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The Cataclysm arrives. Keeping with where you live now, how well did your city/town/community fare? What's your probability for survival?

Me, I'm in Fayetteville, NC. Given the massive tectonic activity, the giant tsunamis, and the fact that the I-95 corridor (which Fayetteville sits on) is the new coastline, I'd say this city is toast. Survivability: 2%, if that. Survivors would then have to deal with, well, dinosaurs, mainly. The only glimmer of hope would be to make it to Charlotte, which remains relatively unscathed (due to it's MDC financial institutes), and NEMA happens to trek through there on their way to Chicago.

Hampton/Virginia Beach/Norfolk......gone.

Cleveland became queens harbor

A small nondescript town in SW Indiana...Swallowed up by the magic zone. No real detail given in the books. Though seeing as how the ENTIRE town sits over top of underground coal mines, any significant seismic activity would cause the whole region to collapse into a massive sink hole. Chances aren't good. Seeing as how we're roughly 5 hours east of the St. Louis rift, chances are even worse.

Florida... Glub glub, glub....

Hampton Roads 'with the fishes'.

Denver under ash an snow

An hour's drive west of what will someday be Lazlo.

Probably safe from flooding & eathquake...but the erruption of ley lines which "run thick" along the shore of Lake Ontario are likely to flatten the town. Since it's December, my family and I starve to death as we try to make it northward to my in-laws (unless, of course, my daughter's latent magic powers are awakened...)

I'm in a small farming city/community about 1.5 hours west of what will be Lazlo. I think this place will be turned into ruins.

Ottawa. Rioting, looting and collapse of society. By the time of Rifts it is a small "lawless town" of about 3,000 wild men and D-bees. Still, at least it wasn't built over a super-volcano or smashed by tsunamis.

I'm in Lazlo ...... I mean I can walk to the valley where it will be founded
And I have plans in place on where to go and how to stay alive.......

Ok. It wasn't looking so good there but I see we finally have some potential survivors...

1.5 hours south of what will become Tolkeen. Looks like I might survive.

For my hometown, Ozone Park New York (a part of Queens), tsunami's would have meant very little hope of survival- and whoever did would eventually become Madhaven mutants.

As for my current town, Natick Massachusetts, not sure really. It's about 15 miles west of Boston, and that town is bye-bye in the same manner as NYC and most of the East Coast. I guess there is a slightly better chance that this town would have survived the initial destruction.

I live in SE WA and have the Cascade volcanoes to the West of me and Yellowstone to the East. I doubt its going to be a good day in my neighborhood.

New York City is the worst hit by the Cataclysm. Several buildings fall, cascading down onto the streets of Manhattan; those that did not completely collapse, leaned against & prop up a few others in some mockery of destruction. The day the Cataclysm hit, the city's populace was an all-time record: ten million souls. Tourists, day-traders, families, sightseers, locals, and more, died in the madness, while others were trampled by the fleeing mobs or simply murdered by those driven insane.
Lady Liberty was a mute witness when the wave that struck, engulfing her up to her very chin. The groan of her structure, almost human-like, was heard for MILES. But somehow she still stands.
Staten Island bore the brunt of the tsunami, washed clean by the water's forces. Later, survivors & explorers told tales of the bleakness of whole former residential areas literally leveled to ground level.

Almost half of Queens is subsumed in the tsunami that rises out at sea & strikes the southern coastline of the borough. Coney Island literally vanishes under the wave that crashes down. The famous Wonder Wheel of Astroland Park buckles & eventually is swept inland like a cast-off toy of a petulant child. The Cyclone, having stood for over a century, shatters like so much kindling. Few structures survive, if any. The trestles that once supported the subway trains wash away like wet sand, sweeping on-track trains along for the ride to oblivion. A few of the domiciles actually survive intact; many homes that were bought out cheaply & replaced by 2- & 3-story apartment 'homes' remain standing with nothing more than shattered windows, while older homes that were simply patched-repaired over the decades or illegally converted to multiple apartments are erased in seconds.

But the worst to come wasn't when the waters finally retreated. When the bodies of those swept up were left to decompose in the daylight, scattered for miles. Crushed & imploded cars were piled up like so much flotsam as far as Atlantic Terminal and the Staples Concert Center. Even the survivors, reduced to scavenging and rading for a soggy uncooked hotdog weren't as bad.

It was the monsters. Nightmares on wings, raptor's-legs, hooves, spider-bodies, and more, fangs and claws, fire and blood, weird magic-like energy and weapons of living, screaming bone and worse.....

LA gone.

Omaha. Far enough away from Yellowstone that we might survive and right smack in the middle of the miswest "dead zone" where ley-lines fear to tred.

Current CE game is based in and around it.

South-Central Michigan, about an hour west of Ann Arbor. Right in heavy Ley Line territory. I'm probably screwed.

Go go google maps. ^^

Tiny farm town in south-east Iowa. Thoroughly decimated due to the major earthquake zone south of here, and then buried under 6 feet of ash because we are directly in the jet stream flow.
However, if the local Amish survived, a century later the soil would be so rich in nutrients that it would grow almost anything.

Yup........exactly where i live

Outstanding. Of the 18 or so people that posted a reply, only a few mention even a remote possibility of survival. The purpose of this topic is to illustrate how massively horrible the Great Cataclysm was. I mean, it wiped out two thirds of the world's population.

Well, speaking on my end, with the recent storms we've had (like Hurricane/'Super-Storm' Sandy), it wasn't that hard to picture what I described. I also remember a few hypothetical disaster programs that detailed what would happen if a Tsunami hit New York. It would funnel right in. After that, sprinkle a little imagination & voila'.
Glad I could contribute.

BRONX NEW YORK tsunami's would have meant very little hope of survival- and whoever did would eventually become Madhaven mutants.

I also live in a basin and we have air problems from wildfires during the summer when all that crud gets trapped here. I'm sure with all those volcanoes going off in the Cascades the air quality will become rather dangerous for a few days at least.

Charlotte NC survives to become the barbarian infested jewel of the Dinosaur Swamp.

Huh, that seems... familiar!

I said might survive. The explosion wouldn't get us, but the ashfall wold make things very nasty, very fast. In-game, respiratory damage, skin lesions and other nastiness (and eventually cancer) are already happening. The infantry have it the worst, as even EBA starts to fail as filters clog and corrosive particles eat away at suit seals. Powered armor, bots and tanks last longer, but they constant upkeep erodes even them, leading to repairs getting harder and harder to make.

It's pretty much impossible to survive outdoors without magic, EBA, or inside a sealed PA suit or vehicle. We've found whole families choked to death, huddled together in their basements. Nothing is alive save renegade military or NEMA scum, and prowling supernatural predators. We'd like to set up a convoy and evac the area to Chicago, but conditions are still far too extreme to keep any of the couple hundred or so civilians we've saved alive for even a couple days. Not to mention all the monsters that would stand between us and a mere chance at salvation. So, we dig in at the underground STRATCOM base and Offut facilities (greatly expanded in the 2nd Cold War) and keep slugging it out day after day, hoping the sky clears.

Calgary, Alberta. Says it all...

What a bummer.

Yea. Even if I had survived the initial earthquakes and ash clouds, I surely would have perished when that ginormous rift opened up.

Chi-Town!!! (by way of Elmhurst, Illinois.) I'd say better than fifty-fifty...

And I think we have a winner! That is, if Devil's Gate doesn't get you.

Biggest permanent rift. The first 1 or 2 weeks St. Louis is told to be pretty stable compared to most places. So if I could get out in that time, might be able to live. After the Arch becomes the gate. So long...

And that could make for a pretty epic scenario: Getting out of St. Louis alive!

Notafraid2die, now that sounds like a movie! ^^

Actually that would be an AWESOME 30 minute mini-movie at the beginning of a Rifts movie taking place around Saint Louis. With time the huge block of time passing between the two.

Just checked the map in RMB. The blue area's that indicate heavy magic activity basically make a circle around my entire home county, but take out everything surrounding me. What the heck? What makes my little chunk of the world so special that it get's left out, while everything around it is suddenly magical? It's discrimination I tell you.

Philadelphia- basically i'm fish food! I ran a CE campaign years ago with some friends that lived near Three Mile Island, according to rough map estimates the Tidal Waves never reached that far inland so we started there. There was a massive Flotsam "Wall" stretching accross the horizon and the reactor complex (which was still working then.. but converted to clean Fusion.. GM privledge!) had... vanished to be replaced by a massive Fairie Ring/Stone Circle- but it was still sending out power to the area somehow. My PCs and the tiny NEMA garrison protected that a bit before striking Westward... Then there was that dragon and the Necromancer nursery...

Look at giant wall of water is heading towards me, well this is going to suck.

Hometown is Asheville (Ash). So I'll be in a fade town if I moved back there before 2098. Currently living in Ho Chi Minh City so I have to wait for Rifts Southeast Asia to come out in 2040 to see what happens

Well I work about 30 minutes east from Toronto, (add another 15 minutes east to that if I'm home). So I might be ok, as long as the power plants don't explode at Darlington or Pickering *fingers crossed and praying*
I don't think my city is mentioned anywhere in the books unless you count the one piece of art. In Rifts Canada they show a picture of some D-Bee trading post, you see a bumper sticker or something on the front of the counter. It either has Osha or shawa or something to that effect, someone help me out here been a while since I read that book? Either way it stands for Oshawa, which is where I live, and I assume that means that someone survived and trekked out to the trading post and left it there, that or Ramon just put it there as a joke, maybe he was still living there at the time.

Wait I forgot, everyone on the boards claim that art isn't "canon", I'm doooooommmmmed!

In the suburbs north of Denver and east of Boulder. Assuming I were to survive (and still be living in 2098 anyway) then I would probably end up with the people who founded Hope (and subsequently the Colorado Baronies) at the site of Greeley to the northeast of here.

I'll go with you and we can get the other poor canadians in this thread too. if they die we can always use their bodies to lure animals in and kill the animals...err did I say out loud??

The pickering plant is offline now..just don't die or you'll be bait for the few wild animals left...

Guess this means the same for the antelope valley? I want to check this game out eventually.

Back in the day our GM ran a pretty cool game. We were an elite scouting parting sent ahead of the main convoy that was heading out. Our job was to report back an hostile activity, possible ambush sites, etc. and to secure supplies for the convoy.

I was the commando OCC (M-Spec or something like that) and I ended up getting a pair of bionic legs part way through the game.

It's a fun setting, you should definitely try it out.

Denver.

Supposedly the Yellowstone Caldera is going full VEI-8 within a day of the onset of the event. 10m of ashfall, anyone?

So...if I'm still alive in 2098, and there's any hints of laser reflective battlesuits packing huge railguns destroying a third world city anywhere near 2090, I'm gonna move. I'm thinking Luna City on the Moon will be nice this time of year.

I believe the northern Bay area of cali will be wiped clean of all life.

I am in sw Washington near Portland, Oregon so assuming the volcanoes earthquakes and tidal waves I might be ok.... but I doubt it