Ape Victorious Introduction
The Maniacs Finally Did It
In the 1970s the Earth experienced its third and final world war. Global nuclear destruction ruined human society and crippled the entire planet.
Only a few humans survived relatively unscathed, retreating to underground bunkers that were prepared for just such a catastrophe. Most of the world’s people bore the full effects of the devastation, greatly reducing the human population and plunging the Earth into a nuclear winter.
By the time that winter had ended and clear skies prevailed, another kind of winter was born. The abrupt change in climate triggered a new glacial period and global temperatures dropped to levels that hadn’t been seen for millennia. Large glaciers descended into lower latitudes, grinding to dust the hollow graveyards of human cities throughout the northern regions of North America and Europe.
Unexpected Evolution
The nuclear winter and glacial age fundamentally changed the human population that was left on the Earth’s surface. Humans regressed into an animal-like state, barely exhibiting any culture and surviving in small bands that foraged on what little food was available. In time they lost even the capacity for complex language, and their intelligence became that of what we might expect from ape-like ancestors.
Meanwhile the humans whom had escaped underground made a new life for themselves in their vast steel underworld. The surface remained inhospitable for so long that eventually these humans, now underdwellers, had little interest in returning to the world of the sun. They too evolved, becoming advanced technologically but twisted and insane. Their minds became as powerful as their advanced intellect, and they manifested PSI powers. After honing their minds and technology for millennia, their interests gradually gravitated back to the surface, but by now their bodies no longer easily tolerated that world. They scheme to take back the surface from its new masters.
Those new masters are the apes. While humanity split into a degenerate breed and an advanced maniacal one, the apes flourished in the world that was slowly recovering from the nuclear winter. On the African continent it was the bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas. In Asia it was the orangutans. These primates evolved to walk on two legs in the expanded grasslands of the new glacial period, much like human ancestors had millions of years previously. All of the new ape races grew in intellect in a short period of time, eventually spreading their geographical ranges even while their populations remained low. Warfare was common when the races interacted in the early period of their evolution, but gradually the apes became united into one society.
The glacial period is now drawing to a close; the retreating glaciers are leaving behind new fertile territories that have been wiped clean of the human societies that had occupied them so long before. The apes have spread throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, and crossed into North America. The apes developed agriculture and domestication of animals, and collected themselves into small settlements. They advanced quickly in technology, though in different ways than their extinct human counterparts. Ape society remains relatively primitive in some respects, relying on beasts of burden and wagons for transportation, yet being advanced in the realms of biological science, chemistry, and the medical field. In these areas they are approximately equivalent to human knowledge of the 1970s. Their technological achievement has been stunted due to religious dogma and their reliance upon slave labor.
As ape society spread, they encountered the degenerate humans. The humans did not use weapons and did not make war, but were a general nuisance due to their tendency to loiter near settlements and devastate crops. The apes enslaved humans, using them as pets, labor, and as lab subjects. Despite the apes’ best efforts the human plague expanded in a parasitic relationship with ape society, and in time the apes also hunted humans for sport.
The New Earth
The nuclear winter drove many forms of flora and fauna extinct. Many large land animals perished. Trees are only beginning to make a comeback all of these thousands of years later. Vast regions of land are deserts, and some areas are still highly contaminated from nuclear radiation.
In spite of these harsh conditions, some life has flourished and evolved at an accelerated rate. Ecological niches left unoccupied have been filled quickly by
new predator and prey animals. Some forms of life have evolved in entirely new directions, exhibiting physical and mental abilities never before seen in nature.
Although the continents are still in their familiar positions, weather patterns have changed so dramatically that many places have a very different climate
compared to when humans flourished on the Earth. The east and Midwest of the former United States are a virtual desert, with small oases of fertile land. The Southwest is gradually becoming a fertile water-rich region, while the coastal area in the west is a parched waste.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:31, Tue 29 Aug 2017.
