Crafting Future From Ruins: A Writer's Guide to Designing Post-Apocalyptic Technology

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Crafting post-apocalyptic tech involves blending creativity and realism. This is a guide to help you invent tech for your post-apocalyptic world:

Tinker, Tailor, Writer, Spy: Start with modern tech. Take it apart (conceptually or literally if you're feeling adventurous). Using the basics, think of how your character might put it back together with limited tools and resources.

Master the Fundamentals: Understand the basic principles underlying the tech you're working with. Physics, chemistry, and biology can be your best friends. This understanding can guide your character's resourceful innovations.

Embrace the Scrapyard: The world around you has potential tech components. Appliances, vehicles, infrastructure - how could these be deconstructed and repurposed? Your characters will need to use what's at hand.

Cherishing Old Wisdom: Pre-apocalypse books and manuals are the new internet. A character with access to this knowledge could become a vital asset in tech-building.

Indigo Everly

My post-apocalyptic Lesbian Cowgirl Mailman choose-your-own adventure has just updated! Read it here, for free on my Patreon! This is only the third installment of PART TWO, so it's still a great time to hop on board!! I just made a summary of the first part, here, which tells you basically everything you need to know about Lou, her unrequited(?) love, and the ill-advised journey she is beginning as of this update.

In the previous update, we found out (kind of) what the object of Lou's affection wrote to her in that heavily, heavily perfumed letter. In this update, she has to deal with what she learned. Her traveling companion/special delivery, Holliday, is being... quite nice? At least, comparatively? They have a bit of "And There Was Only One Bed" going on, in that they're sharing a tent made for one. That's fun, right? Sleepover!!

Excerpt under the cut!

“I’m sorry to have been the bearer of such bad news, Lou, truly I am,” she said. She stroked the back of Lou’s hung head. Lou was surprised to find she found the gesture comforting, not condescending or overly familiar.

“It’s not all bad,” Lou said, her head still resting face-down on her knees. Her voice sounded pinched and nasal to her own ears and her throat felt almost too tight to speak. The knees of her jeans were thoroughly soaked through with tears. “She said she loves me.”

“Oh,” Holliday said, her brows knitting together. She held her other hand to her chest. “Oh, you poor thing.”

“She said. Right? That she loves me back?” Lou said. “She did say.”

“Oh, honey,” Holliday said. She cupped Lou’s chin and tilted her face up, searching her face for something, but Lou didn’t know what. Her hand was not as soft as Lou had expected it to be since everything else about her was so refined. “Bless your heart.”

Something about having to meet her eye made the tears start back up with renewed vigor. It hurt. It hurt bad. She wanted to say that it wasn’t fair, but that wasn’t how these things worked and frankly, Venus was right. That only made it hurt more. She couldn’t even gnash her teeth and wail against the injustice of it all. Venus was right, she was never around. She was always away. She was unpredictable and unreliable. She’d been so happy to be a rolling stone, gathering no moss for so long and now it was biting her in the ass. Turned out, girls liked when you were a little mossy.

me in treasure reef: this is soo awesome i love going underwater :) wait…

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT

Straya mate

Strands by Jedd Chevrier

Kenshall, ominously: heh I think it’s time you join the family…

Emerich: wait we’re marrying him too??

Montrose: ahm I think we need to have ourselves a little confab *group huddle*

Kenshall, just trying to betray them: -_-

Montrose: ah the ballots have been tallied up and you are not joining the polycule. Perhaps run for election next year, I think you have a good shot.

Emerich: but he said we’re joining the family? Wait, are we being adopted?

Beef: no it’s the other way around. Son, we’re very concerned about how much you’re open to murder. Is there something wrong? Are you having problems at school?

Kenshall: hey how about you all get in this not suspicious flying craft…

Still thinking about what it all means. but i feel fucking crazy. i just feel like i’m accessing layers of peebles brainrot previously unseen on this earth.

can i say something

Simon Petrikov has a subtle boston accent

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got fallout au daniil in my mind so much ive started a playerthrough with him

Meet Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky, a Follower and a doctor, part-time courier on the side (to fund his semi-illegal and definitely immoral experiments). 

this face took me forever, just the hairstyle was actually killing me, fnv try not to have the ugliest hair possible (failed). But this hair perfectly encapsulates his patho classic style.

my bad for making his luck two because two steps out of goodsprings my game crashed

I didn’t take a sc of his skills but his tagged skills are science, medicine, and guns. When the gay trait becomes avaliable that is the first one I’m picking 

Adventure: The Doomsday Book

“If you don’t like how it’s done, do it yourself” is very bad advice for someone with a god complex

Setup: In life, the mage Varner of Boltzford was fascinated with the complexity of the world, the seemingly infinite inter-connectivity of all things in a web so complex that one mortal mind could never understand all of it. In death fascination transformed into obsession, as Varner was driven to extend his existence to perfect what he saw as the art of the gods: Genesis, the act of bringing life out of nothingness.

Decades of experiments with astral constructs and transmutation eventually led Varner into the a philosophical and theological haze of “ontology” and “ideal forms”, along with a lot of other prattle that allowed him to convince himself that the things he could create things so beautiful they could redefine beauty, so perfect they could improve on perfection, and so real that they made other things less real by comparison.

He created the Renascent Tome, an artifact that ate up the matter of the existent world to produce things that adhred to Varner’s vision of perfection, small things at first that were mere pretty trinkets, through which he learned that the more he wanted form his creation the more he had to feed it

It was shortly after the lich turned an entire town and its surrounding valley into dust that Varner fell victim to the bane of so many promising omnicidal visionaries: meddling adventurers. The heroes did what heroes did best and though they made a proper mess out of the perfectionist’s plans they were unable to keep hold of his Tome, which slipped through their grasp to cause problems in the wider world to this day, diminished in power but no less a threat.

Hooks: 

Varner went through a number of research facilities/evil lairs in his time before he was felled by heroes, and any one of them could be a resting place for his tome. Such lairs are often dumping grounds for the lich’s escaped or failed experiments: creatures and constructs so beautiful they sear or corrode things around them, eerily stagnant wilderness, the soulless progeny of attempted “master races”.  Such oddities would draw all sorts of adventurers, or at least the collectors and conservationists looking to study these anomalies.

A foolish and famehungry apprentice found the Renascent Tome at his local book fair being sold  ( at a discount no less) by an unwitting salvager. After discovering its ability to transmute things into idealized forms, he began using the book to mend broken objects and “heal” local livestock ( no matter the fact that things the book abzorbs are effectively disintegrated with a new thing made in their place). Tales of his wondrous talents reached the ear of the ailing local countess, who requested the apprentice bathe her in the books healing light and restore her to the glory she once possessed.  Now her lands are ruled by a nightmarish “perfected” tyrant, and patrolled by her inhumanly “idealized” soldiers. The thing that took the countess’s place brings the captive apprentice out from his cell every week or so to illuminate her increasingly crystalline castle, each interaction getting crueler and more alien.

Cultists of an outergod dedicated to ego destroying perfection have come to see Varner’s work as a holy relic of their faith, allowing them to perform miracles that they could have never dreamed of otherwise. They seek it always, putting a target on the party’s back should they come into possession of the Renascent Tome. When pushed to extremes, these same cultists will unleash the relic’s power without any heed for who or what it consumes, gleefully sacrificing themselves to become the foundation of the world it will create.

Item stats: The Renascent Tome

artifact

Dormant: while dormant the tome serves as a +1 arcane spellcasting focus.

A creature attuned to the Renascent tome gains the 2nd level wizard school feature: Minor Conjuration, save that the items created always have a +1 magical bonus to any rolls they were intended to make. Conjuration wizards treat both the focus and the items conjured as if they were a +2 bonus instead.

When this feature is activated, the book’s pages glow and begin siphoning in dust and small unattended objects from its surroundings. The effect is otherwise harmless.

Awakened: When awakened, the Renascent tome gains 10 charges, which may be used to cast the following spells: Discorperating light (1 charge as tasha’s caustic brew, but dealing radiant damage) Conjure Barrage ( 3 charges) or Fabricate (4 charges). Items created by the fabricate spell are of exquisite quality and retain the +1 magical bonus from the minor conjuration feature.  The tome regains 1d6+4 charges at dawn. When the last charge is spent, roll a d20, on a 1 the tome consumes itself in a blast of siphoning radiance. All creatures in a 20ft radius must make a save vs the bearer’s spell save dc ( or int+proff if they are not a caster) or suffer the effects of a successful gravity sinkhole spell

Exalted: The bonus the focus provides grows to +3 and the tome gains 10 extra charges.   The spells that it can cast now include disintegrate ( 6 charges), mirage arcane ( 7 charges) and blade of disaster (9 charges). Spells can still be cast if the item lacks the prerequisite charges, but this increases the number rolled on the no charge roll to go up by 1 per missing charge. 

Curse: Once exalted, Each spell cast from the book now also requires an extra 1d4 charges. If the no charge roll occurs, in addition to triggering a gravity sinkhole, the Tome begins to act as a sphere of annihilation from that moment onwards. 

Further Adventures:

Removing the curse from the Renascent Tome requires access to Varner’s research notes, requiring the party to either seek out a source of great knowledge of attempt to seek the imprisoned lich himself.

Varner has had a lot of time to think after he was imprisoned, and has concluded that the current material world is too corrupt and messy for any of his perfect creations to truly take root. Though his reemergence into the land of the living will bring with it a tide of new horrific experiments and dangerous objects released upon the world, his ultimate goal is to find a nice enough place to use as raw material for the eden he’s going to build. Given that he’s spent long enough as a lich that many of his own feelings have begun to atrophy, he’ll reach out to those closest to him ( like the meddling adventuring party that woke him up) to see what they think of as ideal. Say, the starting town of the campaign or wherever the heroes have decided to make their home.

Should the Renascent tome fulfill its purpose it’s safe to say that the party will have very little chance of undoing what its done, muchless surviving the process should they have been caught within its mile wide blast radius. However, with the slightest bit of divine intervention from whatever spirits are watching over their adventures, the party might just be able to turn that slim chance into a fighting one. They find themselves trapped inside the grotesque Perfection of Varner’s world, a grotesque parody of a place familiar to them with all the personality and imperfection scrubbed away.  At its center is the Tome, its own less than perfect existence protected by an enchantment Varner made to protect his magnum opus from devouring itself in an act of sentimental self sabotage. The perfect world is contained inside the book while the book is contained within the world, this paradox, if inverted, might allow the party to reverse the flow of the Tome’s reality devouring magic, deconstructing the demiplane it’s constructed and reassembling the world that was in mostly the right order. All that’s required is to brave the maze of hyper-real nostalga and face off against a perfected Varner, alive again after a near century of lichdom, ignorant of any of his previous failings, but master of his domain.

My ✨ post-apocalyptic Lesbian Cowgirl Mailman choose-your-own adventure✨ has just updated! Read it here for free on my Patreon and vote in the poll! There is a summary of the first part, here, the second part, here, and the third part, here. They have everything you need to know about Lou, her requited-but-complicated love, the religious assassin who just beat the tar out of her, the worst person she's ever met, and the ill-advised journey she is on! There is also now a discord where Pony Express readers from all across god's green internet can gather, here!

Read it for free on my patreon and vote on what happens next! Excerpt below the cut.

She wasn’t so soothed and medicated that she didn’t thrash in panic when someone woke her by covering her eyes with one hand and gripping her injured arm firmly above the elbow with the other.

“Easy, dude, it’s just me,” Artie said.

“What—“

 “I have a surprise for you,” she said. 

She released Lou’s arm and, still covering her eyes, helped her to her feet. The hand over Lou’s eyes smelled strongly of citrus. Lou had no concept of where she was as Artie led her along. She hadn’t been particularly present as they were making camp and the white noise of the river, the weed, and her lingering sleep disoriented her worse. She reached out and gripped Artie’s belt and the top of her jeans at her hip for stability.

“I made you dinner,” Artie said. “For your birthday. A birthday dinner. Belated. A belated birthday dinner. It’s a regular dinner, too, but, if we just think about it like a birthday dinner, it can be a birthday dinner— a little party. You don’t have to be too festive, I know you’re tired—“

“For gods’ sake, just let her see already!” Holliday interrupted, pushing Artie’s hand away from Lou’s face. 

“Hey, come on, man,” Artie said, disappointed. 

Days without Chaos latching onto minor video game characters and destroying their existing lore to headcanon them as members of my favourite VB faction in my own lorebent timeline: 0

“Pete your feet are too big!” I love these comic’s, absolutely a treasure from my early childhood.

Strands by Jedd Chevrier