Notes from Small Planets

by Nate Crowley

  There were more blurred shots from inside – a bank of barred cells, and a lab with its wall plastered in diagrams of bat anatomy and blown-up photos of dissections with ‘WHICH ORGAN DOES THE MAGIC?’ scrawled over them. There were more photos, but I was still entirely preoccupied with the scene from inside the power plant, and could not process them. Surely all this couldn’t be my fault.

  ‘You see now?’ said Deathwish, taking the photographs from me and passing them to Miller. ‘They’re already using us to power their machines. Soon, they’ll figure out portals. We’ll be done for, and they’ll make our world as drab and dirty as theirs.’

  ‘We’ve got to have this war now, or else it’ll never happen at all,’ added Miller, thumping a table top. ‘It’s the death of all Mundanes, or the Death of Magic.’

  Needless to say, I got out of that cell, and out of Mundania, as fast as my legs could carry me.

  — FROM THE TRAVEL JOURNAL OF FLOYD WATT

  1. WELCOME TO WASTELAND

  Behold, the blasted sands! Witness the mayhem! Feel the roar of the engines, the sting of the grit, and the thrill of the chase in this, the ultimate nihilist adventure destination. High Fantasy’s for scrubs: in Wasteland, the world’s already over, so you can do what you like. Fuck it, why not just punch a car in the face as soon as you get there? I did. Nobody stops you.[1]

  Why Wasteland?

  All things come to an end, and in the mangled psychogeography of the Worlds, Wasteland is the end of all things. While you can head to Wasteland directly, the most common way to get here is by accident: walk out into a desert with an electrically bleak mood, or World-hop while looking at an explosion,[2] and that’s it – welcome to the apocalypse. Or rather, the post-apocalypse – because if Wasteland is anything, it’s one giant, civilisational afterparty.

  Many tourists might baulk at the prospect of such an eschatological getaway. But for those in the know, Wasteland is considered to be one of the best-kept secrets out there. Yes, society may have collapsed, but as any of the locals will tell you (often with a wide-eyed, screaming laugh), it needn’t be the end of the world! Indeed, despite all of the radioactive gales, marauding corpses and claustrophobic bunkers, the people of Wasteland are a surprisingly vibrant, carefree bunch.

  Since death is always hovering just one minor coincidence away, the locals see no point in worrying about anything besides where the next strip of murkily sourced meat is coming from, or how much fuel is left in the murderwagons. You wouldn’t call it optimism, but it’s a kind of contentment, nonetheless. With the past obliterated and the future teetering on a knife’s edge, life in Wasteland is all about living in the moment.

  Wasteland is definitely not for novice travellers or all but the mightiest families, and it certainly rewards a robust constitution. Nevertheless, if you’re prepared to accept the many horrors of the ruined world as part of everyday life, and you’re not afraid to take some fairly extreme cultural norms on board, you’re guaranteed many lovely, lovely days, and a holiday to end all holidays.

  WHY I WOULD DIE FOR WASTELAND

  By Beetle Man, Battle Lad of the Steel Castle

  Welcome, traveller! Or as we say at the Steel Castle, Bloodfight Forever! You’re probably feeling scaredy-bad about visiting the Big Dusty – but don’t worry, brother-sister, once you’ve walked these horizons and stared into the Megaburn, you’ll be burgerfry-good in no time. I was like you once, ha ha! A seekyman I was, for a firm of rek-roo-tars. Came here backing my pack, to find myself, yeah? But I forgot my radgone tabs, didn’t I? Buggerbad! Grot! I got real sick, I did, but War Mum took me in and cleaned my redpipes right up. Gave me a new name, she did – Beetle Man – and a new job as a Battle Lad. Now I stoke the boilers on Count Truckula, War Mum’s big big car, and she takes us out on adventures all the time. We do all kinds of fungoods: sometimes we fight with the bunkerfolk, and sometimes we chase other cars, so the Wrench Ladies can eat ’em up and build new trucks for Mum. I even got a new best mate! He’s called Mugnor, and he’s a big fella with a microwave for a head. He doesn’t say much, granted, but he saved me from the ants once, and he’s got this one really cool boot. Together we’ve found a quiet, trusting love that I wouldn’t give up for the world – even if the world wasn’t already over.

  ‘Can’t Miss’ Experiences

  1 Stumble upon an ancient, half-buried monument

  Nothing says ‘post-apocalyptic’ more succinctly than a famous landmark protruding grimly from a sand dune, and Wasteland is strewn with them. Still, travellers often don’t enjoy the full Ozymandian resonance of these relics, since they aren’t familiar with the cultures that built them. Enter the entrepreneurs of the Monkey Zone, who have built copies of multiple earth landmarks in order to give tourists the full ‘damn you all to hell!’ experience. What better souvenir than a Polaroid of you on your knees, shaking your fist at the ruin of a monument from your hometown, while a gorilla in chainmail gives a thumbs-up in the foreground?[3]

  2 Disrupt the order of an oppressive society

  There are a dizzying number of survivor cultures in Wasteland, but what they all have in common is a penchant for weird and oppressive social structures, which tend to be so precarious that they can be tipped into chaos by the actions of a single outsider.[4] Indeed, in Hierarchia – the granddaddy of all ludicrously stratified dystopias – there are revolutions on at least an annual basis, giving tourists plenty of opportunities to feel the fuzzy glow that comes with toppling a tyrant.

  3 Re-enact a story you barely remember for a crowd of rag-clad yokels

  Outside all the fighting, a big part of Wasteland’s aesthetic is the veneration and constant retelling of stories from the wayback-times. As such, any traveller with tidbits of pop culture to share will get superb mileage from their rememberings. It really doesn’t matter what stories you recount – it’s not like a bunch of irradiated peasants living in a rusty old bus are going to care. With just a carrier bag full of action figures and a dim memory of watching soaps while stoned,[5] you can become a world-renowned bard.

  4 Fight to the death in a hellish gameshow environment

  Almost every settlement in Wasteland has some form of provision for ritualised combat in order to settle differences: in Hierarchia it’s the national pastime, and even in the most out of the way settlements you won’t have to look long before you find two hulks throttling each other in a pit, before an audience with tentacles for eyes and tin openers for hands. And if you want to get involved – go ahead! Just be sure to cheat by bringing an incredibly powerful gun, so you don’t die like a dog.

  DON’T MISS: MENTAL DEREK

  There’s a semi-legendary figure in the Wasteland, and he’s called Mental Derek. He’s extremely competent with a shotgun, doesn’t say much, and has what you might call a habit of getting into trouble. Derek doesn’t seek out fights as such – he just wanders around the region in his knackered old police car, seeking redemption or just something to do. Either way, when he travels through a settlement, it tends to either undergo dramatic regime change or disappear from the map altogether. For the right fee, you can travel with him. Strapped into the passenger seat of his car, you can expect truly abysmal conversation, but the most mind-blowing, white-knuckle adventure that Wasteland has to offer. Spend a month with Derek and you will see dictators overthrown, refineries blown sky high, and countless war machines sent careening off the road in explosions of bolts and nails.[6]

  Region by Region

  Geography is a bit of a tricky subject in Wasteland.[7] All the world’s civilisations are either too rubbish to produce accurate maps or have no interest in doing so, while sandstorms rearrange the landscape constantly. Settlements come and go with such alacrity that there’s little point in charting them, but there are some areas and locations permanent enough to be worth noting.

  1 The Badlands

  Covering a huge swathe of the planet, the Badlands used to be an ocean, until all the water dried up. Now it’s a vast, sun-
blasted salt flat, soaked with poisonous heavy-metal residues. Thanks to the vast tracts of flat land, this is classic territory for eccentric warlords, who enjoy launching grotesquely inefficient crusades with armadas of cars. Things are just as fun beneath the surface too, as bunkers and vaults of all sizes hold a wealth of claustrophobic nightmare societies.

  2 The Worselands

  Even grimmer than the Badlands, the Worselands occupy the remains of what was once a continent in Wasteland’s Southern Ocean, and which was a notably desolate place even before all the bombs and the madness. For the warlords of the salt flats, it’s considered a mark of prestige to be able to trade up for a fortress in the Worselands, and so its inhabitants tend to be an altogether higher class of mad bastard, with a corresponding air of weird snobbery.

  3 The Land of the Dead

  During its final days, society on Wasteland was stricken by an outbreak of zombies, which spread like wildfire across its eastern continent. As a result, this landmass is now an eerily silent wilderness, dotted with decaying cities where the dead still roam. Human survivors persist here in fortified shopping malls, where they survive off the wreckage of the old world while having bleak revelations about the empty nature of consumerism.

  4 The Monkey Zone

  Settled by superintelligent apes who revolted against humanity during the apocalypses, this region comprises a patchwork of feudal states ruled by chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans.[8] Although they have a longstanding habit of breeding captive humans for slave labour, the Apes are relatively affable, and are for the most part fairly accepting of tourists.[9] In fact, the Apes claim they would be open to trade and co-operation with their human neighbours if it wasn’t for the tragic ‘misunderstandings’ that keep kicking off wars between them.[10]

  5 The Robot War

  The Robot War is many things: it’s a conflict, a place and a way of life. Originally kicking off when a network of supercomputers became self-aware and hostile, this conflict still rages long after the rest of the world has fallen into collapse. Its combatants are the Resistance, a band of humans whose scavenged technology would easily empower them to conquer the rest of the planet if they weren’t so busy with the Robots, and the Robots, who would be able to crush the Resistance overnight if it wasn’t for a set of particularly bizarre programming quirks.[11]

  6 Hierarchia

  The huge pyramid-city of Hierarchia is seemingly the most civilised place in Wasteland – but it is a society divided. At its gilded apex sits the supreme leader, plotting ever-more Byzantine ways to oppress the masses beneath,[12] while said masses spend their time plotting equally complex schemes to depose the leader. The result is near-constant, usually teenager-led revolution. Indeed, Hierarchia can go through the whole cycle – from initial insurrection through to government overthrow and then the bleak moment when the new rulers realise they are as bad as the people they replaced – in as little as three weeks.

  2. UNDERSTANDING WASTELAND

  A Brief History

  Wasteland doesn’t really have a history. If it did, it would arguably lose its charm. Every group of maniacs has their own set of creation myths,[13] which they debate as they cluster round to roast scorpion bums over barrels of burning tar, and that’s half the fun of the place. Even so, there are some facts we know for sure:

  At some point the region possessed a technologically advanced global society of between six- and eight-billion people. Then it had … a real run of bad luck (or hubris – depends who you ask).

  It seems the region experienced pretty much every cataclysmic event that can happen to a place, all within the space of a few years. Between an asteroid impact, a nuclear war, a zombie plague, an AI uprising, an ape takeover and a runaway nanotechnology incident, the planet was hammered flatter than shit.

  Nevertheless, the apocalypses didn’t leave an empty planet. Wasteland’s population was reduced to less than a tenth of 1 per cent of what it had been – but that remnant had access to the wreckage of a global society and the vast stockpiles of resources which had sustained it. With close collaboration and careful stewarding, the survivors could have begun the painstakingly slow process of rebuilding.

  Instead, they began fighting. Barely had the bombs stopped falling when the first wrench duels were fought over dog food and the first motorcycle gangs were leathering up and hitting the road to find other motorcycle gangs to go to war with. It’s been going on ever since.

  Wasteland Today

  This culture of mandatory violence might seem crazy, given how much the survivors clearly had to benefit from cooperation. But then, cooperation just isn’t what you do after an apocalypse, is it? And besides, if any psychiatrists had survived the ends of the world,[14] they might have made quiet note of the fact that everyone was a lot less anxious and miserable than they had been when they were worrying about the end of the world. And so it goes on. Empires bloom and collapse in the desert, and occasionally some fresh horror of the old world will be unleashed – a cache of nuclear warheads will be set off by some would-be atomic Caesar, or a legion of supersoldiers will awake from cryogenic stasis and go on a rampage. By and large, however, it’s never long before life in the Wasteland returns to business as usual, offering a comforting familiarity for travellers.

  Climate and Terrain

  Wasteland’s climate is more varied than one might assume at first. Even so, pretty much all of it could be grouped under the broad heading of ‘total dogshit’. Thanks to the evaporation of the seas, the majority of the world’s surface is covered in searingly hot salt flats, broken occasionally by the yawning remnants of oceanic trenches, and scoured regularly by ferocious radioactive dust storms. It’s all drier than a nine-hour lecture on the history of paperclips – and when there is rain it’s usually corrosive enough to strip flesh from bone. Some water remains in the highlands, leading to patches of half-arsed savannah, but pools of the stuff rarely last long without being poisoned by gits in trucks with angry faces painted on them. Rumours abound that at the heart of the Wasteland, nature has reclaimed the wilderness, resulting in an oasis of green land unspoiled by human interference – but this is exactly the sort of ‘promised land’ bollocks that keeps half of Wasteland’s prophets in business, and so should be taken with a pinch of radioactive salt.[15]

  OLDTIMES TELLY

  Where better to learn about Wasteland’s history than from one of the traditional ‘oldtimes telly’ sessions in the Badlands? These theatrical extravaganzas are less about preserving facts than they are about creating huge stories full of gods and monsters. Nevertheless, they usually end with two emaciated labourers dressed as legendary corporate mascots fighting over a dog tendon. These storytelling events are often held on the eve of big clashes between warlords, as it gets everyone pumped up on national myth and mitigates the risk of anyone seeing their opponents as human. After all, it’s a lot easier to ram a harpoon through someone’s neck when you know they don’t venerate the same ancient fast-food brands as you.

  Wildlife

  After the apocalypses, the number of animal species left in Wasteland wouldn’t even have filled one of those depressing zoos where they put wigs on dogs and insist they’re lions.[16] Almost the only things to survive were vermin, domestic animals and anything with low enough self-esteem to eat rubbish.[17] Even so, Wasteland is a surprisingly good wildlife destination: thanks to the vast quantity of radiation and mutagenic chemicals that flooded the atmosphere in the death throes of the old world, these biological leftovers rapidly mutated into an expansive bestiary of slavering predators.

  Zoologists looking over field notes from Wasteland tend to sniff haughtily, proclaiming that ‘evolution doesn’t work that way’ and that substantive change takes millions of years, regardless of how many toxic chemicals you throw at the problem. These know-it-alls also query how a world of barren desert – with no plants to speak of – can support an ecosystem almost entirely comprising apex predators. But they don’t ask many questions when
they’re being chased through a ruined supermarket by a six-foot wasp with muscly arms, do they?[18]

  Anyway, here are some of the more exotic types of creature you can expect to spot during a trip to the Wastes:

  Big ol’ rats (Rattus Magnus): They say that on Wasteland you’re never more than six feet away from a rat. But then again, they also say that a grim messiah called the Burger Lord sleeps at the centre of the planet, waiting to be summoned by the construction of a sky-spanning golden arch. They say a lot of things here. Still, there are a lot of rats, and they’ve evolved into a bewildering array of different forms, from the dreaded Cheetah Rats that can run down a motorcycle from a standing start, to the Eagle Rats, squeaking majestically as they circle distant mesas.

  Miracle Dogs (Canis Mirabilis): They say that dogs are man’s best friend, but they’re barely acquaintances when compared with Miracle Dogs. Whether through mutation, pre-crisis genetic engineering, nanotech or some other euphemism for magic,[19] these canines, which resemble delightfully fat golden retrievers, have the ability to consume dust and rocks and excrete pure water. If it wasn’t for these incredible living chemical factories, most of Wasteland’s survivors would have died of thirst long ago.[20]