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alexsunny123 wrote:Hello,

What do y'all think North America looked like during the Dark Age? I've wondered what stopped some large government from forming in North America within a generation or two after the Cataclysm and it's said that some point in North America always had some kind of technological/industrial base.

thanks
alexsunny

General Sawyer's NEMA unit descendants are slowly expanding a perimeter around Chi-Town, salvaging what they can, adhering what industry they can rebuild to provide them with replacement weapons as their NEMA hardware wears out.
THe frrst mage communities are forming, as people with the ''talent' gang up together and share what they're learned about magic with each other. The same with psychics, who are beginning to codify, unofficially, the talent they're observing in themselves and others. .
It's a race between adapting and dying out. Many communities fail and are lost, along with the knowledge of the high-tech that is the key to to survival. Often the last thing many communities are able to do is get off envoys with technical knowledge. hoping to deliver the blueprints of weapons and equipment to other more industrialized communities that might be able to make use of them.

i would assume that much like the early medieval period in europe, it was less that stuff prevented big polities from forming (because IRL those did) but more that the big organized states that did arise were unstable and limited in their ability to hold and project power. which led to those states rising, splintering, falling, and reforming themselves frequently while equilibrium was being found.

Consider...yes, a large percentage of the populations died-out in the coming.
Consider that a larger percentage of URBAN humans died as a result of the events of the coming. (Due to the breakdown of transportation grids, electrical grids, communication grids, etc.)
For the first few years, most rural residents would have migrated to areas where they perceived a greater degree of safety from raiders and scary beasties out of nightmare.
This would remove people from the soil, and result in less food coming in, leading to starvation and illness.

For the first few decades after the coming, the population of humans would plummet from billions to tens of millions. Disease and barbarism would be rampant.
You would have some areas where circumstances were such that populations, availability of food, access to tech, and industry would allow a faster recovery, and possibly much reduced attrition rate (maybe 70% instead of 90+%) Chi town, for example.
For others, you may have populations where innate connections to the flow of energies allowed them to recover faster due to burgeoning magical abilities.
For areas where the native humans were more flexible where non-natives were concerned, again, there was the possibility of a faster recovery due to co-operation.

Alternatively, there would be areas where the humans (with the exception of those kept as a breeding food source, or slaves) would have been wiped-out, and the invaders grow stronger.

The irony is that a small population of aggressive invaders could technically wipe-out humanity had they wanted to...even in places where firearms outnumber people... Because a 1 MDC invader cannot be killed by a barrage of the heaviest civilian weapons, but a weapon *it* carries can insta-kill almost any human if it hits!