I love post-apoc games (GW, Rifts, Chaos Earth, Wasteworld, etc).

One of the cool tropes is when PCs discover "ancient tech" hidden in secret forgotten military installations.

Here's when it happened in real life.
Explorers discover abandoned Russian Space Shuttles

[video=youtube;-q7ZVXOU3kM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM&t=119s[/youtube]

Anyone have any images / stories about real life post-apoc moments?

There are lots of rapid-transit stories out there. Future Perfect stuff. Abandoned hovertrains, waterplanes, and spaceships.

Fascinating but they didn't get any carnivorous rabbits with shotguns on camera...

Chernobyl and Priyat are the closest we can get to what it would be like if we just disappeared one day. There's a great non-fiction book on that exact subject called The World Without Us that would be great reading for anyone running a post-apocalypic campaign.

[video=youtube_share;TG-nwQBBfmc]https://youtu.be/TG-nwQBBfmc[/youtube]

[video=youtube_share;UeZtlFeEcNg]https://youtu.be/UeZtlFeEcNg[/youtube]

Quote from: Voros;1018155Chernobyl and Priyat are the closest we can get to what it would be like if we just disappeared one day. There's a great non-fiction book on that exact subject called The World Without Us that would be great reading for anyone running a post-apocalypic campaign.

[video=youtube_share;TG-nwQBBfmc]https://youtu.be/TG-nwQBBfmc[/youtube]

[video=youtube_share;UeZtlFeEcNg]https://youtu.be/UeZtlFeEcNg[/youtube]

Creepy and spooky. Personally I think for a "real life Gamma World" your best option may be suicide over a slow death by radiation poisoning and cancer. But I've never been a fan of postapocalyptic  games or fiction.

Quote from: Dumarest;1018197Creepy and spooky. Personally I think for a "real life Gamma World" your best option may be suicide over a slow death by radiation poisoning and cancer. But I've never been a fan of postapocalyptic  games or fiction.

Good point, about the only film that captures that is Testament, I remember this film scarring me as a kid.

[video=youtube_share;CQJy1465NSU]https://youtu.be/CQJy1465NSU[/youtube]

Quote from: Voros;1018214Good point, about the only film that captures that is Testament, I remember this film scarring me as a kid.

[video=youtube_share;CQJy1465NSU]https://youtu.be/CQJy1465NSU[/youtube]

The Day After covered it to a degree.

For sure, but compared to Testament pretty much every other post-Nuke film pulls its punches, even Threads.

Post-apocalyptic games are fun to play. But the truth is that if our civilization falls, that's the fast or slow end of all humankind. We're done as a species.

Hardly.

Massive die off? Sure. It will truly suck to be alive, but it would have to reach Toba levels to have a chance to wipe us out.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1018848Post-apocalyptic games are fun to play. But the truth is that if our civilization falls, that's the fast or slow end of all humankind. We're done as a species.

Some would argue that the entire reason for there even being a United States is so that the entire world doesn't turn into torture chambers and concentration camps.

Uh, okay.

Quote from: Baron Opal;1018954Hardly.

Massive die off? Sure. It will truly suck to be alive, but it would have to reach Toba levels to have a chance to wipe us out.

The reason is not because of whatever the initial apocalypse was. I mean obviously, there's a couple that could theoretically kill off the whole species.

But even a much lesser apocalypse, even one with relatively low casualty rates, if it manages to collapse our current civilization, would lead to a situation where it would be extremely difficult to ever return to our current level of advancement. Mainly because certain vital resources (everything from fossil fuels to rare metals, and some other things) would not be easily-accessible, like they were for us. We would most likely be doomed to be stuck at a pre-industrial level until a superbug or a texas-sized asteroid wiped us out.

That's why we have to get this right. It's why it's so important we defend Modern (ideally, Western) Civilization.

We went from the founding of Rome to early space exploration in a few thousand years from scratch and you think we couldn't do it again now that the recipes are available?  Western Civilization is so special and fragile that if it crumbles then nobody would ever try to do it again?

Quote from: Manic Modron;1019791We went from the founding of Rome to early space exploration in a few thousand years from scratch and you think we couldn't do it again now that the recipes are available?  Western Civilization is so special and fragile that if it crumbles then nobody would ever try to do it again?

It's not about the recipes. It's about the raw ingredients.  It's hard to start up an industrial revolution again if you don't have easily-accessible coal and petroleum. Or to return to the computer/space age without rare metals.