Before, During, and After

A.C.: After Collapse is a post-apocalyptic RPG with a big back story that has been divided in to three parts: Before, During, and After.  Creator Justin Oldham explains why:

"Once upon a time, I was a student of history.  I mean that literally, I was academically pursuing a bachelor’s degree in the subject of history.  As I read about the decline and fall of civilizations and empires, I couldn’t help thinking about those chronologies in three parts.  Before, during, and after somehow made sense to me.  When I did my homework as it was assigned, I found myself writing essays with prefaced remarks that began with: before collapse, during collapse, and after collapse.  There’s really nothing remarkable about that, it’s just how my mind worked."

"As the years passed, I filled an entire notebook with names, dates, people, places, and things that populated the increasing fragments my fictional history of the future world that was eventually going to end.  Using one game system after another as they appeared on the shelves of local stores, we played characters who lived and searched in just about every corner of the world.  The more my fellow gamers wanted to plumb the depths of the world their characters lived in, the more I needed to know about what happened before that fictional world fell apart."

"It’s all fine and well to present post-apocalyptic gamers with the ruins of buildings and bunkers—but—you as the game presenter need to have some sense of what happened in those places before any of the player characters ever set foot in those places.  Think of it as theater of the mind.  What kind of slow moving catastrophe caused an office building to be empty?  If you do describe dust-covered telephones, computers, and the “stuff” people find in cubicles, it’s a good idea to know how those things got there—or—why they were left behind.  Imagine what gruesome remains might be found in a bunker that was quickly sealed—before anyone had a chance to get out!"

"Then, ask yourself what kind of emergency would happen in a place like that, to permanently enshrine that much carnage?  Might be fun to describe desiccated corpses in the armory, or any number of dead guys in a sealed room marked “laboratory,” but you’ve still got to know why they are there.  All of that, even the grisly imagery, made me think in big-picture terms when I planned the backstory of the dynamic world that is now A.C.: After Collapse."