IC Thread | Application Template | Map | Map Roster
Current Year: 2047
Current Year: 2047
It is January 1st, 2047. The world is entering its twelfth consecutive year of economic contraction. The material and financial halves of the economy are both locked in a deep, deep depression - deep enough that it is beginning to gnaw at the physical foundations of globalisation and challenge the structural integrity of civilization as we know it.
The crisis of the 21st century, as many are beginning to call it, is a multi-faceted one. Debts and interest payments lie unpaid to debtors with no hope of future repayment, steadily growing unemployment in the developed world is putting governments in increasingly-precarious financial positions and the developing world’s level of economic modernisation is regressing. The much-anticipated "shale revolution" was not as lucrative as hoped, and global electricity production has slumped even as demand continues to rise with urbanisation and population growth. The most frequently-blamed (and also actually valid) causes of the current crisis include the growth of private debt outstripping the growth of income, the failure of modern industrial capitalism to adapt to a zero-growth economy in response to appearing resource constraints, a sharp decline in the cost-effectiveness of transportation, and a declining energy return on investment of extracted fossil fuels combined with a lack of widespread alternatives to them.
The last of these causes has very serious implications – ones so serious they would be inconceivable to the vast majority of people were they to be made aware of them, even after twelve years of depression and the economically-tumultuous, stagnation-ridden decades preceding it. Regardless of this, the energy crisis will only worsen.
Coal’s heyday as a source of electricity generation is a decade and a half behind it, with lower-grade, browner lignitious and subbituminous varieties now being used for electricity generation after the depletion of higher-grade varieties in the Earth’s crust necessitated the shift. With solar and wind power being impractical means of sustaining a technologically-sophisticated society due to their low energy yields, developing countries bent on industrialisation and developed countries which made irresponsible energy policy decisions in the decades prior are being forced to rely on natural gas and increased extraction of coal to meet their still-growing energy needs.
These solutions, however, are only temporary ones, and as the societies employing them continue to go down the path of dependency on increasingly-finite resources they will suffer from diminishing means to engage in the infrastructural overhauls necessary to change trajectory. As the constant brownouts will soon show, much of the world is stuck in an economic death spiral that it will never be able to climb out of.
The failure of both government initiatives and the free market to even remotely alleviate the 12 year-long economic crisis demonstrates that the spiralling has not only already begun, but that the Earth’s population need only wait for its completion to see its results. No nuclear renaissance or massive expansion of hydroelectric power generation, even if it weren't hampered by the current state of the economy, would be able to replace fossil fuel energy generation fast enough to prevent a massive contraction of the economy and a transition to a lower energy-yield society, while the feats of engineering necessary to put them in place would only consume more energy during an energy crisis.
Industrial society, in its current form, will not survive the changes of the coming few decades. Multiple catastrophes, many as ancient as drought, disease and crop failure, will join the crisis of the 21st century as industrial civilization's EROI freefall renders it unable to manage incoming systemic problems properly. There there will no doubt be a huge amount of turmoil and, in the vast majority of the world's heavily-populated regions with a population above the land's carrying capacity, a reliance upon diminishing imports and little to no pre-existing use of hydroelectric or nuclear power generation, there will be mass death regardless of organised turmoil.
It is January 1st, 2047. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
Time of Monsters is a "nation" (loosely defined) RP where you guide an entity that controls a piece of territory (could be an actual nation, a local government in a federal sovereign state, a big corporation like the TVA that controls land use and energy production, etc) through an energy crisis that will, over the course of several decades, ultimately lead to the end of the modern era and of industrial society as we know it. Feel free to be as destructive with what you've created as possible, have civil wars, play as the sides and offer to have newcomers to the RP pick up a side if you want.
The goal is not really to "win", but to narrate your way through a Rome or Maya-style gradual breakdown of the system that hardly even culminates in a bang (as the thing being destroyed was on its last legs by that point anyway) - for this reason, feel free to RP as a government that comes out of the ashes of a collapsing one you were RPing previously.
Multiple players are able to RP in the same piece of territory if they're on different administrative levels, the US Federal Government and the State Government of Alabama can have different players and it'll be marked on the map. The interaction between countries and their subnational entities can be a big part of the RP, if you as RPers wish to go down that avenue.
Also, the IC thread is structured. A page of the IC will take up a specific number of years, and those specific years will have different events (including regional ones, ie famine in Africa and India) as the collapse progresses. The goal here is to have an already-defined narrative that we can work through together instead of being confused about what we want to post and completely aimless. There is a roster of IC content by page in the post below this one.
