This was originally published here. Please visit the site if you like this post or wish to comment on it. Pulled from Book of the Imagination FloodlandsFor most of the Earth's history, the poles have been free of ice...
The last time there was a major glaciation cycle, fish had not yet crawled gasping onto the land...
The year is 2143, and the oceans, the last great wilderness, have reclaimed their own.
Floodlands is an exciting Codex Imaginata postmodern setting in the twenty second century, and could be summed up as a merging of cyberpunk and pirate settings, with Ghost in the Shell, an undersea Star Wars, Fringe and The X-Files with noir Bladerunner, and Firefly. Please note this is not meant to be a post apocalyptic campaign, civilisation still exists and children still play in the streets.The Rademacher Doctrine:By the middle of the 21st century, the world was more peaceful and prosperous than it had ever been before. Having struggled out of the second Great Depression of the 2010s, developing nations like India, the Philippines, and Nigeria were quickly catching up to developed western countries in lifestyle and technology. Mass popular movements against corruption and dictatorships in these countries allowed for rapid education, infrastructure and manufacturing improvements to be put in place, helped by the debt forgiveness deal brokered by UN Secretary-General Michael Rademacher in 2031, along with binding restraints being put on banks and other financial institutions.
The Rademacher doctrine, as it was known, was a roadmap to control surging population growth in developing countries by improving their standard of living, as it had been observed in developed countries that population growth was flat or even in decline. Other benefits included removing radicalism through better education and opportunities, and creating new markets for their neighbours to grow economically. This step by step process was applied around the world, and the results were immediately apparent.
Of course to achieve this higher standard of living, more resources were needed; energy, mineral, and industrial. Deserts were covered with solar concentrators, coasts studded with offshore wind turbines, nuclear power plants were built in inaccessable areas. The use of fossil fuels was reduced as much as possible, and the widespread use of electric vehicles using new supercapacitors became commonplace.
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| Nobel Peace Prize winner Michael Rademacher making the infamous "we are one people" speech |
Oceanic mining and harvesting enjoyed a boom in investment, although there were many difficulties to gathering resources from the hostile environment of the ocean. These years saw the rise of the first honeycomb modular offshore platforms, first created by General Horizon Composites, which proved to be hugely successful, allowing mining and research groups to establish semi permanent ocean bases.
They were most enthusiastically adopted by libertarian, far left communist, unorthodox religious, and other disparate social groups along with tax haven corporations however, and proclaimed free cities, although this was never legally confirmed and they remained under the jurisdiction of their original countries. Citizen shareholder groups formed the core of these new settlements, the first permanent ocean going centres.
After these were established, free floating submerged, anchored, and embedded continental shelf ocean bases were experimented with and built, clustered around active or extinct hydrothermal vents, polymetallic nodules, and sulphide deposits, some as corporate facilities, others as national efforts, and yet others as co-operative constructions by various free thinkers.
One of the steps of the Rademacher doctrine was to allow developing countries to use older and less regulated industries to bootstrap their economies, something which raised wide protests among environmental groups, as the temperature of the world began to climb, and C02 levels rose. These warnings fell on deaf ears however, while subsistence farmers and poor slum dwellers joined burgeoning middle classes around the world. It was assumed that there was plenty of time to scale back the polluting industries after these countries had gained a better living standard, and in fact that was predicted by almost every climate model of the time.
Still, the world muddled along, quickly gaining a greater quality of life and new markets for all of its inhabitants. Technology advanced rapidly in many areas, such as robotics, information technology, materials, space flight, the foundations were laid for the creation of a space launch tower - an 11km high maglev rail which promised to reduce launch costs to a sliver of their former amount, opening space for all of mankind, education advanced by leaps and bounds, orbital communication networks brought inexpensive or free massive network communication to anyone with a data terminal, the advances were too many to count.
But nowhere did technology accelerate so much as in the field of genetic research, which brought the promise of unlocking the keys to life itself.
BioGenetics  |
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In what was increasingly looking like a golden age, this brought the promise of eternal life and good health, as well as myriad other advancements. The iconic image of the genboom was the fire orchid, engineered by Lei-Wen Genamics to have jewelled light sparkling from their translucent petals, an image which caught the public imagination, and fired tremendous growth in the area.
Investment in the genetics market grew to huge levels, with special investment vehicles being created for the purpose of taking advantage of the near-daily new announced advances in the technology, throughout the 2060s, many of which came from suboceanic research facilities. Household investment grew immensely as people put aside pension plans specifically to buy these promised enhancements, offering longer and healthier lives undreamed of by earlier generations. This boom brought a burst of economic growth undreamed of, since it now involved most of the world's countries, with financial instruments spiralling upwards to ever increasing heights of profitability.
The biogen bubble of the 2060s, the quest for immortality and youth, also brought many other enhancements, such as retroviral cellular modifications to help oceangoers survive deep water and pressure, better foodstuffs to keep the 12 billion strong population of the planet well fed and nourished, hydroponic farms to maximise the use of space, sifters and molluscs altered to filter large amounts of seawater for microscopic amounts of precious materials, and much more.
Unfortunately, for all the real leaps made during this time, many of the promises turned out to need at least decades more research, or were too difficult to put into mass market production, if they were even achievable at all. By 2073, the writing on the wall had become clear, and the biogen bubble collapsed, an event blamed by many on the personal vendetta one financial advisor to the largest investment group held against the CEO, dragging many financial systems down with it. Hundreds of millions of people lost their life savings. While the continental nations went through a tremendous restructuring which was to last for the better part of twenty years, the oceanic settlements grew and prospered.
In the midst of the economic collapse and the downfall of many major companies and not a few governments, it is worth mentioning that while developing new mining survey methods to detect trace elements and voids in ocean floor sediment and rock layers, a surprising discovery was turned up, helped by a timely undersea earthquake: that all along the continental shelves of several countries, there were the well preserved ruins of civilisations from before the last ice age, some of them surprisingly advanced!
Deep Sea DiscoveriesAt the time the oceans had withdrawn to the edge of the continental shelves, leaving large areas exposed, and settlers had come and built what increasingly appeared to be major cultures in these areas during the last cold period. At least five waves of civilisation have been recorded in many areas, and while archaeologists are still piecing together all the parts of the vast puzzle, artifacts and documents from these cultures can fetch staggering prices on markets both legitimate and illicit.
As shocking as this discovery was, it wasn't enough to turn around the third great depression, but nonetheless corporate oceanic outposts became settlements, as more and more people went to sea to escape the crushing joblessness on the continents.
It was at this time that the first Intra Ocean Police Agency, the IOPA, were formed, to help regulate claim jumping, thefts from mines, narcotics operations, smuggling, debt reclamation, and coordinate rescue operations in the case of disasters. Their flagship, the subcruiser Icarus, became the most well known ship in the ocean.
Tipping PointTo this day scientists are unsure what caused the tipping point to be reached, perhaps it was deep sea mining, perhaps the depression had caused developing countries to hold on to dirty manufacturing methods far longer than they should have, but one thing is sure; at some point during 2093, known as the year without winter, ships started to mysteriously vanish, the oceans in places started to bubble, and in the increasingly muddy Russian permafrost, methane started to hiss to the surface.
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| A methane clathrate frozen to the ocean floor |
As huge amounts of methane trapped on the ocean floor escaped, liberated by slightly higher temperatures, a chain reaction began, causing the temperature of the world to rise significantly and rapidly. Methane, while relatively short lived, is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Within a few months of scientists becoming aware of what was happening, the icecaps began to melt at a catastrophic rate. The weather went completely off the chart, with gigantic storms and hurricanes sweeping across Europe and the US for months at a time; huge waves tore at coastlines like hungry dogs, as the ocean began to rise in earnest.
When the Amazon basin flooded in 2101, drowning the tropical rainforests there, the "lungs of the world" were choked off, making the chain of events irreversible.
By 2108, the temperature at the poles averaged a balmy eighteen degrees celsius.
It was a time of horror and heroism, as shown by the remarkable documentaries and poetry of the era. Over five billion people had to be rapidly moved, most urban centres abandoned, since they were clustered along coastlines around the world, almost all of the world's industrial and manufacturing capacity wiped out along with infrastructure and indeed entire countries. And yet for all it's suddenness, this was not an overnight flooding, the rises in sea level stretched over a period of fifteen years. Different governments responded in different ways, some sought to evacuate their citizens to higher ground, others tried to fight back and hold off the rising tide. Paris today sits mostly below sea level, surrounded by hundred meter high translucent plascrete bulwarks, in defiance of the power of the waves.
Most people were pushed back into refugee camps and temporary settlements which quickly became semi permanent, rural areas and higher ground became overwhelmed with people they were entirely incapable of supporting, the enormous press of humanity. Emergency aid flooded in from the few places which were relatively untouched as well as from the oceanic settlements, which had their own problems at the time. The migration of tropical diseases to the northern hemisphere made the problems a lot worse, and famine was widespread among heretofore affluent people.
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| A map of global coastlines by 2108 |
Resources which were already stretched tightly snapped completely, civil authorities even with the help of military engineers, were unable to provide even a fraction of the needed temporary shelter in the wild weather conditions; it is estimated that over four hundred million people globally died of exposure in the first year alone, with the same again of starvation.
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| A section of Northern Europe in 2018 |
There are many different accounts of the terror, lawlessness and death of the year without winter, civil insurrections, riots and minor wars, but for the purposes of this narrative, we will focus on the major global events.
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| The east coast and midwest of the Continental United States and Canada in 2108 |
The First Conventional Conflict: 2102-2114Although the Chinese government had built vacant cities to house its population in the event of global flooding, an action which had mystified other world leaders for decades, they hadn't built enough of them or anticipated the level of sea rises, and so were caught in as bad a position as the rest of the world, with a billion people trying to move inland all at once. it was anarchy and mayhem. Europe and the US did no better, with major parts of northern Europe and the UK being wiped out completely, while the US lost most of its densely populated east coast.
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| European coastlines by 2108 |
With some of the most densely populated countries also being some of the most advanced, it was only a matter of time before larger scale conflicts arose. The five major arenas of warfare were the Russian-Chinese front, although China was experiencing war all along its borders, the European-North African Front, the Pacific-Australian theatre, the South American continental conflict which also saw large naval engagements in the Carribbean, and the Middle Eastern war.
None of these conflicts escalated into full blown nuclear exchanges, and almost all were caused by neighbouring countries being unable to even slightly accommodate the vast sea of humantiy that was pouring across their borders - in retaliation, those countries most affected used, or tried to use, their military force to establish beachheads and secure resources for their own people. It was the darkest hour for the high hopes and optimism which had previously characterised global relations.
These wars were the first time that plasma weapons were used in sea, a new technology that travelled through the water with the ease of a bullet through the air and caused devastating damage upon impact. Gigantic flying wing aircraft carriers soared majestically across the blackened skies, equipped with drone forces and fighter bombers to overwhelm ground based opposition.
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| Supercavitating torpodoes are propelled at extremely high speeds underwater in a blanket of compressed air, seen here being launched from a Russian Skorpomat siltwalker |
The Africa Sanction: 2116Two years after the end of the Conventional Conflict, and eight years after the last of the polar ice caps vanished, the North African and Saharan nations who had successfully turned back European military advances attempted to increase the prices of their rich desert solar energy supplies to a ruined Europe still losing tens of millions every year in its sprawling refugee camps to starvation and disease.
In retaliation, European leaders launched a second offensive on the African continent, this time using battlefield nuclear weapons, and secured large areas, which they promptly began transferring refugees to. In response those global powers who still had the capability sent supporting forces to African nations, although they did not escalate the use of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the oceanic city states had been absorbing as many new citizens as they could, and used this opportunity to free themselves of the last remnants of continental power, legally declaring themselves independent polities in a loose alliance across several different areas. While they unquestionably did everything they could to help the suffering on the surface, ultimately there was not a lot anyone could have done. Nonetheless their power and wealth started to grow as rapidly as their populations, culminating in their expeditionary force to the African theatre which successfully curtailed European expansion there in a display of their full military capabilities.
National Appropriations Accord: 2118With populations still falling rapidly and unstable conditions continuing, many of the larger governments with an eye on the largely untouched oceanic industries decided to take the step of re-exerting control while they could still field an appreciable force. This intention was declared and legalised in the National Appropriations Accord, which divided up the oceans fully between national governments and authorised the use of force to implement their authority.
The Genwars: 2120-2126The Genwars, so named because they first saw the widespread use of genetically modified organisms as weapons, were fought on several fronts. A genetic arms race developed, which the oceanic polities were far better equipped to capitalise on. Information technology warfare reached new heights, with intelligence groups taking over and losing satellite networks sometimes daily, and running enormous encryption/decryption arrays to decipher intercepted messages. It was fought on the propaganda front, whereby continental leaders tried to demonise the oceanic states as much as possible in order to drum up public support. And of course, it was fought physically, with weapons and blood.
Each side had differing objectives. The continentals had to strike hard and fast in order to seize key oceanic assets before their own wavering military forces ran too short to do the job and effectively maintain home security. Having lost most of their heavy industrial production capability, and weakened by the last decade of war, they nonetheless still had significant maritime forces. While they should have had an overwhelming superiority in terms of troop numbers, they were only somewhat above parity.
The oceanic groups had no illusions about the situation their enemies were in. They knew however that to hand over control of their facilities to continental powers would mean the end of their way of life and probably their existence as urban centres, since the settlements would be stripped out and manned with purely production crews to maximise the benefit. They knew that striking civilian targets was futile, since the civilian population, weakened as it was, presented no threat. Although heavily outgunned in terms of available fleet power, they had several key technological advantages that might enable them to hold off the assault until the continentals finally ran out of steam.
They therefore decided on a strategy of destroying military supply lines and material, and using highly targeted strikes to destroy what military production capacity still remained in the hands of the continentals, along with precision assaults to remove key leaders, while spreading counterpropaganda along the information networks.
The Genwars are notable in that they saw some of the greatest technological advances in a single conflict in recorded history. Some of the developments fielded by one side or the other included biosubs, submarines which were biological in part or in whole, doppleganger genbots which could temporarily replace enemy leaders, the first use of Deadfall kinetic orbital missiles, mass produced independent droids to fight automatically, negative energy cryobombs which would freeze an area around a target into ice instantly, the widespread use of force grown cybernetically and genetically enhanced sea creatures as soldiers (including rumoured human hybrids), radiation eating fungi, aerosea fighters which could leap from beneath the sea to the air, widepsread use of supercavitating torpedoes and indeed entire submarines, heavier than air fighter-sub equipped zeppelins in a war capacity, urban hunter seeker missiles which drill through doors and soft walls until they find human targets, giant submersible sub carriers, and the enormous enhancement of maritime stealth capabilities both for ships and submarines and for fixed emplacements.
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| A gigantic cybersquid carves the cargo pods off a tramp hauler |
The intial conflict was aimed at the floating city states, with massive airstrikes and marine attacks, supported by ship borne incursions. Aware that they would probably be the first targets, the floating states had support from the other nations, and the continentals suffered far higher casualties than they had expected. After failing to take two of their three first targets, they opted to use limited nuclear airburst strikes to "shake up" enemy installations. To their surprise, directed energy weapons knocked the ICBM MIRVs out of the air before they could be usefully deployed. This action effectively brought an end to the nuclear age.
It is beyond dispute that the decisive weapons of the war were genetically modified sea creatures, which combined stealth with numbers with cybernetic weaponry to give a killing advantage to the oceanic states. What followed was a long drawn out conflict on, above and beneath the sea, a war of attrition and scorched earth retreats, surprise attacks and warfare beneath the waves, which led ultimately to the defeat of the exhausted continental forces and a peace being signed, which confirmed the oceanic states' right to self determination and governance, as well as numerous other concessions.
The Antarctica Incident: 2132Over the preceding thirty years, a generation had grown up knowing exactly how much damage a disregard for the environment could do, and spurred on by propaganda and radicalists, hardened by decades of warfare that had helped nobody, some of these formed new terrorist groups with the disbanding of military forces at the end of the genwars. One area where conflict still continued was over the previously sacrosanct and pristine Antarctic, now free of ice and apparently up for grabs. With several militaries seeking to seize the precious untouched landmass, the outrage of these eco groups came to a head.
These new eco terrorist groups, veterans of the genwars and their sympathisers, developed genetic bioweapons to seed the environment of the newly tropical Antarctic. They released extremely hostile stealth genomes and mutagens into this new biosphere, turning it into a toxic jungle, dripping with sulphuric fumes and highly contagious diseases borne by swarming insects, as well as rapidly developing larger creatures. A new tropical paradise with mazelike fjords and glacial features, Antarctica is now for the most part a no-mans land, except for a few islands, trading posts, or specially prepared teams.
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| The Antarctic free of ice, note the landmass increased in height without the weight of the ice on top of it |
It has become therefore a sea and air pirate haven, with heavy cloud cover, home to the so-called free nations as well as anarchist and terrorist bases.
So successful was this daring attack that it has since become the standard for ecoterrorist groups, whose main philosophy is espoused to be "to allow nature the capacity to strike back at man on an equal footing", or the Equality Manifesto. Secretive and often relocated genetic laboratories create new creatures every once in a while, releasing them either into the Antarctic or into the low lying warm marshlands that now cover much of the world. Some even whisper that they work with military authorities to produce new weapons for a second genwar.
A global manhunt for the terrorists responsible wiped out most of these groups, but they have a resurgence every few years, with new members and new resources. The iconic figure of the eco movement is Derk Voermans, leader of the pseudoreligious paramilitary ecoterrorist "Group E" organisation, who came out of the Northern Sector 12 camp after his home country, the Netherlands, vanished forever beneath the waves. He remains at large and is the global most wanted, with bounties of two hundred million out for his arrest.
The World TodayWith national governments quite dependent on the now heavily armed loose alliance of oceanic city states, much of their influence is confined to smaller economic zones off the coast, so the oceans are largely wild frontiers, especially with the proliferation of very effective stealth technology. Outside normal territories, the oceans are completely uncontrollable, the power you have reaches exactly as far as you can see or hear.
The world is coming back into balance, the refugee slums are being removed, as new cities spring up along the coasts. A feeling of optimism is returning to the battered nations of the world as they adjust themselves to the new realities.
It's a world of stunning contrasts, the rich and the poor, the enhanced and the norms, recovering from a crippling natural disaster and many man made ones, with mad prophets and opportunity for those will the will to seize it, as new ideas, new groups, and new nations emerge and are forged from the past.
Players in this game are usually submariners, either freelance or working for one organisation (legitimate or not) or another, and fill roles as diverse as tomb raiders, explorers, scouts, pirates, hunters, smugglers, armed merchants, mercenaries in various warzones, bounty hunters or eco terrorists.
Alternatively this can be played as a detective or crime game, an espionage game, or a post modern paranormal game, even a horror game. as the secrets and rumours uncovered and buried in the wars filter to the surface of the datanets. A cyberpunk game or military game are also perfect fits for this milieu.
More details on the technology, geography, specific adventures and plot hooks and more will be revealed on full release of the Floodlands campaign.
Please note that all artwork is (c) 2011 and may not be shared or used without express written consent. Attribution for Creative Commons Licensing must come in the form of a link to the Codex Imaginata website or a clear indication of the Codex Imaginata name if not in an electronic format.
