Summary
Post-apocalyptic campaigns inDungeons & Dragonsallow you to craft a world from the ground up without having to worry about generations of history and ideologies to gum up the works. This can mean a great deal of freedom for both you and your players and inject more humor or horror than traditional campaigns.
There are also dozens of different flavors of post-apocalypse themes, such as a nuclear winter, or the death of Mystryl in Faerûn, which caused magic to disappear for a time. However, there are similar elements to every post-apocalypse story that are necessary in order to craft memorable yet recognizable themes.
10Determine The Time Period And Level Of Technology
During an apocalypse and for many years after, the world will be frozen in time in terms of technology and architecture. After the period of destruction, the survivors are forced to use the technology of their ancestors and slowly build from there, while many forms of technology will be forever lost.
Whenthe apocalypse happens in your campaign will be very important for the tone and themes you are looking for, especially if you want a specific level of tech. This will also flavor what the retrofitted weapons and modes of transportation look like, whether it be a Mad Max-style car or armored carriage crafted from discarded scale mail.
9Civilization Is Sparse And Brutal
What makes an apocalypse truly terrifying is the centuries-long effects it has following the events, and how it forces survivors to do whatever possible to survive at all. This means a great deal of backstabbing, looting, raiding, and other forms of anarchy wherever your players go.
Whatever loose forms of civilization that form later become seedy and dangerous, even for those who can afford protection. For your players, this means there will be very few places they can consider truly safe, but it provides plenty of opportunities for consequence-free actions.
8Junk Is King
The first thing to go in an apocalypse is infrastructure, and especially large-scale operations like mining, manufacturing, and forging. What follows is that every two-bit with a wrench becomes a junkyard inventor and is forced to use the trash of those before to craft necessary tools of survival.
This can mean that scrap itself is a valuable trading tool and most “tech” that players will interact with will be repurposed. This can be a cage made from shopping carts, or a counterweight for a gate crafted from a destroyed cannon barrel, or anything that can vaguely serve another purpose other than for something that no longer exists.
This doesn’t mean that your technology has to revert to a previous age, just that it mostly uses repurposed materials.
7Craft Groups That Seek To Corrupt And Control
Without a heavily reinforced system of law and order, any groups that form some semblance of control can use the resulting power vacuum to assert it over the barren wastes. InFallout, this would be the Brotherhood of Steel, who hoard old-world technology for themselves, or The Inquisition fromA Plague Tale, who attempt to bring back the rat apocalypse under their power.
These can serve as the main antagonists for your campaign, that attempt to restrict the overwhelming freedom that post-apocalyspe life allows, but far worse than what the old-world would have permitted. Whatever form it takes, the wasteland provides you with endless creativity for their goals and methods.
6Add Resource Mechanics
In a world where resources are scarce and people must fight to survive, it is important to reinforce this via a resource mechanic. D&D already has rules for this via rations and waterskins thatgive your players exhaustionshould they go days without it.
You can scale this by simply increasing the cost of water and food wherever it is found, while making it difficult to find in the wild. This also gives plot hooks featuring basic resources much more weight when you consider that a wasteland farmer’s crops were meant to feed an entire community on the brink of starvation.
5Determine What Event Created The Apocalypse
The event that kicked off the end of the world will be one of the top priorities for crafting your campaign before you even start introducing it to your players. Whether it was a nuclear war that irradiated the Earth or a period of magical darkness where nothing grew, it will affect your world differently.
Any event that makes growing food nearly impossible can be considered an apocalyptic event, such as an ice age or locust plague.
The catalyst and setting will also determine what values the survivors share and where or how they are able to make a living, if at all. In a medieval fantasy setting using the darkness example, vampires and Underdark creatures would have made the overworld their playground and monster hunters would be praised as heroes.
4Know When To Lean Into Tropes
When crafting a campaign based on a trope, it is necessary to lean on them to allow your players to have immediate familiarity with the world and be able to craft characters without have to ask a tonne of questions first. Whenever your players meet a junkyard scientist or a black-hat, cowboy zombie, they should know what to expect.
However, this can make it hard to surprise your players if you lean on them too much, andmake your villainsseem much too familiar. Always be thinking about how you can flavor post-apocalyptic tropes to fit the lore and mechanics of your campaign and not the other way around.
3Give Your Players A Home Base
In the wastes between settlements, and even inside them, your players will be in constant danger from even the most basic NPC who has a dull knife and an empty stomach. This means it will be necessary to have relatively few, or even just one home base where they can kick up their boots.
Otherwise, your players can become frustrated at the fact that they have to constantly spend class resources just to make sure they survive any type of encounter wherever they go. In Mad Max, this would be Furiosa’s tanker, or any of the reclaimed settlements in Fallout 4.
2Be Creative With Your Dungeons
After the long period of suffering following the apocalyptic event, everything from before suddenly becomes a ruin. In D&D, this is a perfect opportunity to use certain settlements and building typesfor dungeon crawlsthat you would otherwise rarely be able to use.
This can include a city’s docks where hundreds of ships are crashed and lashed together to form a settlement of cannibals. In futuristic or modern campaigns, any grocery store with rearranged shelves can become a maze of traps crafted by its inventor, locked away in the manager’s office.
1Don’t Be Logical
One of the tropes that makes post-apocalypse media so interesting is that old world values and logic suddenly go out the window in favor of whatever happens to be accepted by the starved and crazed majority that survives. A perfect example of this is the vaults in Fallout, where the experiments create the society that vault dwellers learn to follow.
The quickest way to access this way of thinking when crafting the campaign is to toss away traditional moral values in favor of “whatever it takes to survive.” For instance, in a medieval fantasy where the world is covered in darkness, a small town might happily sacrifice one of its citizens every month to a nearby vampire lord if it means the rest can last just one more month.
