Notes from Small Planets

by Nate Crowley

  DON’T MISS: KANGAROO COURTS

  In many Wasteland settlements it’s common for those accused of crimes to have to defend themselves from a kangaroo with accusations tattooed on its huge, chest-caving feet. It’s a great justice system, and cracking entertainment to boot.

  Gribblers (Gribbula sp): If you’re easily freaked out by creepy-crawlies, you might want to rethink a visit to Wasteland, as all of its invertebrates have been set definitively to Hard Mode.[21] Known collectively as Gribblers – since accurate taxonomy tends to be the last thing on your mind when you’re being beaten to death by a wasp with fists[22] – they swarm in the ruins, caves and tunnels of the Wastes. And while many have stayed conventionally bug-sized, others – such as the Dire Millipede (Myriapoda Caesar), the Battlepillar (Wrigglius Khan) and, of course, the Fight Wasp (Vespa Pugilis) – have swollen to preposterous sizes.

  People

  Wasteland has many unique and colourful cultures, and it would be easy to fill an entire guidebook with descriptions of their various habits and practices. Since there are only a few pages in which to do so, here’s a quick primer on some of the more common social structures you’re likely to encounter during your trip.

  Warlord societies

  These are the most common communities in Wasteland, and tend to revolve around a single charismatic figure and their bizarre cult of personality. It’s hard to say exactly what to expect in any particular settlement, but you can bet your last tin of cat meat it will involve an imposing fortress, ramshackle vehicles crewed by maniacal warriors, and needlessly impractical slave labour. Warlord societies may have a certain degree of self-sufficiency, but where they really shine is in taking things from other people. The elaborate raids, sieges and chases involved will often cost more in resources and human life than they actually earn, but we’re talking about warlords here, not accountants, and ‘return on investment’ is not a phrase that comes up often in addresses to the troops.

  Zombies

  There are many kinds of zombies in the Land of the Dead: fast ones, slow ones, angry ones, sad ones. Nevertheless, they all have an infectious bite, and are drawn to any sign of life in dizzying numbers. Some wonder how, even with the occasional band of survivors being drawn into their ranks, the zombies can keep coming in such quantities. You’ll also likely hear campfire muttering about the implausibility of corpses still being able to walk this long after the apocalypses, or the sheer dismissal of thermodynamics inherent in the idea of a creature that can wander around for decades without food. But you know who doesn’t ask any of these questions? That’s right: it’s zombies.

  The Apes[23]

  Despite literally keeping humans in cages[24], the various species of Apes who rule the Monkey Zone have welcomed offworld tourism perhaps more openly than any other society in Wasteland. Their castles boast fairly luxurious accommodation options, which you’ll certainly enjoy – if you can sit at ease with the fact that they were built by the shaking hands of your fellow hominids, sweltering under an orangutan’s lash. It should also be pointed out that the Apes are in no way either damned or dirty, nor do they have particularly stinking paws.

  Robots

  By far the most exciting Robots in Wasteland are the skull-faced, android prosecutors of the Robot War. Equipped with nightmarishly powerful weapons, a preposterously efficient automated manufacturing base and the secret of time travel, many wonder why they haven’t yet crushed the human resistance led by the rugged general Jack Banner. It’s because the Robots have a fatal flaw: back in the chaos of the apocalypses, a stray EMP blast damaged their controlling AI, leaving it with two minor – but utterly crucial – flaws:

  (A) The Robots have a disastrously poor understanding of time travel. While they have mastered the technology involved in sending war machines back in time, they fail to recognise that the fact the present remains exactly the same means their attempts to nip Banner’s resistance in the bud aren’t working. Pitying resistance soldiers have even tried to explain this to the Robots, but they never seem to get it. They just keep wellying mechanical assassins into the past, who inevitably become part of the young Banner’s increasingly vast cadre of android father figures, rather than assassinating him.

  (B) They all think they’re cockneys. They speak in ridiculous accents, mix their core code with rhyming slang, and have regular knees-ups around big robot pianos. Worse yet, thanks to a broken logic mechanism, the Robots believe that because all Robots are cockneys, anyone who speaks in a cockney accent must necessarily be a Robot. This, of course, means that their empire is incredibly easy to infiltrate and sabotage, offering superb opportunities for tourists with a knack for comedy voices.

  ROBOT RHYMING SLANG

  01100001 01110000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01110011

  00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000

  01110000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01110011 – ‘stairs’

  01110111 01101000 01101001 01110011 01110100 01101100

  01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000

  01100110 01101100 01110101 01110100 01100101 – ‘suit’

  01110100 01110010 01101111 01110101 01100010 01101100

  01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100

  00100000 01110011 01110100 01110010 01101001 01100110

  01100101 – ‘wife’[25]

  3. PLANNING YOUR TRIP

  When to Visit

  Good luck choosing a pleasant time to visit the apocalypse.

  Getting Around

  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the best way to get around in Wasteland is in an outrageous, gas-guzzling motor vehicle – ideally one that has been modified into a sort of moving fortress. Wherever possible, it’s good to book passage as part of a warlord’s armada, if only to avoid being chased by one. Otherwise, consider either muscle power (peasants in rags can be hired from many fortresses for a reasonable day rate, along with manky donkeys with too many eyes) or vehicles with renewable energy sources.[26]

  Eating and Drinking

  Food is a weak spot for Wasteland, if we’re being honest. For the most part, your best non-radioactive options are ancient tinned foods or hydroponic crops, both of which are pretty bland. If you’re willing to enjoy a few isotopes with your food, however, there are plenty of game options available. Cowrat meat has been a staple for some time, with its taste of beef and pet-shop straw, but enterprising cooks are now turning their hands to some of the desert’s more nightmarish wildlife. This new ‘Gribbler Cuisine’ is a bit hit and miss, but definitely worth a go for those with adventurous stomachs.

  WASTELAND’S

  BEST BARS and RESTAURANTS

  Valhalla: Worselands roadhouse run by a retired road warrior; rough as a badger’s arse and most of the liquors double up as fuels, but the battledome out back is a thrill.

  Aunt Betsy’s Cannibal Buffet: Charming rustic buffet with folksy decor and welcoming atmosphere. Only problem is the revolting buckets of lukewarm human flesh.

  Doctor Bozzler’s: This bonobo-run cafe is the only vegan food establishment in Wasteland.[27] The food is great even if it’s been prepped by chimps, but prices are – predictably – a complete rip-off.

  Big Hongo’s Taste of the Beforetimes: Luxury restaurant serving delicacies from the old world for elite warlord clientele. Worth it if you’ve got 500 barrels of oil to spend on a tiny tin of caviar.

  The Dog & Neural Net Processor: Traditional cockney-style robot boozer. Drinks are shit because the Robots can’t taste, but the piano-side singsongs are rollicking.

  Airbar Hierarchia: Swanky joint for Hierarchian socialites, where you can pay dizzying sums to take gulps of fragrant air then blow them in the faces of passing scum while shrieking with laughter.

  Burgerfry Godpalace: Part temple, part fast-food restaurant devoted to the worship of the terrifying chthonic deity known as the Burger Lord. The chips are superb if you can forget the fact that the deep fryer[28] is also used for human sacrifices.

&nbs
p; Currency

  While some communities have their own simple currencies, such as human ears, VHS tapes or remembered dialogue from pre-apocalyptic sitcoms, for the most part Wasteland runs on the barter system. And when the inhabitants of the Wastes aren’t stealing from each other, do they ever love to trade. If you come with enough technological trinkets, canned food and bullets, you can get whatever you might need for your onward journey.

  DAILY SAMPLE COSTS

  Costs given in Barter Units (BU), where 1 BU is equivalent to:

  Half a string of creepy plastic dolls’ heads

  Three big bullets

  1 square foot of rat pelt

  A mouthful of petrol

  BUDGET: less than 10 Bu

  Overnight stay in a one-person dog-leather tent, shared with a dying cyborg: 1 BU

  Transport on the bonnet of a marauder’s buggy: 2 BU

  Sundried tunnel fungus, sautéed with cat-cheese curds: 2 BU

  Groundling’s ticket for a re-enactment of an ancient soft-drink advert: 3 BU

  MIDRANGE: 10–25 Bu

  Bunk in the barracks of a mid-sized death cult (weapon rental included): 3 BU

  Transport on the back seat of a souped-up motorbike with a skull on the front: 5 BU

  1 lb nameless meat, grilled over burning plastic: 5 BU

  A night at the battledome (comes with a strimmer to hand to a combatant): 7 BU

  TOP END: More than 25 Bu

  High Priest’s quarters in a towering citadel, including mutant butler service: 20 BU

  Transport on the gloating dais atop a warlord’s tank-tracked slaughter yacht: 15 BU

  Ancient tin of hamburgers in brine, with human milk cheese and hydroponic lettuce: 10 BU

  Hire of twenty berserkers and two armoured buses to conduct your own raid: 50 BU (plus fuel costs)

  Don’t Forget to Pack …

  A chainsaw: If you can’t see how this would come in handy in Wasteland, I don’t know what I can say to help you.

  Drugs: Either to guzzle for your own entertainment, or to exchange in an ancient oil refinery full of nihilists for tinned meat and/or your life.

  That’s it.

  Manners and Etiquette

  Don’t try to save the world

  After arriving in Wasteland, you’ll probably make it half an hour before you see an act of such appalling injustice that you feel you simply must intervene. Don’t bother. Wasteland’s whole thing is that it’s broken; it doesn’t want to be fixed. Even if you get swept up in binning a dictator, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can stick around to implement lasting social change. The brutal truth is, the Wastelanders like things the way they are, and will always wrestle things back into bleakness.

  Feel free to litter

  I mean, you can’t make the situation any worse, can you? In fact, you’ll probably start a devotional sect if you drop something with a good enough logo on it. Wasteland is altogether no place for neat freaks,[29] and tourists should – if anything – make an effort to be more generally wasteful, boorish and untidy than they are at home. Throw things away half-finished. Set fire to things for a laugh. If you liked a meal, belch in the server’s face. Hell, take a shit right there on the floor, nobody cares.

  DRESS TO AGGRESS – WASTELAND FASHION

  More than in any other World, Wasteland is a place where you need to dress to fit in. Show up looking like a tourist and you’ll instantly be singled out for a battering with a length of rusty chain. But fear not! Considering almost everything here is made from literal rubbish, it’s really not difficult to get together an outfit that’ll be the height of fashion.

  When considering your overall aesthetic, try to aim for something in between ‘medieval infantry’ and ‘motorcyclist with heavily implied erotic appetites’.

  New clothes will stick out like a sore thumb in the Wastes, so distress anything by putting it in a tumble drier with a handful of charcoal and some old meat for an hour.

  A rummage in a hospital skip should provide you with all the padding, used bandages and support braces you need to properly accessorise.

  Rags are your friend. By ripping up old sacks and bin bags, you can make an outfit for casual nights out or a comfy underlayer to mitigate tetanus risk from rusty armour.

  Think automotive! Tyres cut in half make superb (if unwieldy) shoulder pads, while hubcaps and licence plates can be hammered into spiffing improvised armour.

  If trying to infiltrate the Robots, you won’t need much of a disguise – just a bit of silver spray paint on the face[30] or some cutlery taped to your hands.

  While tourists are exempt from Hierarchian law, it’s still best to know the visual signifiers of class during the current dystopia. If in doubt, dress like an extremely camp Roman.

  — TESTIMONIALS —

  I came to the Badlands as part of my gap year, on a three-month volunteering trip to help build a new orphanage. I worked really hard and got horrible lumpy sunburn, but at least the poor orphans would be terribly grateful for everything I’d done for them. Or so I thought. As soon as we opened the bloody place, the little bastards burned it down for fun and then robbed me blind. So ungrateful.

  — Tamara Pibsley, 18, Student

  Talk complete shite

  Patterns of speech in Wasteland are eccentric to say the least, so you’d do well to pepper your speech with mangled slogans from the past, archaic words in weird contexts, and slang you’ve made up on the spot.

  Be discreet about medicine

  The locals might make it look easy to swan around in the fallout all day and only get a couple of weird lumps to show for it, but they are adapted to this environment – try it yourself and you’ll be shedding hair in hamster-sized clumps within hours. You’ll need to bring a battery of medications, and you’ll need to keep their use hidden, or else you risk a sweating giant with a hockey mask asking if you brought enough for everyone.

  Be careful about pretending to be a god

  Weird desert cargo cults eat fewer tourists than they used to, but it’s still worth exercising caution. If you’re a guest of one, don’t pretend to be their god in order to swindle your way into swankier digs – it’s a classic schoolboy error. Everyone thinks they’re the first to try it, but they always regret it when they end up locked in an industrial microwave as a sacrifice after two weeks of luxury.

  4. SUGGESTED ITINERARIES

  1. GHOUL RUNNINGS:

  (10 DAYS)

  Zombie Hunting in the Land of the Dead

  For some reason, one of the most common shared fantasies among human beings is surviving the mass resurrection of the hostile dead. If that sounds like fun to you, so will this itinerary.

  DAY 1

  The trip starts out with a serious jolt of adrenaline, as you’re dropped by parachute in the middle of zombie territory with only your wits and a rifle to protect you.[31] From there, it’s up to you to navigate your way through the eerie, deserted landscape to the nearest shelter, with plenty of great jump-scare opportunities along the way.[32]

  DAY 2

  Unless you’ve seriously fucked it, evening of the second day should see you arrive at the fortified Sunnyville Megamall, where you’re bound to find a band of survivors. Many of them will be former tourists who’ve decided to live the lifestyle full time, so it should be fairly easy to beg your way in through the barricades. After a simple campfire meal in a trashed sporting goods store – a great point to start developing alliances for the mayhem to come – it’ll be time for a whimsical dance with flickering jury-rigged Christmas lights before a trip to the mall’s roof. There, you can drink old whiskey and look down on the hordes of corpses outside, while enjoying sobering reflections on how the zombies ‘aren’t that different to us’.[33]

  DAYS 3–5

  On day three, you’ll get your chance to exercise what definitely aren’t buried homicidal urges, as you’re issued one of the mall’s sniper rifles and posted in a water tower to chip away at the horde, bullet by b
ullet. When you’re done shooting, you can join the other survivors in scavenging the mall, picking up some great pop-culture souvenirs in the process. At night, it’ll be time for more dancing and whiskey. This schedule of murderous monotony might go on for several days, but it’s usually around day five that the survivors pick up a faint radio signal asking for help, and have to send a group of volunteers on a desperate mission into the Z-Zone. Pack your bags!

  DAYS 6–9

  You’ll hit the road at dawn – perhaps in a car, but more likely on foot. Combat will be light at first, so it’s worth building a strong rapport with the ragtag band you’re travelling with. After all, if you let yourself slip into the role of ‘abrasive twat who nobody trusts’ you’ll be thrown to the dead at the first twitch of a cadaver. As the road trip progresses, your encounters with the living dead will get more and more intense, as will the contrived ethical dilemmas the party faces. Inevitably, a situation will arise where the gentlest soul in the group turns out to be hiding a zombie bite, and everyone will spend a miserable afternoon deciding to shoot them.[34] That’s generally the low point of the trip.

  The dust storm abated around midday, leaving a silence so profound that we could hear the trickle of individual sand grains down the pitted faces of the skyscrapers around us. This was it: the fabled Business Place. And although our guide assured us this city was dead rather than Dead, to us it seemed the very definition of ‘too quiet’, and we kept our hands close to our carbines.