End of the word game

Да… уж сколько раз игроделы из Южной Кореи были уличены в неприкрытом копировании нетленной механики легендарных RTS-ок: Command & Conquer, StarCraft и других; в итоге клонов не счесть, а словосочетание «корейская RTS» стало уже чем-то вроде уничижительного штампа. На этом фоне разработчики игр с острова Тайвань выглядят просто невинными младенцами. Их немногочисленные RTS-ки были вполне себе самостоятельными продуктами с хорошим военно-экономическим уклоном — вспомнить хотя бы Colonial Project (1996). Но вот однажды, в 1997-м, за год до выхода знаменитой StarCraft, малоизвестная студия FIE (Frontier Information Enterprise, 飛拓) дебютировала со своей единственной игрой The End of the World. Трудно сказать, сколько здесь исконно тайваньских идей, но по обилию всевозможных видов пилотируемых роботов тут определённо чувствуется «японский след»…

Сюжет интересен и поучителен. Некая фантастическая раса, а может быть — и сами люди (из концепт-арта было сложно понять – да это и неважно), доигрались-таки с экологией своей планеты. Мощный облачный слой навсегда перекрыл поток света – на поверхности воцарился глобальный холод. Начались войны за выживание. Однако спасение вскоре было найдено – магические кристаллы, позволяющие парить огромным блокам из горной породы в небесах выше облаков. Так постепенно и появились целые летающие континенты. Но наверху конкуренция обострилась ещё сильнее – на всю катушку разразилась бескомпромиссная война с применением целых армий боевых пилотируемых роботов. Враждующие стороны: империя Сидов (斯達) и империя Ромов (羅幕). И вот, вам придётся попробовать себя в роли главнокомандующего, в компетенции которого будут входить разведка, оборона территории, строительство….

Эта RTS из разряда простейших – тут даже на большей части кнопок только иконки, надписей почти нет. Нужно строить много зданий, зачищать местность от юнитов противника. Осталось не совсем понятно, есть ли в игре добыча полезных ископаемых? Кристаллы, которые воткнуты по краям парящих в небе островов, выполняют сугубо утилитарную функцию – поддержание блока породы на плаву в небе, и их добывать невозможно по этой причине. А что тогда собирать – осталось неясно. Из учитываемых ресурсов есть только листы стали, расходуемые на строительство, а также вырабатывается электричество. Юниты бывают нескольких типов: строительные, оборонительные и солдаты. Ещё есть огромные роботы, назначение которых также сугубо военное. Строительные юниты могут возводить новые здания, заводы, ремонтировать технику, строить мостики переходов на другие острова. Часто, исследуя островок, можно напороться на скопление сил противника. Это такие же пилотируемые роботы, только другой расцветки. Близкий контакт с ними перерастает в мощную перестрелку, насыщенная озвучка выстрелов которой будет приятно ласкать слух любого геймера. Вообще, тут любое строение, будучи выделенным, издаёт свой характерный шум, гул, грохот, лязг. На CD с игрой присутствует много музыкальных тем разных стилей и аранжировок.

Управление – проще некуда: в основном только мышкой. Из огрехов… Насчёт шрифта текстов – всё обстоит предельно плохо. Это скорописная форма стиля «синшу», более уместного в RPG-шке на тему какого-нибудь «троецарствия», а не в игре с футуристическим антуражем. Вдобавок эти иероглифы – растры очень небольшого размера, раскрашенные в какие-то грязные полутона, из-за чего даже знающему «китайскую грамоту» будет поистине «вырвиглазно» вчитываться во все эти брифинги.

Графика геймплея — обычные 640х480х256с; по сути, ничем не отличается от сотен других RTS-ок, если бы не одно но. Дело в том, что выходила такая игра Cyber Guardian (創世機神, 1996), в которой концепт-арт бил все мыслимые и немыслимые рекорды по своей запредельной сюрреалистичности, – это надо видеть. В The End of the World элементы оформления меню, а также спрайтики юнитов чем-то слегка напоминают тот самый стиль. Вдобавок полная схожесть скорописного начертания иероглифов в обеих играх – тут так и хочется блеснуть новомодной скептической фразой: «Совпадение? Не думаю»…

Игра хороша, но чего-то ей определённо не хватает. Чувствуется сильная упрощённость во многих моментах. Безусловно, для кого-то в RTS-ках и не должно быть никаких графиков, таблиц экономических показателей, списков задолженностей и прочих «дебет-кредитов»… Именно для такой категории геймеров мы и хотели бы порекомендовать сей продукт. А что до китайского языка – так он же тут вообще «нечитабелен», поэтому препятствий к прохождению, по сути, нет. Приятной всем игры!

The End Of The World is a series of Tabletop RPGs by Fantasy Flight Games, based around the many ways that the world could end. Based on El Fin del Mundo, an RPG line originally created by Álvaro Loman and José M. Rey for Edge Studios, it was adapted for American audiences between 2014 and 2016.

A notable element of the series is that the player characters and the environment they live in are, respectively, the players and the area of the world they’re currently in. NPCs can be people the PCs know, supplies are scavenged from houses and stores in the local area, and the apocalypse can potentially start at the gaming table. Each book contains five Scenarios, with both an Apocalypse entry and (if the PCs survive for long enough) a Post-Apocalypse entry, which deals with the world some years after the previous apocalypse.

The four books in the series and the scenarios they contain:

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     Zombie Apocalypse 

     Wrath of the Gods 

     Alien Invasion 

     Revolt of the Machines 

Tropes the series as a whole contain:

• Abandoned Hospital: A recurring location in all four books. Often, they are a good source of medicine, but they’re not as abandoned as they appear to be…
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: How most of the «Revolt of the Machines» settings kick off, a new AI going rogue for one reason or another, from an unexpected side effect of a software upgrade, to interacting with the human brain in unexpectedly malevolent ways, to just deciding humans are too big of a threat to their own existence and it can do better.
• Apocalypse How: Depending on what scenario you’re choosing, it can range from a Class 1 (society is disrupted and changed, but still functional to some degree, even if it’s under the rule of aliens or robots) to a Class 5 or 6 (most if not all life on Earth is dead or has little chance of recovery). The scenarios listed in the books tend to be listed in order from least to worst ending.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Giant monsters appear in almost all the books in one form or another:
  • Zombie Apocalypse has giant blobs of parasites in Beneath The Skin, big enough to flip over trucks and capable of burrowing underground and splitting into smaller forms.
  • Wrath of the Gods has several — Quetzalcoatl the giant flying serpent, Fire and Frost Giants, and of course Cthulhu itself, who is bigger than a mountain.
  • Alien Invasion has the giant ants in Skitter.
  • Rise of the Machines has the «Modulords» (a horde of Modulons who physically link together to form a giant humanoid robot) in The Modular Menace, who wreck buildings and fight each other for dominance, growing bigger with each victory by «absorbing» the loser’s Modulons. The Gray Goop from Nanopocolypse counts too, as it eventually grows so huge it consumes almost all the earth’s surface.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: Both Heavy Metal and The Modular Menace involve domestic machines turning against their creators, although the Modulons are a completely fictional device (a domestic robot).
• Bittersweet Ending: Possible in some of the post-apocalypse scenarios, especially (with the exception of Strange Aeons) in the Wrath of the Gods scenarios.
  • The Ragnarok scenario stands out most of all, because, if the PCs survive, it is all but explicitly stated that the world is better off than it was pre-apocalypse, although many people are dead and there is great devastation.
• But What About the Astronauts?: In the post-apocalyptic stage of «Nanopocalypse», it’s specifically mentioned that the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are safe from the Grey Goo scenario, as none of the nanobots have been able to leave Earth’s atmosphere… but with no fuel, no means of building a new rocket, and likely nobody left alive who could pilot it, Earth won’t be able to resupply the space station or send a rescue party, condemning the astronauts to slowly starve to death in space.
• The Can Kicked Him: «Nanopocalypse» warns players that, while it’s a sensible precaution to use the gas station bathroom after refueling your car, it can be dangerous if nanobots happen to be travelling up the pipes.
• Color Motif: Each of the four books is tinted a specific colour.
  • Zombie Apocalypse is rendered all in shades of red, for obvious reasons.
  • Wrath Of The Gods is tinted yellow and gold, indicating the superior nature of the threat.
  • Alien Invasion is appropriately green, given that it actually features an invasion of Little Green Men.
  • Revolt Of The Machines is blue, reflecting both the cold, clinical nature of the enemy and likely the endings to the scenario (bleak even by this game’s standards).
• Crapsack World: How the world ends up in pretty much every Post-Apocalypse chapter.
• Crisis Point Hospital: «Logical Conclusions» features hospitals being overwhelmed with casualties from the battles between cyborgs and Gladius combat robots, especially once the cyborgs escalate to waging war on humanity. By the end of this scenario, staff are pushed to the limits. As such, the «Emergency Room» is a rich possible source of encounters and events — the most worrying of which involves the cyborgs attempting to use the hospital as a potential source of new recruits.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: How «Logical Conclusions» happens. The government creates cyborg super-agents, but the cybernetics turn them into something wholly alien and extremely malicious toward anything that isn’t a fellow cyborg.
• Death by Materialism: «Nanopocalypse» features looters during the apocalyptic end of the scenario, taking advantage of the chaos to steal just about anything… including stuff that isn’t really needed. As such, it’s entirely possible for them to wind up dead courtesy of the nanobot swarm.
• Downer Ending: Everyone can, and probably will die. Those who manage to avoid death will have to live in what remains of the world. And sometimes the post-apocalypse is »worse» than the apocalypse. In nearly all the books, the final scenario is often the worst one:
  • Even in a game setting that runs on this sort of thing, the scenario «Nanopocalypse» (the final scenario in the final book, Revolt of the Machines) is crushing in the despair it conveys. In this apocalypse, nanobots have overrun the world and consumed every atom of carbon in everything on the planet’s surface, organic and inorganic alike (one of the passages talks about the people aboard the International Space Station watching every trace of green and every city light on Earth disappear from orbit), leaving only dust behind. In the post-apocalyptic world, the safest place for humanity to be is Antarctica (the nanobots can’t survive in extremely cold temperatures). A harsh life, but at least humanity survives, right? Not for long. It’s implied that the only food supplies left on Earth are the ones left in those arctic bases, which aren’t enough to feed all of the arctic refugees for very long. And there’s no means of resupply from the outside, no means of growing food locally (the environment is too harsh), and no way to grow food anywhere else in the world because the very soil has been stripped of carbon (as the book puts it, «The surface is not only devoid of life, but lacks the necessary foundations for life to ever again take hold.»). In this post-apocalyptic world, humankind isn’t just in for a rough ride like it is in most other scenarios — it’s dead and just doesn’t realize it yet.
  • The final scenario of Zombie Apocalypse, «Under The Skin», is not much better. A nigh-invulnerable parasite has begun to infect people all across the world, the symptoms of which don’t show until days later, allowing it to spread unchecked. The apocalypse section ends with approximately 60% of the uninfected population of the world hiding in underground bunkers while the governments of the world initiate a «scorched earth» policy via nuclear bombings. Humanity is forced to live underground in the post-apocalypse, with much of the surface world left a charred, radioactive wasteland teeming with mutant animals, and there’s no guarantee that the parasite is completely eradicated. But at least there is some hope that the human race may survive, if they don’t kill each other first.
  • Wrath of the Gods has Cthulhu rising from the deep and slowly marching along the continental US, destroying everything in its path. It shrugs off all damage, instantly regenerating after every attack. Only a barrage of nuclear warheads manages to vaporise Cthulhu completely, and even then it only takes slightly longer to regenerate before finally taking off into deep space, leaving a trail of destruction and a radioactive crater behind. Afterwards, the Deep Ones and Star Spawn take over, and humanity is forced to live the rest of its days being enslaved, tormented, and experimented on by these monsters. Even the cultists who helped them are not spared.
  • The final scenario in Alien Invasion offers a small shred of hope: though the Visages have replaced nearly everyone and have turned all farms and cities into giant spore-making factories, the book points out that Visages only have a lifespan of about 20 years, after which they shrivel up and crumble to dust. So as long as what little remains of humanity doesn’t die off or kill each other, there’s at least a small chance of reclaiming the Earth..
• Dreamville: In the post-apocalyptic half of «Logical Conclusions,» «deserving» American citizens are kept in communal pods by the cyborgs and allowed to inhabit a VR scenario taking place in a Norman Rockwell-esque vision of 1950s America.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: A unique mechanic in the «Ragnarok» setting is a PC embracing their doom, which gives them max stats and basically makes them unstoppable until the end of the current encounter…but it’s a Heroic Sacrifice as they suffer some kind of epic death at the end of it.
• Dystopia: In the event that the post-apocalyptic world is intact enough sustain a working civilization, it will usually be some flavor of this:
  • «Night Of The Meteor»: With EDEN having managed to create a means of preventing zombification, it’s now been given carte blanche over the world in exchange for the cure, turning the entire planet into a corpocratic police state. Surveillance drones patrol the streets, people will occasionally vanish, and anyone protesting working conditions can be sentenced to hard labor or even re-education.
  • «Under The Skin:» The population of the world has been relocated to a network of underground fallout shelters to escape from the Polluted Wasteland created by the nuclear destruction of the parasites. Here, conditions are miserable, individual rights are few, and any benefits are skewed heavily in favor of the elite. Plus, it’s heavily implied that the apocalypse was allowed to continue simply so that a One World Order could tighten its grip on humanity.
  • «The Brotherhood Of Babylon»: Humanity is completely subjugated by the Annunaki and the world has been reduced to a Vichy Earth.
  • «The Modular Menace,» «Logical Conclusions,» and «Death From Above» all feature the robots taking over the world and reducing the human population to slavery in some form or another, sometimes to the extent of offering an attractive alternative to resistance.
• The End of the World as We Know It: It’s in the title.
• The Everyman: PCs aren’t heroes trying to prevent the end of the world like they would be in most any other game, they’re regular people just trying to survive it.
• Everyone Dies: Most likely how a game will end.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: The Visages from Alien Invasion don’t replicate animals, especially dogs, as animals can sense them.
• Fallout Shelter Fail:
  • In Zombie Apocalypse, the scenario «Under The Skin» features an ancient Puppeteer Parasite being accidentally unearthed by miners and infesting millions of people worldwide, forcing governments to hastily build underground shelters, evacuate as many uninfested people as they can, and then nuke the surface in an attempt to destroy the parasite. As the post-apocalypse segment of this scenario makes clear, life in one of the shelters is anything but pleasant, and it’s possible for a shelter to fall in certain plot events: in one case, the screening process on new arrivals fails, letting in a parasite-infested scientist; in another, characters are tasked with digging a new tunnel to expand the shelter — only to accidentally uncover another dormant parasite.
  • In the epilogue of the Revolt of the Machines scenario «Nanopocalypse», the survivors of a Grey Goo situation flee to Antarctica, where the cold disables any pursuing nanites. Here, Antarctic research stations become the shelters of choice… but it soon becomes clear that there isn’t enough food to go around in storage, and once the hunters run out of game, wars between other stations and even cannibalism become common. Worse still, it’s clear that with the rest of the world stripped bare by the nanites, this is one case of this trope that’s going to end with the human race extinct.
• Fate Worse than Death: Surviving the apocalypse is not necessarily a good thing, especially when it comes to the final four scenarios of each book. The worst of these is unquestionably «Nanopocalypse,» which offers absolutely no hope of improving the world even slightly, suggests nothing positive in the event notes, and condemns the players to spend the rest of their lives eking out a futile living in an endless desert haunted by nanobot swarms or waiting to die of starvation in an Antarctic research base. Even the book itself refers to your survival as «lucky» in sardonic quotation marks.
• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter:
  • «Under The Skin» can feature players being forced into the sewers to avoid the parasitic infestation bringing about the Zombie Apocalypse. One possible plot features them stumbling upon the door to a shelter hidden in the sewers; unfortunately, convincing the inhabitants to let you in is another matter, especially if you’ve gotten the attention of the zombie hordes… or worse still, the gigantic superorganisms the parasites combine into.
  • Once «Nanopocalypse» kicks off, everyone is rushing to find a shelter that’s safe from the Grey Goo, but because the nanobots eat anything containing carbon — like concrete — the only viable shelter is another continent entirely. As such, airports are overrun with refugees, and because jet fuel also contains carbon, escaping player characters may find themselves boarding a plane with a huge wave of nanobots spilling onto the runway behind them. However, given that nanobots can travel on air currents, chances are you’ll eventually be forced to flee again; the only viable long-term shelter for the players is an Eerie Arctic Research Station, as polar temperatures disable nanobots on contact… but by the time this is realized, getting there will require another frantic escape from the country you’re sheltering in, followed by another potentially lethal flight through nanobot-polluted airspace.
• Foregone Conclusion: There’s nothing that can be done to halt whatever enemy’s the focus of the scenario. There’s a small chance the survivors might be able to pick up the pieces and start over in the new world of the aftermath.
• Gaia’s Vengeance: Literally one of the scenarios in Wrath of the Gods.
• Genre Blindness: Subverted in Zombie Apocalypse— in most scenarios, the book notes that both players and NPCs have mostly likely seen their share of zombie movies, and know how to deal with them. It doesn’t stop the zombies from taking over, of course.
• Government Conspiracy: Implied in Under the Skin, where it is heavily suggested the U.N. not only could’ve developed a cure for the parasite if they’d put as much effort into it as they put into building the shelters and eradicating all life on the surface, but that they knew about the parasite’s existence beforehand and even deliberately released it.
• Here We Go Again!: After all the trouble the UN’s gone to just to annihilate the parasites in «Under The Skin», one of the possible events for the Shelter features the players being tasked with expanding the Tunnel Network… only to accidentally unearth another group of parasites.
• Hollywood Voodoo: The It Ends With A Whisper chapter has a brief note at the beginning stating that the «voodoo» magic shown in this scenario is based entirely on this trope, and not any of the real-life Afro-American religious beliefs.
• Hope Springs Eternal: Most of the post-apocalyptic scenarios feature at least some vague thread of hope for the player characters to cling to, even in the bleakest storylines: «Visages» reveals that the doppelgangers will eventually die off, scientists can determine a method for curing the murderous tech in «Heavy Metal,» a plot suggestion in «Skitter» features the possibility of Myrmidons being domesticated, counterattacks against the Atlanteans are underway in «Rising Tides,» and all manner of rebellions can potentially succeed in «The Brotherhood Of Babylon,» «Night Of The Comet,» «The Modular Menace,» «Logical Conclusions,» and «Death From Above.» Even the spectacularly grim «That Is Not Dead» hints at an artifact that might be able to kill the Star Spawn. Appropriately, the only scenario that doesn’t feature some kind of hopeful note is «Nanopocalypse,» with every suggested plot thread featuring temporary survival measures, unsolved mysteries, or even bigger horrors, and all indications are that nothing will ever improve.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: Or rather, a horde of alien ants.
• Homage: pretty much every scenario in the books is based on another piece of apocalyptic fiction, some more blatant than others:
  • Night of the Meteor is based on the original Night of the Living Dead.
  • No Room In Hell takes its title and premise from Dawn of the Dead (2004).
  • Skitter is based on Them!, whereas Visages is based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
  • Heavy Metal is based on Maximum Overdrive, as well as the short story it was based on.
  • Logical Conclusions and Death From Above both takes notes from the Terminator franchise as well as The Matrix, with government-built A.I.s/robots going rogue and taking over the world. Logical Conclusions even features pod-based Mind Prisons being built for human captives, along with the heroic Gladius robots becoming virtually identical to Terminators.
  • That Is Not Dead is, of course, ripped straight from the Cthulhu Mythos, even directly referencing it within the story descriptions.
• Invincible Boogeymen:
  • Cthulhu of «Wrath Of The Gods.» As with his original counterpart, nothing can stop him; as you’re playing a lone everyman caught up in the apocalypse, you don’t have access to the kind of weapons that can even mildly inconvenience the chief of the Great Old Ones, so all you can do is run like hell and avoid looking at him.
  • The nanites of «Revolt Of The Machines.» Most of the time, they’re too small to be seen until they start eating something — or someone — leaving you effectively helpless; when a nanoswarm gathers in large enough numbers to be seen by the naked eye, nothing in your arsenal can hurt them. All you can do is put an ocean between you and the infestation, and that won’t work for long.
• Killer Rabbit: Gaia’s Revenge can have literal killer rabbits, and one of the examples of enemies featuring in the chapter is a cute little beagle puppy… chewing on a severed human arm.
• Little Green Men: One of the scenarios in Alien Invasion has them as the antagonists.
• Magic Meteor: Every book in the series has at least one scenario involving a meteor or comet that kicks off the plot, either carrying cosmic invaders (Return of Quetzalcoatl, Skitter/Visages) or bathing the planet in weird radiation (Night of the Meteor, Heavy Metal).
• Mistaken for Disease:
  • In «Night Of The Comet», the first zombies to rise as a result of the freak radiation are animals, resulting in an epidemic of animal attacks that are initially blamed on rabies.
  • In «Under The Skin,» five days after the initial release of the parasite, doctors are left baffled by a plague of what appears to be necrosis and cannibalism… up until they finally discover the parasite infesting one of their patients.
  • When nature turns on humanity in «Gaea’s Revenge», baffled experts initially believe the animal attacks to be the result of a mutant strain of rabies… up until plants begin growing out of control and earthquakes start leveling human cities en mass.
  • In «Nanopocalypse,» the initial stages of the Grey Goo incident are met with confusion at first, and one of the many theories claims that the disaster is the result of a biological weapon — supposedly the reason for people suddenly withering into desiccated husks. Four days after the crisis begins, the government comes clean to the public, but with the nanobot swarms almost unstoppable, revealing the truth does very little to help apart from providing some basic safety guidelines.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: In «Under The Skin,» the menace of the story is an ancient Puppeteer Parasite unearthed by a mining operation. It takes the form of a tarry black fungal gunk infesting any living thing it touches, gradually reducing its victims to decomposing zombies. This is bad enough, but if allowed to clump together after their host bodies break down, the parasite can form a giant Blob Monster of Kaiju proportions. The stuff is so dangerous that the governments of the world opt to move their people into underground bunkers and nuke the surface to a crisp rather than let the parasite roam free.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Each scenario in Zombie Apocalypse features a different kind of zombie:
  • «Night Of The Comet»: Infected by radiation from a comet, any human or animal in the world that dies automatically becomes a zombie. All are shambling, mindless ghouls that devour flesh despite deriving no nutrition from it, though the animal undead tend to be quicker. Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain is the only way to kill them, and their bites will not infect anyone.
  • «No Room In Hell»: Brought back through no specific means, though it’s hinted that the supernatural might be a reality in this setting. Similar to the last, though only human beings can be resurrected as zombies, and a bite will definitely create a new zombie.
  • «Pandemic»: Fast-moving Technically Living Zombies brought about through a rabies-like virus that drives them into unreasoning rage. Can only be human. Getting bitten or clawed or exposed to their blood will spread the infection. On the plus side, Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain is not necessary as they’re technically still alive. On the downside, some infected individuals become Primes, who are not only stronger and even faster than ordinary enemies, but can spit infected blood, climb sheer walls, and even make use of weapons and tactics.
  • «With A Whisper»: Voodoo Zombies. Can only be human. they can take the form of living people being possessed by Voodoo practitioners, or undead soldiers reanimated by Voodoo, but both exist solely to serve their masters’ agenda. Biting doesn’t spread zombification, which can only be inflicted on the living or the dead through magic rituals. Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain works only in the event that the head is completely severed or destroyed.
  • «Under The Skin»: Parasite Zombies. Can be human or animal. once infested, they’re initially Technically Living Zombies compelled to eat brains to feed the ancient parasites within them, using their intelligence to acquire prey and spread infestation further. However, as the parasites grow and continue to feed on their hosts from within, the infested individuals begin to decompose until they become shambling, mindless zombies. Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain will only work in early stages of infection and does nothing to destroy the parasite itself; older zombies will continue to function even when hacked to bits, either existing as chunks of animated flesh or joining together into huge superorganisms. The only way to kill them once and for all is through fire.
• Polar Madness: In the post-apocalyptic phase of «Nanopocalypse,» it’s discovered that the nanites can’t tolerate extreme cold, forcing the survivors to flee for Antarctica… but given that the polar research bases weren’t meant to accommodate more than a few people at a time, supplies quickly run short, resulting in violence, cannibalism, mounting despair, and insanity — especially once it becomes apparent that the nanites have stripped the rest of the world bare of all resources, including the ones needed for life to take hold again, meaning that the world is essentially dead and the remainders of the human race are condemned to slowly starve to death.
• Polluted Wasteland:
  • The Earth ends up this way in «Under The Skin», after the U.N. carpet-bombs the surface with nukes in a desperate attempt to finally kill off the zombie parasite. The surface is now all but uninhabitable and radioactive, though it does hint that some (mutated) life exists aboveground.
  • In the Post-Apocalypse chapter of «The Modular Menace», the Modulons have taken over the world and built enormous «cubes» where they and the remainder of humanity live and work. The rest of the world outside the cubes is almost all polluted wasteland, as the Modulons see environmentalism as an inefficient waste of time.
  • «Nanopocalypse» ends up this way as well, to an extent. Anything that isn’t carbon or carbon-based is left a brittle silicate husk that quickly crumbles, turning every bit of land between the poles into either a lifeless desert of sand or a churning sea of gray goop.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: The Mayans actually did predict the end of the world in 2012… but they got the math wrong by a few years, so when the world starts being wracked with natural disasters seemingly out of nowhere, necessitating Quetzelcoatl’s return, that’s what’s actually happening.
• Reptilian Conspiracy: The scenario «The Brotherhood of Babylon» in Alien Invasion has an Ancient Conspiracy, masterminded by the Anunnaki and carried out by Reptilian Half-Human Hybrids.
• Robot War: The fourth book in the series focuses on this, though «Logical Conclusions» and «Death From Above» feature the most straightforward instances of actual war.
• Rock Beats Laser: The main reason the armies of the world get wiped out while doing no damage in the «Ragnarok» scenario is the invaders come from a place and time where valor and skill at arms were how wars were fought. Automatic, computer-controlled weapons that remove the need for such things are mystically ordained to fail against the mythological hordes. What this boils down to is that a PC wielding an improvised weapon and with nothing to lose stands to do a lot more damage to a frost giant or troll than a laser-guided missile.
• Self-Insert Fic: The rules officially encourage you to use yourself as a Player Character on the scenarios. Among the game’s few comical moments is mentioning in some of the scenarios having the apocalypse interrupting their gaming session, or its onset going unnoticed if they’re too into it.
• Sickening Slaughterhouse: In «Night Of The Meteor,» one possible encounter involves players stumbling upon a slaughterhouse and realize that the tools inside could make effective weaponry… but to obtain them, players have to get through a particularly horrific bunch of pre-slaughtered animal zombies.
• Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality: The post-apocalyptic stage of «Logical Conclusions» features many survivors of the nuclear apocalypse being brainwashed into mind-slaves by the ultra-nationalistic cyborgs — assuming they’re not valuable enough to be converted into cyborgs themselves. When not at work, these mind-slaves spend their days podded up in a collective Mind Prison, bombarded with patriotic imagery and pleasant sensations in order to ensure their compliance. However, scenario notes indicate that the cyborgs are also building an immersive VR environment for «deserving citizens», based on an idealized, Rockwellian vision of 1950s America.
• Subterranean Sanity Failure: In the post-apocalyptic stage of «Under The Skin», the uninfected populace survives in a worldwide network of shelters deep underground, but most citizens are forced to live in communal barracks with terrible food and no rights, and the only inhabitants who will ever see the sun again are scientists — or exiles. Consequently, one possible suggested event for the Shelter features a resident finally cracking up under the strain and attacking their neighbours.
• Swarm of Rats: One of the many animal zombies featured in «Night Of The Meteor.» Given their sheer numbers and ability to infiltrate otherwise safe territory, zombie rat swarms are among the most dangerous enemies in this particular scenario, especially since it’s just about impossible to kill them unless you have a flamethrower on hand.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The first book focuses on several different ways this could happen, from damned souls emerging from Hell to a rabies-like virus sweeping through humanity.