Survivor communities outside the known world

[kjeks]

I've been thinking about how magic would work outside the Nordic countries. Magic and spirits exist, so are presumably worldwide. Magic users would likely be based on their culture's opinion of magic. Japan for instance would have heavily spirit based magic, others could lean towards sigils etc.

Icelandic mages get their powers from the Norse gods. Does this mean then that other ancient gods are now back? Are Egyptians now reworshiping Osiris and Thoth? Or are the Norse the only ones, and other cultures are seeing them as their own gods?

Maybe that depends on the communities which survived.
But the role of gods puts another option of surviving on the board. I mean, maybe some small populations worshiping ancient gods like the native australians following the dreamlines or tribes in africa have been saved by their gods? If cats didn't get infected by the rash illness, maybe tigers, lions, pumas and all those survived as well. We don't know about these regions yet, but it seems a possibility to me. And maybe those big kitties helped in surviving beasts in deserts and rain forests.

[Superdark33]

I read a lot of things with unreliable narrators or explanations, so i say that stuff like magic shouldnt be trusted to highly.

Maybe magic is only Icelandic belief magic or Finn nature magic, maybe there is native american shamanism or atheist science magic, maybe there isnt magic at all, for all we know magicians never did anything showey, so its best not to tackle that issue beyond cultural stuff.

Eygeptian gods arent as known as Nord gods, and werent worshipped for longer than norse gods have been, plus Islam is too strong there. The biggest thing is soem sort of combination of Islam and eyeptian gods, replacing stuff in the Quran with "The Nile" and other eygptian gods, maybe some greek ones.
That is, if they manage to survive the plague at all, which given all the clues to when the comic starts, doesnt give  too much hope to the poor eygptians, but with enough dramatic interventions any country can survive, and if humans turn out not to be as monstrous as the trolls, maybe a pan-nile nation can emerge. (Hippo beasts though, that cant be pleasent, maybe the crocs can fend them off)


Brittania: Well maybe there is a community but it didnt breach waters yet. Either the United Kingdom became more closely tied, with maybe Ireland re-joining, or they scattered to be on their own, with England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Personaly i prefer the first because its nice when people get along. "Rule Brittania, Rule the waves"


To coin a term: Dramatic Intervention: Corrupt politicans? Incompetant leaders? Religious nuts and idiotic bigots? What are those? The governorments make ONLY good decisions, and maybe some bad ones, as long as the country survives the rash illness. Of course this cant happen because all of the above exist and are likely to hamper all the good people, but maybe that can make a very-likely-to-survive-country a survived-by-the-skin-of-its-teeth country.
For short: Any country can survive if you belive hard enough.

Also @Raya the thing i didnt like about this line was "Only Nordics can into immunity" which carries a lot of very unfortunate meanings to it.


In other news: I saw a mod for Crusader Kings that is set in US 2666AC, after an apocalypse punched everything back to medival age and caused a drastic change in beliefs, The Founding Fathers and The Atom became as holy as Jesus and The New York Giants and other sports teams are famous mercenries. I couldnt find the mod afterwards, but i think that toning it down can create the culture in the US at year 90.

Food for thought:
Africa: The Maghreb, the center and South, what will go with those?

Malta: One of the oldest human settlements in history, dating to beyond the stone age. Will the legacy stop with Illness? how will they be like if they survive?

[Hrollo]

Food for thought:
Africa: The Maghreb, the center and South, what will go with those?

In Africa I have observed that the only places that get something ressembling a winter with snowfall are a couple of mountain ranges in southern South Africa and in Lesotho.

(The Kilimanjaro does have snow on top, but it's an isolated mountain in an otherwise relatively flat, low and tropical environment, not really helping)

[Raya]

And maybe those big kitties helped in surviving beasts in deserts and rain forests.

Just imagine, cleansers in India riding around on Grade A tigers. Awesome.

Also @Raya the thing i didnt like about this line was "Only Nordics can into immunity" which carries a lot of very unfortunate meanings to it.

Uh, no I didn't. I said that the Britons would have a similar level of immunity to the Nordics, not that the Nordics are the only ones who are.

[kjeks]

Just imagine, cleansers in India riding around on Grade A tigers. Awesome.

Nice. But at the same time elephants would make for much bigger trolls than cows or moose do. So it's only fair, that the get the bigger kitties for support

In africa the problem would seem, that even the heat would not help against trolls because they would seek all watering places like humans would do. I had similar thoughts on wastelands, but in the end the arguments convinced me that surviving there would be kind of hard.

Maybe on military bases there would be a chance. I mean, there a enough weapons around there but I don't know how highly secured military bases there are. As I look how Ebola works its way through Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guniea I would think, that these countries would not have much of a chance for surviving. Nigeria and the Senegal seem to fare better.

The countries belonging to the Maghreb have an environment which trolls and beasts would like, as its warm there and when its to hot there is water around. The nights are not getting cold enough to stop the spawning of the beasts for long. Military bases would seem the only hold-up against these beasts, but they would need to close their doors quickly so the rash doesn't spread there. Then they would need to live on supplies, getting out or talking to other bases seems nearly impossible to me but I'm not that familiar with the infrastructure there.

[Superdark33]

Even if trolls go to water to cool off, they still need to get to those places, and that makes the hunter's job much easier.
Rather than the norwegian "Walk through the wild, look for prints, signs of nests, be careful", the desert hunter's is "These places have water, go here every once in a while and destroy the trolls there." Plus any troll that wonders into human settlements will probably not be in a good physical condition to cause too much harm.

I see society in the Maghreb and other middle eastern areas breaking down to what they were before any european labels were forced on them: Simply tribes surviving on their own in whatever location they were in.


Replying to myself: Malta: Depends on when they close the borders and how hard their dozen battleship will go page 51 on immigrants, id say they either survive well or die horribly and become Trollta.

[Noah O.]

Shoot, there was a really good XKCD picture for this in What If, but I can't figure out how to get the picture out of the book. Ah well, It's in the "Global Windstorm" section.

[Kay]

Forgive me if this point has been made; I read a lot of the topic but not all of it.
It seems to me that the biggest problem a lot of these areas would ultimately would be that closing boarders would be pointless. Even if they 100% blocked out all possible human carriers, the rash would still eventually get through because it can jump species. Infected rodents would wipe out most groups that tried to isolate unless they were as cut off as Iceland to the point that no other mammals could possibly get through.
This is why the other nations that have survived outside of Iceland have such high immunity rates: it's not that little communities that were isolated managed to survive, it's that they just so happened to have the right set of conditions present for the few people that were immune to survive long enough to gather and form their own communities.
It's another reason why, isolationist, doomsday communities at year 0 would fair poorly. A single infected mouse or rat contaminating their food stores could potentially infect a large chunk of their populations. In most parts of the world, isolation simply wouldn't be enough.

[Peeves]

Now, an Akula class submarine... does Russia still have any of them? They might come in handy during the rash for a short period of time. Longer than the carrier anyway.

sorry, noob replying to your comment:
ok, so I have read World War Z, and I totally agree. submarine life is the way to go. if you get soil and seeds, you can use the vitamin D treatment light as a sun and grow your own food(as far as I know). the only problem I can procure is energy. in WWZ, the sub was nuclear, so it had like a crazy amount of energy. but some don't. my solution would be to make a wave turbine on the sub. when moving through the water, this turbine creates electricity. but basic physics tells us that this cannot produce enough electricity to power a sub, especially when the power is also used for other things. so I also propose covering the top of the submarine with solar panels and installing collapsible wind turbines for when the sub surfaces.
Note: the turbine would most definitely show up on radar.


Note: this assumes an abundance of time, resources, and know-how. this would be rare to the average citizen in SSSS.
also, Mutated sealife might be a problem...

[Hrollo]

I see society in the Maghreb and other middle eastern areas breaking down to what they were before any european labels were forced on them: Simply tribes surviving on their own in whatever location they were in.

Hm, no.

The meditterean south and middle east have had sedentary civilization centers *long* before European colonialism showed up.

[JaoLao]

So, perhaps this is more suited to another topic, but it has been briefly discussed here, so feel free to split the topic if deemed necessary.

Before the actual cleansing infographics were uploaded, the process wasn't exactly clear and it seems that, at the beginning, some of the discussion took some more liberties when discussing surviving possibilities. So I've been thinking: in what other ways could cleansing occur? Not necessarily cleasing per se, but what are other possible structures in surviving (perhaps coexisting with?) trolls, giants and beasts? I mean, maybe this is the best method for the known world, but it could be rather pointless in other ecosystems.

I'm mostly rambling through first, seeing what I can quickly sketch and, hopefully, get some commentary from the creative minds of yours. Heat was briefly mentioned and seems like a good point for speculation, but what about other climate factors? Could dry climates affect the behaviour of trolls?

About deserts and the water situation: perhaps small communities could stock up on water, planning big, dreadful trips involving losses and facing the river trolls to restock?

Back on the cold: how exactly is the cold important in dealing with trolls? This is rather vague. Is it the lack of shelter? Is it the lack of snacks? Is it really necessary to have extreme colds for both of these options to work? Without shelter - from the demolition bit - beasts might have a easier time, but wouldn't like 0 or -3 degrees Celsius be enough to kill most people? Assuming, of course, trolls' cold vulnerability have any semblance to humans'.  How long does the cold have to last to do the trick? How about the not so rare 0º Celsius going on the northern part of Sahara, is one night too short?

Perhaps different trolls have different down times and that's where the longer winter comes in really handy in the known world, but perhaps one could use those short bursts of freezing temperature to organize hunts to individual or small bands of trolls? Would exposure to cold not severe enough to kill a troll weaken it all the same?

I understand this is all conjecture and not supported by any evidence on the comic right now, but it has its own appeal too, right? :p

(btw, hello folks)

[Mayabird]

It's a good point that there's very incredibly little that we (or the characters in the story, really) know about how the monsters beyond actually operate.  People just happened to pick up that fire+freezing=dead and electricity+bullets=dead and cats=good and kept doing that because they had something that worked and probably didn't have the resources or people to risk figuring out if anything else worked.  One thing that may keep Our Motley Heroes in funds enough to explore might be that they learn some important thing about how trolls or whatever operate that's really obvious and easy in hindsight, only no one was able to figure it out before, and that makes cleansing easier. 

Heck, could be they accidentally discover (after crashing through a former perfume shop maybe) that a particular smell repels trolls (maybe not giants or beasts, but trolls), but people can spray their trains, boats, walls, tanks, whatever with it and make travel and exploration easier.  Step 1 of cleansing would be "unleash the stink bombs."  And then further travels to distant lands find people who discovered the scent thing decades ago. 

[FrogEater]

Right, this ignorance makes us closer to them. We also know trolls don't like light(even moonlight curbs their appetite) and that's pretty all.

Who knows, we might learn more from Siv ?

Wonder, too, how they react to heavy metal ? :-D

[kjeks]

Wonder, too, how they react to heavy metal ? :-D

Depends on the genre. If it's "depressive suicidal ambient black metal", "progressive technical modern death core" or progressive ambient blackend thrash metal" (or anything else using more than two adjectives) I would assume it puts them to a kind of rage which only could be stopped by a thick bullet rain. I would react the same as the poor beasts. But maybe they like it and treating them with special heavy metal genres creats friendship between humanity and beasts

If that counted, Wacken, Summer Breeze, Slowenian Metal Days or Hellfest would truly survive because they produce enough sound to get beasts and the likes convinced not to destroy the humans working the music.

[Hrollo]

Or maybe they can't go beyond "music = humans = go that way".

(That's how it works in The Walking Dead, music attracts zombies, no matter which kind of music).