Starfall (GURPS Post Apocalypse)

About the adventure

It was centuries ago, almost lost to memory and time. The world was destroyed, probably sometime during the 21st century. It started when a massive undetected meteor shower hit the Earth and the Moon. Each meteor was radioactive, and full of mutagenic and transgenic spores. Where they landed, the created what we call Hellpits, oozing pools of irradiated greenish slime that twist and warp nearby creatures, and sometimes directly spawn monsters. One of the larger meteors broke off a hunk of the moon, creating a new ring of asteroids around the earth, from which irradiated and infested hunks still sometimes fall. As if all that wasn't enough, we believe several nations at the time fired nuclear weapons at each other, believing the meteor shower to be an enemy attack. All these strikes, both kinetic and nuclear, plunged the world into a nuclear winter that lasted 6 years. 400 million people died in the impacts and explosions. 6 billion people died of famine and exposure during the winter. Even more died in the years to come from monsters, radiation, and killing each other. Now, the world is a savage garden. It isn't a wasteland, and most of the radiation is long gone, everywhere but the Hellpits, though we did lose most of the ozone protecting us from the sun's UV. Survivors band together in small relatively isolated communities, marveling at the ruins of once great civilizations. Monsters and mutated animals (and plants) roam everywhere, some of them sapient. Few humans remain that are not also mutants, and almost all of those come from isolated communities that hid in bunkers during the Cataclysm. Some of those bunkers were enormous, like Cheyenne mountain in Colorado. Others were smaller, made by billionaires to keep themselves alive. From those vaults, unchanged humans have emerged. Most are reasonable folks, but others are human supremacists, part of the Church of Humanity Untainted, and they want to 'cleanse' the world of mutation. This is the perilous world of Starfall, where nothing is as it seems, and if you let your guard down for an instant, you will soon be very dead.