Lore Bugle #1: Regarding Mega Star Grid Universe and The Ravaged States of America
When I was working on Mega Star Grid Universe, I was planning to move my core character roster from their respective Mega Grid West/The Ravaged Frontier settings into Mega Star Grid West; lawless and independent network of solar systems, and have the characters be space mercenaries because I thought that would allow me to just do new things with them. All I ended up doing was adapting old ideas I haven't worked with in a long time into planets, and I realized that it would be better to keep my characters and settings isolated in their own lives instead of cross-contaminating one group of characters with others. That would be a fucking porridge soup of disaster. I will easily be mixing up characters and ideas.
Now that I am revamping the old version of my interpretation of the Fallout setting; formerly known as The Ravaged Frontier focusing strictly on The Mojave, some of the characters are coming back home and it just makes the characters feel familiar again. This time I decided to give Warren Payne an actual backstory instead of keeping him as an ambiguous secretive leader character. The BLACK BUNKER CHRONICLES has been an opportunity for me to begin grounding my core character roster in The Ravaged States of America before they became who they are now.
While Mega Grid West; notice the missing Star in the name, is focused on Southern California with a contrasting environment, it was deliberately intended to be a sister project to The Ravaged Frontier, co-existing right next to each other. My characters were able to experience dystopian life in both a big cancerously sprawling city and neglected dangerous desert wasteland.
The characters from my East Coast setting, formerly known as Gothic Coast City, will no longer just live in an amalgamation of Nyew Yawhk, Bahstuhn, and Flahridah. I'll actually just commit them to New York where I will focus on their detective neo-noir stories there. Being post-collapse will provide fertile breeding grounds for depraved stories.
Q: What was The Ravaged Frontier?
A: It was originally an experiment originally titled Wasteland Frontier, attempting to change the culture experienced in the Fallout series forward from the 1940s/1950s to a mix of the turbulent political and societal landscapes of the 1960s through 1990s. It was heavily inspired by the fact that there are suggestions in the Black Isle/Obsidian and inXile post-apocalyptic games that society did in fact move forward, but the Bethesda games seem to insist that there was complete cultural stagnation.
Q: What was Mega Grid West?
A: This setting was straight up inspired by Judge Dredd, Appleseed, other Shirow Masamune OVAs, Goku Midnight Eye, Angel Cop, Cyberpunk 2077, and other media. I needed it to co-exist with The Ravaged Frontier and here is why: What I enjoyed about several of the inspirations is that they stuck to conventional technology but either industrialized it or futurized it. I am not too much of a fan of how Shadowrun really leans into the Cyberpunk and Fantasy themes, so for me it was much more interesting to create a late 1990s dystopian city, and just stick to the industrialization of technology more for efficiency than for aesthetic appeal. Setting it in Southern California simply allowed for me to adapt landmarks and other details I was familiar with, or reinterpret them believably.
Q: What was Gothic Coast City?
A: It was a great departure from what I usually get inspired by. Nothing to do with videos games or anything like that. I was really just toying with the idea of adapting The Grim Fairy Tales into serial killer case files. I felt like the early 1900s East Coast would be a very interesting time period to have a lot of crime happen. Forensic science and detective techniques were still evolving, and loosely working around those limitations would allow for pretty much only the most gruesome crimes to happen. Rapes, torture, cannibalism, necrophilia, the imagination is the limit.
Q: What is gonna happen with the Mega Star Grid Universe and Mega Star Grid West?
A: I am still going to be working on that. It's just that the vastness pool of ideas I'd like to expand on is overwhelming for now. You can see what currently exists for it right here: Mega Star Grid Universe