 What kind of things could end human civilization as we know it? Zombies, nuclear war, a deadly virus, climate change, sex bots becoming so lifelike that we stop having sex with each other and the population crashes? Sounds like fun. Post-apocalyptic settings have been around basically forever and they have a ton of overlap with science fiction, dystopias, even fantasy on occasion. The basic premise is that human civilization has met with some sort of disaster that killed off most of the population and rendered our modern way of life untenable. There are a hundred different ways for civilization to end from nuclear war to an asteroid strike to a zombie plague to an alien invasion. The popularity of these each ebbs and flows based on what society fears, however, they're all well known by this stage. It's been a while since I last did this sort of exercise where rather than talking about world-building in a general sense I just craft a basic setting with you to help people understand the process a bit better. But before all that's a Sponsor thing. All right, I need to come up with an attention-grabbing advertisement for my new sponsor. What can I do to get the audience to pay attention to me? Maybe I should film impoverished children in an African slum with a sad song playing in the background. No, that would take too long. How about exploiting nostalgia? I could talk about Harry Potter and it- no, no, let's stay away from that for now. Dinosaurs? Everyone loves dinosaurs. I'll just get a life-sized T-Rex statue and slide down its back like Fred Flintstone. Oh, no, I'm out of time. I have to do the read now. Books AI is a veteran publishing house powered by a dedicated production team that's here to help you bring your books to life. They offer everything. Editing, layout design, proofreading, marketing, even distribution to stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. They'll also provide you with a manager to help you figure out how everything works and navigate the world of publishing. They even offer translation services, so your work can be read all over the world. If this doesn't work out for you, they have a 30-day money-back guarantee. They handle all the technical aspects of publishing so that you can focus on the important part, writing. Don't waste any more of your time trying to get publishers to notice you in a giant stack of manuscripts. Check out Books AI today. Well, at least I got all the pertinent information out there. Wait, I should do something with a monkey and a stick of dynamite. Do we have time for that? Today, we're obviously doing a post-apocalyptic setting where civilization has ended and only a few survivors remain. Something like Fallout or I Am Legend. This sort of thing has happened in the real world before. A lot of civilizations have fallen over the years and something else always pops up in its place sooner or later. If it's been 500 years since the world ended and there's still nothing but roving bandits and lone wanderers, something has gone wrong in your creative process. The main thing to keep in mind about a post-apocalyptic world is how the world ended and how that affects everything in the present. What parts of the world were hit hardest? What types of people managed to survive? What challenges does this all create for subsequent generations? With those basics out of the way, let's get to building a post-apocalyptic setting. First, ask yourself why you're doing this in the first place. Is it for a book, RPG campaign, just for fun, or something else? That should help you understand what parts to focus on. This world will be one made for a book since that simplifies things a bit. We only need to focus on the area where the story takes place. If we made an RPG, we'd need to go into detail about more areas to allow for greater flexibility in campaigns. For this world, we'll do something fun and have the world end from a deadly plague. Topical. There are a ton of ways to handle this, from a regular old superflu to a parasite that spreads through drinking water to a flesh-eating bacterium STD. You can broadly split all fictional diseases into two categories. Stuff that just kills everyone, and stuff that turns people into zombies. It's just those two. In this case, we'll go with a zombie-esque disease, since that's more fun and allows for more threats to persist into the future. However, zombie apocalypses are very unrealistic for several reasons. Namely that zombies only means of reproduction is also their apex predator and their food source. So we'll have to tweak things a little bit to make the world ending make sense. We also can't call them zombies, for some reason. We have to call them something like walkers, hosts, biters, the infected, or something else benign. I guess audiences can't take the word zombie seriously anymore. First, this disease will spread through the air and outright kill most of the people it infects. That way, when it spreads, all the death will damage human infrastructure and get rid of people important to stopping the spread or fighting the wave of undead, like doctors, politicians, and military personnel. Even those less important to containing it will start to clog up the medical system and mass deaths will cause chaos ranging from economic instability to riots and civil unrest. Those who don't die will turn into rabid monstrosities who want to eat human flesh. They won't be dead because that requires a higher suspension of disbelief, and it annoys me personally. This means they don't have to be hit in the head to kill them, and they can starve. As with all diseases, there will be a small chunk of the population who are immune to its effects, or at the very least, asymptomatic when infected. What this means is that it's more believable for the not-zombies to collapse human society here. There is some wiggle room to change things up from here, though. We could make it spread slowly enough that a vaccine is created, or so fast that no one even realizes what's happening before the world falls apart. Whatever the case, global civilization and trade collapses soon enough. Where does this disease begin? China is the cliched answer, though for good reason, since they have a giant population and a government that frequently engages in information blackouts. Having the disease start here, whether it's natural or man-made, makes sense. However, we'll start it somewhere else just for the sake of originality. Wherever it hits first will probably be hit hardest, and other countries will have the chance to prepare for the coming attack, but they'll also be hit by things like refugees and economic troubles. It's a double-edged sword. If it hits in a poor country with fewer medical resources first, it'll take longer to realize what's going on than if it hits a richer area. So we'll say that the disease begins in Brazil. It has a lot of poverty and corruption that would keep information from getting where it needs to go, but it's also a big country that's well connected to the rest of the world. Once the not-zombies break out there, there will be chaos. 200 million people will start fighting, dying, or fleeing. When the agricultural giant stops producing, the world's food supply will suddenly be constricted, raising prices all over the world. Imagine if two countries who produced 30% of the world's wheat exports went to war and stopped exporting. That would cause chaos in places that depend on food imports. Good thing that'll never happen, right? Those who flee will spread the disease even farther to the rest of South America for the poor people who left on foot, and as far away as the United States and Europe for those who managed to fly away. Small outbreaks might be contained, but eventually the whole crisis spirals out of control. Governments collapse, famine and disease spread, violence breaks out between humans, and all the while the not-zombies are growing around eating folks. By the end of this, 90 to 95% of the world's population will be dead. Some areas may be less affected due to luck, isolation, or vaccination, but civilization as we know it will be gone. So that's the apocalypse out of the way. What does the aftermath look like? If the setting is only a few months or years after everything ends, then things will still be in a chaotic flux. If generations have passed, then things will have settled down and calcified a bit. That goes the same no matter how the world ended. Whichever one you choose will largely depend on what the actual story will be about. Is it a grim dystopia about how awful things have become after the end of the neoliberal world order? Is it people trying to rebuild the old world? Build something better? A simple survival tale? Maybe a story of one small tribe of humans being conquered by a new imperialist power? The best setting for all these stories will be different. We'll set this around 40 years after the world ended since it gives me more room to play around with how things have changed. By now, most people will have come up with ways to deal with the not-zombies, assuming the disease didn't die out. They might have created and distributed vaccines, come up with treatments, or maybe they just kill everyone who gets infected. Whatever the case, the not-zombies are still around and, once in a while, they will cause problems. They won't end civilization again anytime soon, though. Unless, of course, the disease mutates and becomes more infectious than it used to be. Or if it develops resistance to old treatments. Or if the symptoms change and become harder to recognize. Or if the not-zombies start retaining some of their intelligence so they can form a rudimentary society of hunting packs. Maybe they could even turn from mindless beasts into humans who are just very angry and want to cause chaos. They'd still be able to talk and drive cars they would just run around acting violently high. Like this guy. A story that takes place long after the not-zombie apocalypse where the not-zombies start becoming a threat again due to their changing nature would be an interesting twist on the genre. After this long, new forms of governance will likely spring up in the ashes of the old world. People will have banded together for survival, the instant everything fell apart, and while this may have been primitive to start, it will evolve over time. In some areas they might be in small tribal groups, in others they may have formed proper city-states, and in others they could have formed large nations. As with the real world, the governments of these places will range from Athenian democracy to representative democracy to military dictatorships to absolute monarchies. For the sake of keeping this video focused, we're going to primarily work on a single nation that's risen in the remnants of the old world. We'll call it the Republic of Furgaga and we'll put it on the west coast of the United States. Why there? Because it's a great spot for agriculture, it has natural resources like oil, and the ocean allows for trade. It would be one of the best spots to try and rebuild. Furgaga will be a democracy, but a sort of... guided democracy. The specifics aren't super important unless you're making a political thriller or something like that. The general idea is that the ruling class is in no real danger of being removed from power through some combination of gerrymandering, voter restriction, and Byzantine election rules. If you want some examples, look at Singapore or certain U.S. states like Wisconsin. There's plenty of potential conflicts to explore there without even exploring the rest of the world. The mountains will separate Furgaga from the rest of North America, making them a sort of free marches with little or no government control. This means that there'll be a great place for the not-zombies to wander around without being killed. It also makes them a great place for anti-government rebels, criminals, and anyone else who wants to escape the reach of the state to hang out. This, combined with geography, will make trading with anyone to the east difficult and expensive, and whichever side controls it will have a buffer to protect them from the other. So both sides will have a vested interest in pacifying the region. How successful this is will depend on a variety of factors, but it will always be a priority, and both sides will try different ways to take control from the other. Bribing local chieftains, military expeditions, sending over locals as colonists, there's a lot of different ways to colonize new regions that have been used by real empires over the centuries, and I'd encourage you to look into it yourself if you want to figure out how this sort of thing might work. So here we have about eight or nine different storylines to choose from and plenty of flexibility with the setting itself while simultaneously making it a well-defined place. From here we only need to worry about the smaller details like language, culture, and the specifics of economics. Not that those are unimportant, adding them as what gives worlds dimension, just that they come last, after the foundation is set. Now, it's difficult to talk about the end of the world without thinking about things like nuclear power plants. See, if a plant isn't shut down and no one is there to maintain it, it'll melt down quickly, spilling deadly radiation from miles and miles around, and there are 440 of them all over the world. In a truly apocalyptic event, many of them would probably melt down and coat the earth in alpha particles, so it might be good to consider which areas might be no go zones for the people living there. Unless of course your setting is thousands of years after the end of the world, in which case most of the radiation will have dissipated. If you want to just ignore things like this, most people won't begrudge you for it, not even me. If you want to take a moment to think about it though, you make the setting that much deeper. People ask me how I can analyze things like this and that's how. I consider every possible angle. For the sake of simplicity, we'll say that the power plants were shut down without issue, except for those in China. This will have spread radiation throughout most of East Asia, rendering Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and maybe some other regions uninhabitable for humans or animals. The people there wouldn't have just laid down and died though, they would have fled the area to somewhere safe. Some might have tried crossing the ocean and wound up in places like Polynesia, Australia, or the Philippines. Most would have taken the easier land routes into Central Asia, India, or Siberia. Those would be dangerous treks, and a large percentage of them would have died along the way from exposure, starvation, or violence. Some would have moved on from the first place they stopped, either because it was too crowded or because the locals forced them out. Some of them will go on to the Middle East, some might make it as far as Europe, and some of those who set out to sea might make it to the Americas. When you're talking about 30% of the human population, there's a lot of room for someone to get lucky. So basically, a lot of East Asian people will be entering the population of the rest of the world. Most everywhere you go in this post-apocalypse, there should be a population of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. people living there. Maybe this could even influence things like culture and language. How much it does that will depend on how many people reach the new areas and what sort of economic status they achieve, but it will likely change things. Even something as small as the people of Furgaga using a few Mandarin swear words can hammer that in. Now take everything I just said about nuclear power plants and apply it to other things like dangerous chemicals, heavy metals in the environments, oil spills, cold dust in the water supply, plastic pollution, and climate change. All of it will affect the world going forward. We all pay for the sins of our ancestors. And we'll leave it there for now. There's obviously an endless amount of depth we could add here, but part of world building is knowing when to stop. If you're not careful, you'll never get started on the more important part of your project, or you'll start tweeting about how students at Hogwarts used to shit on the floor. How would you add on to the setting we just built here today? Let me know down below. Brainstorming helps you to get better at it yourself. Also, subscribe to my channel and my other one. I'm trying to get that off the ground still. See you later. Bye. All of you are great. If you want to get your name up here, then consider becoming a patron. If you can't do that, then you could also become a YouTube channel member. Or just like the video, comment, and subscribe to share it around, and help me eat food this month. Yeah, thanks. Goodbye.