I've been trying to decide how to create a scenario for my game background which devestates the world to a degree that it doesn't make it slide into barbarism, but it does create widespread anarchy and havoc such that the geopolitical maps dramatically change.

My original choice was to drop a splintered asteroid onto earth, one making landfall in Russia, one in the Pacific and the other in the Atlantic Ocean. The collision wasn't Jurassic-extinction sized, but on the order of magnitude of several scores of Krakatoas or Mt. St. Helen's....enough to send a huge plume of dust into the atmosphere that didn't quite trigger an ice age, but that nevertheless severely disrupted weather patterns. And as we tragically witnessed so recently, we saw how devestating a relatively small tsunami did to south asia, imagine what an impact like that would do to coastal areas along both oceans where the waves reach a couple hundred feet high and go miles inland.

My next option was closely related...a sort of "Day After Tomorrow" scenario. This was fine because my game world takes place in the near future (about 70 years). I envisioned that a rapid cease in the flowing of the Atlantic gulf stream could cause the heat pump it creates to stop and thereby create a new Ice Age that would happen in just two or three decades (as some scientists now feel that ice ages can happen as dramatically as within just a few short decades). The problem with this idea is that although on a cosmic scale, 2-3 decades is a drop in the bucket, that's quite a bit of time to give humanity to prepare. Sure it would cause a lot of civil unrest but I'm not sure it would cause the level of anarchy that I was looking for.

The third idea I had was a pandemic of some sort of pathogen. Many WHO (world health organization) officials believe it's just a matter of when, and not if, we get some sort of pandemic on the order of a influenza or worse bubonic plague type of outbreak. The problem with this one would seem to be that while it could definitely cause some massive death tolls, I'm not sure it would cause the underpinnings of society to change. Look at the Black Death in which about half the population of Europe died....it didn't really cause any massive social upheavals (although the low technology of the time may have been a steadying influence in this regard).

The fourth idea was to have the magnetic poles reverse themselves (a phenomena which has happened many times in the Earth's past), causing an EMP wave of untold magnitude to sweep across the Earth, essentially obliterating all electronic devices. Who needs any of the above to cause havoc to civilization when all you have to do is turn off the electricity. The problem here is that it may be TOO severe, and this more than likely would slide the world down into barbarism.

A related fifth idea I had was a terrorist destruction of world economic markets. Just place a couple EMP bombs in all the financial districts in all the major countries across the world, and watch hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of digital currency get evaporated in a nanosecond. Just like taking away electricity, civilization as we know it requires these financial institutions to run smoothly. Even third world countries which may seem to not be involved in world financial markets wouldn't be spared, as ironically, these countries are even more enslaved to the world bank. Imagine the great Depression of 1929, but 10 times worse. The problem with this one is like turning off the electricity, it may be too bad....but then again, maybe not. The more I think about this one, the more I like it though.

The sixth option was the old standby, a world war. Make it have just limited NNBC (Nuclear, Nano, Biological and Chemical) strikes, but enough to cause even more damage than occurred in WWII, splintering countries and causing New World Orders to appear.

Any other ideas? Of the five mentioned above, which sounds the most interesting?

Finding the body of Jesus?

Okay, first, the quibble: You mean chaos, not anarchy. Anarchy is a functioning social dynamic without hierarchy... like many good gaming groups.

Which I think gets at the question you most need to address: What sort of disaster is likely to make government, as it currently exists, totally ineffectual as a response?

The environmental issues are good ones, because modern governments are awfully bad at triage... tell them "You can save ten million people here, at the cost of telling one million people here 'We could save you, but it's not cost-efficient'" and they sort of thrash.

Gives new meaning to "finding Jesus" eh?

At the risk of hijacking my own thread (can you hijack your own thread?) , and tongue-in-cheek aside, I honestly don't think it'd be too impacting....unless this body started performing miracles. Me personally, and no offense to other Christians, I take a gnostic view of Christianity (since I'm Buddhist). And for me, Christ was just another Buddha.

That's why I don't see the big hoopla over the popularity of the Da Vinci code (or its forerunner, Holy Blood Holy Grail). The idea that descendants of Jesus are running around fascinates people I guess, because perhaps they believe it makes these people special or somehow more divine. But because I take a gnostic stand on Christianity, I see Yeshua's teachings as trying to tell us that we are all "Sons of Man" (which is what Jesus almost always called himself, rather than the son of God). In other words, Jesus was just saying, "live like I do, understand like I do, and you too can can become a Son of Man". Orthodox Christianity however has trained people to believe that Jesus was unique and that people cam aspire to follow his teachings, but they can't ever be like him. Instead, he is seen as an intercessionary for people on God's behalf.

But the idea is interesting....what if someone proclaiming to be the messiah returns, and can perform miracles to back it up (though Jesus himself often tried to hide his miracle performing, going by the backdoor so as to avoid attention to himself). This would definitely cause some uproar and excitement within the Abrahamic-background dominated coutries. Not sure it'd cause massive upheaval. Unless of course this was the anti-christ :0

I entertain this notion mainly because my game background will have a very large element of gnostic (of which I include not just Christian gnosticism like the Cathars or Essenes, but also the Sufis of Islam, and the Kabbalhists of Judaism), Buddhist, Taoist and jnani (a part of the Hindu tradition) elements in my game world. Most people are familiar with Orthodox Christian elements, so I wanted to introduce other religious and philosophical concepts in my game. There's an old Japanese saying, "If you know only one religion, you know none".

TonyLB-
Well, I guess I'm looking for a mix of chaos and anarchy then. I want anarchy in the form of massive upheavals in the status quo of political, economic, and social entities across the world. But I also want it to have created actual physical chaos, i.e. fighting and civil unrest that turns ugly. In the environmental disaster scenarios, I saw it with a combination of small scare civil wars, where localized groups start fighting over scarce resources.

But you're right, if the government tells the people, "we can save 3 our of 10 of you, for the rest of you, God Speed", well, things are going to get real ugly. Especially if there's some warning time before the impending disaster. This could also work in the case of a pandemic in which some form of cure or immunization is discovered, but there's only a limited amount of treatment available.

So, above and beyond chaos, what moral issues do you want to explore?

Think of it this way-

They find the body. There are no miracles. There are no secret scions. And no, the story is out and confirmed, with no way of putting the genie back in the bottle through devious super secret organizations.

A really horrible bout of existentialism grips an unnamed, nuclear armed, relatively religious nation. Suddenly one of the key societal glues just plain ceases to have relevance. The organizations that supported that religion suddenly lose the cornerstone of their economic support, becoming impoverished and subject to angry criticism overnight. People whose behavior was at least partly based on Desire for Heaven/Fear of Hell lose that basis of behavioral constraint. Perhaps some of them, even a large majority of them, begin to look to other faiths ( Islam? Judaism?). If those faiths had their majority of adherents and learned religious scholars outside of said hypothetical country, you suddenly have a big part of your population that has become "politically unreliable".

Further, Christian missionaries start to be eyed with suspicion. All the old fears that those missionaries were nothing more than tools of superpower control and manipulation resurface, possibly with bloody results along the lines of what happened historically in Japan when the Christians were purged.

So, yeah, I can see a period of serious upheaval resulting from that. Not a permanent upheaval, certainly, but one that could provoke the sort of general cascading chaos you're discussing.

komradebob wrote:
A really horrible bout of existentialism grips an unnamed, nuclear armed, relatively religious nation. Suddenly one of the key societal glues just plain ceases to have relevance. The organizations that supported that religion suddenly lose the cornerstone of their economic support, becoming impoverished and subject to angry criticism overnight. People whose behavior was at least partly based on Desire for Heaven/Fear of Hell lose that basis of behavioral constraint. Perhaps some of them, even a large majority of them, begin to look to other faiths ( Islam? Judaism?). If those faiths had their majority of adherents and learned religious scholars outside of said hypothetical country, you suddenly have a big part of your population that has become "politically unreliable".

TonyLB-
The game will be a transhuman/extopian setting...but a dark one. The chaos causing scenario I'm looking for is actually in the history of the game setting. As I mentioned, the game takes place about 2080 AD, but there's been a massive change in the world order of things. I want some sort of near cataclysmic event to have taken place approximately 20-50 years prior (to give a chance for society to have rebuilt itself to some degree) and is also the reason why the chaos can't be too destructive, and the anarchy would have been temporary so that a New World Order would have time to assert itself.

The moral issues will be those relevant to a transhuman/extopian setting; namely how technology will change how humanity views itself and society. The reason I say it is dark is because in the post-chaotic world, various factions of temporal power (policial entities) as well as memetic ones (religions, terrorist groups, ideological groups, etc) will be opposing each other. At its core, the game will explore the technophiles vs. the luddites, and the haves vs. the have nots.

Here are two more suggestions:

1. The Rapture
Do some research on Christian belief in the rapture and current events in the middle east. There are all kinds of scenarios in here. First of all, it doesn't have to actually happen in a metaphysical sense for there to be an armageddon level event. It just requires that certain people in powerful positions want it to happen enough to start a nuclear war. Self-fullfilled prophecy and all that. Or you could have an actual real biblical rapture fallout scenario: The faithful have ascend to heaven decades ago and everyone else was left behind on Earth, which is now so devastated that it has become a living version of purgatory - rising from the ashes is a new materialist science unleashed from any moral constraints. I kind of like melding the two as competing histories. An armageddon has come and gone, but the nature of it is left ambiguous. New christian cults emerge declaring that it was the rapture and that the new "immoral" secular-science order has created a purgatory on earth that can only be ended by overthrowing the technocrats and the prophetic emergence of a new messiah who recreates the harrowing of hell. On the other hand are cynical secular materialists who believe that religious dogma almost destroyed the world and now power and order must be imposed through strict materialism, social darwinism, and the unfettered exercise of raw power. Finally there are new age spiritualists and secular idealists who oppose both groups but have no power and no real answers, thus being relegated to the "punk" fringes. There is little to no compromise between these fiercely opposed world views.

2. Economic Collapse, Descent into Facism, and World War III
As the primary pillar of our economy now is financing, two factors together could completely collapse the U.S. economy. First OPEC nations move from tying oil prices to the dollar and tie it to the Euro instead. Second China and maybe a couple of other nations stop buying U.S. bonds to fund the deficit and start trying to sell the debt instead. This creates a rush on selling the dollar, the U.S. government goes bankrupt, interest rates soar, inflation moves to devastating levels, jobs are cut, and families who now are at the highest debt levels in american history start losing everything they have. This sends shockwaves throughout the world economy, creating geopolitical chaos. In the middle of this, the U.S. still has more military power than the rest of the world combined and a population that has been trending over the past decades toward patriotism, glorification of the military, and villification of political dissent. How are they going to stabilize their economy and try to reclaim the standard of living to which they believe they are entitled from those nations that destroyed their economy by pulling out of the dollar? Also, how do the people in power make sure that those under them stand behind them instead of blaming them for the collapse (research the Reichstag Fire)?

As regards your concern about global warming being too slow to have a major impact, consider the potential scale of what could happen and the fact that there are not really 70 years to deal with it because realistically nobody would probably take measures drastic enough to help for many decades already into that time period. Geopolitics usually only address solutions when every possible effort to avoid doing so has failed.

It also doesn't necessarily require 70 years to happen. In case you haven't read it already, here is a report put out by the U.S. Pentagon in October 2003 to evaluate the geopolitical fallout of a sudden climate change:

http://www.ems.org/climate/pentagon_climatechange.pdf

I think one possible angle to your scenario if you want very serious devastation is that the threat of nuclear war really isn't any less than it was during the Cold War. It has just been delayed for a time. An increase in geopolitical tension could very quickly create conditions much more conducive to total global nuclear war than the Cold War was, especially considering the proliferation of nuclear capability (and current trend against non-proliferation efforts) that has continued to this day and continued to trickle down into the hands of less stable countries - some of which control important resources. This tension can come from a large variety of sources, or perhaps even more than one coming together in a perfect storm. If the leaders are sheltered in bunkers and the population is already starving to death anyway, who is left to stop the madness?

Hi Dauntless,

I don't know what you mean by "best way." I think you'll continue to get a bunch of disjointed or highly-personalized responses until you clarify that.

Best,
Ron

Actually I think collapsed society is something that narratively you build backwards, in my opinion. You may want to know specifically where your society ends up before you decide HOW it arrives at its current state. Disaster is anecdotal (not to those who live through it) in terms of the aftermath, because it is the consequence of disaster that is important.

Environmental. Survival can range anywhere from a lil tough (i.e. no Starbucks or Denny’s) to brutal and day to day (scarce food, mutant cockroaches.) Environmental dangers could be wide spread and traditional modern conveniences would be non-existent. This would not necessarily cause absolute chaos but it would certainly create a huge economic disaster for the modern nations.

Political. How easily could America slide into chaos and civil war? I would guess much easier then we think. Regionalism is not dead and neither is racism. Political elections are becoming increasingly vicious. Abortion is possibly a sleeping giant that splits even devout Catholics into several camps (Pro Choice vs. Pro Life and Peaceful Protest vs. Violent Protest). Now consider, America is relatively stable. Other countries rely on her support and good will. If we faced chaos and pockets of anarchy or secession here at home, what would our overseas troops and citizens do? How would they be treated? Twilight 2000 anyone?

Spiritual. Rise in suicide. People lose faith in God, government, and granola. As an aside, regardless of what our personal beliefs in Jesus might be, many people have very strong belief and faith in mainstream Christianity. Finding the body of Jesus would cause some consternation. There was a novel written and I cannot remember the name but the premise was interesting: God’s body was found on the bottom of the Atlantic(?) and so the Human race put God on trial for crimes against humanity. Interesting ideas.

Instead of the Journey defining where you are now, where you are now will define the Journey i.e. how you got there.


Sean

Actually, point of note, I don't think finding the body of "Jesus Christ" would be all that damaging- for one, how in the world would we know a 2000+ year old body to really be that of Christ, and two, it simply wouldn't make sense that doing so would drive people to Islam or Judiesm as all three are, for the most part, part of the same over all concept- major differences are in who the "savior" is/was.
What you WOULD likely see in such a discovery, were it possible to ID it beyond a shadow of a doubt, is a flocking to totally different faiths- your wiccians, native american spirit beliefs, etc etc.

I think it would either be rationalized, denied, or sidestepped, or Christianity would just change a little bit to adapt (like how deism has become a somewhat mainstream current), as has been constantly happening since the enlightenment when science was somewhat freed from Christian bias. I think that evolution was a much more fundamental threat to Christianity and it has been weathering that for 150 years using the techniques given above without worldwide chaos. Why would finding the body of Jesus be much different?

Excellent point Ron.

By best, I mean it should satisfy several conditions I have in mind:

1) This chaos/anarchy period has happened in the past...roughly 20-50yrs prior to the start of the game world setting. The current game world setting is transhuman in its genre, so therefore, there is a high level of technology that is extant.

2) The chaos/anarchy period will have drastically altered and/or restructed the current geopolitical landscape. In other words, most countries around the world that exist today will take a different form by 2080AD. Either the geopgraphical boundaries have changed, the political form former countries take are different, economic policy has changed, etc etc. The chaotic period should have been a major contributor to this change (either directly as in the case of war, or indirectly say for example by encroaching glaciers)

3) The damage can not be too intense, otherwise civilization will not be able to rebuild itself within 50 years. However, I have toyed with a possible alternative possibility for this in which the devestation was massive...say 90% of the population dying, but still being able to rapidly redploy civilization and technology within 50 years (ala a Morrow Project renaissance, or from having Colonies which existed on other planets which could repopulate Earth).

Given these constraints, what method of chaos will best create a plausible environment for Earth to reach a transhumanist-level society by 2080-2100? The question may be asked, why create this chaos era? I wanted to radically alter all the current political entities that exist today and redraw and redefine them. A sort of controlled apocalypse if you will. This will allow me to have both a connection to the past as well as creating a new canvas to write new societies virtually from the ground up (well, from whenver the traumatic event happens).

ADGBoss-
I too try to work backwards from the game world I want, and then think back recursively find out what happened between the future and now to explain what happened.

However, I'm having difficulty figuring out what sort of massive trauma inflicted on all of Earth's society could serve my needs. As I pointed out in the response to Ron, I've already figured out some basic elements of where I want the setting to be. The current game world will take place sometime between 2080-2100, and will focus on a transhuman/extopian setting with a luke-warm war going on between several various factions (so more dark than the cold-war extension of the Pacific War that is happening in SJGames Transhuman for example).

I also don't do some of the radical elements that typifies transhuman stories. For example, there are no brain uploading and therefore no immortality (I personally think that due to quantum constructs within our neurons called microtubules, that we'll never be able to perfectly copy our memories, and thanks to Chaos theory, the tiniest element which is askew can lead to dramatically different results....hence, no memory mapping). On the other hand, I have Zero-point energy power which in turn allows for reactionless drives (zero-point energy is a phenomena that quantum theory has successfully predicted that says there's no such thing as a perfect vacuum, there's always energy somewhere....and theoretically, there's an infinite amount of it...this energy is what some physicists think causes inertia).

I like to think of the setting as a mix between Morrow Project, Transhuman, and Dune.

kenjib wrote:
Economic Collapse, Descent into Facism, and World War III
As the primary pillar of our economy now is financing, two factors together could completely collapse the U.S. economy. First OPEC nations move from tying oil prices to the dollar and tie it to the Euro instead. Second China and maybe a couple of other nations stop buying U.S. bonds to fund the deficit and start trying to sell the debt instead. This creates a rush on selling the dollar, the U.S. government goes bankrupt, interest rates soar, inflation moves to devastating levels, jobs are cut, and families who now are at the highest debt levels in american history start losing everything they have. This sends shockwaves throughout the world economy, creating geopolitical chaos. In the middle of this, the U.S. still has more military power than the rest of the world combined and a population that has been trending over the past decades toward patriotism, glorification of the military, and villification of political dissent. How are they going to stabilize their economy and try to reclaim the standard of living to which they believe they are entitled from those nations that destroyed their economy by pulling out of the dollar? Also, how do the people in power make sure that those under them stand behind them instead of blaming them for the collapse (research the Reichstag Fire)?

I've got three thoughts; I'm not sure they haven't been mentioned, but my impression is that they aren't being serious considered.

• Twelve Monkeys did a post-apocalyptic based on the release of a devastating virus. Such a plague need not be as devastating as that movie held, and it need not be man-made (I was reading today that we're anticipating a particularly deadly Avian Influenza in the next season). Something like that could be very quickly destabilizing. Because of the nature of human immunity, though, it would swiftly pass (as the majority of the population would develop antibodies, and thereafter it would become a much feared potential childhood disease but not likely to be deadly again without seriously mutating).• Graeme Comyn is running a Multiverser world that is somewhat post-apocalyptic. He suggested that terrorists detonated suitcase bombs in several major U.S. cities, destabilizing the U.S. and its partners sufficiently that China simply moved in and claimed the place; Japan did the same with greatly destabilized Canada (Comyn is Canadian and British). The collapse of so much of American industry led to serious economic depression, with incredibly blatant class divisions as those in power attempted to hold on to some semblence of comfort and those among the conquered slid into abject poverty and disease.• Our Second Book of Worlds includes the post-apocalyptic without the apocalypse, The Industrial Complex. The core concept is that automation completely replaced all manufacturing and service jobs, and society's adaptation to the severe unemployment was to shift to a system whereby everything was provided free for the asking. Consequently, no one bothered to learn or do anything, and society decayed into very primitive levels. This would take several generations minimum, so it probably wouldn't fit your time frame.

Anyway, those thoughts might spark some ideas.

--M. J. Young

Good point about politics. That means you can't really make it about terrorism, wars of aggression, or current events at all or you are bound to offend someone pretty quickly. So you are left with external forces intervening and interrupting the status quo, which gives you an abstract "bad guy". There are already several great suggestions such as a virulent pathogen outbreak, disruption from global warming, or a near-mass extinction level meteorite impact. You could even have a combination of several. Other candidates for dangerously disruptive technologies would be things like cloning, prohibitively expensive anti-aging drugs, AI-exceeding human intelligence, prosthetic enhancement, molecular assemblers, and Bill Joy's and Eric Drexler's famous "grey goo" scenario.

However, if ethical issues surrounding technology are going to be one of the key components of this setting, perhaps the issue should come from technology: People destroyed themselves through their own technology. One approach I can think of would be to look at the "hot button" technological developments of today and decide to push one of them. This, as background, will get people instantly into the mindset of questioning issues of the moral and ethical boundaries of science.

Maybe you could examine, first, what kind of technological issues you are actually interested in exploring. It's a huge subject and seems central to your setting vision but it's not really defined. Each different type of technological scenario you bring to bear can bring up different themes. You mention trans-humanism many times - is that they key issue you want to explore? What makes us human? If so, consider making an issue of humanity the cause of the collapse -- who's fault was it (according to whom)? On the other hand, are you really interested in something else and trans-humanism is just a bit of color background?

Technology in fiction is often there as a metaphor for trends in our current society. The reader travels into the fantastic of the future, experiences a transcendent experience in an altered state, and then returns back to the real world when done reading, bringing something of the sublime back with him into the real world when done. These new things help to shape human consciousness and our sense of the boundaries of what is possible. What are the ethical and moral issues in your future world that you envision people grappling with? What kinds of technologies can bring those issues to crisis? What does the crisis in the past say about the crisis in the present? It seems like the crisis in the past, effectively, establishes a premise for your game. What is this premise?

By the way, here is a pretty influential essay that might be of interest if you haven't read it already:

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

There's also an increasingly popular post-aopcalyptic German RPG called Degenesis that tackles directly those issues your want to target. There is an English section of the forums at http://www.degenesis.de/html_forum.html.

M

I think that a better worldwide dilemma would be the events of Michael Chricton's book "Prey". Basically, nanorobots equiped with computer programs that essentially allow them to learn escape into the wilderness of the desert, and evolve massive swarms of microscopic particles that learn how to suffocate people, make them trip and fall, and end up looking like humans as well. They also have a corrosive ability that lets them destroy the memory chips in electronic devices (however, this wouldn't turn off electricity - just computers). However, by the same token, they can be electrocuted to death (because their made out of metal).

Also, they reproduced through E-Coli bacteria. So, they'd kill an organism, infect its corpse with E-Coli bacteria, and use the bacteria to produce more nanobots. Its a very interesting book to read even if you decide not to use it.

The thing that makes people revert to their basest natures quickest is hunger. If the global food supply goes poof, you're looking at riots in the streets in every affected city within days.

I also have a few books-- hopefully, this isn't turning too poll like as a thread.

a) Nancy Kress's Beggar's trilogy: Beggars in Spain (& sequels). Basically, an elite created by genetic engineering patents essentially free energy, radically altering the relation of nations and their citizens.

b) `Warday', by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. It's a novel about, roughly, the effects upon the United States of a limited nuclear war in 1988, in the form of a travelogue written by two writers touring the country five years later... The key is that the war is very limited, very few cities go poof. However, the relations of nations, famine and mutated viruses mangle the working order of the world.

c) Day of the Triffids has two ideas... but only one's really necessary. Blind almost everyone (they do it with a "light show" in the heavens that everyone watches that fries their eyes). Suddenly, the few who can still see are vastly important; strange social schemes are reintroduced (like feudalism, with eyesight equating to "nobility").

Just a few quick thoughts. Hope they're useful.
--Scott

There is quite a list here already and I'd say people who have responded have a very good idea of "plausible collapse". The technological singularity between AI and human intelligence, the prospect of environmental catasrophe, rogue states and rogue superpowers, rogue asteriods, collapse of the financial system and, that time honoured favourite, the return of the Big Sky Daddy.

Now apart from the last one (keeping in mind that a major Xian religion predicted the end of the world incorrectly three times in the 1920s... Let's think of the predicted disasters c1875... and what had happened by 1975...

Push the assumptions to places where they would prefer not to go. Take all of the above suggestions (with perhaps the exception of the Second Coming) and combine them, and multiply their effects.

Have fun!

I think the asteroid or comet is one of your best bets given your goals. The key is for it to strike unequally on the globe, thus creating a shift in the global balance of power. For example, two options would be (1) an Atlantic-centered strike which essentially wipes out the Eastern U.S. and much of Western Europe; or (2) a North-American strike which essentially takes out all of the continental U.S. There would also be a huge global effect as well. A few decades later, this makes China, India, and Russia the world superpowers. This will be a radical restructuring from the view of American or European players. It will also have a major cultural and political implications.

Super-pathogens could also have a restructuring effect, especially depending on whom and where it strikes. It could affect different racial or economic groups, as well as striking in different places.

The EMP or terrorist destruction of markets doesn't seem like it would have that much of a restructuring by comparison. The global economy would be set back, but superpowers would still be superpowers, and the Third World would still be the Third World.

What if... we heard a Voice.

This is essentially a riff on the venerable conspiracy trope that the MIB's are covering it all up because "the public would panic". In this scenario, the cover-up fails and the public really does panic.

The scenario here is something like this: all of a sudden, a clear and unabmigiously alien signal is detected. It does not expect answers - it merely talks. What exactly does it have to say?

The decipherability and precise content of the message - and whether or not it is purposefully directed at us - can be worked up later. The central idea is to trigger the not-quite-barbarism of the nbew social order, a re-settling of the status quo as this central question changes priorities.

--

Or, perhaps, the Rise of the East. If China and India achieve positions in the global order commensurate to their size and populations, the world will be a very different place. Some of this has been echoed in Cyberpunk but they have seldom gone the whole way and eliminated western hegemony completely. This may entailo a few short clashes, perhaps the odd bit of gunboat diplomacy, but you could probably engineer a new global order without requiring any major wars.

Heh. The Day the Earth Stood Still RPG.

A virulent disease strikes that attacks people with Y chromosomes, killing almost all of them. It's a classic.

Mike

Aliens.

Its gotta be aliens.

I just read a rather disturbing article which could do everything I want.

An energy crisis.

Namely an oil shortage crisis which will make the 1970's oil crisis look like a $.05 tax on gas. In essence, our whole way of life, our very civilization rests on the energy production of oil. It's not just about driving your car, but about our food, about the goods that are transported, and the manufacturing of goods. Everything is powered by oil. If you want the gory details, and the reasoning behind the disaster, click on the link.

On that note, there was that Outer Limits dream sequence where bacteria had eaten all the oil in the world.

In the Shadowrun RPG I believe there was a (bacteria?) that ate all the paper in (London?). If it'd been more successful.

Oh yeah. there was that (Now/Once?) and Again dream sequence where all the books in the world slowly turned blank. Can't remember if that was explained or not :)

Yeah.. I'm just reporting what I've seen elsewhere, but they looked good :)

I was reflecting on my aforementioned Industrial Complex, in which the world declined into primitivism because no one had to do anything so no one bothered, and it occurred to me that in many of these scenarios one critical element lies in explaining why no one did anything about it.

Having technology is too much of an advantage for everyone to let it slip away; someone would keep it, somehow, unless there wasn't any reason to do so.

--M. J. Young