[UA] "The End" of UA? (Don't worry, it's just a title.)

[holycrow at mindspring.com]

ua at lists.uchicago.edu wrote:
> Well, if everyone died on Earth, the IC would still be there, right? >So they'll just have to make more people, Adam & Eve style. There is >a *chance* that Humanity returns to a nuclear wasteland, after all...

Ooogah.  THERE'S your high-stakes variant UA campaign.

1) Nuclear disaster or mutant airborne AIDS or gargantuan ecological collapse wipes out humanity.  Or it SHOULD -- in a sane and strictly mechanistic universe, all would perish.

2) This, however, being a universe with a board of directors, a few humans survive through mind-boggling coincidences.  All the Godwalkers survive -- at least, all the loyal ones.  ("Here's a message... SEE YOU IN HELL, DERMOTT!")  In fact, probably ALL the survivors are high grade Avatars, protected by their invisible patrons?  

Or you could lighten up on the disaster a bit and have there be some pockets of human survival.  F'rinstance, suppose the Big Boom Splat takes the Hollywood-approved form of a giant 3d Extinction asteroid.  It hits in, say, Jerusalem and wipes out all the people in Europe, Asia and Africa.  Australia, along with North and South America, are trashed, but there are a few survivors. 

3) In addition to your hot hot Mad Max post-apocalyptic cyclegang action, you now have a human population that's hovering around the 2-3 million mark GLOBALLY.  

How much easier is it to get the proportion of belief needed to force an Ascension?  That is, in fact, what all these surviving Godwalkers and Avatars are doing -- running around trying to convince enough of the survivors to Think Their Way, thereby pushing the Right People into the IC before it finally gets clogged.  Instead of Ascensions every couple hundred years, you get one every 8-12 MONTHS -- which means the arcane environment is in a state of constant flux, not to mention the collective unconscious.

If it wuz me, I'd have the PCs be the brave astronauts who tried to knock the asteroid off its course.  (Ooops...)  They return to Earth and try to pick up the pieces.  If you really want to make things ass-wacky, give 'em a live nuclear warhead and no delivery system.  ("It was shoved way in the back of the cargo bay behind the terlet paper.  Maybe THAT'S why we couldn't complete the mission...")  

Take a few pages from "The End," call it "Planet of the Avatars" and you're ready to rock and/or roll.

-G.


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