How gloomy and desolate do you make your settings when beginning a campaign?

[Shorty Lickens]

Is your version of North America a complete hell hole, dark and scary and miserable everywhere? Or do you describe it to players as a lush green wilderness with tons of exotic flora and fauna? I only ask because the books describe most sections as a horrible wasteland but it seems to me with not many humans running around topside for a couple hundred years, and the Rifts constantly dumping in all sorts of alien life forms, anything outside a major city could be quite lively and perhaps even beautiful. To be honest in many of my games I usually describe it as a vast, desolate wasteland, like the whole continent was once a giant city and now theres just garbage, litter, and rubble everywhere. I could probably change that in my next session.

[Grazzik]

Just looking at the environmental aesthetic of Rifts Earth, it's pretty lush in my games. Locally, it can be whatever you want it to be, but globally, the planet is awash in jungles, forests, grasslands, meadows, marshes, swamps, etc. There are blasted zones, deserts, rocky expanses, etc. but they are all over the place IRL too. Climate patterns may be different on Rifts Earth and this may change the landscape accordingly, but Nature finds a way if you leave it alone for a while. Given a couple decades or so of Cataclysm, another century of Dark Ages, and two centuries of gradual recovery, that gives a lot of time for Nature to recover or dimensional invasive species (both flora and fauna) to take root. While dimensional invasive species are abundant from a scenery perspective, they don't often play a major factor in gameplay. If PCs are locals, it's presumed they probably take what they see for granted and ignore it. When they travel, it is likely they would come across something new and might take notice.

I use weather as a chaos agent - tornado clusters, firestorms, blanket lightning, mega-acid rain, etc. This is where the weird can come to play. For example, PCs come across rows of deep furrows neatly parallel to each other? Must have been an interdimensional gravity wave storm or "wobbly"... get caught on the crest of the wave and have every atom in your body torn apart, one foot to either side and it's just the worst earthquake you've ever survived. However, the troughs of the wave are as bad as the peaks, except, instead of being torn apart, atoms are compressed to a highly dense state. Rare super strong waves could generate some interesting finds...

Yellowstone and the volcano orgy of the Cataclysm is a big environmental variable that impacts NAm depending on how you incorporate it into the setting. To account for all the other volcanoes, I use 2x the posted RL ashfall forecasts for a Yellowstone super event which results in no more than 6mm on the eastern seaboard. This is basically Nature's fertilizer. As I understand it, ashfall over 100mm makes the soil sterile, but it eventually bounces back as Nature creeps in. Any ashfall less than 500mm will breakdown over 150 years to become farmable land if cleared. So, good to go by 110 PA. Over 500mm, it will take a lot longer, but after ~300 years, the devastation from the Yellowstone event would be substantially reduced.

Radiation from nuclear weapon strikes would have dissipated within 50 years, but the real danger of radiation would be old power plants that may have pockets of radioactive material. Even still, 300 years on, it would be safe to visit and Nature would have reclaimed the sites. Without the necessary sensors, low-tech PCs might not even know a nuclear ruin is there until their villagers start getting mysteriously sick if the radioactive pockets are disturbed or they drink highly contaminated water.

Exposed modern concrete and asphalt would have long degraded. Exposed metal rusts. The wildcard is mega-materials - how abundant they were and how long they last, but the books say that over 300 years pre-Rifts ruins are mined for all the mega-materials where there isn't some badness keeping people away.

The one ubiquitous aspect is pre-Golden Age plastic everywhere. It ain't going anywhere unless you have some sort of alien thing emerge that eats it. Think about Lazlo environmental ads featuring a wild Fury Beetle with a single use plastic straw stuck up its nose... However, I always presume that sometime between now and the Golden Age, all plastic use switches to biodegradable plastics. This means things like hovercars, laptops, and such would have long broken down, leaving behind little pockets of metals, silicon, and glass (assuming glass isn't replaced by thin sheets of transparent wood - yes, it exists). Ancient parkades would be mining motherlodes. However, plastic take-out food containers from today might still be gathered up by scavengers 400 years from now and reused in some fashion.