Inspired by the Burning Empires PBP game going on where they are currently putting together the game world, I was wondering if it would be possible to design a world burner for a Post-Apocalyptic game.

I think there is a lot of potential here, but also some limitations, deal-breakers even.  

Here are my current pros to the idea:

PA is a setting that has a lot of options in it.  Tech levels, civilation levels, reality levels, time from apocalypse, etc.  Depending on how you set those things up you can create a wide range of settings, from Mad Max to Gamma World.  

You get all the positives that come with world burning, mainly player buy-in (which is huge obviously), but also less work for the GM, inspiration, etc.

One of the juiciest parts of the PA setting is the nature of the disaster that brought humanity down in the first place.  It would be cool to have a burner that took this into account and allowed you to choose from a wide range of awesome falls and then tweak your world around that.


Here are some of my concerns:

The main one is that unlike say Burning Empires, where as far as I know there isn't a lot of exploration, a big part of the fun in a PA game is the mystery and exploration.  What did happen?  Where does that concrete door in the desert floor lead to?  Can you burn a post-apocalyptic world together as a group, yet keep enough mystery and unknown in there so that it will still have that element of "Holy crap, the ancients ate each other!"?

One solution would be to just say that if you want to have a lot of unknown for the players, the GM makes certain choices on his or her own.  But it would be cool to actually structure the burner so that it accounted for this and allowed for a certain amount of unknowns to be a part of the group's consensus on the world.

That's really the only negative I can think of.

Comments?  Criticisms?  Suggestions?

I'm also open to people starting to put together categories and choices within categories.