Most post-apocalyptic films and games focus on the horrors and hardships of the immediate aftermath of a global catastrophe. The Knowledge looks at the longer-term recovery of society, and what you can do over the generations to reboot civilisation from scratch. So this Kickstarter project really caught my eye – Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is a tabletop game where players work together in a changing world to rebuild a life for themselves. The game is very nearly fully-funded on Kickstarter and so if this appeals to you make a contribution right away! This guest post is from the game’s designer, James Iles.

Hi!  I’m the designer of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, a tabletop roleplaying game about the survivors of a reality-twisting apocalypse, the families they form, and the new world they will create as the ages turn. While most post-apocalyptic media focuses on the immediate aftermath of an apocalypse, with its associated grim survivors making hard choices, I thought it’d be interesting to explore the process of rebuilding: the difficulties people face understanding the old technology of the world before, the new challenges the apocalypse has created, and how the world changes from generation to generation.

To accomplish this, Legacy gives every player control of both a Family of survivors and a Character chosen from that Family to deal with their problems. A Family is created by choosing one of five reactions to the apocalypse – holding on to the old lore, turning to martial strength for security, finding refuge in faith, seeking and trading valuable things, or trying to impose law and order. Each archetype comes with its own playbook of traits and abilities, with customisable cultures, lifestyles, resources and needs. Each Family has something it urgently needs and cannot easily get, and that’s where your Character comes in, picked from one of eight basic archetypes and customised by your choice of abilities and gear. While your Family can accomplish broad, sweeping changes in the world via diplomats, spies, scientists and soldiers your Character excels at more precise, dangerous activities – exploring crumbling ruins, conducting delicate negotiations in enemy territory, and hunting down the horrifying monsters created by the apocalypse.

Legacy promises rapid, flavourful gameplay, with a system that produces tough choices and unexpected opportunities. If you’re interested the Kickstarter has two days left, and provides the current draft text of the game free to all backers. Check it out!

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Chapter 4 of The Knowledge talks about the importance of fermentation for making wine, beer, mead (see the How To guide here), or any other alcoholic beverage, and how concentrated ethanol can be distilled from that for applications like antiseptics. If you can’t find any dried sachets of yeast for brewing or making bread I explain how you can isolate the yeast and other microorganisms you can use from the environment around you. The cells are present on the skins of grapes, or wheat grain, or even just floating on the air. One increasingly popular method for producing craft beers is spontaneous fermentation – simply allowing wild or natural yeasts and bacteria to essentially infect your starter and drive fermentation.  Well, about the most wonderfully hipster effort I have ever come across is that of John Maier of Rogue Ales, who is planning to sell beer brewed using yeast harvested from his own beard. Cheers…

Find more details on Smithsonianmag.com

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

The Knowledge attempts to provide a guide to the fundamental principles and processes that underlie our civilisation, and so how to rebuild from scratch if you ever needed to. But trying to rebuild civilisation and resurrect practical skills purely from the knowledge contained in a guide book would be a huge challenge, no matter how extensive it might be. Tasks are achieved not just by knowing the correct information, but also by possessing the required practical skills.

Diderot recognised this short-falling in the mid-1700s and so attempted to preserve not just facts in his encyclopaedia but also the practical or manual skills needed in carpentry, weaving and mining, for example, in detailed engravings. While a picture may well be a worth a thousand words, how can you hope to capture the subtlety of the dextrous motions required for, say, carpentry in just a few images or even a video? Achieving the required ability can take years of apprenticeship, under the tutelage of an already-proficient craftsman.

This is the problem of implicit or tacit knowledge; something you may know how to do yourself, but would find extremely challenging, if not impossible, to successfully convey to someone else in just words or pictures.

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Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Mark Westcott is a TV documentary director from London. He worked on the Discovery channel series ‘Man, Woman, Wild‘, a survival show featuring American special forces expert Mykel Hawke and his broadcaster wife Ruth England. In 2011, the series took the film crew to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where they got special access to explore regions laid to waste over a decade ago by eruptions of the island’s volcano. In this guest post, Mark describes his experiences in this devastated landscape of decaying collapsing buildings, scavenging vital supplies from abandoned kitchens and garages, and the feral cattle: like a localised apocalypse.

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Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Let’s imagine another thought experiment. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that we had a time machine, and we’re about to go back 300 years into the past. We’re allowed to take a single scientific instrument with us, an experiment that we could use to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt something profound, something fundamental about the nature of our Earth or our place in the cosmos — something that people just refused to believe back in the 1500s.

What item would you take back with you?

Well, the scientific experiment that I would take back in time would be Miley Cyrus on her wrecking ball… I’d bundle her into the back of my DeLorean and drive back to the 1500s. There, I’d find a nice big cathedral, and hang Miley and her wrecking ball from the tall ceiling, and then give her a good push.

If you watch Miley swing back and forth on her wrecking ball (sat nice and comfortably like she seems to be in the picture here…) over the course of a day, you’ll notice something very strange happen, something that doesn’t immediately make any sense. Because Miley won’t keep swinging back and forth in the same direction, but she’ll seem to slowly twist around across the floor. Now, there’s no wind blowing inside this cathedral to deflect her, so the only conclusion you can come to is that the entire planet Earth itself is turning beneath Miley as she swings. You can use Miley Cyrus to demonstrate that the Earth isn’t flat, but that it’s a huge ball of rock and that it turns on it’s own axis. The reason the Sun seems to move across the sky (and the nighttime stars wheel around the heavens) isn’t because there’s some god on a blazing chariot dragging it around, but because the entire Earth is turning.

This experiment is known as Foucault’s Pendulum, and is covered briefly in Chapter 12 of The Knowledge. It’s a classic demonstration from the 1700s, and you’ll also notice that the magnitude of this effect – how quickly the pendulum seems to rotate around – depends on how close to the north or south pole you are. So you can use Miley Cyrus to demonstrate not only that the Earth is constantly turning on its axis, but even what your latitude on the Earth is.

And even better than that, if Miley happened to be wearing a wrist watch as you bundled her into your DeLorean, you could use just that to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is the Earth that orbits the Sun, and not visa versa. You can prove the ‘heliocentric solar system’, and the truth that the Earth isn’t in fact at the centre of everything, using nothing more than a simple clock.

All you need to do is watch when any particular star rises or sets below the horizon  (or some other static landmark) each night, and note down the time from Miley’s clock. You’ll notice that this happens just under 4 minutes earlier each night. If the only motion the Earth experienced is its own spin then this wouldn’t happen. In fact, four minutes is almost exactly 24 hours (the length of one day) divided by 365 days (the number of days in a  year). What’s happening, is that between each night the Earth has swept along in its orbit around the sun by one three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth, and so the world doesn’t need to have rotated completely to bring the same star back into view. Thus, any star seems to rise (or set) four minutes earlier each night.

Proving that the Earth isn’t the centre of the universe is merely a matter of having a good enough clock. Imagine all the trouble and stress — and threats of being burned at the stake — that could have been spared if only Copernicus and Galileo had had Miley Cyrus back in the 1500s…

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Chapter 5 of the book opens by talking about how ‘chemicals’ have seemingly become maligned in modern culture, whereas of course even pure water is itself a chemical, as are the constituents of  ‘organic’ food and all the components of our bodies. James Kennedy, a high school chemistry teacher in Melbourne, Australia, makes this point extremely elegantly with his graphic listing the ingredients of fruit, such as the banana below. You can browse more examples on Kennedy’s website.

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.