Anyway: habitat destruction.
Sea Level Rise: We're positing a sea level rise of about 30 centimeters by 2075. That's a
bit on the conservative side, since a number of projections have us beating that by 2050. It's also one foot though, so it's nice and round and easy to explain. That makes us lose about 5000 square miles of US coastline, but it doesn't submerge any major cities or do anything stupid.
Still, a lot of homes and aquifers are unusable and radical urban planning is needed in Florida.
Weather Shifts The stars are right and there are
extra land masses. The clouds can pretty much go wherever you say they do. So any region that depends on rain for its water (that is most places) can simply be a desert now. The inverse can also be true: any desert that suddenly starts getting 80 inches of rain a year will "flood" and pretty much stay flooded until people figure out that the lakes and rivers are actually permanent and they are not getting their houses back.
Industrial Accidents Nothing has been rebuilt over the Bhopal Union Carbide pesticide factory. The entire city of Pripyat stands vacant. The release of enough poison int an area that cleaning it up would cost more than moving somewhere else has a pretty good success rate of getting people to abandon areas to habitation. An advantage here is that there
is industry in pretty much every city in the world, and in the future there
could be industry on a scale sufficient to generate a fuckup of sufficient magnitude pretty much anywhere. I mean, you could have people build a new widget plant and have it explode at any point in the next 60 years. If something lie that
didn't happen, that would be surprising and unrealistic.
Nuclear Bombs Totally overdone, and actually nuclear bombs have a
surprisingly poor history of actually wiping cities off the map in any permanent way. Still, we have
bigger bombs now, so it's plausible to create a literal nuclear wasteland. Again, this can be pretty much anywhere. It can be a terrorist nuke, a War Games style experiment gone wrong, an act of war, or a last-ditch attempt to stop the awakening of an evil god.
Mana Storms Again, overdone. But useful, since there is
specifically nothing in Earth's actual history or topology that makes that happen. Not much to say about this, but you can put one of these anywhere.
Conflict Political turmoil and the threat of war can push people out of cities. There's totally Varosha. It doesn't happen very often, usually cities turn into Stalingrad or West Berlin when invading armies come through, but an empty city is creepy as hell, especially if it is full of discarded ammunition and maybe some leftover monsters or something.
Resource Shortage Without a functioning economy, there is no reason (or ability) for people to stay in town. It could be like Bodie, California where people just run out of a way to make a living and everyone leaves. This mostly happens to one-industry towns lie something built around a copper mine or something. But in a world that is fuel and water scarce, pretty much anything could dry up.
Monsters Similar to manastorms, in that it could happen anywhere for no reason. Actually, it's pretty hard to justify how monsters could actually depopulate a city. But they could easily make a road or rail line impassable.
Geology Volcanoes have a really good record of turning cities into non-cities. Earthquakes and the associated tidal waves have done
OK, but they usually need help from another event afterward to keep people from just rebuilding.
Anyway. The next thing to do is to look at a population density map of the US. Ther is one
Here.
Anywhere that is full of white space could be declared to have roaming basilisks or nuclear fallout or something and it wouldn't make much difference. The red spots are the important ones, because where those are and are not will determine where actual political power is.
- I want to have something fatal happen to Jacksonville. It's in an awkward place between the CSA and the Caribbean Empire, and I don't want to deal with it.
- Something catastrophic should happen to either Austin or San Antonio. Because they are too close to be different, too big to ignore, and not big enough to be worth detailing both. Probably Austin, so that the Lone Star State can put their capital in Dallas or Houston.
- California is too connected. That is, it is too easy to get from the Bay Area to Sacramento and too easy to get from LA to San Diego. The regions in between those cities need to be hellscapes that require daring DMZ running or going the long way around.
- Cleveland is on the border between Greater Kentucky and Greater Pennsylvania. It should be an empty wartorn hellscape.
- The East Coast generally has too many cities, and a wedge has to be driven between Philly and New York. I suggest an attack from Devil's Reef.
-Username17
