Warning: Pre-Alpha
This game is currently in pre-alpha, and at this time, I do not recommend running a game in it yet. Every single game mechanic and piece of lore is subject to potentially breaking changes.
Thank you for your interest in this game! You can follow its development at https://www.youtube.com/@trekiros
-Trek
Core Themes
Flare Fall's world is in equal parts sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic. Let's break down what both of those themes mean in practice:
Natural Apocalypse
Usually, Post-apocalyptic media blames the world's end on whichever deeply ingrained fear people have at the time of its creation: for example, an invasion from a technologically superior alien civilization could represent the worry Americans had, in the 1960s, of losing their status as the leaders of the western world.
Some post-apo media created during the Cold War blamed the apocalypse on nuclear warfare instead. More modern takes blame climate change, rampant unchecked capitalism, or mis-aligned general artificial intelligence.
But Flare Fall doesn't blame its apocalypse on anything we as humans could possibly control: its apocalypse is caused by a massive solar superflare, which then triggered the start of geomagnetic reversal.
This fall was completely natural, and inevitable - in fact, humanity has gone through similar events hundreds of times in the past, and made it through every single time.
Your players' characters are just unlucky enough to be born at exactly the wrong time - whether they make it through or not is still to be determined.
Tabula Rasa. One major theme of the natural apocalypse genre, is to give your players a blank slate - a world where every tradition, institution, and corporation was wiped clean off the map. And then asking them: what will you choose to build?
Knowing everything you know about how the modern world functions, will you try to repair what's broken, or create something new?
Given the chance to re-create society, would you rig the system to your advantage, or sacrifice yourself for the good of others?
This world is a blank canvas. And your players' choices, their agency, is the paint that will bring this canvas to life.
Doomsday Prepper Delusions. The post-apocalyptic genre is also about power fantasy: part of that is about asking your players to decide the fate of the world, sure... but another, equally valid aspect of that power fantasy, is to show them an extremely dangerous world, and then tell them:
"Sure, society has collapsed, most people have died, there are mutant monsters everywhere, but you... YOU would survive, right?"
Give your players a community of survivors who rely on them. Give them powerful enemies to overcome. Give them objectives which sound positively impossible to achieve. Turn their characters into action heroes, who can overcome any challenge through their wits, their skills, and their bond as a team.
Environmental storytelling. Post-apocalyptic media lends itself particularly well to the juxtaposition of what is, and what used to be.
A skyscraper which represented the height of human engineering, leaning dangerously like it's about to collapse. A luxurious vacation resort turned into a bloody fight pit for raiders and cultists. A supermarket whose security robots mercilessly cut down survivors who desperately need its food, thinking they are thieves. Ruins filled with the skeletons of those who used to work there.
Whenever your players approach a new location, ask yourself these two questions: what did this place use to be, and how has it changed? The more the original purpose of a place was twisted into a dark mirror of itself after the apocalypse, the better.
Real World Definitions
Solar Superflare. Our Sun often sends out incredibly powerful electromagnetic waves. These waves vary in intensity and in their direction - but every couple hundred years, one of these waves is both incredibly powerful, and... aimed in our direction.
The last time this happened was in 1859, during something now called the Carrington Event. An aurora, the same kind we normally only see at the poles, lit up the entire night sky, everywhere on Earth. Telegraph pylons bursted into flames, with sparks flying everywhere. Some telegraph operators received electrical shocks just for standing near their device.
Scientists estimate the odds of another Carrington Event happening during our lifetimes to be around 12%. But if one did occur today, the results would be much different: we use a lot more electricity today, than we did 170 years ago. Every single lightbulb in our homes, our cars, the smartphones we carry in our pockets, nearly everything you use in your daily life would become a mortal danger in an instant.
Our modern society also relies heavily on long-range communication. If the Internet and telephone cables suddenly broke down, your local supermarket wouldn't be able to order the food you need to survive. You wouldn't be able to call your local firefighters if your home caught on fire. Your government wouldn't be able to coordinate a proper disaster response. Our GPS satellites would stop working.
Geomagnetic Reversal. The Earth's magnetic poles are known to have flipped hundreds of times in the past. This is a natural process which takes about 5,000 to 10,000 years to complete. During that time, three main effects can be observed:
- The Earth has dozens of "North" and "South" poles, making compass-based navigation nearly impossible.
- The Earth's magnetic shield, the one which usually protects us from solar winds, is reduced to only about 10% of its usual strength - this would be the equivalent of suffering a solar superflare that lasted 7,000 years.
- Seismic and volcanic activity is increased, causing earthquakes and the creation of new volcanoes, creating winters which can last several years, as the skies are covered in volcanic ash. This would kill most crops, and cause mass famines.
Geomagnetic reversals happen on average every 450,000 years... and the last one happened 780,000 years ago, so we are overdue for one.
In the world of Flare Fall, the superflare disturbed the Earth's magnetic shield, which triggered the start of the flip. The fall was immediate and brutal, but its effects will continue for thousands of years.
Near Sci-Fi
Science-fiction is the genre of what-ifs and wild ideas. Like the dreams and nightmares we have at night, the purpose of sci-fi is to place us in a situation that we believe might happen, so that when and if it does, we can be prepared for it. We'll have thought about the consequences of this new technology, and we'll, hopefully, be able to avoid its pitfalls.
Flare Fall's particular flavor of sci-fi is "near sci-fi", which means its world is largely similar to our own, with just a few extra toys for people to play with (and for you to create monsters for your players to fight, and loot for your players to get). There's no faster-than-light travel or alien civilizations, just cold fusion, some talking robots, and maybe a colony of scientists on the Moon, if you're lucky.
Real World Definitions
Cold Fusion. Scientists have been researching fusion as a power source for decades now. Its potential impact is immense: for perspective, the shower you took this morning includes enough deuterium to power your home for 30 years - and the byproduct of the reaction would be helium, rather than any form of dangerous waste we would struggle to dispose of.
However, in real life, the best efficiency scientists have managed to achieve so far has been around -21%, meaning for every watt they put into the reactor, they only got 4 watts back. What's more, the equipment necessary to create this fusion reaction is so large that an entire power plant needs to be built around it.
In the world of Flare Fall, which is set a couple decades from now, the efficiency was pushed to a positive yield of +2%, and a method was discovered to produce cold fusion in miniature reactors small enough to fit inside your pocket.
With 2% efficiency, your morning shower would be enough to power your home for about 7 months.
A sense of familiarity. The most important aspect of near sci-fi is that it is relatable. Because the world of Flare Fall is so close to our own, you and your players can come to this game with pre-existing knowledge about how things work.
Before the Flare, your characters probably used to care about the same things you care about in your daily life. They struggled to pay rent. They spent too much time on social media and dating apps. They went to concerts. They had an annoying coworker. They had a celebrity crush. They loathed family reunions because of that one uncle.
Maybe your campaign can take place in a post-apocalyptic version of your home town. Maybe your next adventure will bring your players to that one place you've visited on vacation years ago. Maybe your players will negotiate peace treaties with wasteland warlords by giving them a copy of Tailor Quick's last, unreleased album that was due to come out a couple months after the Flare.
And this familiarity is important for your players. It is precisely because this world reacts as they would expect to their actions and decisions, that they get to take action, and make decisions.
A license to have fun. The "fiction" part of "science-fiction" gives you just enough leeway, just enough separation from the real world that you get to ignore the parts of it that you don't think would make for great adventuring material.
Maybe that one company you don't like went bankrupt between now and the Flare, in 2083. Maybe racism and war stopped when post-scarcity became a thing. Maybe people just don't care about religion in the wasteland for some reason that you absolutely won't ever bother explaining.
You don't need to justify what your game is not about. Flare Fall is a game - the type of thing you use to escape those daily woes and just have some perfectly harmless fun for a little while.