Detail Required for a Setting

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[SheikhJahbooty]

My only change would be discussion of travel to discussion of everyday life, assuming that people live there at all.

(Roughly two weeks after my mugging, and after identifying two of the thugs who got me to the police, I got it in my head that I win as long as I'm not miserable about my scarred lip that prevents me from playing the flute, so I'm on a bit of a sex and rum bender, gloating over the fact that those guys who were caught are in jail so they can't get drunk or have sex with women, so forgive me for being too inebriated to remember or look it up on your blog if people actually live in the anarchy zones.)

But if people are travelling through the anarchy zones they will want to know how to get around, what there is to eat, how available water is, what type of weather there is, what type of shelter from that weather there is, etc.

Partially these types of questions always fascinate me (are parasite killing nanotech common enough that they need not worry about dirty drinking water? Do the nanites that kill parasites get used up, or do they reproduce so that people feed them iron and sugar like high tech sour dough starter?), and partially I'm fascinated by Charognard (which is unfortunately only in French), so I kind of want post apocalyptic games to be about struggling to get by with what you can forage from the wilderness and find in the rubbish of the previous civilization.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I'm sorry to hear about your misfortune, but elated about your response. Its exactly the kind of direction I need at the moment. Although I just wanted a general thread about settings, I'm really inclined to give some quick answers.

Only about 10% of the 2050 population remains - reanimates, disease, starvation etc. (how many people have survival skills in a highly urbanized culture?) About 70-80% of those who remain live in the Anarchy Zones, usually in towns of a few hundred to a few thousand focused on agriculture and resource extraction. (Albeit the definition of resource has expanded to include controlling universities that produced nano-tech, cities full of salvage, or nuclear power plants.) G-Zones are a few tens of thousands or more and tend to operate on a bigger picture scale - restoring industry, military expansion, preserving history.

Nano-Vac does not reproduce itself, but doesn't degrade all that quickly, unless the user is exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation. (Listed operation about 14 months, actual half-life is closer to three years.) Still, a booster injection before dealing with parasites would be recommended. More troubling is that it only deals with pathogens - chemical pollutants from unmaintained factories and the like are quite dangerous.

Its rather like the movie version of the wild west, but with reanimates replacing blizzards and cholera, while aliens are wily Indians and bandits are... bandits, but have motorcycles. Functional computer components replace gold dust at the saloon. Actually, if you think of the G-zones like the empires of Britain, Germany, etc and settlements as African/South American colonies - the early 19th century a pretty good fit overall.

Returning to the original line of discussion, I've looked at my collection of published games. Accounting for the change of travel to living conditions, most of them meet the above five criteria. Some of them do place travel in a separate category - most notably the SF ones with space or underwater vehicles (Jovian Chronicles, Blue Planet) - though Twilight 2000 has quite a bit on that as well. (The whole theme is get back home from Poland.)

Conversely, even the SF ones don't give quite the technical detail of equipment or the background to things like I've been doing. Fortified cites are simply accepted without explaining the environmental trends that created them, gauss weapons simply use magnets instead of gunpowder, no further explanation. I seem to be losing the forest for the trees in my quest to make the zone something to explore rather than just the hexes between each dungeon.

[koipond]

[SheikhJahbooty]

Just make sure you focus on setting appropriate details. Zombie - psychological details, how well people are handling it. Apocalypse - scarcity, isolation. Losing the forest for the trees would be like focusing on how gauss guns work. We can all read wikipedia. Giving good detail that a GM can use to start making the PCs desperate as they zombies close in from all sides is stuff like how gauss guns break.

Are they sturdy? If you drop one, do the magnets get misaligned? Are the capacitors easy to recharge, or are there only a few places that can do it? Can it fire iron pellets (easy to make), or do you need special darts (need special dies and files)? If I want to scare the players who've spent all day trudging through the desert, when the zombies come out at night, is it appropriate for me to spring it on them that their guns have lost charge from being in the desert heat all day? How many days of being left in the sun before an ordinary magnetic rifle completely loses it's charge?

If any of these things are non-issues, just skip them. For example, if every blacksmith has a set of dies in different calibers, then say the rail guns use darts, and you can buy or trade for them almost anywhere, done. If you pretty much have to bake the capacitors before they lose charge, then ignore what I said about heat.

It's like in Rifts, Vampire Kingdom. There's a lot of information provided, but you don't really feel like it's too much because the goal is to give the GM all the information necessary to turn Scrupulous PCs into people who are so frustrated and paranoid that when a child walks up to them on the street, they ask, "Are we going to shoot him?" They should think that Mexico is crazyland, and that the violent illiterate Lone Star burbs in the shadow of the nazi CS is a welcome vacation.

[Corone]

I'd suggest that as long as your setting answers these three questions you've probably got it covered:

What are the player characters?
What can they do?
Where can they do it?

If you're thinking of a game you can create more supplements for,
the best plan is to offer a wide general overview in the corebook
and fill in the details in further supplements.
this also gives you a chance to hear from your players what they think is cool in your world and they'd like to know more about.