Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[Lokathor]

Well, how big are the nukes that the Moon Beasts had? And how many did they have?

Because it occurs to me that even in my tiny City of Boise, early nukes would not be able to eliminate the city in a single blast. And that's just Boise, a not-very-dense city of 300k to 600k people. Any major earth city with 1 Million+ people and all that (all 336 of them) would take several nukings to actually damage to the point where it won't just grow back in a few decades.

And the thing is that a lot of people love to play in cities that really exist, even if they're playing in the future and the city they're in really has nothing to do with the modern city it has the name of. So maybe we shouldn't go too crazy with eliminating all the major cities and just replacing them.

[Chamomile]

I find a setting much more interesting when it has a geography that I care about, because it creates an instant sense of continuity with other stories, even if they're unrelated. Sometimes this can just mean having it set on the same world map as some other piece of media I already enjoyed (anything set in Faerun is surprisingly engaging right off the bat because despite it being a not especially great setting, Pool of Radiance and Baldur's Gate happened there), and in the case of the real world that's automatic.

The fact that a place is called New York and that the buroughs still recognizably exist makes it feel like a place I've been to before and a part of a greater whole, even if half of Manhattan is a glowing crater. I like the fact that political boundaries between Freedom, Communism (and within Communism, between Leninism and Maoism), and the Third Way are mostly where you'd expect them to be even though the decapitation of these philosophies mean their supposed adherents may be running things exactly the opposite of how they're supposed to. It gives a sense of having been here before and knowing, in a rough way, how this world works. I like "what if MLK fought for Deep One rights" and I want to have "what if New York City added a sixth borough, which is just the underwater parts of it where the Deep Ones live."

This is really rambly and probably not a clear explanation of why I like having recognizable cities/cultures at all, but I'm going to post it anyway in the hopes that people will be able to figure out what I'm saying. I can't find a way to put it any clearer than this, despite my best efforts.

[Grek]

Because it occurs to me that even in my tiny City of Boise, early nukes would not be able to eliminate the city in a single blast. And that's just Boise, a not-very-dense city of 300k to 600k people. Any major earth city with 1 Million+ people and all that (all 336 of them) would take several nukings to actually damage to the point where it won't just grow back in a few decades.

There's destroying a city in the sense of "leave no brick standing atop another" and then there's just destroying it in the sense that Galveston was "destroyed" by the Hurricane of 1900 that killed a thousands of people and made the city cease to be a strategically important port for the United States. The number of nuclear bombs required to do the second one is significantly less, especially considering the fact that you could seriously have a Moon Beast agent infiltrate through the Dreamlands and set up the bomb for maximum economic damage.

[squirrelloid]

I find a setting much more interesting when it has a geography that I care about, because it creates an instant sense of continuity with other stories, even if they're unrelated. Sometimes this can just mean having it set on the same world map as some other piece of media I already enjoyed (anything set in Faerun is surprisingly engaging right off the bat because despite it being a not especially great setting, Pool of Radiance and Baldur's Gate happened there), and in the case of the real world that's automatic.

The fact that a place is called New York and that the buroughs still recognizably exist makes it feel like a place I've been to before and a part of a greater whole, even if half of Manhattan is a glowing crater. I like the fact that political boundaries between Freedom, Communism (and within Communism, between Leninism and Maoism), and the Third Way are mostly where you'd expect them to be even though the decapitation of these philosophies mean their supposed adherents may be running things exactly the opposite of how they're supposed to. It gives a sense of having been here before and knowing, in a rough way, how this world works. I like "what if MLK fought for Deep One rights" and I want to have "what if New York City added a sixth borough, which is just the underwater parts of it where the Deep Ones live."

This is really rambly and probably not a clear explanation of why I like having recognizable cities/cultures at all, but I'm going to post it anyway in the hopes that people will be able to figure out what I'm saying. I can't find a way to put it any clearer than this, despite my best efforts.

On the one hand, some global warming is pretty inevitable anyway. So there's no way we're talking ourselves into modern coastlines.

On the other hand, even if we accept the full polar ice cap melt +60m sea level, there's still plenty of stuff we care about. Much of Europe and the US is still recognizable. Ignoring Bangladesh, the Indian subcontinent is fairly unscathed. Taiwan and Japan are mostly intact.

Places that obviously get nuked:
Washington DC (US capital)
Moscow (Russian capital)
Beijing (Chinese capital)
London (UK capital)
Paris (French capital)
Tokyo (Japanese capital)
New York City (seat of the UN)

Places that probably get nuked, nukes permitting:
Birmingham
Manchester
San Francisco
Boston
Chicago
Detroit
Atlanta
Miami
Los Angeles
Seattle or Portland (or both)
Hong Kong
Amsterdam
Antwerpen
Leningrad
Sevastopol
Rome
Shanghai
Singapore
Rio de Janeiro
Buenos Aires
Istanbul
Osaka
Sydney
Milan
Seoul

Possibly get nuked (nukes permitting):
Kaliningrad
Hamburg
Berlin
Marseilles
Barcelona
Lisbon
Madrid
Venice
Tripoli
Cairo
Beirut
Jerusalem
Tel Aviv
Baghdad
Kuwait City
Dubai (at least my assumption is that much of the world's oil passes through these two)
Jeddah
Aden
Jakarta
Cape Town
Port Elizabeth
Melbourne
Perth
Tai Pei
Vladivostok
Quebec
Toronto
Montreal
New Orleans
Kansas City
St. Louis
Cincinatti
Frankfurt
Munich
(+several additional US cities)
(+several additional european locations)
(+several additional locations in Japan - Nagoya, Sapporo, Nagasaki all come to mind).

And I've probably left some out. We know India doesn't get nuked, because that was explicit in someone's fluff write-up.

If the Moon Beasts have at least 32 nukes, they can hit all the probable targets. If they have more, they can start hitting possible targets.

A lot of their choice of targets will depend on how well they understand our industry and transportation infrastructure. Ie, do they understand our oil dependency - that would promote several targets in the middle east and the ports that service them (including locations not even on the list). I've listed a large number of ports because of how critical they are for current manufacturing infrastructure. If they just go after largest population centers, the lists look quite a bit different. (Mexico City ends up on the list, as does Lima).

Now, post flooding, paris is a protectable place. The ocean floods up the Seine, but that could easily be damned, and it doesn't even cover all of Paris in water if it gets that far. (And since we know Paris is getting nuked, maybe Paris regrows around this ocean inlet and lets the sea claim radioactive old paris). Regardless of what happens, the eiffel tower and the arch de triumph are gone. They disappear in a mushroom cloud in 1970.

Large portions of France and Italy remain unflooded. Tours, Orleans, Lyon, Turin are all unscathed. Genoa doesn't disappear, although it may lose some of its current land area. Some of Naples survives. Milan and Rome of course may get nuked, but parts of Rome survive the flooding and Milan is untouched by the ocean.

Austria and Poland are mostly unscathed, leaving us cities like Lodz, Warsaw, and Vienna. In Germany, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Munich survive if un-nuked. Athens mostly survives in greece. Russia leaves us plenty of cities, including whatever remains of Moscow after being nuked, and notably Minsk.

Building a neo-Tokyo on the coast near where old Tokyo was is similarly not a problem. And it lets us keep Tokyo as a hypermodern city (to the new standards of our setting).

If there is anything resembling a centralized chinese state, the new capital is probably Xi'an, although there are alternatives which have also historically been the capital at various times. Kaifeng, Chengdu, Chongqing, Anyang, Luoyang, Shangdu (Xanadu - only ruins today), and Datong are also unflooded, and have all been a capital at one point or another. One could imagine centering separate chinese successor states around a number of them.

In India, Delhi and Bangalore are totally untouched.

Mexico City is nowhere near the flooding.

Lima in Peru loses a little land area, but it still large. Santiago survives in Chile unscathed. Sao Paulo and Brasilia remain in Brazil, as does Caracas in Venezuela.

Figuring out what doesn't get nuked in the US is hard, but we potentionally have Dallas, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago (which is one of the cities you could make the best case for surviving a single nuke, given how geographically large it is), Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and at least part of Los Angeles. Canada is barely touched by flooding.

The idea that geography we care about no longer exists is ridiculous. New York City is not the only city in the US, London is not the only city in Europe, and we *know* both of those are getting nuked. In NYC's case, that's going to definitely take all the iconic architecture with it, because its all in lower Manhattan, which is precisely where the bomb goes off.

[Chamomile]

When your list of suggestions for major cities in China and America features Kansas City and Kaifeng it means that you have annihilated all of the most interesting population centers of two of the world's three most populous nations, and that's terrible.

[squirrelloid]

When your list of suggestions for major cities in China and America features Kansas City and Kaifeng it means that you have annihilated all of the most interesting population centers of two of the world's three most populous nations, and that's terrible.

Kaifeng isn't on the likely to get nuked list, its on the former capital of china list. And it is a former capital of China. Its hardly the most interesting one on there, but the list is complete. (That is, it includes all former capitals that are not underwater in the proposed flooding).

Kansas City is a major industrial and transportation hub. Lets face it, if you wanted to paralyze US infrastructure, it might not make the A-list, but it certainly makes the B-list.

If you want additional chinese cities that might be of interest to *play* in, you have Zhengzhou, Changsha (which is now a port), Kunming, Taiyuan, Changchun, Harbin, and even Urumqi which all have large populations. Many other industrially important cities beyond those could become major cities. The list of important chinese cities *I can name off the top of my head* that are unflooded is greater than the similar list that is flooded. (Admittedly, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing are better known in the west than most of those, but only by name. Any attempt to use any of these as a campaign location is going to require basically the same amount of resources. I highly doubt a significant portion of the relevant gaming population could produce even the skeleton of a layout for Beijing, much less Shanghai).

[Chamomile]

This isn't about campaign resources. It's about being able to set a campaign in China and have it actually be in China. In Beijing, or Nanjing, or Hong Kong, or Macau, or other parts of China that people actually care about. I'm sure you can name plenty of Chinese cities "off the top of your head" (which appear to be every city that gets a dot on google maps rather than anything to do with cultural significance), but if you can't tell why it's more desirable to have Beijing on the map as compared to stuff that hasn't been relevant since the Mongolian Empire, you might just want to back out of the conversation now. If you've got the Blade Runner version of Los Angeles where everything is very different from the Los Angeles we know, that's cool, because the contrast demonstrates the way the world has changed. While it is literally a greater change to have Chengdu promoted from "who cares?" to "second most important city in all of China," the fact that players walking into Chengdu respond with "is this a real place" or possibly "isn't this Liu Bei's old capital" means that you can neither demonstrate a sense of reality by having familiar elements of our world in the fiction, nor can you demonstrate a sense of uncanny dystopia by having things be different in a bad way.

Having New York and Washington DC be different countries in the wake of a now-decades old nuclear apocalypse is cool and interesting. Having New York and Washington DC be bombed out shells while the party operates primarily out of Milwaukee sounds like a joke.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, "some of these places got bombed, but people cleaned them up and moved back in. Then sea levels rose, and now those cities are inhabited by people who can breathe underwater. Conveniently enough, you're probably one of those people."

[Whipstitch]

It sounds like a joke to you, but if it's a joke then it's one I'd genuinely much rather play than an LA/NYC game at this point. I'm not for rendering places people inexplicably care about utterly unplayable for no reason, because that would be weird and petty, but if you were to say that Montreal is way more important now, and here's why, you would have my attention.

[squirrelloid]

This isn't about campaign resources. It's about being able to set a campaign in China and have it actually be in China. In Beijing, or Nanjing, or Hong Kong, or Macau, or other parts of China that people actually care about. I'm sure you can name plenty of Chinese cities "off the top of your head" (which appear to be every city that gets a dot on google maps rather than anything to do with cultural significance), but if you can't tell why it's more desirable to have Beijing on the map as compared to stuff that hasn't been relevant since the Mongolian Empire, you might just want to back out of the conversation now. If you've got the Blade Runner version of Los Angeles where everything is very different from the Los Angeles we know, that's cool, because the contrast demonstrates the way the world has changed. While it is literally a greater change to have Chengdu promoted from "who cares?" to "second most important city in all of China," the fact that players walking into Chengdu respond with "is this a real place" or possibly "isn't this Liu Bei's old capital" means that you can neither demonstrate a sense of reality by having familiar elements of our world in the fiction, nor can you demonstrate a sense of uncanny dystopia by having things be different in a bad way.

Too much playing China Rails, actually xP

What does it mean to be 'in china', in your head. Can you tell me anything about Beijing that makes it China 'in a way that's been relevant since the Mongolian Empire'? Something that's intrinsic to Beijing and can't easily be moved. Something other than its name? Something that wouldn't have been destroyed by having a nuke dropped on it?

Those reactions to Chengdu you list? Those are more or less the same reactions to Beijing or Hong Kong, more or less. The odds that *any of your players have actually been to any of these places* is approaching zero. All you need to do to make it compelling is describe it in an interesting way. (Which you'd need to do with Beijing anyway).

Having New York and Washington DC be different countries in the wake of a now-decades old nuclear apocalypse is cool and interesting. Having New York and Washington DC be bombed out shells while the party operates primarily out of Milwaukee sounds like a joke.

Why are you so obsessed with a few cities whose notable features must have disappeared in mushroom clouds?

Is there something wrong with Chicago or Detroit? Las Vegas?

Seriously, you seem hung up on *only the name* of these places, and that's just silly.

[Whipstitch]

Actually, for the purposes of an rpg I'm way more comfortable with largely depopulating or occupying currently major cities than I am completely wiping out or submerging all the coolest landmarks. People can stomach "Milwaukee is important now" a bit easier if you can still land the skyranger on liberty island and punch out Cthulhu.

[Chamomile]

China's eastern coast is a place where economic inequality is very, very easy to see and pronounced. America statistically has more actual inequality but in China you can see it. The rich people look pretty much exactly like the dudes in the New York stock exchange, but the poor people look really poor and they're everywhere. Things are more cramped, but not as much as Japan. There's more people. The greed and aggression of your average city is more so. The people have a shaky and contradictory cultural heritage, with the Great Leap Forward having ripped up the cultural foundations of a generation and left their descendant with nearly as much culture imported from Japan and America (who are theoretically their greatest enemies) as from their own home. Government corruption is much more common than most cities with comparable wealth, so criminals thrive and the upper classes are entrenched more with laws than finances. The government also has more influence, but it doesn't seem to have diminished the prominence of corporate branding any.

This could all be basically the same or totally different in Sentai Fhtagn and both of those would be interesting. What's not interesting is to have this entire region wiped out and replaced with Kaifeng and Chengdu. Because Kaifeng and Chengdu aren't like that. They're different places. They're closer to rural areas, large chunks of the cities themselves and basically everything in the surrounding countryside is completely impoverished, the influence of corporations is felt less which means the influence of the government is that much stronger by comparison.

The loss of the east coasts of China and America are the most devastating because those places are not the same as the inland areas of the same nations. Kansas City is not basically the same as Philadelphia. Atlanta doesn't have a ton in common with Boston. Chengdu is not the same as Beijing. Trying to replace Nanjing with Kaifeng is like trying to replace London with Prague.

[squirrelloid]

China's eastern coast is a place where economic inequality is very, very easy to see and pronounced. America statistically has more actual inequality but in China you can see it. The rich people look pretty much exactly like the dudes in the New York stock exchange, but the poor people look really poor and they're everywhere. Things are more cramped, but not as much as Japan. There's more people. The greed and aggression of your average city is more so. The people have a shaky and contradictory cultural heritage, with the Great Leap Forward having ripped up the cultural foundations of a generation and left their descendant with nearly as much culture imported from Japan and America (who are theoretically their greatest enemies) as from their own home. Government corruption is much more common than most cities with comparable wealth, so criminals thrive and the upper classes are entrenched more with laws than finances. The government also has more influence, but it doesn't seem to have diminished the prominence of corporate branding any.

This could all be basically the same or totally different in Sentai Fhtagn and both of those would be interesting. What's not interesting is to have this entire region wiped out and replaced with Kaifeng and Chengdu. Because Kaifeng and Chengdu aren't like that. They're different places. They're closer to rural areas, large chunks of the cities themselves and basically everything in the surrounding countryside is completely impoverished, the influence of corporations is felt less which means the influence of the government is that much stronger by comparison.

And its a century later. Those places *could be* like that. And the flooding didn't happen overnight. You have a mass exodus inland as sea levels rise. Actually, those places will differ markedly depending on what they do following the moon beast attack, some of which may end up looking like that, and some of which may look totally different.

I mean, ffs, you're talking about events being important that happened in the last 50 years, at least half of which *never happens in setting* because Mao dies in nuclear fire. The cultural revolution dies in 1970 with the bomb. The China you're referencing *never happens* in this setting. Deng Xiaoping doesn't sieze power from Mao's successor, the gang of four is never executed for the excesses of the cultural revolution, and 'market socialism' and economic growth that followed never happens.

The loss of the east coasts of China and America are the most devastating because those places are not the same as the inland areas of the same nations. Kansas City is not basically the same as Philadelphia. Atlanta doesn't have a ton in common with Boston. Chengdu is not the same as Beijing. Trying to replace Nanjing with Kaifeng is like trying to replace London with Prague.

Even if there was no moon beast attack and no mythos, Beijing in a century will be culturally radically different than it is today, just like New York in 1900 isn't much like New York in 2000. London in 1900 was in the tail end of the Victorian era, ffs.

The culture of Boston isn't lost, it migrates, same with other coastal locations. I mean, aside from whomever dies when the bombs fall. And it evolves, probably faster than might be expected since you have a society rapidly integrating mythos tech.

I'd recommend the following above-water setting focus locations for the Union:
Chicago
Las Vegas
Xanadu
Taiwan
Neo Tokyo
Bangalore
Jerusalem
Somewhere in Europe, possibly Warsaw or Vienna. Paris could also work.

Regarding NYC specifically, there's a small bit of Manhattan that doesn't end up underwater (including the Empire State Building, which is basically surrounded but not itself submerged). Lots of the buildings would stick up out of the water as well. But the problem is that the ESBuilding is basically where you'd detonate a nuke, so it doesn't actually exist anymore. So its possible you have a NYC setting, but the buildings aren't familiar, and most of the ground level of the city is in 10-40 meters of water. It would basically be like writing a totally new city, it just happens to be co-spatial with the NYC we know.

[Korwin]

I find the changed geography and all the implications cool.
Just saying

[squirrelloid]

Amusing note: the statue of liberty is far enough out that it would probably suffer little damage from the nuking of New York City, and the pedestal on which she stands is tall enough that the water comes no higher than her knees. Visitors to the new, amphibious NYC are still greeted by her as they come in by boat or swim in from the deeps. The Union may even have chosen to build its headquarters here. (Maybe I should figure out exactly where the current UN building is).

[RadiantPhoenix]

(Maybe I should figure out exactly where the current UN building is).

There's a building somewhere, but most of the really important people telecommute.

[Chamomile]

And its a century later. Those places *could be* like that. And the flooding didn't happen overnight. You have a mass exodus inland as sea levels rise. Actually, those places will differ markedly depending on what they do following the moon beast attack, some of which may end up looking like that, and some of which may look totally different.

I mean, ffs, you're talking about events being important that happened in the last 50 years, at least half of which *never happens in setting* because Mao dies in nuclear fire.

Pay attention:

This could all be basically the same or totally different in Sentai Fhtagn and both of those would be interesting.

It is totally fine and, in fact, really cool if these places look very different. Even if they're unrecognizably different. That's possibly the best way to do things at all. That's been my point since the very beginning of this discussion. Blade Runner's Los Angeles looks nothing like the LA we know today, but that makes a point about how different the world is. Going to Jerusalem to visit the memorial to all the religious icons that were vaporized by the Moon Beasts is really cool. Going to Beijing and finding that it's still stuck in the Cultural Revolution, or is now the capital of a restored Han Dynasty, or has been occupied by Koreans or something would all be really cool. The idea here isn't that we go to familiar places and they look familiar. The idea is that we go to familiar places and they aren't familiar, they're really different, and it gives you a sense that the world has changed and things are all uncanny and stuff.

Also, Xanadu, what the Hell? That city hasn't just been irrelevant since the Mongolian Empire, it's been non-existent since the Mongolian Empire. Why on Earth is a city that is no longer standing on your list of major focal points for the setting?

[hyzmarca]

I have to agree with Chamomile here. Setting it on Earth and not using cities that people will recognize is sort of missing the boat.

[squirrelloid]

And its a century later. Those places *could be* like that. And the flooding didn't happen overnight. You have a mass exodus inland as sea levels rise. Actually, those places will differ markedly depending on what they do following the moon beast attack, some of which may end up looking like that, and some of which may look totally different.

I mean, ffs, you're talking about events being important that happened in the last 50 years, at least half of which *never happens in setting* because Mao dies in nuclear fire.

Pay attention:

This could all be basically the same or totally different in Sentai Fhtagn and both of those would be interesting.

It is totally fine and, in fact, really cool if these places look very different. Even if they're unrecognizably different. That's possibly the best way to do things at all. That's been my point since the very beginning of this discussion. Blade Runner's Los Angeles looks nothing like the LA we know today, but that makes a point about how different the world is. Going to Jerusalem to visit the memorial to all the religious icons that were vaporized by the Moon Beasts is really cool. Going to Beijing and finding that it's still stuck in the Cultural Revolution, or is now the capital of a restored Han Dynasty, or has been occupied by Koreans or something would all be really cool. The idea here isn't that we go to familiar places and they look familiar. The idea is that we go to familiar places and they aren't familiar, they're really different, and it gives you a sense that the world has changed and things are all uncanny and stuff.

Also, Xanadu, what the Hell? That city hasn't just been irrelevant since the Mongolian Empire, it's been non-existent since the Mongolian Empire. Why on Earth is a city that is no longer standing on your list of major focal points for the setting?

Because Xanadu has western cultural context (the Coleridge poem) and mythological associations. For basically the same reasons Shangri-La shows up in various games, despite the fact that it *never existed*. Hell, we could have a Shangri-La setting, except that's a totally western piece of bs. Xanadu has actual historical roots. (Similarly, resurrecting Timbuktu would be totally cool for an African setting).

Beijing isn't going to be a familiar place for any of your gamers anyway. They won't be able to tell if it has changed or not, barring making it some crazy technological place which obviously couldn't exist today. All they're going to know is the *name* ffs, and that's nothing. Even Xanadu has that going for it. What you're talking about only makes sense at all for places the audience has any familiarity with whatsoever. Blade Runner's LA works because we *know what LA looks like*. A large part of the audience have probably *been there*, and they've certainly seen it repeatedly in movies that they remember. San Francisco is distinctive for a couple prominent features (the Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street) that have featured extensively in movies, and if you didn't see one of those locations you'd *never know you were there* for most people. Beijing has been in few western movies, has few distinctive locations any of your audience could name much less recognize, and the forbidden city probably disappeared with the mushroom cloud. Seriously, going to Beijing for 99.9% of your gaming audience would be 'oh, the forbidden city isn't here, why do we care again?' More of your audience is going to have read Romance of the Three Kingdoms than be able to tell you four distinctive things about Beijing, ffs. At which point Luoyang probably carries more meaning for them than Beijing does.

In short, going to Beijing isn't going to be a familiar place at all, because your players don't have a fucking clue what it looks like today. It's just a dot on a map.

Besides, being underwater doesn't mean these places don't exist. If you want a Beijing it can be a Deep One city. We have a fucking playable race that's part of the Union and fully amphibious.

And how does going to Beijing and finding out its fucking underwater not make the setting uncanny? The face of the world has changed by the coastlines rising *60 meters*. That's major, and it's an immediate announcement to the players: you aren't in Kansas anymore.

Its not like we don't have known cities above water players can't adventure out of: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, Vienna, Paris, Moscow, Delhi. LA isn't even totally underwater (nor technically is NYC, although its close).

Some cities aren't enough underwater that they can't reasonably have buildings which break the water's surface and are mostly above it (most of NYC is like this). The Empire State Building is 381m tall, ffs, and its only the 22nd tallest building in the world today. So you can basically have cities that are like venice, but the 'canals' are actually where the old streets were. Possibly we have some cities that are in enclosed bubbles instead. Rather than throwing a hissy fit because they're underwater, actually think through what that could mean.

But I think the outright loss of some currently major cities would also be good for the setting, and I don't see why this is so problematic. Washington DC not existing anymore because its in 50m of water and no one cared to engineer a solution is a major change, and its cool.

Fuck this argument is dumb. You're fixated on solely the names of places. Having a world which logically follows from a *global nuclear war* in 1970, which led to a military-industrial complex unshackled by the environmental movement (which died stillborn) is cool. Global warming totally happens without any mitigation in that world because no one fucking cares. The ice caps melt and sea levels rise 60m. Hell, you probably had a Deep One lobby in favor of global warming. Having the map be different but eerily familiar is incredibly fucking cool. This totally outweighs wanting to be able to visit Beijing without scuba gear.

[hyzmarca]

Beijing is useful because you can totally look it up in google maps and have a good idea of what's there. All we have to do is lay out where the craters are and the living giant penis skyscrapers.

And, you know, Chinese people might wan to play our game.

[squirrelloid]

Beijing is useful because you can totally look it up in google maps and have a good idea of what's there. All we have to do is lay out where the craters are and the living giant penis skyscrapers.

And, you know, Chinese people might wan to play our game.

And you can't look up Xi'an or Zhengzhou or dozens of other cities that don't end up underwater? Or just write an underwater Beijing (or hybrid underwater/abovewater city with spires that pierce the surface, and people live in them)

A chinese audience would also probably appreciate some awareness that there are cities in China other than Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

[Chamomile]

The litany of wrong and backpedaling is almost painful to read. I never said there was anything particularly wrong with bubble cities or whatever. What I've been opposed to is your insistence that Chicago be the only city worth caring about left in the entire continental United States. Your criticisms of me caring about "only the name" are kind of funny when I've already demonstrated that no, Beijing means more to me than just its name and meanwhile you're propping up Xanadu for nothing except its name. There are at least three people on this forum who've physically been to a major city on China's eastern coast, two of them are currently living there, and I'm pretty sure the average gaming group will have pretty even numbers of people who've read RotTR as compared to people who've seen Jackie Chan movies set in modern China. Like that Karate Kid one a few years ago.

Also:

And how does going to Beijing and finding out its fucking underwater not make the setting uncanny? The face of the world has changed by the coastlines rising *60 meters*.

While it is literally a greater change to have Chengdu promoted from "who cares?" to "second most important city in all of China," the fact that players walking into Chengdu respond with "is this a real place" or possibly "isn't this Liu Bei's old capital" means that you can neither demonstrate a sense of reality by having familiar elements of our world in the fiction, nor can you demonstrate a sense of uncanny dystopia by having things be different in a bad way.

Pay attention.

A chinese audience would also probably appreciate some awareness that there are cities in China other than Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Yeah, Nanjing is missing from that list. Along with a couple of other major cities which are all also underwater. For real, you should probably be more familiar with China than a board game if you are going to try and carry on a conversation about Chinese cities, because the east coast is pretty much 100% of the parts of China that might actually play this game, since the rest of them are busy being dirt farmers.

[squirrelloid]

The litany of wrong and backpedaling is almost painful to read. I never said there was anything particularly wrong with bubble cities or whatever. What I've been opposed to is your insistence that Chicago be the only city worth caring about left in the entire continental United States.

I wasn't aware that NYC, LA, Chicago, and Washington DC was a full list of cities people care about in the US. It would obviously be impossible to have compelling settings in Atlanta, Detroit, Nashville, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, or Dallas.

Your criticisms of me caring about "only the name" are kind of funny when I've already demonstrated that no, Beijing means more to me than just its name and meanwhile you're propping up Xanadu for nothing except its name.

Actually, the mythological and poetic associations are what make Xanadu interesting. Meanwhile you've demonstrated nothing *inherent to Beijing* which wouldn't evaporate in nuclear fire that would make anyone care. It's 130 years in the future from the last common shared historical point (1969), if these places are at all recognizable you're doing it wrong.

There are at least three people on this forum who've physically been to a major city on China's eastern coast, two of them are currently living there, and I'm pretty sure the average gaming group will have pretty even numbers of people who've read RotTR as compared to people who've seen Jackie Chan movies set in modern China. Like that Karate Kid one a few years ago.

I would claim that there being *any* person on this forum who has lived in China is so exceptional for TTRPGs that its well beyond expectation. The average gaming group in the US is ~22 years old and has had maybe 1-2 people who have been to *europe*. Most of the group's idea of 'leaving the country' will be Canada or Mexico if they've left at all. European players might be expected to be somewhat more cosmopolitan (insofar as moving around europe is easier than getting to europe from the US), but I'm guessing at best half of any gaming group will have been to the US. The expected number of people who will actually have been to Asia at all in either group will be less than 1, and the vast majority of those will have gone to Japan.

Also:

And how does going to Beijing and finding out its fucking underwater not make the setting uncanny? The face of the world has changed by the coastlines rising *60 meters*.

While it is literally a greater change to have Chengdu promoted from "who cares?" to "second most important city in all of China," the fact that players walking into Chengdu respond with "is this a real place" or possibly "isn't this Liu Bei's old capital" means that you can neither demonstrate a sense of reality by having familiar elements of our world in the fiction, nor can you demonstrate a sense of uncanny dystopia by having things be different in a bad way.

Pay attention.

There are basically no familiar elements from our world. You might be able to construct some cultural homologies, but even the cultural should have markedly changed with the integration of mythos tech. Physical aspects like the buildings are almost entirely different and replaced by new Mythos tech construction. (Historically relevant older buildings may be around in major cities that didn't get nuked, but for a city like Beijing or New York, most of the important ones disappeared in the Mushroom cloud). Also, we're talking about a society that is fighting for survival. That kind of atmosphere has less interest and resources to preserve historical monuments. There will be 'new' monuments commemorating the victims of the moon beast attacks, and the victims of other wars thereafter, but there will be little protection for buildings just because they are old, and little restoration work.

Names really are just labels, because there's no reason for the players to be able to recognize *anything*.

Yeah, Nanjing is missing from that list. Along with a couple of other major cities which are all also underwater. For real, you should probably be more familiar with China than a board game if you are going to try and carry on a conversation about Chinese cities, because the east coast is pretty much 100% of the parts of China that might actually play this game, since the rest of them are busy being dirt farmers.

And so is Wuhan, Guangzhou, Macau, Tianjin, and Shenyang. But you didn't seem to be defending anything but those three.

[Username17]

What I've been opposed to is your insistence that Chicago be the only city worth caring about left in the entire continental United States.

But no one ever suggested that. People actually discussed the fact that Chicago would probably take a nuke and discussed how it might recover from that because it's pretty big and protected from sea level rise. That being said, I think that North American central defense would be organized out of Denver.

There have been several armageddons, a holocaust, and a cataclysm. The map is fucking different. Many of the cities of today exist as ruins that are partially or wholly under water. And that is OK, because it's a post apocalyptic setting.

-Username17

[Pedantic]

I think that North American central defense would be organized out of Denver.

NORAD is right near by already. It makes sense they'd only expand.