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Ursus Maior
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 00:46

Bravo Ursus Major, you pretty much said everything I've been thinking (but also have the capacity to put it into words, unlike me :D ). This covers pretty much everything that I've been trying to go over on the discord every time the topic arises.
Thanks, it got longer than anticipated. :geek:
The rules as written seem to oversell the collapse of society on the individual level and undersell it in the economical sense.
So when in the rulebook you seem to have Mad Max or Bethesda Fallout-esque bandits and "happy" communities living their lives, in my mind it would be far more realistic to make the main antagonist be the lack of supply/infrastructure/food and leave the marauder groups for more morally grey situations than have them be the objectively bad guys.
Well, the question might simply boil down to "what kind of game do you want for your table"?

The mechanics of 4E seem to lend themselves beautifully to both of these options and everything in the middle. I'd say, Poland is the Fallout-esque Wild, Wild East, with villages, forts and some big cities plus a lot of "Indians" aka marauders and raiders, whereas Sweden has a stronger "woodlands of frozen death" feel. Beyond that, everything else seems to be pretty open.
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Ursus Maior
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 01:12

I wonder, though. How all-encompassing a nuclear engagement are we postulating?

With a finite number of warheads launched, and with every warhead — especially if we assume mainly tactical nukes in the 1-100kt yield range being used — affecting a finite area

The greatest effect of the war — nuclear and otherwise — on agriculture I rather suspect would be that with a buckling infrastructure, the supply of petrol for tractors becomes patchy, or dries up altogether. This would force farmers to either revert to muscle-driven agriculture (animal-drawn, or in the extreme, human drawn), or else find out how to cook their own fuel snappish.

Either way, yields would certainly plummet, both for grain and other produce as well as for hay to keep livestock fed, but I have hard time envisioning that it would disappear entirely.
So, I'm only referring to Poland here, because we read little on the rest of the world. It seems clear that there was a strategic exchange and supply chains collapsed. Poland, on the other hand, must have gotten it pretty bad, since nukes were used tactically and operationally to break each other's attacks and counterattacks. This means along the front, but also in-depth, as maneuver columns, bridges and cities or infrastructure were hit.

So, soil contamination is definitely an issue, at least in the weeks after the exchange. But since that's the collapse period, clean-ups aren't likely to have happened. Then comes the winter. The snow covers the irradiated earth and once Rasputitsa (further to the East), spring floods and rains hit in March, most of Poland and the Western USSR will be washed over by toxic, stinking and radioactive mud. That leaves back huge pockets of radiation, but some areas will also clean up on their own. Maybe, by early summer 1999, survivors start recovering. The war seems to have boiled down by then, too. Maybe displaced person come back, too, in some quantities. So, they start rebuilding. We see Krakow and Silesia mostly do their own things. During the winter of 1999/2000, NATO starts drafting plans for Operation Reset, moving stuff into position during the time rivers are frozen and destroyed bridges are less of a problem. Once preparations are set, NATO executes the operation and fails, as we know so well, by mid-April.

By the way, I'd be curious to know, why FL advanced Operation Reset into April 2000 and thus changed the date of demise for the 5th Infantry Division from July 18th to April 18th 2000.

Addendum: There seems to be some form of military supply chain left, at least allowing for a massing of fuel, ammo, food, other supplies as well as personnel in advance of major advances, such as Operation Reset. So, maybe units in cantonment horde their fuel rations most of the year, unless in defensive operations. Then, once they start mustering for Operation Reset, they levy additional troops and supplies from their cantonment area, i. e. the population. All of this cannot be salvaged and recycled goods. Some of it must have trickled in from the rest of the world.
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Ursus Maior
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 01:26

So yeah, I imagine it would get pretty medieval. Societally, too -- because feudalism was a system that sort of made sense for the scale of human operations at that time, and now we're sort of back to it. The difference being that there are people around with advanced knowledge of medicine, engineering, science. A fiefdom over here can potentially still use radios or the internet to communicate with a fiefdom way over there. But do people have the basic needs to make any of that matter? The fall will be softer in places that had less technologically advanced lives to begin with, but the struggle is almost certain to spread there, too.
Besides from my dislike for the misuse of the term 'medieval' that's pretty much what it boils down to, yes. I'd like to add that feudalism isn't the only or even the best option of governance for post-collapse societies. Feudalism creates waste of resources and excess, as it leads to palace cultures and privileges granted on the basis of services rendered to the local 'big man'. In fact, feudalism isn't so much relevant in many parts and longer periods of the medieval world as one might think. The phenomenon also takes different forms in France and England compared to Central and Eastern Europe, where local communities are more egalitarian on the levels of towns and cities. Especially in Poland, Southern Germany, Bohemia and Moravia (if memory serves correctly), towns tend to be organized around privileged citizens, who fiercely defend their rights against all forms of nobility and 'big men' with armed gangs.

The roots of these vary, but it makes sense, especially for T2K. Why should someone, who until recently was a regular Polish citizen, now suddenly be a count, duke or king? These things in T2K 1E always sounded to me more like delusions of grandeur than realistic options. Looking into today's Donbas, local 'big men' rather call themselves "president" or "prime minister" etc. Duke of Silesia just has such a pulpish Bond villain vibe.
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omnipus
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 07:48

I didn't mean to evoke antique titles, which I agree seem a little silly and probably wouldn't be accepted by the people. The way of life, however, mostly would fit, out of necessity. If you're an average person, you perform manual labor in a protectorate of some sort. The protectorate is run by a "lord" who is in power because he can make some appeal to a higher power that supports or tolerates them -- be that the "central government," VII Corps, the 21st Motorized Rifle Division, the Archbishop... this is a power structure not all the different from that in countries with weak governments in the third world today or during the Cold War. To survive you need a benefactor and that goes all the way up to the top and the top probably isn't that many levels high.

In exchange for community defense and basic provisions, you give your labor and the colonel/governor/commissar/lord gets to do what they want, to an extent (while also living in fear, no doubt). If you're at all able-bodied, you're presumably also by default a reservist in a mandatory civil defense/militia.

This is the social pattern that makes the most sense to me, anyway, in a world where most people are very very poor again, few people can travel, and communications are difficult and unreliable. I'm sure you know more of the historical specifics than I do but this is a pattern that's seen all over the world in many different eras for the most part.
Author, Central Poland Sourcebook -- now available on DriveThruRPG
 
Old Dog
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 09:45

A lot of really interesting points and discussion has been raised in this post, mist of which I agree with.
At the table I just use the rule of thumb that each marked town has 1/10 it's 1990s population in 2000.
 
fougerec
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 17:49

I don't put too much thought into it, just what feels right for our game which I deliberately want to feel isolated and desolate. The 1/10th of 2000 population sounds like a great benchmark though.
 
andresk
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Thu 27 Jan 2022, 07:36

1/10th sounds about right for cities as long as you don't involve actual metropols, where that 1/10th would be close or over 100k. And for villages and smaller towns 1/10th may be a bit drastic. The main thing to keep in mind is that with the loss of specialists, machinery and supply lines the economies of scale collapse. People would need to produce most of their resources locally and to do that they would need to spread out the best they can. There's strength in numbers, but not when the surrounding fields feed 100 people, but your village has 5x that.
 
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Ursus Maior
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 28 Jan 2022, 11:22

The only metropolis of Poland would have been Warsaw and that's been obliterated. So, with regard to that, the setting doesn't have a problem. As for the rest of the world: we know to little to determine the amount of destruction in other regions. Hence, I'd tailor that to my needs. In earlier editions, a lot of the US metropoleis, for example, were largely obliterated or massively damaged as well. Others would have been evacuated. I'd imagine, some evacuees might go home after some time, if there's be food supplies. Take NYC, for example: Central Park became a farm, as did other parks, but that won't feed more than a couple of thousand people across the city boroughs. Maybe add some "arable land" on-top of flat-roofed buildings, some fishery and some livestock rearing (e. g. breeding rabbits, chicken, goats, sheep and pigs for food) and that's about what you can manage in a city. The rest would have to move upstate or spread across New England.
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SykesFive
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 28 Jan 2022, 20:40

By the way, I'd be curious to know, why FL advanced Operation Reset into April 2000 and thus changed the date of demise for the 5th Infantry Division from July 18th to April 18th 2000.

I suspect it is to provide a longer summer for the player characters to "enjoy" before they have to worry about winter. That time could be used hexcrawling or for a structured summer 2000 campaign. The Poland campaign for 1st ed. was crammed into the period between July 18, 2000 (Battle of Kalisz) and November 15, 2000 (departure of the "Going Home" convoy), during which time the players were supposed to have visited Krakow, steamed down the Vistula to Warsaw, saved Warsaw, and possibly even located the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

Addendum: There seems to be some form of military supply chain left, at least allowing for a massing of fuel, ammo, food, other supplies as well as personnel in advance of major advances, such as Operation Reset. So, maybe units in cantonment horde their fuel rations most of the year, unless in defensive operations. Then, once they start mustering for Operation Reset, they levy additional troops and supplies from their cantonment area, i. e. the population. All of this cannot be salvaged and recycled goods. Some of it must have trickled in from the rest of the world.

I think the classical idea is that units go into cantonments in fall and eat and make fuel from the harvest. This lets them build up a surplus for summer operations. Where this falls apart for me is ammunition. Sure, you can produce some small arms ammunition. But why are there any artillery shells and missiles left at all? You may still have some running tanks, but what are they firing?

Besides from my dislike for the misuse of the term 'medieval' that's pretty much what it boils down to, yes. I'd like to add that feudalism isn't the only or even the best option of governance for post-collapse societies. Feudalism creates waste of resources and excess, as it leads to palace cultures and privileges granted on the basis of services rendered to the local 'big man'.

People mean lots of different things by feudalism. I used to be a medieval historian and went to college and grad school at a time when feudalism was under attack as an unhelpful construct. The reason that feudalism is inapplicable to the post-Twilight War situation in my view is that feudalism concerns land tenure. Lords grants land to the vassals who in return perform military and other service. In the classical conception, this basic system of "I let you live on my land, so you work for me" goes from the king down to peasants. Despite the mentions of the cantonment system, I can't see land tenure as being all that important in the post-Twilight War world and certainly not formalized to that extent. Fundamentally, no one is that settled! Also, relations within the military aristocracy wouldn't embodied in land at all. Why soldiers follow other soldiers in this setting may be complex, but I think in approximately zero cases does it involve something like "Johnson follows Smith's orders because Smith granted Johnson the fief of Farmville." (Why anybody can order anybody else around in this setting when they both have guns is an interesting question.)

So I think what you really have is nonterritorial warlordism. It could mimic aspects of feudalism after a few decades if the cantonments stabilize. They would not be stable in 2000.

Maybe add some "arable land" on-top of flat-roofed buildings, some fishery and some livestock rearing (e. g. breeding rabbits, chicken, goats, sheep and pigs for food) and that's about what you can manage in a city.

What are you feeding the livestock and why aren't you eating it yourself? I don't doubt many people in such a situation would want to create storybook farm operations that include meat-raising operations, but that's inefficient, particularly since you may be turning part of your harvest into fuel. If you want meat, hunt and fish.
 
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Re: How many people are actually living in towns and cities?

Fri 28 Jan 2022, 21:58

Taking my own urban /suburban location as a sample, I asked the question 'how many people would be able to survive as farmers?'
Now, I'm a reenactor... I did medieval reenacting for years and then became a Civil War reenactor. Because of this background I have a better understanding of just what it'll take to create a crop of edible food than most people. I'm also realistic enough to know that 'understanding' and 'ability' are two very different things.
So without getting bogged down in details and trivia, my suggestion is to take the pre-War-Three statistic and reduce it by 90%. Ten percent, or fifteen percent AT MOST, will survive in an urban environment when subjected to the stresses of nuclear war, the breakdown of the transportation net, the lack of medicines, the lack of clean water, the lack of sanitation, and the lack of knowledge of how to survive.
Yeah, that's brutal. But if you needed a reason as why a nuclear war is to be avoided at all costs, there you go.

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