Second Dawn:Cataclysm
From EryriWiki
This is a reference document for the LARP The Second Dawn.
In the year 2098, anyone could see that the world was teetering, yet few expected the Cataclysm to arrive as suddenly it did. Three great powers stood astride the world; the United States, China, and the Greater Caliphate. They had at their command the greatest technologies ever known; orbital battlestations, nuclear weapons, AI coordination, the new nanotech manufacturing, and more. Colonies, government and private, spread humanity into orbit, the moon, the Lagrange points, and beyond.
The three giant powers of Earth stood in a dangerous cold war, while beneath their massed power, the fringes of society eroded away their feet. As the world’s resources ran low, the oceans rose and its population grew, the benefits of the greatest new technologies went to an ever smaller portion of the populace. Many of the disenfranchised turned to violence, low-level religious extremism and eco-terrorism permeating even the greatest cities, indistinguishable from the sad microstates of the “unaligned” world.
No one knows why exactly the war started. The first nukes drowned the atmosphere and satellites with EMPs, destroying mass communications. Theories abounded; maybe one great power decided it was time for a preemptive strike, or maybe a nuclear-armed terrorist tricked one great power into believing another had done so. The most common belief was that the military AIs decided it was inevitable and necessary- that the final decision wasn’t made by humans at all.
The war was fast and brutal, but could have been far worse. The skies flashed with the exchanges of conventional and nuclear weapons in orbit, but the ground war was limited. Major capitals and military institutions were nuked, but most cities were spared. But as the targeted governments collapsed, the organizations of Luddites and extremists, rebels and revolutionaries, took advantage of the chaos. In their great numbers, they sacked the half-ruined cities of the rich, tearing down what institutions had survived the start of the war, bringing about the start of the new Dark Ages. The Midwest was hit hard, with its many buried missile silos; Canada less so, with its relative dearth of major military sites.
The fate of the colonies out beyond Earth are unknown. But the fate of the orbital colonies and satellites was very, very clear. The war in orbit caused an ablation cascade, as the scattered orbiting fragments of each ruined satellite destroyed the next, and the next, and the next. That orbiting shrapnel remains to this day, forming the Shroud that makes the moon appear slightly hazy in the night sky.
