I am not a fan of apocalyptic fiction- mass death and destruction do nothing but disgust me. Post apocalyptic is different for me. The rebuilding, the exploration of the old world and its secrets, the interaction between cultures that developed in the years after is why I like Gamma World and Mutant Future. After reading a column in the paper today about how society seems to be eating up both like candy recently (echoing Tomorrowland), I started to think about how to remove the cataclysm from Mutant Future and still retain the flavor.

The ruins of the old world could be from a slow collapse, one where the human population shrank from a low birth rate or leaving for the stars. Humanity has trouble cleaning up after itself now so I would expect that a lot of infrastructure would be left to rot along with a lot of junk and even valuables (much like how such end up in landfills today). Those humans that remained couldn’t keep the high level of technology afloat and thus slowly fell into barbarism. Androids tended to erase their memories as not to get terminally depressed over what they lost.

Artifacts were left behind when people just didn’t care about them any more, forgot them on a one way trip, died out from old age or (local) disease or were stolen by those who remained. Other artifacts were created haphazardly after the Great Leaving, thus causing all kinds of superscience wackiness in the world.

The mutants are the result of technology, biology based or otherwise, that have slowly swept through the biosphere. As people lost their advanced technology, the planet’s ecology became more and more hazardous, eventually causing the blood soaked wastes that exist in the setting. Mutant plants and animals could be from the years of high technology, uplifts of a sort, or could be the result of AIs attempting to recreate biological intelligence for reasons they keep to themselves.

Radiation hot spots are easy to explain- power plants, medical equipment, physics labs and other places that used nuclear material that eroded to the point where the fuel is exposed to the environment.

I am not sure if I will do this, but in many cases the actual cause of the cataclysm isn’t that important to the players or their characters. Just trying to survive the dandelion/jellyfish hybrid that is trying to eat the PCs takes up their time for contemplation.