H2O-Pocalypse: Surf Punk Piracy in a World of Water
What is H2O-Pocalypse
I plan to do two kinds of H2O related content on this blog: development and "Drowned Future." This will be extra stuff not appearing in the zine, like cocktail recipes and pizza, dive bar games, dive bar name tables, and the ecology of some of the creatures. I am going to release this collection on itch.io as a separate zine for free with a print-on-demand option sometime around fulfillment.
The Big Wave
We sunk it, big time! The ice caps melted, and this rotting planet was covered in a crashing blanket of death, followed by a winter that seemed endless.
But we humans are like cockroaches. We persevered. We knew it was happening centuries before the great surf. Some of us turned to religion, some of us turned to science, and everyone turned to war. People started splicing themselves with aquatic animal DNA. We called them Meta’s – they were not allowed in the sleep tanks when the Surf hit. No one knows what happened to them. Those lucky enough to have the best sleep tanks survived. The rich and powerful built massive barge cities with towering white spires and armed Hydro-Sub patrols. They created a “High” council with many dumb rules to punish anyone who didn't think, act, or look like them, evicting anyone who didn't listen to those rules or was too poor out into the open waters. All these evictions formed the Outer Barges, full of thievery, desperation, and disease.
Eventually, the old inhabitants of Earth showed up: the Atlanteans. They were peace-loving, scientifically advanced people who had a hippie vibe. They shared new ways of creating materials, medicine, and food out of plankton and provided us with crystals that could do things similar to (or, most of the time, better than ) the tech we read about in the Before Times. These things could even do magic! They only had one stipulation, and that was to never use the crystals for creating weapons. So naturally, we did. And just like that, they all disappeared again, leaving behind some crystal tech and bad feels.
The departure of the Atlanteans pissed the High Barges off! The High Barges sealed the ports to hoard what little Atlantean tech and medicine they had left, only allowing those “worthy” to come and go.
The High Barges have all the food, medicine, and water filtration tech.
Resources are always thin in the Outer Barges. We hunt for trash to bring to the Junk Lords. These guys can make anything from scraps of the old world. When we can’t find Junk, we turn to piracy! It's fun to rip off the aristocratic scurvs of the High Barges.
Grab a ship, grab a band, and get in the pit!
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