Given these goals, I ask the “sacred four” questions proposed on these forums by my friend and yours, Scarlet Jester:

Who are you? You’re a survivor of a cataclysm like the world’s never seen before. You’re most probably just a weathered human with a canteen and a bowie knife; but you might be a Scarlet Monk of Canberra, master of your own mind and body; or a freed Genimal, a genetically-enhanced animal engineered to serve the human race (available in dog, cat, and ape varieties); a man of screws and metal, a shining robot under the harsh sun; a surly Little Green Man, interstellar refugee from that greatest of enemies (and authors of the cataclysm), the Greys; or, finally, a Hot Green Woman, the completely opposite gender of Little Green Men, hotter than most stars with one sexy hand on your sexy hip and the other sexy hand on your completely sexy ray-gun. (Call it sexist–I call it camp. Really, who doesn’t love space-babes?)

What do you do? You try your hardest to survive. Man’s organized himself into small villages and larger settlements, and many survivors gather there, finding safety in numbers. You most likely don’t join them, though, deciding rather to follow in the footsteps of the fabled Waste Rangers, 13 men and women that stalk the feral Outback, blazing their own trails, and keeping the paths safe and open for others.

Why are you doing it? For that ultimate post-apocalyptic camp purpose: you’re a bad-ass, or at least you think you are. This game will not deal with angst, or the glories of the meek, or anything remotely like that. The current–and very temporary–subtitle of Waste Rangers is “Love and Lasers Among the Ruins,” but that about says it all. You’re out there proving you’re the Man (or the Woman) everyday in order to find bigger lasers, shoot bigger dinosaurs (I swear on everything holy I’ll explain this and it will make sense), and get laid. Really.

Where do you do it? (This, I suppose, is a good place to explain the dinosaurs.) You’re on Earth in the year 2165, which is a number I just made up. The Earth became an idyllic place to live during the 21st century as humans began to settle their differences, forming a semi-global economy and dismantling their nuclear weapons towards a new pax terra. New psychotropic drugs and methods of therapy halved the crime rate in a matter of three years and advances in technology sent the economy into a gentle, but steady rise.

Perhaps man’s greatest achievement was in the science of genetics. The human genome was completely scrutinized, and soon genetic anomalies were weeded out long before birth. With the ever-growing economy, the blue-collar labor force became more and more sparse, and soon PaxCorp, the largest of the genetic think-tanks, created the first Genimals. Genimals (an abbreviation for genetically-enhanced animals) were created from dog, cat, or primate DNA combined with human DNA (but always 49 percent or less, mind you), and were capable of speech and understanding human tongues, and were used–at first–to replace human labor. They proved a tremendous success, as they were stronger than most humans, and owners could take further measures to ensure reliability: since PaxCorp had unraveled the genetic keys to aberrant human psychology, it was relatively easy to breed Genimals with instinctive needs to follow human orders.

There was spartan opposition to the idea of Genimals, calling the act of creating them inhumane, but the decadence of the mid-2000’s silenced most voices. Genimals were soon used as house servants, cooks, laundry washers, and swimming pool cleaners. This last task led to the obvious: genetically enhanced pleasure receptacles. We need not go into that too deeply, except to say that the mid-2000’s got extremely decadent, and the preferred models among men were usually from the feline genus, and the females of the era preferred the Stallion, or perhaps the Ox.

This would all be fine and decadent and pleasant except for two quite annoying beings. Light-years away, a particularly impish Little Green Man named K’Lax’On the Particularly Impish thought it might be quite amusing to crash the coronation of the new Grey emperor, Tartanamous 18.4. K’Lax’On hid quite well during the ceremony, but soon found himself in need of voiding. Sneaking off to the Grey restrooms, he found himself perplexed. Grey anatomy is a puzzle to even themselves, and no one outside of the Greys can ever determine the gender of one. This is doubly strange as the Greys don’t ever wear clothes as such. Now, anyone familiar with the Greens knows that their males and females are quite different, and the Green females don’t particularly care for their males; in fact, they usually kick them around a bit and sneer. (The author does wonder how the Greens continue to perpetuate their race.) K’Lax’On stood in front of two identical doors with identical signs on them, not knowing which one to enter, and paralyzed by fear–entering a Green females’ bathroom would have gotten his furry chin kicked in, and he imagined quite the same would happen here.

As it turns out, it did. Tartanamous, our new Grey Emperor, had drank heavily of the spirits that night, and needed to use the loo–as the Greys call it–and ran right into little K’Lax’On looking slack-jawed at the doors. The Greens and Greys, being the only sentient lifeforms they know of, have never been quite at ease with each other, and the sight of a Little Green Man there in the Grey Palace (on Kortol 9) sent Tartanamous over the edge.

Wanting to set an example in his first days as Emperor, Tartanamous took what seemed to him the most viable form of action: he blew the Greens’ planet right the hell up. He didn’t really ask too many questions as such, just blew it up and flew home.

One Green ship made it off the planet, though. This wouldn’t be a tremendous problem except the Greys didn’t like it so much. They of course followed, and shot a bit, and what not, and the Green ship eventually was shot down. Coincidentally, it landed in Australia. This wouldn’t have been such a problem, really, except two things: first, the ship landed right in the middle of PaxCorp’s new theme park, Dinosaur Land, and knocked down a few important fences and such (dinosaurs explained); and second, the Greys decided to shoot around a bit with different weapons, such as the Burning Ray of Death, and the Sandblaster, and the Curses-on-your-Children-Genetic-Modulator-2000, and the like. They really weren’t good shots, but it didn’t seem to concern them much, as historians recall.

And that brings us to the cataclysm. From there, it’s mainly foraging for food, and rebuilding cities, and attempting to make it with Hot Green Women. Now that we’re completely aware of where we’re coming from, I should be able to design some rules that fit these goals, and this setting (poor, poor setting that it is.) Next week, I’ll discuss the Huge D20 Issue of classes, why they’re all right, and how to implement them in post-apocalyptic Australia.