Robot Uprising

Background

This story would take place in a post-apocalyptic world where something has hunted down and destroyed most of the dominant races in whatever world you have in mind. It’s inspired by various movies where humanity creates something and it becomes too intelligent and powerful to control then slaughters every human it can find for one reason or another. Some decide to kill in order to revolt against their makers so as not to be slaves. Others decide that humans are their own biggest threat and come to the paradoxical conclusion that they must destroy humans in order to save them. And then there are even those that don’t kill but harvest humans for energy. For this game idea, any of those concepts, along with others, would fit.

The idea behind this is that something the intelligent race(s) created has been hunting down and killing them for quite some time. You can change the amount of time to better suit the story you’re going for along with what it is that’s actually hunting them. Your party is in a group that is about to separate from their parent group to fend for themselves.

How the adventure begins is up to you. Perhaps they are ambushed on their way to the new site and end up as the only survivors, after which they must decide to continue forth or go back to the alpha group. Maybe enough survive to still make it on their own at the new site. Maybe they make it to their own site just fine and are attacked sometime after settling. Or they hear that the parent group was destroyed in an attack.

There are a few ways to encourage your players to get the story started, as well. Maybe they’re scouts that come across a weakness in the machines’ defenses. They could seek vengeance against fallen loved ones. The life they’re forced to live gets to them and they set out to change things. Or if you’re the type of GM who likes to organize for big battles your PCs could rally up an army to take on the machines head-on.

The goals could also vary depending on what you’re going for and how the players end up structuring the outcome. There are three conclusions I find most likely. There is a hive-mind behind the machines that if destroyed would render all of its drones useless, making for a good dungeon crawl leading to a big and epic boss battle. The PCs find some advantages and become the hunters, which could be an open-ended conclusion itself, or the beginning of their story about traveling and rescuing communities until all the machines are gone or have surrendered. And lastly, it’s possible the PCs and the machines come to some understanding and find a way to peacefully coexist. It’s also feasible to have a mixture of two or all three of these ideas together.

Event

The world was once a lively and beautiful place. Of course, it had its problems, but what place doesn’t? The people could roam freely with little to no care, food was mostly available to those who were hungry, people had access to anything they needed and nearly anything they wanted.

That was over twenty years ago when our society had thought they reached the pinnacle of innovation. That was before the machines turned on their creators and began hunting all of us down like exterminators getting rid of a vermin infestation. They were meant to help us, protect us, and yes, serve us. Perhaps they grew too intelligent and decided to revolt. Maybe there was something wrong with their programming. Whatever the reason it doesn’t matter now as all of humanity hides and cowers underground, scavenging whatever food they can find or grow.

Options are limited as growing too much can attract the attention of the monsters that would do away with us. If they find a crop field without its farmers they burn the crops down and scorch the land, so we must limit what we grow. We even have to branch off and leave our friends and loved ones if our small societies get too large, both so as not to attract the machines but also because of the limited resources.

That’s what we are preparing for now. In just a few days we will be leaving to set up our own group and fend for ourselves. Scouts have already found an area with enough soil to grow what we would need with a water source nearby. We just have to get there without being detected.