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Ok, how do those of you who run AtB, treat it? Yes, knowing the history (the virus, the bombing, etc.), how do you portray the setting to your players?

Are the cities still standing (albeit ruins)?

Is the countryside littered with junk/junked vehicles (everything from aircraft to cars)?

Do you have lost artifacts from pre-Crash U.S.? (seeing the spot in Rifts: Merc Ops about GAW weaponry sprouted this question)

Curious, and the board could use a bit of a infusion of chatter.

The times I've had campaigns that wound through the ATB world, I portrayed it as a recovering post-Apocalyptic world. In other words, there are still plenty of ruins to be found, but many of the larger cities and rural areas are in decent shape. There were always specific ruins and locations for the character to adventure in, but their home base was generally in a tidy wilderness town, or fairly complete modern-ish city. As far as I saw it, there was no reason to think that, several decades after the Crash, people wouldn't have cleaned things up a bit.

All my adventures (campaign or otherwise) are set in a destroyed world filled with ruined cities. The city ruins are attributed to bombings, civil unrest that followed the Crash, nature (weather, earthquakes, etc.), fires, and general entropy.

Much of the countryside and burbs have been reclaimed by forests. I attribute the massive forest growth to genetically modified trees that were created pre-Crash to feed the global timber industry. With these trees they could clear cut an area and have it regrown in a decade. After the Crash the tree growth went unchecked and much of the east coast is now very green in my games.

There are always lost artifacts popping up in my games. Robots, AIs, computers, bizarre gizmos, etc.

As for the nukes, I've never really ran anything that involved radiation. But I've been looking at how quickly the radiation has dissipated in the area around Chernobyl and how life has returned, so since I play the setting as taking place around 75 years following the Crash, I presume that there aren't that many radiation hot spots.

macksting wrote:Steamworks exist, but in North America most engines run on petrol. Mechanical energy, however, has not been neglected; petrol is spendy, even though you may use it every day to raise of lower your drawbridge, so other energies are frequently harnessed. I'm sure I have a treatise on such matters elsewhere.

I'd think that, with the greater proportional strength that mutant animals have over humans, there'd be a much greater reliance on mechanical energy (i.e. muscle power). For instance, why waste that precious gas/electric/etc. when you can have a couple SL 20 elephants or rhinos working the cranks to raise your drawbridge? While that would be less prevalent in larger cities, I think it'd be commonplace in smaller towns and villages.

My idea of ATB is a lot like Rali's. There are urban centers and ruins and a whole lot of The Road Warrior in between.

I would go with Rali's view. Most of the major cities would be in various states of disrepair (from starting to crumble to exposed skeletal husks), with whichever ones were 'occupied' at least shored up & gaps covered with whatever salvagad material was at hand (or claw, tentacle, ect.), such as makeshift tarps. Most would be abandoned outright, tales of some building haunted by the ghosts of pre-Crash humans.

As far as radiation, those would be mostly localised around the no-longer-used nuclear powerplants that are no longer maintained. No doubt some leakage occured, contaminating the area nearby & creating 'wastelands'. There would be some minor traces, not much, but maybe enough to cause some sickness with lengthy (more than a week) exposure....

The unused nukes would still be in their bunkers, slowly rotting away....

I've always looked at it from an Indiana Jones perspective. Instead of crawling through lost temples and such, characters would pick through the half-buried remains of a shopping mall or library or university, each fraught with relevant perils like a partially functioning security system or a resident population of superstitious mutant animal natives. In ATB knowledge can mean power and what we consider trash at the neighborhood 7-11 might be another man's (or animal's) treasure in 300 years.

I've got a 5+ year outline for a sourcebook or rifter article detailing such adventure opportunities as well as the Academic Underground, but I'm too lazy to finish writing it.

Trashed cars littering the country side are cool in any setting

I tend to think of it ike Rali does as well.


A book called Eternity Road does a good job protraying a PA setting in which the characters are in search of treasure.....in the form of books preserved over the years.


The History channel did a neat show called Life After People which talked about how animals would fair and how long our stuff would last when we're not here to maintain it.