Post-Apocalyptic Plot Seeds

These sixteen plot seeds for Post Apocalyptic adventures originally appeared in TSS 43, but I'm reprinting them here....possibly for a second time, my memory fails me!...for your enjoyment:

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 auto-docs are failing, and he need 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 smoldering crater from the end times) is radiating a lethal cloud of spores, which infect local humans and animals with a silicone-based life form 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 wanders 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 leads back in to the distant past. It’s trying to perfect a way to send people through, to test the laws of causality!

11 Sometime during the cataclysm an ancient army of war machines was buried beneath waves of lava. The basalt later proved to be a valuable mining source for a local colony of survivors, who were digging for the metallic parts and pieces entombed within. One of the war machines was otherwise preserved intact in the quick-cooling lava flow and has awakened! It now seeks to reconstruct the interred army of its machine brothers, to complete the job they started…and needs humans to serve as "living brain cases" for the hyper-advanced machine intellects!

12 A horde of slavering, liquefying mutants that generate voluminous quantities of highly corrosive vomit are marauding the land and terrorizing the local citizens. The heroes stumble upon a camp of survivors in an otherwise intact resort facility from before the end times who are being terrorized by these slimers.

13 An alien vessel investigating the burnt out shell of Earth has crash landed, and the alien is on the loose! The alien is masquerading as a mutant, or perhaps even looks human enough, but some of the more savvy scavengers in the area have gotten wind of this high tech marvel wandering around and are trying to find it. The characters might benefit from aiding the creature in repairing is starship, either for gifts it offers them, or a chance to escape the Wasteworld. Of course, they could just as easily by the scavengers!

14 There’s a local hermit in the mountains called Big Ben who is a survivor from the old days, an ageless cyborg soldier who has lived through a hundred years of struggle and doom. Rumor has it that he’s the only one who knows where the crazy cyber-mutants from the nearby city ruins are coming from, and the PCs need to convince him to help their little survivor town.

15 Monstrous mutant insects are coming from south of the old border, larger than skyscrapers and leaving massive swaths of destruction in their wake! The PCs are not only challenged with protecting their local community, they have to figure out why the bugs are migrating north, and what could possibly be so terrifying to these immense mutants that they would flee from?

16 The PCs are investigating rumors of a local mystery, where people are seeing a strange, supernatural entity that they are calling the Mothman. Someone still has a working DVD player, or one of them curious “books” about the mysterious Mothman, so they know this is a supernatural being from before the end-times, and a small cult is growing up around this being, which people believe is a harbinger of doom. A local skeptic thinks the Mothman is a fake, and that someone is behind it, maybe even the preacher who’s initiating the new cult growing up around the creature, and he wants the PCs to debunk it in favor of his techno-church that’s losing its congregation! Of course, the mystery of the Mothman could be a fraud, but maybe, just maybe there's something more to it....

Zaidan's Blight

I worked out this campaign outline a while ago and never ended up going anywhere with it. It's fairly setting neutral, but it is situated in the Warlords of Lingusia campaign (and could just as easily work in any era of the campaign). Enjoy...



Zaidan’s Blight


Suitable for a party of 2-3rd level adventurers (or some very foolish 1st level adventurers!)

Deep in the Halale Wilderness, along the edge of Mitra’s Woods lies the remote barony of Osterman. Here in the town of Gray’s Retreat a hardy folk live, skirting constant danger for the local profits from a very prosperous mining operation as well as a local timber mill.

The town of Gray’s Retreat wasn’t always such a prosperous location. As the story goes, Lord Gray Osterman in his youth forged out in to the wilds, far away from the comfort of the provinces of Octzel proper, skirting the very edge of Mitra’s Woods to seek his fame and fortune. With him was a small company of loyal soldiers and allies who believed in the young baron’s cause.

The troop of men led by Osterman eventually happened upon a lush region of hills and woodlands in Halale, where they settled for a time, while the baron and his advisors decided upon a course of action. The stone in the region was plentiful and useful for construction, there was no end to the harvestable wood and a nearby river provided fresh water. It was clear to the baron that this was an ideal location to build his remote keep and establish a name for himself.

Only Osterman’s eldest advisor, the seneschal Grimark, suggested otherwise, pointing out how dangerous the region was and how close the hills were to the ominous Mitra’s Woods. The baron paid no heed, though, for the old terrors and mysteries of the land were largely unknown to him and his men.

For months the baron and his men labored to build a keep, and a small settlement of his loyal soldiers and soon their families began to spring up around it. During the first new moon of the third month however, a small army of monstrous beings descended from the hills upon the settlement and attacked, burning houses and pillaging in the night. Dozens of people were killed or kidnapped, and though Gray’s men mounted a strong defense and drove the beasts away, the damage had been done.

With morale at a new low and many suspecting that the seneschal was right, Osterman took a squad of his best soldiers in to the deep woods of the hills to follow the trail of their attackers to its source. He eventually happened upon an ancient castle, overlooking a hill riddled with shallow caverns and an occasional, deeper warren that appeared to delve deep in to the earth. They happened upon a small tribe of orcs and engaged in a brief skirmish, after which prisoners were taken and an interrogation of one of the captured warriors revealed that the hill was called Zaidan’s Blight, and it was shunned even by the orcs in the region. \

“Zaidan dwells here,” the orc said in his crude mastery of the human tongue. “Zaidan is evil, in a way my people find disturbing.” This news left Gray and his men with a new determination. He let the orc go, and told him he would demand peace from the orc and his tribe if he braved Zaidan’s Blight and put an end to the evil. The orc agreed.

What happened when Zaidan and his men journeyed up the hill and smashed their way through the ancient gate to enter the courtyard of the ruined castle, none can say. All that is known is that Gray Osterman and his men spent three days inside, and when they at last emerged, half of them were dead and all had a haunted look about them. Gray returned to the settlement and resumed building, stating only that the evil was gone, for as long as he lived. About this he was right; the settlement prospered, and turned in to a thriving township named Gray’s Retreat after rich gold veins were discovered. Soon the young barony was recognized by the King of Octzel, and the baron and his family became very wealthy and important, even in so remote a location.

The story of Gray’s Retreat and its early years is known to all locals. Recently, sixty years after the incidents which happened in those first months, Lord Osterman came down with a terrible illness that ate away at him and in months he went from a strong 85 year old man who had lived a full life to a hollow shell. He at last perished, and a funeral was held the next day, with his body interred in the fresh family mausoleum, blessed by the local priest of Death, the Nameless One to insure safe passage to the afterlife. All seemed well, and his immediate heir, his son Davin Osterman, who had already been participating in managing the barony stepped up to the task in a public ceremony two days after the funeral. Davin was already an older man at age 60, being the eldest son, and he was no longer in much condition to fight, though he had a son and daughter who handled such affairs for him.

Eight days after his burial, a new raid took the township by surprise. In the middle of the night an army of monstrosities, including chimeric creatures ridden by mihidr trolls as well as ground forces consisting of wolven and goblins descended upon the town and attacked. When the monsters were at last driven away, it was determined that several dozen townspeople had been killed or kidnapped once more, and even stranger, the Osterman family Crypt had been smashed open and the body of Lord Gray Osterman had been stolen away! This blashphemy drove Davin Osterman mad with rage, and he rode off in to the deeps of the woods, where his father had gone so long ago to find the mysterious hill and castle known as Zaidan’s Blight. He and his force of one hundred men were never seen or heard from again.

Now Erik Osterman, son of Davin, has been forced to step up to the mantle of baron while his father is absent and possibly dead. On the day the PCs begin the adventure with their arrival in town, a strange messenger from the hills appears. The misshapen goblin bears a scroll, from which he reads a new proclamation.

“Lord Zaidan has claimed the soul of Gray Osterman, lord and Baron of these lands!” The goblin cackles. “Per his agreement with the late Lord Osterman, all of the lands under his lord’s barony are now Zaidan’s to claim. Let any who would oppose his great and evil master step forth, to be struck down at his convenience!” The cackling goblin will then toss the scroll down and try to make good an escape, certain that the humans of the town will try to kill, capture or enslave him.

Thus does the adventure of Zaidan’s Blight begin, with Erik Osterman declaring a great reward to the first hero who puts down the threat of Zaidan once and for all, and possibly deliver’s his father’s and grandfather’s bodies back to him, for he has no hope his father yet lives.