Welcome to the Carbon Coast!

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 level. The oil still flows uncontrolled from those wells, giving the location of my campaign its title. Fuel is the major economic driver, a source of conflict, and even a form of currency to those trying to survive on the polluted shores of the Gulf of Mexico. I haven't yet decided how bleak life is for the player characters, and this potentially plentiful resource could justify a fairly stable region.

Speaking of player characters, I will be using the Gamma World rules based on the D&D 4e chassis, While this version of Gamma World did not get the greatest support from WOTC, I find the character generation and advancement wonderfully uncomplicated. The official WOTC character generator has vanished into the ether, but several other character generators remain, written by talented and enthusiastic fans. This one creates first level characters only, but uses an image of the original character sheet to present the information. This version gives players the chance to build higher level characters, and also shows how the various abilities are calculated. Finally, this beta test page works fairly well and prints out a concise character sheet with lots of room for additional information. (Fair warning: any character with the "Yeti" origin might find that identifier unceremoniously renamed "Skunk Ape" to keep with the regional flavor.)

So with this brief glimpse into life on the Carbon Coast, I hope you all find your stay pleasant. Mind the mosquitoes!

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An Appetizing Menace

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?...

What happened? (Update 07/09/2017)

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,...

Corporate babble-speak

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...

Carbon Coast Chronicles

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