and a Tribe.

The consequence of this is that if you can't produce it locally, it probably can't be had. And in general, knowhow has been reduced to the lowest common denominator, the near stone age level of technology that gives the game it's name. Some, perhaps most communities have preserved some sort of higher technology, but which ones are idiosyncratic. Some communities might know how to work metal, while others build computers from carefully tended nanite cultures, but no community preserved all knowledge. Stone age technologies serve as the robust foundation that communities must build apon.

That doesn't mean the things industrialism produced are just gone, however. The landscape still has overgrown ruins, and scavenging is a thriving trade. People take shelter under ancient overpasses, faithfully care for salvaged metal knives, and knap their arrowheads from the shard broken toilets. But these Black technologies are mostly seen as curiosities, because if you can't make it yourself you can't rely on it.

Post-Apocalyptic

Apocalithic is a game that comes after the fall of civilization. But unlike other Post-apocalypse scenarios, there was no catastrophic event to pin the blame on. Civilization didn't so much crash as it petered out in fits and starts, coming to a rest by the side of the road and being abandoned to rust because their was no where to get gas for the tank. It ended in some places before others, depending on local resources and infrastructure. Depending on your location and how you figure things, it may have ended for you up to as far back as 500 years or as recently as 50 years ago.

And when it ended people didn't turn into crazed cannibals or roving biker gangs willing to die for a tank of gas. Because it was slow, people had time to adjust. Sure, life got tougher, but smart people were more likely to share food with you than kill you over it because friends and family are the real key to survival. When global society went away, people responded by forming local societies, and to many this was actually an improvement in the quality of their life.

This Utopian vision is what differentiates Apocalithic from, say, Burn Shift. Apocalithic is inherently hopeful. Civilization as we know it may be gone, but the worst fallout from that is over with. And the new societies forming have the opportunity to be Better. They have the freedom to explore the way things could be, free from the burden of the way things are. They aren't there yet. But that's where heroes come in.

In Apocalithic the players don't just create a character, they create a shared community for those characters to be part of. Advancing your community takes on the importance that advancing your character does in most RPGS. Your characters will become community leaders, organizing and influencing the development of a new civilization. Along the way you'll explore what communities are for, what they are, and what they should be.

I'm sure I've left some very important ideas about the setting out, but I think these are the basic ideas. The setting details are least important parts of this; they're hooks but if they were the point I'd just drop them into Burn Shift and be done with it. The point is the mood and the heady philosophical stuff. I'm trying for a sort of stone age Star Trek, a vehicle for morality plays about the pros and cons of civilization. I really hope I'm up to it.