Games you've run.

[Colonel Wolfe]

I has seen the Ideas of "Shopping runs" going in to a metro area and trying to Avoid the enmy to get supplies. Bullets, clothing ect, all needed, all hard to come by in your hobbit hole you live in.

[LJ]

When I ran a game some years ago, I had all the early missions set up like a tutorial in a video game.

First Mission.
-Go around and take out power/phone lines.

The NPC leader was a survivalist who had a bunch of gear including TNT, so the PCs first decided to try and make stuff go boom during the middle of the day, and found out that that brought a lot of attention on them, so they switched over to night time ops using normal tools to bring the lines down.

Second Mission
-Deal with nearby bugging facility.

Fairly close to the PCs was a mall that was used for bugging humans/sending the unbugged ones further into bugged territory to get bugged. The PCs tried a couple times to sneak around and take out powerlines by themselves, but the place was occupied fairly well, so the PCs went onto lesson 2. How to recruit people and plan raids.

Etc etc

[LJ]

Another good way to start up a campaign is by having the PCs start off by having little or no gear, and they just escaped from a large Splatterpunk gang or from silkworm zombies bringing them to get bugged. Any gear they have was grabbed from one of their captors. Something like this....

All of you had been captured by the Reaver Gang, and stripped of all your possessions, even your clothes. In little more than rags, you were then shoved into the back of a truck on your way to be sold as slaves, when all of a sudden the convoy was ambushed by bugs. <Player Name> you managed to use this to your advantage and surprised one of the guards and took his weapon. Escaping into the wilderness during the Chaos, you try to put as much distance between yourselves and both groups of would-be pursuers...

Then as the PCs run and try to outwit their pursuers, have them stumble upon an abandoned farmhouse or small shopping area that hasn't been thoroughly looted.

[Shawn Merrow]

The group I was in worked out of a small farm in SE Washington. We did odd jobs for NORAD and just tried to stay alive. When the game ended due to time conflicts we were on the way back from doing a recon of Seattle.