It reads like it was written in about April of 2020, but I actually wrote the skeleton of it for a TTRPG party I was setting up with some friends while I was unemployed back in 2019, although I did come up with the title after people started saying “the before times” to refer to pre-Covid and I put together a lot of the details (including the existence of Covid in the alternate history timeline) through the shutdowns.
It’s been a back-burner type of project for a while since I haven’t actually run a campaign in it in about two years, but since I had the materials for it, I figured I’d share it.
If you have feedback, please pass it along! And if you want to use it as inspiration for your own campaigns, feel free, as long as you let me know what you come up with.
(copied from my other post)
Little bit of c/fuckcars in there too ;)
This is great! Very thorough and interesting - something about timelines that diverge around 1970/1980 are very interesting to me. A little more familiar and niche. Can’t wait to dig deeper into it later on :)
Excellent, I’m glad you like it so far! I picked 1980 as the divergence because I feel like a lot of our modern ills can be traced back to, or would not have been as severe without, Reagan, and I wanted to have a situation where humanity pretty much had their shit together but were then undone by forces truly beyond their control. I also obviously took heavy inspiration from Fallout, but didn’t want to do a direct 1-1 copy, y’know?
And yeah, I definitely did grind a few of my own personal axes in there, heh. During the transit revolution section, the town I give as an example of a “worse outlying town” that “dries up and becomes a ghost town” due to lack of rail service is the town where I currently work, which is based on the reality that a bunch of rich nimbys there shot down a proposed BART extension to it for all the usual reasons rich nimbys shoot down public transit proposals. The extension in question would have come straight from Oakland, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.