Here is the future history of humanity, when the stars have wheeled around again and Chaos is about to swallow the earth.
What came before the Fall is not all that important. What matters is that over the course of a few years, the mundane problems of a near-future world were overrun by a series of increasingly deadly, and increasingly paranormal, events. Rampant storms and "heavy weather," plauges, disappearances, earthquakes, and madness swept the earth. Slowly at first, and then swifter and surer, the forces of what humanity came to call the Mythos became more and more blatant. Paris was overrun by the Ghouls of her famed catacombs; New England and then New York were by rising waves that brought Deep One colonists in their wakes. Across the roof of the world, Ithaqua the Windwalker took back his old domain. Deep in the Australian Outback, shattered stone doors appeared in satellite photography one week; by the next week, there was no living human left on that continent. Cthonians are churning the solid rock of the American West like melting butter. And somewhere in the South Pacific, a mountain of twised masonry has heaved itself above the waves once again... Now the Earth is in the hands of various 'lesser' Mythos races, each pursuing their own incomprehensible agendas. The very plants and animals are beginning to warp and change as the Earth is made ready for a hundred eerie goals. Beasts, madmen and desperate survivors scavenge the wreck of human civilization. And the worst is yet to come.
This is a game of claustrophobic horror. Most of humanity is subjugated by eldritch terrors. Most of the rest is living a nightmarish hunted life, while the very land they are trying to live off is becoming something alien. And the tiny remainder lives sunk into bleak stone and steel warrens, growing weaker and weaker while their leaders become more paranoid and ruthless. There are two main divisions of the surviving members of the human race. One is the "Organized" faction, hiding in various fortified enclaves scattered around the world, most of which are hastily expanded, hardened military bases (think of NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain facility). Each redoubt is basically its own little world, although there is some communication between certain of the bases. Most have begun sending out armed tactical teams to defend their locations and search for useful items. What they define as useful can range from uncontaminated foodstuffs to possibly useful arcane artifacts to 'clean' feral humans for breeding stock. The flip side of the coin is the aforementioned feral population. These run the gamut from insane cultists to armed bandit groups to desperate people who, for one reason or another, haven't been able to find or gain admittance to a redoubt. Some of these wild people are powerful magicians; others have turned to the Dreamworld in an attempt to build a place more hospitable to humanity than the waking world. Most of the survivors in the wild are master trackers, skulkers and survivors. Those that are not do not last long.
The material on this site tends to focus on one of the Redoubts, the Appalachian Mountain Redoubt Bravo - Alpha has entirely vanished, as well as most of the mountain it was buried under. Bravo's P/R/B thinks it was either an experimental Mi-go mining technique or a badly botched invocation. Most American redoubts have a P/R/B - the surviving vestiges of the nationwide Parabiological Research Bureau, instituted before the Fall by the Centers for Disease Control to investigate and combat the strange things that eventually destroyed the world. In some Organized strongholds, the P/R/B is wholly discredited, treated as scapegoats for failing to halt the tide of the Mythos. In others, the P/R/B acts as advisors. In the Appalachian Redoubt, the P/R/B has become a ruling clique with the power of life and death over everyone living under the mountain. Bravo's P/R/B has become more and more ruthless. Two years ago, they began segregating all tactroop and exploratory personnel into an upper level of the Redoubt which has been unofficially dubbed the "Waiting Room." If your job takes you into the outside world, you are not allowed to mix with the rest of the redoubt population. Further, there are incredibly stringent identification and decontamination procedures one must go through to reenter. To prevent infiltration or contamination, exiting and returning personnel are subjected to rigorous genetic, psychological, magickal and Dreaming tests to confirm their identity. Anything being brought back into the Redoubt is subjected to just as much scrutiny. And anyone bypassing these strictures (or many other P/R/B regulations) is subject to summary execution.So the troopers go out, sealed into their environmental armor; some are just soldiers, some are Dreamers with injectors full of Sleepdust, and others are half-lunatic Willworkers, desperately using the magic of the Mythos to try and buy some time for what is left of mankind. And more and more are becoming Sleepwalkers - slipping in and out of a "fightstate" where time seems meaningless and the horrors of the Mythos somehow less threatening. Meanwhile, the redoubts themselves are already beginning to crumble. A rising number of people appear to be sterile, and many births are clearly (or not so clearly) tainted by the Mythos. Many of the fortresses are already below a sustainable breeding population, and most others are not far behind. The number of people who die or are expelled greatly outpaces the birth rate. In Redoubt Bravo, the P/R/B's stopgap solution is compulsory pregnancy for all fertile women older than 16 (although the P/R/B is considering dropping this to 14). Some groups look to space, wanting to somehow make it to the few operational space stations left in orbit, or even to the tiny settlements on the Moon. Others plan on staying in the buried fortresses permanently, ekeing out a circumscribed survival for humankind as rats in the walls. A few even hope to reach an accomodation with one or more Mythos factions. No one seriously expects to be able to retake the surface world.
I highly recommend that these cliches be used with appropriate and interesting modifiers, such as Bloodthirsty Trooper (4) or Bibliophobic Willworker [3]. See the characters page of this site for some ideas as to what I mean.
[More about the setting and character creation...]