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

I - The World of Flare Fall

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.

Timeline

Here are a short series of important events in the setting's past, which most characters would have at least a vague idea of:

2033: Commercially Viable Fusion Energy

In 2033, a new alloy, Kelvinium, is discovered. It works like an incredibly efficient solar panel, but is tuned to the infrared frequencies of light: those we perceive as heat. Thanks to this property, Kelvinium becomes the new best way to convert heat into electricity, and vice versa.

This invention allows fusion reactors to finally reach a positive yield of 2%, making them commercially viable. Construction began the same year, and completed 6 years later in 2034.

2035: The Discovery of Hardlight

Indonesian scientist Laban Bacha accidentally discovers a strange phenomenon: for just a fraction of a second, the photons that are created during a fusion reaction behave more like matter than like electromagnetic waves. They can clump together into a solid, which very quickly turns back into light.

By focusing the energy output of a fusion reactor into a beam, Bacha is able to create simple shapes, like a fast, but temporary 3D-printer, or a CRT television. This discovery is dubbed "hardlight".

2042: Cold Fusion

French researcher Juliette Moreau discovers that by aiming two opposing beams of hardlight at deuterium, the fuel for nuclear fusion, she could increase the pressure enough to trigger a cold fusion reaction.

This discovery allows for the creation of much smaller and safer fusion reactors, small enough to fit inside of every appliance that needs power.

2042-2083: The Holo-Age

Thanks to the ubiquity of cold fusion reactors, technologies which were deemed too energy-vore to be commercially viable in the past, such as climate engineering, personal rapid transit or super-AI trained on yottabytes of data, all suddenly come into the realm of the possible.

The applications of hardlight were explored more and more throughout this period. Due to the ability to instantly replace broken hardlight, it was used as an indestructible building material in the construction of mega-structures such as space elevators.

2083: The Flare

One day, something went wrong. Every single piece of electronics around you either exploded, or caught on fire. A couple seconds later, you saw airplanes falling out of the sky. You were inside at the time - those who weren't, got sick and died after a couple months. But they might have been the lucky ones.

This was the Flare - and nothing has been the same since then.

2083-2084: The Long Winter

The first two years after the Flare were the hardest. Food stopped being delivered to your local supermarket, so people grew hungry. Then, desperate. Then, violent.

Un-controlled forest fires, and volcanic eruptions covered the skies with ash and soot, causing a 2-year long winter. Earthquakes created cracks in most buildings, so finding shelter from the cold became impossible. The frost, as well as acid rains, killed pretty much any crops that were not inside of a greenhouse.

The vast majority of humans died within those 2 years. Those who made it usually had to get their hands dirty.

2103: Present Day

This is where your story starts. Good luck.

The Flare

The Flare is the name of the event which caused society to collapse.

When the Flare happened. The Flare happened on September 8th, 2093, around 9pm GMT (meaning, it was evening in Europe and Africa, night in Asia, morning in Australia, and daytime in the Americas).

The solar flare itself lasted for about 2 days, but its effects are still felt to this day.

The First Few Moments. When the solar wind hit Earth, most electronic devices, even those which were unplugged or out of battery, started being overloaded.

Electrical sparks flew everywhere, causing many fires, especially in highly-populated urban areas. Some appliances simply exploded on the spot.

Indoors, every single lightbulb, power plug, microwave ovens, smartphones, televisions, laundry machines, hot water tanks, etc. became an electrical hazard.

Outdoors, cars started crashing into walls, planes started falling from the sky, trains derailed, and any exposed power line shot electrical arcs for hours.

In the parts of the world where the sun had already set, the sky was covered in bright auroras, and it was possible to see as if it had been daytime.

In the parts of the world where the sun was visible, anyone who was outside at the time was exposed to deadly amounts of solar radiation, grew sick, and died within a couple of months.

After a couple hours, the ground started shaking in many parts of the world, including ones not usually known for seismic activity. Many buildings started to crumble, some collapsed.

Areas which already had a lot of volcanic activity were hit the hardest: new volcanoes emerged from the ground overnight, and started spewing ash into the sky. Coastal regions were hit by several tsunamis.

The Long Winter. It took about two years for the volcanic ash to slowly fall from the sky, in the form of acid rains. During that time, temperatures dropped below freezing for most of the year.

Most crops died, and without long-range communication, it was nearly impossible to coordinate an appropriate disaster response.

Famines swept through the world's population, and as people grew desperate, it became impossible to maintain order. Most had to resort to violence, either to steal food from those who had some, or to protect themselves from those who didn't.

The Calm after the Storm. After the skies cleared, things got relatively more peaceful. However, the flare triggered the Earth's geomagnetic reversal, a phenomenon which should take around 7,000 years to complete.

Until this process finishes, the Earth's magnetic shield will only have a fraction of the power it normally has.

Humanity was reduced to small groups of scattered survivors, just trying to make it to the next night.

What the world looks like today

Auroras in the sky

At night, you don't see most stars, because the night sky is covered in beautiful snaking auroras.

Their color indicates how strong the solar wind is. If the auroras are just blue or green, everything is fine.

However, if they are multicolor and the blue or green fades into a pink or an orange hue, this means a solar storm is brewing, in which case it is best to find shelter.

Red Overgrown Plants

Plants are thriving under these conditions where they get ten times more sunlight than usual.

Most buildings and streets are covered in creeping vines, as Nature slowly reclaims its place.

However, just like the Red Forest around Chernobyl in real life, much of the light they are absorbing these days falls into the ultraviolet range. Because of this, plants have taken a red hue instead of their usual green tint.

Crumbling Infrastructure

Earthquakes are still commonplace, twenty years after the Flare. Most buildings show cracks or even holes.

Some skyscrapers are leaning dangerously to the side like they're about to collapse. Others already have.

When survivors build settlements in the wasteland, they use materials which are not too brittle, like wood or metal, rather than stone or concrete, to try to account for the tremors.

Glitched Electronics

The vast majority of electronic devices have stopped working. The vast majority of those that still work... Don't work quite right.

It is common to see AI-controlled robots have incomprehensible and erratic behavior, or for holograms and hardlight constructs to have visual glitches.

These glitches can range from harmless, to funny, to deadly, depending on what device is glitching.

Nocturnal Expeditions

Going outside during the day is still dangerous unless one is equipped with anti-radiation equipment.

Because of this, most survivor groups sleep during the day, and are active at night, using torchlight or their vehicle's headlights to navigate the wasteland in the dark.

In urban centers, it is still possible to go outside during the day, using the shadows cast by skyscrapers, and subway tunnels, to traverse the city without being exposed to sunlight.

Wild Climate Change

Due to having very little protection against the Sun, the global temperature has increased by a couple degrees.

This has had some major effects on the climate. Hurricanes, dust storms, acid rains, and other weather phenomena are commonplace.

Additionally, the level of the sea has risen by a few meters. A lot of coastal cities have the first level of their buildings flooded. The survivors who dwell there navigate their cities using canoes and boats.