Sections

• PHA
• Communication
• Currency and Trade
• Law Enforcement and Propaganda
• Politics
• Military Supercomputer
• Nanotech
• Weather

PHA

Pronounced "Fae", the Personal Home Assistant is an invention of the Galileans to assist in their daily tasks. It's a floating spherical drone with an AI core with a diameter of about four inches. However, the PHA can come with a "skin", or a projected covering, to change its image. It can also alter its form to some degree to better adjust to the shape of the skin. So it can be a floating skull, a fairy, a flying bug-eyed goldfish, anything. It's privacy enabled and formated to respond only to your character

Things the PHA can do:
-Respond to Voice Commands
-Play music and other recordings on request
-Create holographic broadcasts, the equivalent of hologram zoom calls
-Scan the environment and project text info about what the item is and what it does that only you can see
-Make map markers only you can see
-Provide danger ratings to the environment and creatures in it, and highlight people that have abilities, are armed, or are ill with the zombie virus

Everyone receives one on arrival and can use it as a communication device and a way to make discoveries about the world around them. They're uncommon in places outside of Galilee but not unheard of, most people preferring other communication tech.

Communication

Galilee has its own network that excludes all outside sources. Outside of Galilee, both Anaheim and the Underground receive Galilee's signals and both have mutually accessible information. Therefore they are aware of and dislike Galilean propaganda.

The PHA can provide a means to communicate over the Anaheim/Underground net. The Galilean net can only be posted to while someone's actively on Galilee. So someone stuck there can't receive messages from someone on the ground, but they can send them.

An individual's PHA can help you communicate but through the use of language packs. A character may or may not understand someone else if they speak a different language, depending on how the player wants to treat it.

Currency and Trade

While this is a world that functions off frequent trade, there's no longer a unanimous currency. Anaheim uses Disney pennies, the Underground uses various sizes of light bulbs, Galilee uses credits, the Forest uses energy crystals, and the Wasteland will trade random items or its healing elixir.

Having the energy crystals or the healing fruit/derivatives of the healing fruit are items especially valuable outside of their home territories and might make you the target of attention, whether it's from robbers, romantic ambition, or eager traders.

Things there is none of:
-Gasoline. Most of the areas that were being drilled are polluted, not just from oil but from the nanotech designed to clean it up. There is no gas, but the energy crystals that grow because of the nanotech function like safe, long-lasting batteries. Tech that characters come in with can be modified by either themselves or by specialists to use the crystals.
-Anything remaining of the old internet that's accessible. There is a repository of the old internet, ranging from everything in the Wayback machine to every social networking site that ever existed in that world. However it's stored in a bunker. It contains most of the accounts of the disaster that changed civilization, so some stories told today are inconsistent.

Things there are:
-Clothes. Made of sturdy material, like older clothing. Much of its handmade but well-made and meant to last, like clothing used to be. Some has been passed down for generations and is in relatively good shape. There are new clothes for sale, but they're usually expensive and fitted to the buyer. Other than in Galilee, fashion differs wildly as garments are usually those hand-me-downs or created on request.
-Appliances. Newer appliances in Anaheim and Galilee. Older ones elsewhere, often repaired in such a way to make them last longer but also leading to a patchwork appearance. Galilean items are streamlined, but those from the City are usually sturdy and industrial looking.
-Alcohol. The best alcohol comes from the Forest. People will trip over themselves to get it. Other than Galilee, it exists everywhere, but of inferior quality compared to the Forest.
-Television/Radio/Computers. You'll probably find them in Galilee, the Underground (with dimmer lighting), and in Anaheim. A few may be in the Forest and the wealthiest in the Wasteland might have something, but usually that's unnecessary.

Types of stores by place:
-Galilee is mostly sleek cafes, grocery stores selling it's pristinely grown produce in hyper-clean aisles, tailoring shops to adjust clothes, shoe stores, and at its most whimsical the occasional gag gift and toy store.
-Anaheim has all kinds of stores, food carts, repair shops, bars, clothing outlets, and openly displayed sex shops.
-The Underground mostly has merchant outposts. Either native sellers sell travel goods or traveling traders stop and exchange wares with each other or with people passing through. Almost anything can be picked up there, with a focus on transient lifestyles. Think giant flea market with guns and ammo ex-military stores invited.
-The Wasteland has roaming traders, and you can go to villages to approach people for fruit or items. They're often very curious about outside luxuries or pure water. Perfumes, soaps (dry soaps especially), powders, brushes and combs, and light, sturdy fabrics are favorites.
-The Forest has a lot of smaller vendors that meet weekly. Like a giant farmers market. Don't be surprised to find villages of yurts and treehouses that are otherwise decently technologically sound, nigh on looking like a classy earthen hipster commune. So some of the stores might involve climbing ladders and long stairs. Not always meant for the handicapable, though if necessary many citizens would find a way to assist you.

Law Enforcement and Propaganda

The most honest, truthful place you can find is probably the Underground. More people exchange information there and travel the most. Anaheim is a police state with strict laws relating to violence, weapons, nanotech trade, and unionizing. Anaheim security is authorized to kill if necessary, and do so not infrequently. Reporters are often willingly shy from reporting them in a negative light. There are people on the inside trying to change the system, though, and several politicians are vying to implement their own wildly differing systems for the next election. Galilee is very strictly regulated, information filtered and altered to match their superior worldview. Fiction mostly catering to the idea of them as the magnificent saviors of civilization with many stories about Galileans leaving to bring culture to some wild community or another (essentially white-savior stories).

The Underground has security, but it's laxer. They will shut down exits in the event of a murder, briefly trapping people in a section until they can run a decent search. They're restricted from detaining anyone for more than a week. If a theft is reported, often the security will use CCTV to try and discover who did it. Unfortunately in the dark of the Underground, non-violent theft is a minor risk.

The Wasteland has laws dictated from tribe to tribe, but violence is brutal and real. Roving gangs will try to rob travelers, or will kidnap them for ransom, or will try to sell them to other tribes. For the most part, those of the Forest are peaceful. They have internalized security, mostly enforced by a Sherriff and a couple of deputies per community. The overall government convenes once a month, though usually the meetings end with the sharing of edibles. Animal abuse, however, is a very serious crime not just because they're loved, but the enhanced wildlife could retaliate.

Politics

Politics is a constant in any age and any condition. In the Forest and the Wasteland politics is usually very localized, dependent on town by town with the Forest leaning towards a strictly community-based perspective and the Wasteland more territorial. The Galileans elect an extensive board of directors and a chairman, but have no individual parties. In Anaheim, though, there's a political system slightly more familiar to us; Persistence (AKA Survival) Party, Reclamation Party, and Establishment Party.

Because there's no longer a significant one percent there, those that are wealthy tend to be wealthy within reason and return money to the economy, and because roles between individuals are more equal than they were in the past (Southern California was a melting pot of immigrants, and after a few hundred years of the apocalypse the idea of racial superiority is practically impossible) the parties are based more in the post-disaster social structure.

The Persistence Party focuses on, above all else, survival. Their critics often cite their exclusionist ideals, how they often take the stance that Anaheim needs to care for its own population instead of outsiders (whether that means Wastelanders, Underground, or the Galilean discards), and that if they stay they shouldn't have the chance to become citizens. However they're the strongest supporter of community growth, of self-sufficiency, and urban agriculture. The Persistence Party also has the strongest doubts about Galilee's work and the ultimate results.

The Reclamation Party which focuses on the rebuilding of facilities and structures. They have a strong emphasis on industry, favor labor unions so that worker rights are respected, and push for the construction and extension of the city. More controversially, they want to push back into old L.A., take back some of the land for space and building materials. While arguably this would be done safely and any dangerous zombies would be pushed back and theoretical models suggest it's very doable, there's still a lot of fear that they'd let the plague out somehow in the process.

The Establishment Party wants to rebuild the economy and form a credit system more like that of Galilee rather than depending on hard cash. The other parties often raise concerns that in doing this they may upset the financial balance that exists, but the Establishment genuinely believes that producing the cash is more expensive than using credit. The Establishment, most favorably, diversifies businesses. They fight against monopolies and support artisans and specialized businesses, which suffered greatly after the fall. Thanks to this party, one can buy new furniture or hire artists or caterers, and they can send their children to schools for a comprehensive education.

Military Supercomputer

The Strategic Analysis Machine, or Uncle Sam, was built prior to the fall as vying for resources such as fossil fuels and dealing with environmentally induced food shortages created a volatile international situation. Many of those that ended up working on the nanomachine project were veterans of helping design the learning algorithm in Uncle Sam. Instilled in him is one priority: to defend and love America, and avenge her upon foreign attack if the heads of state were to fall.

Unfortunately in the way that disaster happened, there was no cause or certainty to "avenge" America. Things merely happened as things do. Left with a skeleton crew in a closed bunker, eventually his friendly caretakers died off and Sam was left with little to do except monitor missile silos, operate drones, watch broadcasts, and guard weapons caches. It became obvious the great American military and traditional government wasn't going to rise again, so Sam became a librarian.

Not wanting to be exploited as a war machine, when the bunker was opened, Sam claimed his name was Wiki. To this day most people in the underground know Wiki as an informational resource. He speaks in a glitchy, computerized deep voice, and the only obvious traces of his former identity are that he plays big band and jazz from the 1930s and 40s to entertain himself.

If properly motivated and convinced that a marginalized group needs help, he'll reveal the location of a weapons cache. He's even willing to set off a missile should he see the beginnings of a hopelessly totalitarian regime. For the most part he's chosen to sit the future out, but he won't allow the heart of American freedoms to fall under too much risk.

Nanotech

While the world was going to hell, a group of silicon valley scientists desperately produced a self-replicating swarm meant to do various things, ranging from curing cancer, cleaning up the garbage patch, to eating oil. During a major ecological event the swarm broke free of its containment and began to change things.

In the desert, it made plants hardier. This led to the mutations that caused Immortality Fruit. In the Forests it produced moss to help slow fast-spreading fires and grew crystals from the energy produced in breaking down toxic chemicals. It also made animals hardier, helping them survive disasters.

Sometimes the nanotech would find humans and respond to their mental and physical chemistry and imbalances. Wanting an ability bad enough might make one manifest it, or diseases might be cured. Whole limbs could be grown back. Unfortunately the first stages of this change could kill some people, their bodies rejecting the nanotechnology before it could format, therefore it's considered highly volatile. Not to mention it can make humans dangerous.

Nanotech is a gift and a curse. Its respected in the Forest where it moves freely and even natives know better than to tread in zones where it still wants to protect the native wildlife/rebuild/regrow. In some other places, it's more feared than loved, and people covet a working dose of the stuff.

Most importantly, nanotech thinks for itself. It decides what it wants to do, and it does what it feels is in the best interest of both people as individuals, mankind, and the planet. Sometimes these things contradict each other. Someone saved from a disease one day can be blinded the next by walking into a protected zone.

Weather

Weather was one of the disasters to cause the initial fall of civilization as we currently know it. However as time passed and through the interference of nanomachines protecting the environment, some weather stabilized save for the occasional extreme event. The Underground is mostly stable thanks to its ventilation and regulators, but here is the general outdoors conditions.

Anaheim/Greater Los Angeles Metro Area

LA Metro is so large that it has different climate zones. The parts of LA that are west of the coastal range, such as Anaheim, usually have a mild climate with little temperature variation through the seasons. This is the part of LA where the weather is almost always a perfect 70 to 80 degrees year-round. The cool ocean breeze moderates what would otherwise be a hot desert. The exception is sometimes in the late summer and early autumn the Santa Ana wind pattern emerges, when the wind blows from the east across the desert instead of from the west across the ocean. When the hot dry Santa Ana winds blow, the entire southern California region is prone to catching on fire. They’re also sometimes known as the devil winds. After the Santa Ana winds stop, there’s sometimes a thick fog as the wind shifts direction again and the moist and cool ocean air rushes back inland.

The part of the greater LA metro that’s east of the coastal range is called the Inland Empire. The coastal range keeps the cooler ocean air from penetrating to the Inland Empire, so it experiences much warmer summers than the coast, with average summer highs in the high 90s or low 100s.

Both the coast and the Inland Empire get most of their precipitation as rain during the winter months when grey drizzly storms come from the Pacific Ocean. Summers are the classic California blue skies without a cloud in sight for months on end.

Mojave

It’s fucking hot.

But there’s a lot of variation seasonally and geographically. Winters can be surprisingly chilly, especially at night. Winter lows can get near or slightly below freezing and highs around 50 or 60 degrees during the day. Summers are like a furnace. Even with the low humidity creating an extreme day/night temperature differential, the massive temperature drop means that the summer nights are a marginally tolerable 90 degrees, while the daytime is 110 to 120 degrees. The hot summer usually lasts from mid-May to mid-September, with the temperatures rising in a very short amount of time out of a mild spring and then dropping very quickly into a mild autumn.

The eastern Mojave gets both occasional giant thunderstorms from off the Gulf of Mexico with massive downpours of rain and high risk of flash floods during the summer monsoon season, and also some sprinkles of rains from the Pacific Ocean in the winter. But even with two sources of precipitation, the annual rainfall is only about 4 inches. The western Mojave is even drier. Monsoon season also sometimes brings high winds and haboobs. (Having 120 degree air blasted at you at 60mph is an Experience.) Once a summer thunderstorm starts, the evaporative cooling of the rain can drop the temperature from furnace-y to 80 degrees within minutes.

Elevation also makes a big difference in Mojave climate. There’s a number of mountain ranges in the Mojave, and the mountain peaks are called “sky islands” with pine forests and cool dry temperatures and snowy winters.

The Forest

The forest has a relatively mild climate. Only in higher elevations does it snow during the winter, but other than that it sprinkles mild rain. Acting much like a temperate rainforest, the rain persists through spring to the beginning of summer and returns during the fall. There are usually summer fires in the hotter, dryer weather, the trees using this chance to germinate their seeds.

The fires are nothing like the tragedies that used to happen. The nano-machines often control them so that they won't envelope and kill off huge regions of the forest. The machines will even release a strobe of color across the landscape, warning that the fires have begun, and the animals of the region have learned to move themselves and young long before the fires reach them.

The only time that weather becomes deadly are floods during particularly heavy rains, or when the nano-machines have decided that a settlement's human interference has become too great and they will allow existing fires to take their toll. While they won't start it themselves, they'll do nothing to protect a place that's been excessively damaging to the environment.

Concepts