OK, so I've been reading this thread an any ideas I have come up have probably already been posted/suggested by others, but I thought that maybe someone could create a map of the world showing any possible locations of surviving communities, just so we can get a picture of what the whole world looks like? I know people have made maps of smaller areas, but that could be quite interesting.
I'm thinking about it and should probably have some free time over the next two weeks, so hey, why not. Given the sizes of possible survival communities, that would have to be a really huge map, just so that it could capture all those tiny specs of red. Or perhaps there could be arrows pointing to general regions on Earth map and "zoom-ins" on the margins.
On another note, having just caught up with the thread (37 pages since I've last been here :'( ), I've been thinking about some other ways people may've survived. So far, all of propositions were static, permanently inhabited areas, save for mention of Mongolians and aircraft carrier groups. But what if some people would manage to eke out a living as a nomadic community?
Aha - this is gonna be a long post.
Imagine this scenario: everything goes to hell and some people perform a GTFO, running off to the countryside. We can assume those are the immune, as the Rash-affected don't have time to run. Now, however, those runaways have a problem: while they may have some means of transportation and thus shelter, they probably don't have much in way of food or water. So what do they do? Basically, they have two options:
- hunt in the wild (and we know now that some game animals, like deer, have survived)
- scavenge from villages and cities (which would kill off any non-immunes left v. quickly and would require much stealth, but as the team has shown so far, you can walk in and out of a city without dying)
Over time, those groups of survivors would bump into each other and join forces, as this means more people to hunt/scavenge, to fix stuff, watch over others and so on and so forth, not to mention more genetic diversity. The cars they used to get away from the city start to break down and run out of petrol, but there are some ways to counter that. If they find some immune horses, they can use them to pull the cars (now I have an image of horse-drawn caravan in my head) or abandon the machines alltogether and loot some shops for lightweight tents, possibly with immune animals to carry the stuff for them. Perhaps, if they have electric car, some know-how and luck, they can loot solar panels off some house and fit them on to the car's roof. And of course, they can use bicycles (anyone noticed how underused bicycles are in any post-apo?).
For the first year, the main food source is probably what they manage to find in cities - they probably don't know how to hunt at this point - and this is also where all their tech and spare parts come from. However, over time there's less and less of ready-to-eat food to go by and hunting starts to be main way to eat. Any animal that can be taken in - dogs, cats, chicken - is, and soon the cats' value is discovered. Water can be filtered - again, filters would be looted - and, later, cooked. Perhaps the survivors find some cattle and so it accompanies them. Perhaps they grow some food on the backs of pickup trucks or roofs of other cars. In any case, as there is less and less working tech to go by, the survivors are slowly gearing down to baser tech levels. They are always on the move, for several reasons:
- they need to find new hunting places;
- they want to avoid trolls;
- they are aggressively looking for tech to replace what's breaking down.
By the year 90, I imagine such a nomadic community to look thusly:
- huge "main group", moving through what was once rural areas, keeping their distance from cities. Children and food animals are with them, as are all the technicians (doctors, manufacturers etc) and people who take care of cattle and "roof farms".
- "defenders", whose job is to protect the main group. Best armed of the bunch, and if there's not much weaponry to go around, the only armed force. They use cats and immune dogs.
- "front watch", checking whether the area the main group is going to is safe, and "back watch", checking whether there's nothing following them. Similar to scouts of Nordic Alliance. Also use cats.
- "looters", daredevils who venture into the city to search for anything the community may find a use for. Value stealth above everything else and have cats to alert them.
- "hunters", who provide everyone else with food. Likely to be one of bigger groups and may sometimes spend days away from the main group.
As to their tactics against trolls: even if they have guns, they are sure to run out of bullets rather quickly, therefore those nomades prefer to avoid trolls rather than combat them directly. However, if things go south, their weponry are likely to be some bows, blade-on-a-stick kind of weapons and large, immune dogs trained to combat trolls. As everyone is immune, the vermin are not as big a problem as in Scandinavia, but if they eat food, cats are there to kill them.
As to nomads' magic and beliefs, it depends, of course, what region they're in. It's also likely that the group ends up so diverse that none major religion reemerges and instead they believe that, for example, their ancestors work through the mages.
So yeah, there's that. Any thoughts?