Saturday, November 29, 2014

Postcards from Pripyat Chernobyl As Fodder For Your Old School Post Apocalyptic Campaigns


I ran across this video from Facebook a couple of days ago from the Laughing Squid website HERE

 Frankly there's an angle that the video creator brought to my attention an angle that I had not thought of for post apocalyptic adventures, namely the idea here of a party documenting and commercially selling a snap shot of the wastelands. Baring in mind here that I'm not trivializing Danny Cooke's great video. This is a incredibly well made piece that documents a horrifying living piece of history. 
Chernobyl Disaster.jpg
Chernobyl is and has been an on going haunted location that traces its roots all the way back to the 1986 nuclear disaster. I remember I was in middle school when the first hints of the nuclear accident reared its head. The scope of the disaster was incredible and it was a time of living in a fishbowl nightmare as the echoes of pop culture blew through with the specters of the cold war and the ghosts of nuclear disaster.
You can find extensive information on Wiki right HERE  of the  Chernobyl disaster
Chernobyl isn't an epic scope disaster that defies rational explanation and the wastelands of post apocalyptic campaigns should have the same epic scale.

The use of drones as both advanced recon and as adventure source is unique here but has been used extensively in other new school rpgs such as Shadow Run,some of the newer editions of Gamma World,Buck Rogers, and many others. But this option puts the power of the drone into a party's hands enabling them to pull the intelligence right into their own hands. Drones will have an incredible impact on the balance and turn around of adventures.
The scale of this sort of operation puts a whole different twist into the role of mutated life forms in old school games, imagine a situation  where a city of domes style society of sedate citizens pays for the jaded  privilege of touring the wastes from the comfort of their very own 'Logan's Run' style society homes whilst others are out risking their necks for incredible entertainment and thrills. A similar situation to the early heady  of motion pictures when audiences thrilled to films from the far flung regions of our own Earth.
Chernobyl offers a DM a template of destruction and human error for the nuclear wastelands. The adventurer as a lens for documenting and seeing the scale of ruins and grand scale background is brought home in only a three mile video. Still there have been a number of video games, science fiction novels, and other popular pop culture products have used the Chernobyl  disaster as a backdrop.

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