How to create a post-apocalyptic space opera setting? Honest

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>>52754718

You might take a look at how they did it in Traveller: The New Era. (Though that was only the most recent collapse in the timeline, it was also the nastiest one on record)

Look to Issac Asimov's Foundation series. The galaxy basically went to shit and everyone is left trying to hold onto a few planets or reinvent old tech.

>>52754718
>Galactic empire collapses
>Imperial fleets become pirates now that the empire can't pay them
>Planets dependent on interstellar trade suffer from either starvation or economic collapse
>Planets that were self sufficient get raided by space barbarians
>Planets that were militarily powers go to war with each other in an attempt to establish themselves as the new empire.

The "Long Night" is a very common theme in space opera. If anything, the bigness of space makes it hard for large empires to last indefinitely.

>>52754718

A galaxy wide empire falls apart relatively quick (a decade) people are so subjugated that they don't realise it's failing until the guards and such start to fail ( assume they're cyborgs and it's a virus, or a non-carbon based lifeform and it's a genetic thing)

by the time it does fail, few have realized and only the humans who haven't been genetically modified for their role realize this and become a new sort of priestly class to the genetically abused.

>>52754718
>The giant bug/robot/whatever swarm of planet eaters won
>They kicked the galaxy's ass, ate a bunch of shit
> Then they left for a new galaxy or died out because it could no longer support them
>You're picking around in what's left over

>>52755147
welcome to 40k's age of strife

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You can also go for more existential apocalypses. An old board game, Dying Lights, had a really neat concept for its setting.

A group of powerful psychic masters decided to end suffering and war by bonding the soul of every living being to the universe itself. Letting people nourish themselves on the stuff of the soul, and giving every person such an intense sense of empathy and higher understanding that bloody, violent conflict would cease to exist.

They succeeded. And the pure, innocent soul of the universe was suddenly bombarded with all the emotion and memory and pain of every single entity living within her. Her scream destroyed entire worlds, rending peoples minds apart, boiling oceans and shattering suns... And then she died.

The fabric of space itself tore open, the universe bleeding and dying as what was meant to remove need suddenly became the greatest hunger- Everyone felt their soul slowly draining away, the essence of their existence vanishing. The only way to replenish it was to take the energy from others, or to simply reduce the population to reduce the drain on the rapidly depleting resource.

Worse still, everyone still had that same sense of empathy. In a universe where you had to kill for the very survival of your soul, you'd sense the final moments of each and every person you inflicted it on.

The game wasn't great and the company is long dead, but I thought that despite the somewhat ultra grimdark execution the setting had a lot of really interesting ideas in it.

>>52754718
don't remember what game this was

>somebody invents FTL, everybody uses it to build starships, colonization phase etc
>some small percentage of FTL users become psychic via mutation
>psychic-powered jumpgates replace FTL ships because they're faster and easier
>hundreds of years pass, FTL ships are as obsolete as horses
>The Scream wipes out all psychics
>nobody can travel outside their own system unless they find an ancient starship first, starvation and chaos ensue

40k is actually post-apocalyptic for a little while. Well, I guess "29k" is more accurate. It's called the Age of Strife, appropriately.

If you ditch the more fantasy side of it, basically:

>interstellar travel and communication network is cut off
>human colonies are separated and alone
>they enter a dark age where individual warlords battle for planets or star systems
>worlds fall into barbarism or are thrown into conflicts with crazy technology and space magic

>>52760041

Stars Without Number

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>>52754718
you could always limit the apocalypse to a single system, a la Destiny.

>>52760119
thanks. liked the fluff but never got to play it

Fading Suns is kinda post-apoc.....

>>52754718
>How to create a post-apocalyptic space opera setting?

We might be living in one.

In the sense that; the galaxy could have just been FILLED, just OVERFLOWING, with a splendiferous amount of galaxy-wide-faring space empires: grays, lizards, blonde-super-angels, burning wheels, etc..

But something happened and now they're all gone. All of them.
Turns out the ancient alien guy was right, but it doesn't matter anymore because all the ancient aliens are fucking dead a long with their civilizations and it's just all gone. All of it.

So we finally master faster than light travel, get out of our system, start visiting other systems and find out for ourselves that everyone is dead and we're completely alone and the only reason we were spared the same fate was because we were simply too far away. Out safe and sound at the end of Orion's Arm, deep in the space boonies- we were only ever a brief pit spot or a footnote to the other civilizations.

That's how I'd do it anyway.

>>52760355
That's a good idea for a mystery setting, but how would the collapse actually occur?

What weakness would all the members of such a diverse and far-flung society share?

>>52754718
Technically the early/good Halo games were this.