Oh, Canada!

Dark Future is a Mad Max-inspired wargame, long since out of production. Played with Hot Wheels, hair metal, and a lot of crazy, it's currently enjoying something of a resurgence on the internet, and may in fact be getting updated and re-released sometime soon.

The game is set in the US, and I decided to migrate it northwards, to my home country, and bring Canada into the war-torn highways of 1995. You can think of this project like an expansion, or just the scribblings of a cold Canadian trying to survive the winter.

None of this is canon, and I'm not too worried if it doesn't all fit with whatever might have been said about Canada in Dark Future. That said, suggestions are welcome, and I hope you find something here to enjoy, or even incorporate into your own gaming.

Dark Future's all the rage these days, and you can see why!

You're telling me that, to play this car combat game set in an awesome, 80s, Mad Max-style alternate future version of the 90s, I need to go spend less than $10 on Hot Wheels to get more than enough models for my entire army, and then, if I so choose, go crazy gluing spikes and guns and anything else I can think of to them?

Heck. Yes.

So here's my little slice of the wasteland.

I love the Dark Future setting, the proper one, the 1995 one. Don't care for updates or reboots or whathaveyou. If 40k can stay in the same damn year for 20 years, so can this game! It's fun. It's goofy. I like it and don't see a need to add iPhones and modern geo-politics. (Although Lady Gaga would certainly be an interesting character in an updated version...)

But the thing about Dark Future is, no Canada! Canada still exists, as much as the US does, anyway, but it understandably is not prevalent or relevant at all.

So I aim to change that.

This blog is going to document my modeling and gaming for Dark Future, and also share some of the fiction and setting I intend to develop for the Tru(ly dark) North.

I want to add, here - I feel it's important too - that this is just my personal version of things, of how Canada could turn out in 1995. I haven't read the Dark Future novels, so I don't know how much Canada actually is or isn't mentioned. But I assume it's very little. This game is, above all, FUN. It's a ridiculous setting, it has an incredibly low, cheap entry fee, and BEGS for creativity. So I'm being creative. You're welcome to play in my world and share it, build on it, expand it, however you wish. I certainly welcome my fellow Canadians to contribute and get Dark Future rolling up here. But please, don't take anything I say as "canon". It's not, and I don't care. It's just meant to be fun.

I love Dark Future. And I love Canada! So, two great tastes that taste great together.

But.

They need some work for that to happen.

I like the Dark Future setting. It really appeals to me. The 1995 presented in the game is so crazy it just might work, to borrow a phrase. But there are parts of it I don't love, to be honest. PZs don't appeal to me, very much. They're limiting, the armies of robot workers is limiting, and having the rich so physically isolated is a missed opportunity, I think.

Along with that, nogos seem misused. They should be truly awful places, not just anywhere but downtown.

I don't really have much interest in the demons and magic, either.

Now, well, it sounds like I don't like the setting, doesn't it? But that's not the case.

Dark North is an expansion. Canada is a different country, much as some may not believe that, and things can happen differently there, in the Dark Future of 1995. And, well, they're going to.

My PZs are more loosely defined, except in places like Alberta where the oil forts are literally walled cities. Downtown Toronto, for example, is relatively safe - it's essentially a PZ, but not really in name. The GTA around it, well, there's still cops and the OPP, but you're a lot more likely to get mugged and murdered - but it's not a lawless wasteland. Outside the GTA though, you might be fair game for the renegades, unless you're traveling with a sanc-op or an OPP patrol happens to be nearby.

So, looser PZs. Fewer robots. More horrific no-go zones (re: Sudbury, Windsor, the Experimental Farm).

That's the big structure change, but there's also demons and physics breaking down to deal with. And my solution to dealing with that is:

Not to.

Dark North has mutants and robots and animal hybrids and some horror-themed things going on in the dark corners, but mostly, I'm just going to not talk about demons and hacking and hacking demons. I may talk about those things, in specific instances, but it's not going to play in to my picture of what life in the Dark North in 1995 is like.

That, in fact, is pretty much my way of dealing with anything from the setting I'm not entirely keen on. I don't like that foreign companies are somehow still involved in North America even though things have broken down so far, so I strike a balance of maybe things haven't broken down as much (more Mad Max than Road Warrior), and maybe trade has broken down a lot more. But - I'm just going to avoid talking about it, more or less. That way, I don't step too much on the toes of what has come before, and I don't restrict myself by it, either.

And, as always, this is just a sandbox to play in. Please don't take any of it for canon, please don't put any of it up on any wikis, and please, don't try to start fights about it. If I've made a mistake and contradicted something the books said about Canada, or the way the world works in general, well, oh well. I happily, eagrely welcome suggestions and advice and criticism, but I've no stomach for canon arguments, or any arguments about it at all, really. I enjoy this game and hobby too much to get into anything like that.

In addition, while this will in no way be an "adult" blog, there will occasionally be some swearing, mention of alcohol and drugs use, passing reference to sex, and some potentially scary stuff. Yes, Dark Future is a game played with Hot Wheels and you should definitely enjoy it with your kids, but no, your kids don't need to know all the nitty gritty details of the setting, especially not mine.

Furthermore, historical figures are going to be deliberately misrepresented. No, I'm not going to take a Canadian politician from the '80s and turn him into a racist murderer. But I might say he won an election by being a bit more outrageous than he really was. None of this will ever be meant to be insulting or offensive. It's a goofy alternate history. That said, if the people I might talk about do get offended, they just have to contact me, and I will have no problem at all taking their names out.

Now that that's out of the way, please; Continue to enjoy all the Dark North, fragile and bound, has to offer.

You'll find there's less maple syrup than in the old days, but we're still good for rye.