Rise of the Scavenger

Years before I was ready to begin work on A.C.: After Collapse, I was thinking about the nature of Player Characters and why they are so often...the way they are.  People I knew at the time spent many casual evenings with a pad of paper and a lot of math; trying to figure it out.  The answers to many of our most aggravating questions didn't come until we saw "classless" character generation in action.  Then, we began to understand what was so elusive.  All of that abstraction played its own part in the way I eventually approached role playing games.  What we think of as the Rogue or the Thief in Fantasy gaming evolved in to my concept of salvagers and scavengers in post-apocalyptic settings.

In my youth, the Cold War (1945-1991) was always on our minds.  More than anything else, we asked ourselves questions about survival.  Books and movies probed the question darkly, it was widely believed that surviving a nuclear war just wasn't possible.  I've never been one of those people who takes "no" for an iron-clad answer.  Life has taught me that people can survive anything except extinction--if they want to.  When it came on to the market, The Morrow Project seemed to support my thinking; that it was possible to survive "the end" no matter what form it may eventually take.  When I got, the internet and the mapping of our human genome made me revisit this grim subject.  As we approached the 21st Century, my thinking crystalized.

In those days, I was not yet a full-time author.  I'd write short stories at night and during weekends that always got thrown out every Monday.  As a civil servant who was working 40+ hours a week, that process of writing was good therapy that reduced my frustrations; it also helped me to construct the pieces woaht eventually became the backstory for A.C.: After Collapse.  That part of me that doesn't like to give up kept coming back to salvagers and scavengers.  Over the years, I've known people who are like scavengers.  You know the type, they're always trading one thing for another.  For some vague reason, they always seem to know a guy who has the thing you want--for a price.

People like that exist in every society, it made sense to me that they would thrive in a dying world where nothing was off limits...if you could find it or pay for it.  In some ways, the might be the most heroic resistors of the Collapse.  You can think of the civic-minded thief in a Fantasy game as the man or woman who becomes the new Robin Hood.  Imagine how hard it might be find prescription drugs during the collapse, then imagine what you might be willing to do just to get those drugs for people who mattered to you?  As criminals go, you might not be terribly noble--but--you'd know why you taking the risk.  That's an extreme example, though it does illustrate why I put so much effort to portraying scavengers in the post-apocalyptic fiction I write.