The War for Island 018 - OOC
The War for Island 018 -- OOC
The year is 2035. A state of martial law exists over the Continental United States (which includes an annexed Mexico and Canada.) The government, which is less and less often seen as a diplomatic entity, and more often a totalitarian regime, rules with an iron fist. Reacting to paramilitary secessionist and religious fundamentalist forces from within, and responding to an ever-expanding list of threats around the globe, resources for the last superpower are stretched to the breaking point. U.S. Foreign Policy is thinly-veiled thuggery, piracy, lunacy. At home, desperation reigns. Cities are fully divided between haves and have-nots. The unemployment rate reaches 65%. Mega-city slums and refugee camps for scores of displaced and migrant souls, eking out their meager existences in extreme poverty, dot the landscape. The crime-rate is off the charts. Disease runs rampant. Education is minimal. America is dying.
In this fearsome landscape, where gangs openly vie for authority with police and military forces, where drugs and goods are currency and a human life means nothing, human corrections housing and detention is big business. Continental prisons resemble small cities, and all are overcrowded, filthy and the most vile, concentrated nests of evil located anywhere within the four corners of the Earth. Life expectancy in a max-sec prison is a little under a year.
The business interests of what remains of America have undertaken a new experiment. A series of Islands under American control have been given over to the Corrections department. A last-ditch effort to rid American soil of the destructive element that erodes from within.
You are part of that experiment. An inmate, devoid of rights, stripped of citizenship, birthright or hope of parole. No reprieve. No escape. Exile, and death are the only expectations the wardens have for you. Survival is defiance. Hope is revolution.
Taking cues from a recent resurgence in the popularity of the genre by the likes of ‘The Passage’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ as well as little bits of ‘Escape from New York’ and originally inspired by the little-known film ‘No Escape’ starring Ray Liotta and Lance Henriksen, I love the notion of supposedly brutal people dropped into a wilderness, both foreign and familiar to live or die by their own code. Hell, I guess you could say there’s a bit of ‘Lord of the Flies’ mixed into my overall vision for the RP, as well.
Island 018, as inmates will discover, is tropical or sub-tropical. A small island, it has obviously been populated by man in the past, fairly recently, as there are at least two main habitable encampments on the 3 km-wide island. One was obviously a small community that housed workers and laborers, in the centre of the island. The other was once a bustling resort on the South coast, long derelict. Both communities date from the 1990’s. There is no readily available power on the island, no communications, little in the way of tech resources, unless it arrives with the PC, or is scavenged from the ruins.
The island is mostly deep, inhospitable jungle, difficult to traverse and inhabited by the denizens typical to the climate: insects, birds, small mammals, the occasional oxen, some predatory cats (panther) and lizards.
Welcome to Island 018. The Warden hopes you die quickly, and alleviate the surplus population.
