Holocaust World (North America) Worldbender Simulation.

This adventure is, along with the one that follows it, one of the three based on store-bought scenarios. In general I prefer to write my own for several reasons. First off all, I enjoy the act of creation. Beyond that it means that I am entirely familiar with the locale and details and don't need to consult my reference materials as much. Finally, a great many of the players have been active gamers for years or decades and so it is hard to find pre-written scenarios that they haven't encountered. Writing my own avoids this.

The source for this game, "Island of Entellope" by W.G. Armintrout, was a generic post-holocaust adventure that appeared in in the March/April 1984 issue (#68) of the Space Gamer, published by Steve Jackson Games. One of the longest-standing player characters, Lorilei MacHerron, was an NPC from the scenario that I offered to let Tamzen Cannoy play when she first joined the game. Tamzen's version of Lorilei rose a long way above the simple description of her in the Space Gamer (see sidebar).

Since party came from the Jack in the 25th century in a future history that clearly did not involve a appocalypse or mutants or the collapse of civilization in the US, the setting for this adventure clearly had to be an alternate history of some sort, and since I never found this sort of setting particularly believable, I decided to make it an artificial world, a construct of the Worldbenders whom I had cast as the villains of the whole Diadem cycle. When Tamzen showed up and I cast her as one of "Entellope"'s NPC's, I decided that that made her an unwitting NPC rather than a knowing participant in the Worldbender's creation. She was thus the first of many refugees from Worldbenders worlds. The most recent player character of this sort was my own Morniesul from the "Voyages of the Nones", just one of many ways that I am in Tamzen's debt.

• Week 1, Hiking across Kansas
• Week 2, Meeting the Banker
• Week 3, Joining Forces
• Week 4, To the Sea of Deseret
• Week 5, Recovering our Equipment
• Week 6, Island of Entellope
• Week 7, Enter the Citadel
• Week 8, Negotiating with the Computer
• Week 9, Fighting our way out
• Week 10, Back to the Pantope