This article originally appeared (I think) in an issue of TSS, but I present it now for posterity on the blog...
Needless to say these plots should work with any post-apoc game, be it Mutant Epoch, Mutant Future, Atomic Highway or Gamma World!
10 Weird Plot Ideas for your Post-Apocalypse Adventures
1
While traveling through wasted ruins, characters
stumble across a colony of sentient rats which have descended from genetic
experiments before the holocaust.
2
The players see a distant shooting star that grows
ominously large, and crashes somewhere nearby. On investigating, they find a
starship, out of which emerges a cosmonaut who claims to have been part of an
experiment to test a ship that could travel close to the speed of light. The
cosmonaut’s ship left Earth orbit in 1970.
3
The entrance to a hidden vault is found, in which a
fabulously wealthy billionaire from Old Earth, surrounded by very human-like
android servants has whiled away the years, kept unnaturally young by
telomerase resequencing treatments. Recently, he discovered that his autodocs
are failing, and he needs to find the tools and materials necessary to repair
his anti-aging system.
4
One of the players discovers what appears to be an
impressive ebony sword trapped in a lava flow. After pulling it out, the local
survivor villagers proclaim him a new warlord. Unfortunately, the sword was
lodged in the chest plate of a powerful pre-cataclysmic warbot, which, weapon
now removed, begins to heal up with nano-repair bots before shattering its
rocky tomb. Oh, and it wants its sword back.
5
A nearby volcano (which may be a smouldering crater
from the end times) is radiating a lethal cloud of spores, which infect local
humans and animals with a silicone-based lifeform that drives them in to
madness and frenzy. The spores are wafting from a lava tube inside the crater,
where the deadly plants are blooming, having grown up and out after being
exposed from the depths of the earth.
6
A war satellite is still functioning, zapping targets
at random on the planet below with a powerful particle beam weapon. It is
possible to be stopped, but this involves finding an ancient comm. Station,
breaking in past the still-functioning robot security units, and shutting it
off.
7
A squad of immortal super-soldiers wander the
wastelands, carrying out a need for war which was genetically encoded as a
biological imperative. They wander in to the peaceful lands of a survivor
community, and attempt to forge an army out of the weary folk, or destroy them
if they wont cooperate.
8
An alien vessel arrives in orbit and sends a contingent
of scientists down to the surface of the apocalyptic world to investigate. It
turns out they are from Earth, and that the wasteworld is really a colony that
succumbed to civil war decades ago!
9
While traveling the across the wasteland, the players
stumble across a humongous relic from the old war, a tripod-like tank left over
from the Martian invasion of Earth.
10
Locals are terrorized by what appear to be immense
ravaging dinosaurs straight out of the cretaceous and beyond. They ask the
adventurers to stop this menace. The trail leads to a ruined laboratory where
particle physicists once worked on creating wormholes. It turns out that the AI
which runs the facility is still quite active, and finished their work,
creating a wormhole in time which lead back in to the distant past. It’s trying
to perfect a way to send people through, to test the laws of causality.
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