Page 1 of 1

What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Wed 06 Jun 2018, 01:15
by nerdvana
I could have sworn I'd asked this and seen an answer but I cannot find it. Is there a canonical answer to the current year in the zone at the start of the metaplot? If not, what are people's best guesses for this?

Re: What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Wed 06 Jun 2018, 02:01
by Fenhorn
FL didn't wanted to set a specific date, letting this to be open to the GM to decide. But we can backtrack from the setting material in various books (mostly MYZ and MGA) I answered in the Mutant Year Zero fb group this:

"According to Genlab Alpha it was 252 years ago the red plague swept through the world and 251 years ago since the nuclear bombs. Assuming that the red plague will happen next year (2019) then "Year Zero" will be 2271."

That is just about how accurate we can be. In my first campaign I set the red plague date to 1989 (yes we are all "oldies" in my group). I did that mostly with a little bit of nostalgia in mind (the first Mutant game came out 1984). It was fun for a while to describe the world as I remember my 80s. In my current campaign, I had set the red plague date to 2018 (I started the campaign last year). Its easier to describe various ruins and scrap that way (my 80s memory turned out to be quite blurry).

Re: What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Wed 06 Jun 2018, 03:04
by nerdvana
Thanks. I'm a stickler for details but couldn't find that information again. Helps me use my perpetual calendar for the back in info. :)

Re: What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Wed 06 Jun 2018, 23:15
by Unslain
The English language M:GAlpha doesn't seem to include any reference to how many years have passed since the red plague, at least not that I can recall or quickly find. But the blurb on the back cover begins, "01/19/2278, 3:47pm." So if this were to be shortly before the campaign begins, I'd set the current year as between 2279 and 2281, depending on how far your zone is from where you place Paradise Valley, (if you've gone into that sort of detail) and how recently animal mutants arrived in the area.

Unless of course you decide to have your animal mutants hail from somewhere else, at which point it hardly matters. Our initial campaign predated Genlab and had two animal tribes: the settlement of Ondo Zo (London Zoo) was run by a lion hybrid, with an elephant chief enforcer; while we never knew the name of the other lot, as things got violent rather quickly there and we just called them mutt-men.

For the sake of completeness, the Mechatron blurb also begins with a time-stamp, this one for the evacuation of humans from Mechatron7 - 10/07/2153, 0617. So we know that the Enclave Wars were in full swing at this time.

Re: What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Tue 20 Nov 2018, 07:41
by Montana
By cross referencing the English and Swedish versions of the books I've figured it out.

It's actually somewhere around 2334.
The Red Plauge swept the world around 2082.
Nuclear war one year later in 2083.
Enclave wars took place from 2149 up to at least 2197.
(Math and references below).

There are some minor spoilers below, but I'll try to keep it as vague as possible:

I have some information from the Swedish version of the games, both Elysium/Exodus (the human sourcebook) and Genlab Alpha, as well as the English version of GA.
In the Elysium book there is a reference to Elysium IV (the mother enclave of Genlab Alpha) and it being 137 years since last contact. This is backed up by a timeline in the Swedish version of GA.
The English version of Genlab Alpha has a date (November 17th, 2197) talking about Elysium IV going dark. (2197+137=2334).
The Swedish version of GA States that it was 252 years since the plague, so that places it in 2082. (2334-252=2084)
It also states that the Enclave wars started 185 years before the GA campaign starts (2334-185=2149).
(Dates may be +/- a year or two since the length of the campaigns aren't set in stone, and may vary).

Elysium also says that the Genlab Alpha campaign ends about halfway through the Elysium campaign. 
And since there are Mutated animals as well as humans in the zone, I think that they all run more or less concurrently, with Year Zero actually being the last one, 2334+ (1-2 years?).

Re: What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Tue 20 Nov 2018, 13:30
by nerdvana
Thank you! That's awesome

Re: What is Year Zero in Mutant: Year Zero

Posted: Fri 03 May 2019, 21:33
by Nibbleberget
If the city you play in is small you could give it a 20 years of burst growth.