Day 23 of the #RPGCampaignTour for my Gamma World campaign "This Is Not a Test", and we finally hit our first road block. The question from the challenge, "What Are the Major Exports? " Let's be totally honest. Gamma World for me is a series of gonzo adventures with crazy character concepts. With few exceptions, there larges swaths of the world that are glossed over, politics, military, and economics are only fleshed out as needed.
So I plugged the other 26 questions into ChatGPT and asked for replacement questions for Day 23... and it's counterpart for tomorrow, Day 24 "What are the major imports."
Today is a similarly worded question, but one that sparks my interest more, "Arteries of Survival"
Because our three three towns along the Big River: Riverbend, Fair-Town, and KIA Academy, as technically independent of each other, but their is trade, political organization, and problems. And the one question my one player has essentially asked multiple times in varying ways, "How are these players still around in a dangerous world like Gamma World?"
The Roads:
One thing about the Big River, the area a few days journey downriver of KIA Academy, with places along its bank with dangerous names like "The Wildlands" and "The Wall" seem to have stifled traffic of any sort upriver... on both sides of the banks. While there is a stable but narrow path on the KIA side (old railroad tracks on phenomenal levee that survived the apocalypse and 500-year floods.
The truth of the matter is, transportation in this river valley starts at the Ancient technology softrock bridge crossing the Redline Creek, is extraordinary in KIA, transforms to a stable and maintains dirt track for traffic going back and forth, the road runs through Fair-Town, continues upriver to Riverbend, until is winnows out to a path through the wilderness at a second bend in the river, eight or nine miles upriver near an odd low spot that could be used to ford across in the Hisser lands. The path continues, and folks from places to Blackvale and The Catacombs do venture down from a long journey.
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| The Redline Bridge. |
The Big River:
The Big River is far more massive than anyone ever recalls. There are not even ruins of bridges in this region from the Ancients, and KIA probably has plans to construct a beautiful four lane softrock bridge to the other side... but there's nothing on the other sides. Perhaps the start of a road to the now-ruined town of Jainus? Not particularly appealing.
There is extremely limited fishing in the river. Certainly a mutant raccoon with a pole and some bait could catch fish of varying sizes, but the predators swimming within it as quiet and deadly. Someone could make a basic living fishing on the river... for a year or two, until disaster strikes.
The Capillaries of the Towns
The one thing I've failed to do is probably explain that these three towns are not bastions of civilization, surrounded by nothing but wastelands.
Riverbend is an agrarians town with farms upriver and downriver, but not going into the interior. Barley, root vegetables, and enough linen and wool-equivalent material for basic clothmaking. I would expect further beyond the town that there are trapper, hunters, and furriers bringing back their kills. They would make the true front line of defense against those creatures migrating from a land labelled on the maps only as "Nightmare Monsters"
Beyond the famous walls of famous are primitive farms, producing grains and vegetables. Beyond the walls are two functioning mills using water power from streams.
KIA Academy has the most obvious capillaries. Most of the population is situation within the complex, but until the recent worries of war encroaching their lands, KIA had different outside districts that resembled suburbs. Each district had departments operation out of stations for road work and other functions, and self-sustaining communities were beyond the direct protection of the academy.
Day 24 - Contraband and Catastrophe
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