Dead South
The apocalypse came and it went. It was a vicious disease that killed most every soul it touched, leaving only small handfuls of survivors across the world. The US Southeast was hit the hardest, and that's where you have the bad luck of living. You survived the Plague only to end up stuck here, in this nowhere town called Bluffton, straddling the border between Alabama and Georgia, waiting to get yourself blown to bits by raiders. You joined up with this group because you thought you'd finally be safe. The Jonesgroup, is what it's called, led by an old woman named Mama Jones who says she used to own this land you're living on now. Things weren't so bad at first. There's farming set up, y'all are bringing in just enough to keep yourselves fed, but there's no electricity at all- man, you miss having A/C in this heat- and all the nearby stores have been picked clean of anything valuable already.
Not by the Jonesgroup. That's the problem. There are other groups of survivors out there. Farming-scavenging communities like this one, redneck hunters living like wildmen out in the deep woods, and- unfortunately- some cranked-up, desperate raiders. One of those raiding bands, the Mounted Skulls, have been extorting this group for years. They ride up on their motorcycles, pumping their shotguns, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes waking you up in the middle of the night, and then leave with sacks full of your hard-grown crops. Last week, you watched Mama Jones finally stand up to them. It was a dramatic scene, that old woman silhouetted in front of the campfire when the Skulls ride up to collect their tribute. You didn't think a woman that age could stand so firm. She told them in clear terms that they'd get nothing more from her- except for bullet-holes, if ever they come back here again.
Most of the Jonesgroup celebrated. But as you look into the campfire tonight, you know: that means they are coming back, and this time it'll be a fight for sure.
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General Idea
This RP is a post-apocalyptic struggle with Southern Gothic themes and a bleak approach towards our situation. We're in a fictitious small town right on the border between Alabama and Georgia, if you were to drive for about an hour east from the ATL. Our characters will be attempting to survive in this now empty, bloody South, but- be warned- they can die. They can also become injured, crippled or ill.
I will be GM'ing, making those kinds of decisions, though I also intend to play as a character of my own. (He can die, too. I will have one or two co-GMs who will decide without bias when my own character is in trouble.) As mentioned in the prose above, we're a part of the Jonesgroup of survivors, living on land that used to belong to an old Southern woman named Mama Jones. Recently we've started denying tribute to a group of raiders that have been taxing us, and we're now expecting to have to fight them.
This is a problem, because we are not at all ready for the fight. Our territory isn't walled or fenced, most of us aren't fighters, we have no electricity or good equipment. So, the early stages of this RP are likely to center around us scrabbling to get things in order before I have the Mounted Skulls show up to test how well we've done.
But, rest assured, that's not all we'll be doing, because...
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The Problem System
The Jonesgroup is a poor group in a world where we can't rely on society any more. We always are facing some kind of challenge, even when the Mounted Skulls raiders aren't coming around. I will keep a running list of current Problems that the group has. This may be a shortage of water, a heat wave that's going to melt us where we stand, or stranger things like an unsolved murder or a mysterious infant appearing at our doorstep. Players can pick what Problems they want to pursue working on, or kick back for a while and interact with one another's characters.
I will update this list as Problems are solved and introduced.
The Jonesgroup's current Problems are:
-No electricity, no refrigeration or AC/Heat
-No fence or wall around our territory
-The Mounted Raiders are coming soon
-No electricity, no refrigeration or AC/Heat
-No fence or wall around our territory
-The Mounted Raiders are coming soon
I prefer statless, numberless RP, so I won't be keeping track of things like the exact amount of food and water and whatevers we have. Rather, I will be going by a narrative. I might say "We're low on water right now," and then when a character goes out and finds a Piggly Wiggly store that still has dozens of packs of bottled water in it, the Problem will be temporarily resolved. If you manage to make a system for purifying water from a nearby stream, instead, then it may be resolved forever.
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The Judgement System
The Judgement System! This is a fancy, dramatic-sounding term for a very simple idea. As mentioned already, I prefer statless RP and I do not like juggling numbers. As also mentioned, your characters can get hurt, or get in trouble, or get dead. The combination of these two facts results in the Judgement System. All it means is that when your character is doing something difficult or risky, you shouldn't say in your post whether they succeed in it or not. Me and the co-GMs will use our best judgement, based on the situation and how you wrote it, to decide on whether what you're trying to do works.
So when you make a post where you, say, attack a bad guy, you'll say something like "Jimbob McCharacter charges at the Mounted Skull raider with his machete, trying desperately to cut him down before he can fix his jammed gun," and me or my co-GM(s) will let you know if it worked before you make your next post. You may then start your next post by writing about your Jimbob McCharacter actually succeeding in cutting down the bad guy. We might also tell you that it worked, but Jimbob got bruised when the Mounted Skull took a swing at him.
This system applies not just for fighting, but for anything significant. Trying to fix an engine, hunting in the woods for food. Smaller things like everyday tasks or firing a few shots that don't hit or whatever won't need to go through this kind of check; use your own best logic. Me and the other GMs will also be subject to this system, since we can each judge one another.
But that's enough boring talk about systems, now. Let me tell you a story...
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How, Exactly, The World Ended
It was a pandemic.
There's something abnormal about some kinds of sickness. The ones that don't just kill the body, but take their time doing it, slowly picking you apart with a hint of malevolence. There's something about it that feels supernatural, in a way that isn't quite adequately explained by germ theory or by the coldly clinical words of the doctors who espouse it. In the throes of a fever, delirious as their body fights for its survival, a sensitive man might swear his sickness was the work of the devil.
The Olive Plague that rolled through the world certainly didn't feel like anything normal. It was a virus that killed everything it touched, sure enough, but it killed slow. Real slow. The sick were debilitated on their beds for months before their microscopic tormentors finally let them die. That was almost the worst of it: the infected had to be taken care of, they needed constant tending-to. The worldwide economy came to a halt as people had to stop working to care for their sick relatives, and then as shutdowns were implemented far too late. Hospitals overflowed, out into the streets, out over entire city blocks covered in make-shift tents for the ill. At the end, roofed football stadiums were filled with the sickbeds. On each of them, the moaning body of someone wishing to be dead. Those who tended to them would soon join them.
Boils forming on your skin were one of the first ways to know you'd been infected. These boils were tan, mid-sized little bubbles that grew out of your face, arms, legs, with a dark red dot in the center of each. In other words, they looked like olives. Hence the name.
Only a lucky few could dodge this fate. Media started calling them the Resistant. People who, due to either lucky genetics or from being one of the few people to survive the Olive and develop a resistance, were immune to the disease. Nobody knew for certain why it was that so few could stand against this plague. Nobody even knew where it came from.
The big theory- as spoken by conspiracy theorists and then by news anchors, by old mamas and eventually by everyone else- was that it must have been man-made. "This came out of some lab somewhere" was a phrase spoken ad nauseam, especially down in the U.S. Southeast, where the pandemic hit the hardest. Something about that region, probably the humid swamp-tainted air, was the perfect breeding ground for the Olive Plague. From New Orleans to Savannah it transformed into a world of the dead, filled with the smell of rotting bodies and a few Resistant trying to escape it all. That was the first region to fall. But the rest of the world, in due time, did join it.
It has been seven years now since the plague swept through. The Resistant were cursed to watch as the human race ended not with a bang or with a whimper, but with the moaning of the diseased. There's nothing left now but the them, and the empty Earth they've inherited.
Some of them started to rebuild. But now, with pre-apocalypse goods starting to give in to age and even canned foods expiring, the fighting over resources begins...
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Interested?
If you've read along this far- congratulations! You're probably interested in joining. And why wouldn't you be? It's an awesome RP idea and you obviously have excellent taste.
The character sheet template is below. My own character sheet will be in the Char tab, hopefully in a day or two, and can serve as an example.
P.S. I have an unfortunate fondness for long sheets that ask you about things like your character's favorite color, and their worst fear, and other nonsense. Most people are wiser than me, and so do not care about these things. If you, like me, are a fool, I've included an optional "extra details" hider within the CS that asks such questions. (At the least, it might help you develop your character a bit!)
Also, if you're working on a character, don't forget to join our Discord. It'll probably be the best place to keep up with the community around this RP and discuss arcs/drama/whatevers together: discord.gg/9HQXunpF8X
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