D100 games, like Rubble and Ruin are either heavily
built into their world, or they offer nearly infinite customization to any
world. The latter are frequently massive tomes (I’m looking at you Mythras
and Basic Roleplaying), Rubble and Ruin was always intended to be
one of the first kind. I have a very specific world in mind that I would like
the players and GM to consider.
The book is a free download from drivethru.
The Future History. The book starts with the big picture
and zooms in towards the Chicago of 2100 AD, twenty years after the end of the
Global Wars. From now until 2065 America existed in an ever-more chaotic state.
Moneyed oligarchs are increasing their power, hoping to become feudal lords
while many of the rank-and-file work to oppose this. During this time,
biomedical research continues at its current pace. But as the corporations
become less regulated and crazy oligarchs use their fortunes to twist life to
conform to their biases and desires, more and more creatures are created. Rats
and dogs are uplifted. Mice are engineered to perfectly match humans. Existing
lines of humans are modified to create transhumans. And other technologies
continue to advance. Material science allows the creation of giant ship-sized tanks.
Nanotechnology allows the creation of cybernetics and self-aware robots are
built.
Then things go bad. For fifteen years the Global wars raged
and the human population collapses.
The game is set twenty years after the end of the wars. Prospectors
are heading back into the rubble of the old cities, looking for salvageable
technology.
Is this world near future dystopian, post-apocalyptic or
solarpunk or what? It depends on where you are. Much of the former state of
Michigan is still cruising along as an agrarian democracy. Feudal lords rule
Wisconsin and many other areas while a theocrasy dominates the old Southeast. But
Chicago is a post-apocalyptic ruin, and that is where the characters are
heading. They may be from nicer places, but now they are in the rubble and
ruin.
Fictional Climate Change. The future history of the
game involves a lot of things which are hard to predict—advances in science and
technology and the effects of climate change. For the latter, I didn’t even
try. I just made up my one future climate. In Chicago there is a nine-month dry
season and three months of monsoonal rains. This climate change has killed
almost all the local vegetation, with new plants taking over; sages, hawthorns,
and bioengineered kudzu.
Although the weather is fictional, the shoreline on the
continental map does match a reasonable prediction for 2100. It has about a
50-foot rise in sea level which at the time of writing was meant to be extravagant
and to get people thinking about how our world is changing but has subsequently
become a reasonable upper prediction for the year 2100. Go figure.
Real History. Originally the 29 pages of The Chicago
Ruins was going to be an introductory chapter in the core rules. But I realized
that every player should have access to the setting information, but I didn’t
want to force everyone at the table to buy a copy of the book, so I made
Chicago Ruins. The idea is that every player can have a copy, they can print it
out or put it in on their preferred electronic device and refer to it as
needed.
Since its release in 2021 the free book has been downloaded
over 1,200 times and about another 100 copies of the print-on-demand book have
been sold (as of Jan. 2025). In writing the book, for print-on-demand it needed
to be a minimum number of pages, so at the last minute I added 16 pages of tables
and information that I thought might be useful for players either in character
generation or at the table. Early on,
customers asked for some additional files, and being a total noob at self-publishing,
I created a second download of Support Files. It has north of 400 downloads.
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