Project Doomsday
Old Blogs Greatest Hits, pt. 1
Some of you may be aware that I used to blog about games. Yea, verily, that’s why I got on Substack in the first place: to see if I could get back into some sort of regular “blogging” type activity.
Since my old blogs (“The RPG Corner” and the blog I ran on my currently-mothballed sirlarkins.com domain) are no longer available for public consumption, I thought it might be fun to go back into the archives and dig out some of my older, more popular posts.
For the inaugural post in this irregular series, I want to share this fun bit of post-apocalyptic world-building I dove into back in 2017, when I was contemplating developing an original setting heavily inspired by Rifts, Robotech, and 80s post-apocalyptic cinema.
I have a few ideas for what to re-post next (maybe I’ll make this a monthly feature?); I’ll post a poll shortly.
In the meantime, please enjoy PROJECT DOOMSDAY…
According to the Gregorian calendar, the year is 2048, but many alive today only count the years since Doomsday—65 years ago now.
September, 1983: The nukes started flying, and to this day no one knows why. It is generally agreed by everyone outside the Sino-Sov Empire that the Russkies struck first. The retaliation from NATO was swift and decisive enough; the MAD Doctrine bore its bitter, radioactive fruit in the form of hundreds of millions of lives cut short, incinerated in the blink of an eye. Billions more would perish in the famines, increased volcanic activity, and nuclear winter that followed.
The “Long Winter” lasted six years; even today, with red-orange ash-choked skies dimming the sun’s warming rays, the advancing polar caps and glaciers remain thick with ice, sufficient to soak up enough water to lower global sea levels by one hundred feet and perpetuate a new Ice Age.
Within ten years Post-Doomsday, radiation reached tolerable levels and temperatures stabilized across much of the planet. The Wastes of North America and Europe were ruled by rad-zombies, mutoids, and nomad packs, but in places largely spared from nuclear destruction (South China, Japan, South Africa, Brazil), humankind set about the arduous task of rebuilding. And that’s when the Colony crash-landed…
A massive alien generation ship, the Colony was already inbound towards Earth when the nukes flew in ‘83. The colonists aboard the ship, a psychically-sensitive race known as the Uru, were stunned by the shockwave of death and misery unleashed into the cosmos by Doomsday. The ship’s Nav-Brain actually exploded inside its capsule, so overloaded was it by the empathic wave. The ship drifted rudderless for ten years, slowly descending towards Earth in a lazy orbit before crashing not far from the ruins of Ulaanbaatar.
Explorers and scientists from the nascent Sino-Sov Empire were the first to reach the Colony. They found an alien ecosystem, complete with animals, plants, and sentient residents, taking root around the ship. It took three months to reach the crash site proper, by which time many of the ship’s animals and plant spores had scattered to the four winds. So too had many of the Uru colonists; those who remained would come to rue their decision, for they were quickly rounded up by the Sino-Sovs and taken off for “further study” in underground labs scattered across Manchuria and Siberia, the beginning of the Sino-Sov dominance of psy-tech.
No matter where they went, the Uru bore a dire warning: they were only the first. Their generation ship was launched in an effort to escape the grasping tendrils of the ever-expansive Galaxian Empire, a multi-system conglomeration made up of scores of enslaved species from innumerable conquered planets, all under the collective thumb of the grasping, venal Galaxians, a gestalt race of air-breathing, helium-filled jellyfish possessed of neither morality nor ethics, masters of genetic and biological manipulation.
Even worse was the news of the Uru ship’s departure being noted and tracked by the Galaxians, soon hot in pursuit, drawing their attention to this previously quiet little corner of the galaxy. Their arrival on Earth was anticipated to come just a few years after the Uru.
In the years following the coming of the highly-psychic Uru, a change came over the planet. Starting in Central Asia, then spreading out to eventually encompass the whole world, extra-sensory abilities began manifesting in men, women, and children from all walks of life. Telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, psychic healing; psionic abilities blossomed more or less at random at differing levels of power, with some folk transforming into master psychics practically overnight—a process that left many little more than drooling vegetables, their brains fried by the experience. For those who survived, however, came power undreamed-of. Other strange effects, like increased poltergeist activity and even ghostly manifestations and strange phenomena, proliferated as well. Most remarkably, the entire continent of Australia seemed to disappear into a parallel dimension. Although it is still visible from space, it is impossible to contact by any means, and so far no one who has ventured there has yet returned.
None can yet say with certainty what caused the Awakening (as some call it). Was it the mere presence of the psychically-advanced Uru? Was it strange spores released from some of the xenoflora aboard their crashed Colony ship? Or perhaps the Uru are merely coincidental players, and the Awakening was owed to the subtle effects of radiation from the War?
Forty years passed since Doomsday, thirty years since the arrival of the Uru. Things would never be like they were, but there was a sense of increasing stability arising here and there. A new normal asserted itself. And then the Moon exploded.
The Galaxian invasion craft, a massive battle fortress called Nemesis, announced its arrival in the most spectacular way possible. In a twinkling, the Moon was no more, reduced to billions of micro-satellites which quickly settled into a silver ring around the planet. The larger chunks from the explosion rained down on the planet, initiating a new cycle of death and destruction. Worse, without Luna’s gravitational pull, the oceans rose up in surging tsunamis across the globe as the tides equalized. Whole swaths of tough-as-nails survivors who persevered through four decades of post-nuclear chaos were wiped out by the rising waves. Even those coastal cities that weathered the Lunar Explosion, such as Hong Kong and Rio, lost millions of lives.
As the waters receded and the meteor strikes abated, humanity looked up to see a new sort of moon in the skies overhead, just barely visible orbiting outside the new Lunar Ring. This was, of course, Nemesis. One month after the Lunar explosion, the first Galaxians descended from their dark orbital base, touching down in the city of Brasilia in the in the Corporate States of Brazil.
Although spared the holocaust of nuclear fire, Brazil, like much of the world, had suffered greatly from the ensuing global nuclear winter, breakdown in infrastructure, famines, and floods. In the immediate aftermath of Doomsday, most of the country was controlled by petty warlords and their bands of former miners and foresters, or else reverted to jungle; only the three metropolises of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia clung to any semblance of order and civilization, and even then only under the autocratic rule of the United Corporations: a conglomeration of the country’s twenty most powerful business syndicates.
The technology offered by the Galaxians allowed the Corporate States to rebuild in earnest. Gengineered symbiotes and parasites cured endemic diseases overnight; Galaxian slave labor drove back the jungles once again, driving the Miner-lords to ground or else into the arms of the Anden-Nazi-Reich, a small insurgent mountain state led by ayahuasca-sipping refugees of the Third Reich, their lives artificially extended by psychic powers, and their local allies. The Corporate States happily allied with the alien invaders, selling out their souls in the process.
On the other side of the globe, other centers of power emerged—some more than willing to fight against the Galaxians, others remaining steadfastly neutral for now, waiting to see which side could offer the best inducements.
Let us take a tour of the rest of the world as it stands in the year 65 PD (Post-Doomsday):
The former NATO nations are wastelands. In Europe, small conclaves (most notably the the fortress-monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia) represent the most advanced states, but even these are limited to just a few thousand souls each and largely rely on pre-Doomsday tech. Caught between the chill descending from advancing glaciers to the north and an expanding Sahara across the sea to the south sending searing, dust-choked winds their way, their future looks grim.
North America, too, is a howling wilderness dominated by nomadic packs of irradiated mutants and cannibals. Six decades on from Doomsday, the last of the “OldTech” is being used up; vehicles run dry of guzzolene and there are no more bullets for guns. Slowly, the American mutoid packs are reverting to a Neolithic tech level, their once-exalted superpower past now but a distant memory and the stuff of myth-making.
Death comes swiftly to those foolish enough to venture to the Wastes of America and Europe, yet many do, intent on scouring the ruins for pre-Doomsday artifacts and gear, which then commands outrageous prices among wealthy collectors in Hong Kong, Beijing, Sun City, and Rio. Only the heavily-fortified dry moat that is the Panama Canal Zone, manned by CSB soldiers, prevents the madness of the nomads and mutoids from spreading further south.
Doomsday cored out the Soviet Union just as surely as the NATO member nations, but thanks to the fact that the Russians struck first, theirs was not a total holocaust. Eastern Siberia and northern China both caught their share of nukes in the madness of Doomsday, but fared better than the West. In the rebuilding since the Long Winter, the survivors have come together to form the icy, totalitarian Sino-Sov Empire. A Maoist-Stalinist state, it is by far the most expansive and powerful of all human nations on the planet, projecting its strength over the former states of Amur, Irkutsk, Buryatiya, Zabaykalye, Primorye, Khabarovsk, Sakhalin, Kamchatka, all of Mongolia, the old regions of North and Northeast China, and the two Koreas, as well as the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The beneficiaries of Uru psy-tech, extracted slowly and painfully from their alien captives, the powerful Sino-Sov authorities eye the Galaxian invasion with open hostility, particularly in light of the alien empire’s open alliance with the capitalist stooges of the Corporate States. The Sino-Sovs are busily preparing for what they see as another global confrontation not long in the future. Despite its ruthless totalitarian structure, the Sino-Sov Empire might just represent humanity’s best hope in the face of the would-be Galaxian conquerors—at least for those investing in preserving the old order of things.
South China, like much of the world, has fallen to lawlessness. It is the Sino-Sov Empire’s number-one military target ahead of the anticipated Fourth World War, but this reconquest will not come easily, as this part of China is overrun with warlords and their private armies. The warlords formed an uneasy peace in the face of Sino-Sov aggression, creating an ad-hoc Bandit Empire to call their own.
Off the coast of China sit two great island nations. The first is Japan, surely the most singular of all the planet’s countries. A leader in technology prior to Doomsday, the Japanese, largely spared the destructive rain of nuclear fire, were able to leverage stolen Uru xenotech after the Colony’s crash in the year 10 PD. Advances in cybernetics and bionics came thick and fast, and Japan found ready buyers in the Sino-Sov Empire and the Bandit Kingdoms alike. With technology increasing by leaps and bounds every year, Japanese cybertech is everywhere, spreading as far as South Africa and Brazil.
The greatest irony of Japan’s success is that it has come at the cost of its own humanity. The first artificial intelligences came online two decades after Doomsday, and the first self-aware robots walked the streets of Neo-Kyō not long after that. In a twisted parody of mankind’s fears of mechanized automation, the new robot population quickly assumed power, forming an elite caste of nobles and warriors who keep paternalistic watch over Japan’s “meat-population” of unskilled tech-laborers, kept docile and entertained with the very gadgets and VR rigs they helped invent and develop.
Although the Sino-Sovs conquered Hokkaido thirty years ago, they have made no further military progress in the face of Japan’s fearsome robo-samurai, and an uneasy truce now exists between the two nations. The Sino-Sovs grew too dependent on Japanese tech to risk destroying it all in a futile invasion, and the growing proliferation of a new virtual currency system (called “Digi-Credits”) recently introduced by the bankers of Neo-Kyō is yet another guarantor of Japan’s continuing independence.
To the south, in the temperate zones beyond the Bandit Empire, the city-state of Hong Kong glitters like a jewel in the South China Sea. The last outpost of the British Commonwealth, Hong Kong is a multi-ethnic, multi-national free city of spies, mercenaries, black marketeers, and Taoist mystics. Agents of the Sino-Sovs and Corporate States move unnoticed amongst teeming crowds, past stands peddling the latest in smuggled Uru-tech, Japanese wetware, and Galaxian bio-mods. After the floods following the Moon’s explosion, the whole island was enclosed in massive cement walls to prevent a similar disaster in the future. Now the citizens of Hong Kong Walled City are building up rather than out, creating a hive-like mountain rising up over the surrounding waters. This great island-city offers anything and everything to those daring enough to reach for it—if they don’t get their hands cut off in the process.
Thanks to collateral nuclear damage, increasing desertification, and an unfortunate meteor strike that stretched from Pakistan to Azerbaijan, much of the Middle East and India is largely uninhabited, their cities long since reclaimed by jungles and deserts, the graves of billions resting below the radioactive loam. Rumors persist, however, of reclusive kingdoms in the lower reaches of the Himalayas, beneath the great Tibetan glaciers. The most outrageous of these rumors insist that strange monstrous beasts rule their petty shangri-las, leading some to jokingly call these polities the “Yeti Kingdoms.”
Sub-saharan Africa fared better than the north, and it is here that we find perhaps the most unusual of the major human powers: in the wake of Doomsday, the white minority government of South Africa collapsed, and the native amaZulu peoples and their allies established self-governance. Only in the resort community of Sun City did the old order hold sway, the former getaway destination transformed into a fortified city-state. Eighteen years ago, the Afrikaners of Sun City reemerged, backed by terrible forces. None can say definitively what gives them their powers, though many claim it to be nothing less than a deal with the Devil himself, but the “Witch-Kings of Sun City,” as they are called, quickly overran the various Zulu states and reasserted their dominance. Naturally, this did not sit well with the amaZulu peoples, and South Africa is currently torn by an ongoing civil war between the Witch-Kings and the Zulu Resistance.
Despite what Sino-Sov propaganda insists, Earth is no longer humanity’s domain. The Uru, and the many subjects of the Galaxian Empire, represent the first competing sentient species on the planet in 30,000 years. Alien flora and fauna introduced by the Colony ship and bio-engineered creatures unleashed by Galaxian scientists now proliferate across the globe, as do the Galaxian servitor-races, displacing native species that have no defenses against these new threats; some Terran species, spurred by radiation-induced mutations, quickly evolved into new, alien plants and animals in their own right. Psychic vampires hunt down the most powerful mystics, intent on feasting on their brains. Rad-zombies roam in all-consuming hordes across the Americas and Eurasia, like terrible shambling locust swarms, devouring all in their path. And, for the first time since Doomsday, the planet is threatened by global war. The Sino-Sovs prepare to move against the Bandit Empire and the Galaxians plot in the glittering penthouse offices of their slimy human allies, planning a sweeping offensive—only where they will strike remains to be seen. Their ultimate objective is clear, however: total conquest of the planet.
The view from Hong Kong Walled City is a bleak one, yet not entirely without hope. Earth may have changed forever, but it’s still worth fighting for...isn’t it?