Long Road to Utopia - design diary 1

During the development of The Long Road Home, I did start thinking about the possibility of telling post-apocalyptic stories too. I didn’t want that first game to balloon in size though, and it seemed to me that I’d want a different character to a game of post apocalyptic survival.

So what elements stay the same, and what will change?

Tropes

I still want to have a range of tropes, but in deference to the source material I’ve removed the children’s stories from the list of tropes. I’ve had a few discussions on Bluesky and elsewhere, but almost all of the books that involve children would be classed as Young Adult literature now, with protagonists in their early teens.

So I think I’ll have four trope types, and I’ll adjust some of the tropes within each of those if necessary to make them a better fit for post-apocalyptic survival stories.

• Young Adult
• Heroic
• Grim
• Horror

Home Becomes Utopia

In The Long Road Home, the players create together the home which the characters set out from at the beginning of their story, and to which they are returning at the end. The sights, sounds and smells of home.

By contrast, in the post-apocalyptic game the party of characters is not returning home after completing a quest. They are trying to reach a utopia... a land of peace and plenty, a respite from the world that they find themselves in. Examples that come to mind are the titular White Mountains from the first of the Tripod books by John Christopher, or the beautiful valley in Mad Max: Fury Road that Furiosa is hoping to find.

Touchstones will be things that they are hoping for in that future place - safety, food, comfort, love...

Settings

I think There should be a number of potential settings reflecting how recently the apocalypse took place and thus how much time there has been for society to rebuild. The further you progress along this line, the less contemporary technology is available and the more society has regressed too. Or perhaps societal breakdown is at it's peak in the first two, and technological breakdown is at it's peak in the second two?

1. It’s happening right now. Everyone is panicking and trying to get to safety.
2. It’s only just happened. Anarchy has broken loose, gangs have risen up in power.
3. It happened a while ago. Society is losing the ability to make new technology and is reverting to simpler things.
4. It happened a long while ago. Society has regressed to an agrarian subsistence level and much technology has been lost and forgotten.

It may be that as I proceed I can't see a good basis for having these distinct settings, providing a basis for locations, people-based threats, and treasures. I'm going to include them for the moment though.

Threats

We have a wider range of threats that we can call on. Threats are the source of the apocalypse, the reason why the world is so much less hospitable than it used to be. I offer these in decreasing order of likelihood (although I sincerely hope we won’t have to face any of them!)

1. Global Pandemic
2. Environmental Disaster
3. Nuclear Holocaust
4. Asteroid Impact
5. Zombie Plague
6. Robot Uprising
7. Alien Invasion

One of the questions that I’m weighing up at the moment is whether there is a significant difference between environmental disaster and asteroid impact - or if an asteroid impact might just be a proximate cause for one brand of environmental disaster. Similarly, do I want to distinguish between a freezing earth (because of climate change, nuclear winter, asteroid impact) and a searing earth (because of greenhouse effect on climate change).

Essentially these threats are there to provide genre-appropriate additional threats for the story.

Allies and... Traitors?

The Long Road Home has supporting characters that may be allies or enemies who work for the evil overlord. The latter doesn’t work so well for post apocalyptic settings. What does work well is the idea that some of the allies will crumble under pressure and turn traitor on the group. Stealing, fighting, abandoning, or betraying them when they finally lose their nerve.

So rather than simply going for an adjective, adjective, noun approach for the supporting characters, I'm going to choose a positive first adjective and a potentially troubling second adjective. This would drive home that any of the supporting characters could turn traitor given the right circumstances that trigger their motivation.

Homecoming becomes Arrival

In The Long Road Home, the characters are on their way back to their starting place, hoping to find it intact and their loved ones safe.

The Long Road to Utopia has a less hopeful approach. You are hoping that you are going to find your way to a Utopia, but you may not find all that you are hoping for. It might end in disaster, or it might be that you discover that you just have to make the utopia for yourself.

Next Steps

I've got to review a bunch of inspirational stories and films which touch on this subject area, and start fleshing out lists of locations, threats, and treasures. The ease or difficulty of populating those lists will give me an idea of which ones really want to stay in the book!

• utopia