Complete Technology Failure

Define the details very carefully, because they make or break this sort of thing. If you say compressed air exists, or phosporous burns n situation y but not x - the PC's don't need to know details (except for crazy PC plots!) but they need to know there is a coherent rule system for it or consistency shatters.

>>52917267
>electricity no longer works
>however, your nerves do
How though
Will nerves work different now?
Will the frog legs in acid experiment no longer work?

>>52918895

I don't know myself.

In the book, it was suggested that only the flow of electric currents in metal wiring was stopped, also near the end of the series it turns out, the Pagan Celt deities were responsible.

>>52917267

Those books went to shit way too fast.

>>52917267
>S.M Stirling
For a while I was making a drinking game related to him.

If the protagonist is a lesbian mary sue, take a shot

never got much farther than that.

>>52918940

You're shitting me. Damn am I glad I didn't get that far.

>>52918950

I know right? I should've suspected it would go downhill after the Wiccan scene in book 2, but I was ignorant enough to keep reading.

File: 511Psr5w8tL._SX285_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg (46KB, 287x499px) Image search: [Google]

46KB, 287x499px

>>52917267
And I, meanwhile, don't have to deal with this shit, because I am in Nantucket.

>>52918940
That's one interpretation. Another is the world went full Singularity, and the pagans are just avatars for post-singularity factions implementing a CEV project (i.e., humanity got exactly what it wanted monkey's paw style and received what its prehistoric consciousness really wanted instead of what consciousness claimed to want).

I did a campaign like this and I defined it as being an energy density problem.

Physics still works as we know it at lower energy densities. Hydrodynamics still means that pressure pumps blood through your veins, but try to make a steam engine, and the energy density bumps up against a change in physics that requires some sort of logarithmic energy input.

Similarly, wood or coal burns, but gunpowder only fizzles and burns but doesn't explode because the energy density of gunpowder is reduced. same for gasoline or other accelerants.

>>52917267
I mean you could just say solar storms increase in frequency. You can shield some stuff against the EM waves... but it is a pain, can't really work over distances, and breaks down long term. Radio is fucked because static. Gunpowder is a thing, but the storms tend to set it off.

When this started the cities just burned. Rural society had to pull together with the loss of electronics and the raiders (population that couldn't be supported by unpowered tech turned to banditry.)

You could go out a generation, with a group seeking some underground bunker rumored to still be producing fertilizers and medicines.

You could go out a few hundred years, and have a party trying to find a trade route to the sea by river.

>>52918958
How did you survive?

>>52919406
Growing up living with a Greek who brewed Ouzo in the tub works wonders anon.

>>52917267
SO many people in hospitals and on planes just died. It would be a holocaust no one forgets.

>>52917267
NEVER.

EVER.

EXPLAIN.

The moment you try and give a how and why, it falls apart. Because it's such an impossible idea that the only justifications are basically: A Wizard Did It or Its All A Simulation. And nothing is at all improved by either of those. Just have it happen, and never try to give a reason. Speculation, rumour, as long as it's all unreliable narrator in-character stuff, fine. But for fuck's sake don't try and explain it. Set out the basics of what doesn't work and leave it at that, with a discretionary 'also doesn't work' on any workarounds the players might come up with.

Right well since I got that >>52919561 out of the way...

>>52917267
Well, for humanity you're going to lose billions. That's going to have a significant traumatising aspect on the survivors. Weird Shit will happen in the places that are not already running on subsistence-level farming. Petty warlords, cults, mass suicides, dogs and cats living together, but with a key theme of survival at the core of each group, because whatever they did, they didn't die where practically everyone else starved/died of plagues. Violence is going to be a fact of life.

You also won't have much of a recovery, ever, because all the useful shit like iron ore that can be reached without machine tools is long gone. Salvage is order of the day, what can be got of it anyway. Cities are going to be death traps without maintenance and services, not even cannibal gang territory after a while. You're going to get a lot of isolated camps, depending on the locality you might not have people for hundreds of miles in any direction. Protected locations with fresh, clean water and decent farmland that doesn't need a ton of fertilisers (they're gone) to work are the main priorities. I'd expect a ton of hill-forts rather than isolated farmsteads, because communities survive one hell of a lot better. Especially without firearms to let one person be a threat to many, people need to gang up.

Given the traumatic events, set it several decades later. Far enough that people have reached into adulthood and had kids of their own after the event, but not so far you don't still have a few people who remembered what things were like before.

>>52918985
Such a better series. Still, the first three books of the other series were pretty decent. Basically until the Bearkiller died.

>>52918985
>>52919838
Favourite book series I've yet read. My only three complaints were
>Nantucketers seem to be able to do no wrong
Even when they deliberately set up their allies in Babylon to fall in the name of setting up a democracy later, nothing and no-one ever calls them on this bullshit, treating democracy like it's an objective good. Further, their colonization, hegemony and early adoption of a form of Manifest Destiny is never ever shown in a poor light, except by people the reader is clearly meant to hate
>Marian's everything
Oh look, she's a black woman in a position of power AND a lesbian to boot! There is absolutely no reason why she had to have all these things stacked onto a character that is perfectly able to carry herself without them. It just feels forced
>Walker's comeuppance
On the one hand, it's wonderfully handled, using Odysseus to use Mitler to do all the dirty work, but at the same time, I feel at least a little cheated of the epic final showdown everything seemed to be heading towards... And having Walker's daughter fuck off to do her thing feels like sequel-baiting for a sequel we've never got

Besides those three nitpicks though, I can't get enough of it. It's one of the VERY few series I'll constantly go back and re-read, though I always find the second and third books to be stronger than the first.

>>52917267
His setting is amazing, it's his writing that is capital t shite. It's the only series I've read for the setting despite piss poor writing. Black Library reads better then this stuff, but damn if the setting ain't cool.