Apocalyptic Gaming

I've been reading John Birmingham's excellent post-apocalyptic thriller After America (a sequel to Without Warning). Like S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire,  it's basically a story of  a strange phenomena killing millions of people and upending civilization. Distressing in all the obvious ways but also very interesting as a thought experiment. What would I do in this impossible situation? What if it were some other bizarre catastrophe? Aside from making me marginally more aware of my own family's lack of emergency preparedness, stories such as these also make me think of gaming.

Post-Apocalyptic gaming has a long and rich history in our hobby, from Gamma World  to Apocalypse World (which I want to pick up soon). If one subscribes to the theory that Dungeons & Dragons is fundamentally a post-apocalyptic game (see here), then it is perhaps the oldest style of roleplaying. But while our games often take place amongst the ruins of ancient civilizations, it doesn't seem as common to set adventures at the very moment when everything goes south. Perhaps I'm wrong. I know that lots of people played Twilight 2000 at one point, and that's closer to what I had in mind. And of course there is All Flesh Must Be Eaten. But I wonder how many people run those games right from the moment things go pear shaped?

A campaign where the world falls apart is a natural for sandbox-style play. The conditions of the environment provide plenty of drama as the player characters struggle to acquire supplies and find some area of relative safety. From there, characters should be sufficiently motivated to restore something of what was lost and they will naturally come up against violent strong men and ruthless opportunists. Of course, the GM does have his or her work cut out for them. They should have some idea how things would shake out if the players didn't get involved. Then again, that's not necessarily the case. In some ways, the GM can play through these moments at the same time as his or her players, reacting to events on the ground and discovering the world through their eyes.

My own Knights of the Astral Sea campaign has elements of this. The characters existed before the apocalypse struck and they had to use their wits to survive in those crucial moments after everything went to hell. They are, in fact, still struggling to help put their interdimensional civilization back together.

Another idea that I have been mulling over for years is a sort of a magical apocalypse. In 2012 (of course), magic violently returns to the world. Technology is thrown out of whack, supernatural phenomena kill or mutates millions, and governments collapse. There may or may be not extra-dimensional creatures that arrive to wreck havoc. Into all of this, a party of ordinary people can gather survivors, establish a fortified settlement, and even learn how to harness the magical forces that are suddenly available to them.