Carbon Coast Chronicles

Last night, the family went to The Tin Cow in Pensacola for a small celebration. We've gone there for years for their great burgers. But last night they had something different on the menu: Smoked lionfish seafood dip! The dish comes garnished with two tomato slices and a bed of arugula. Tortilla chips are the dip delivery system of choice. The presentation was fairly unremarkable, but this concoction is an appetizer, not some avant garde foodie bait. Curious, I ordered some for the family. Now I liked it. Not something I would seek out, but it was not bad. The rest of the family was similarly underwhelmed and stopped eating the dip fairly quickly. Nonetheless, I found the experience an interesting intellectual exercise in apocalyptic thinking. I suppose that it sounds weird that an appetizer would be relevant to a barren wasteland, but follow me for a bit. As I was ordering this novel seafood offering, I asked generically,"What's this lionfish dip all about?...

So who is watching our players as they try to survive in this oil-soaked utopia? Obviously, local groups will take notice of local disturbances. For example, Uncle Bayou's Appeasement Patrol wants to preserve peace, order, and proximate petroleum interests, and are more than eager to bash a few skulls for some tranquility. image from the Bureau of Engraving and printing But are there other groups out there? Could large cabals be hiding in the shadows manipulating events? Or are there public organizations with ostensible interests that hold shrouded plans? Below is a short write-up of the factions listed in the Core Rulebook on page 91, with some editorial content from yours truly. The Archivists Society is devoted to Ancient Technology, literally. This group collects items from before the Balefire but does not use them. All artifacts are preserved and worshiped, regardless of functionality. Technology that still works is treated with the greatest reverence. They will attemp...

Okay, I'm really not curious about what happened to bring about a post-apocalyptic, partially submerged, oil-soaked Gulf Coast. I've already placed many details in order to my satisfaction. But I am curious about what to call that terrible event. photo from FEMA Humans always want to name catastrophes. Hurricanes have names that are repeated until a named storm turns deadly, at which point the name is retired. Historians refer to the Great Depression like that level of economic collapse could never happen again. World War I was originally called the Great War, under the misconception that such massive destruction could never happen again. And if you refer to 9-11, every American above a certain age remembers so much about that terrifying day. photo from FEMA So what would the survivors call the almost End of the World? Judgement Day would be great if it hadn't already been used by Terminator II. Other terms like Armageddon or Ragnarok refer to specific battles,...

So in trying to get an idea of the current state of the Gulf of Mexico and the impact of oil drilling, I started digging through the  USGS Energy Resources  website. I've looked at the USGS store and want to purchase a few maps from there. Another resource found was the  abstract  of a paper (the full paper is behind a paywall) detailing the impact on the Louisiana coastline from resource development and extraction, with emphasis on the rate of land loss. All of this information (and more) will make it into the campaign setting in some way. One characteristic of the Gulf of Mexico coast is that the shoreline has changed dramatically. Sea levels have risen roughly fifteen meters (or fifty feet for any Americans in the audience). The bottom half of the Florida peninsula has vanished beneath the waves. Although not on the map, portions of Cuba are high enough to remain inhabitable. The large blue streak on the left is the Mississippi River basin. Other portions ...

photo from Bureau of Labor Statistics During my haphazard research into this new campaign setting, I found a generator for fake  corporate mission statements . It already knows an impressive array of business jargon, but the program allows you to add anything you think is missing. To add new words to the list...er, I mean to synergize legacy vocabulistic infrastructure with neologistic business expressions , click on the appropriate tab (nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives) and enter a comma at the end of the extant list to include words like: photo from the Bureau of Labor Statistics incentivize crowdsource smartsize rightsize six-sigma black belt refocus reorient recenter positive externalities prioritize bifurcation breakthroughs The vision statements and enterprise goals produced are needlessly obtuse, the perfect artifacts of our age to let Gamma World characters find scrawled on the walls of office complexes or embossed on stationary. Imagine the fun a...

The Carbon Coast is my campaign concept that I've been working on for about three years, although my love of all things post-apocalyptic goes back several decades to when I lived within the primary strike zones of both Norfolk, VA and Washington, DC. Gamma World was always an attractive escape into fantasy when reality kept telling me that I was minutes from annihilation at any instant. The main NPC (okay, the only NPC) I've devised is Uncle Bayou , an intelligent humanoid alligator. While not directly based on Louis from The Princess and the Frog , that character is a useful reference. He runs an oil refinery/ water treatment plant/ wildlife rescue mission/ bazaar/ whatever else I need somewhere along what was once the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and a bit of Florida. As society collapsed, offshore oil drilling operations were attacked or abandoned, leading to massive spills affecting the Gulf Coast, which was already altered by a fifty foot rise in sea l...