The Great Turning

The Old Times have faded into myth and mystery and the world is being re-forged by the New Breeds and the World Allied Resistance.  The Great Turning began in 2018 and from then until 2022 the world fought back.  The US, Canada, New Zealand and France were ground zero.

## In the West…

By 2023 we had ceded everything south of the 32nd parallel in the US.  The dead spread fast to the south and into the lower Americas.  Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, California…all gone.  At first it seemed geography would provide the answer as the wastelands of Arizona, Nevada and California combined with the western mountain range funneling the waves of the dead north.  Last recorded transmissions out of Alaska were from a settlement in an old school in 2026.  The signal was a call to inform the world that the dead were breaking in the doors and there was no one left alive.  Then the north went black.  Canada held the western front (after abandoning British Columbia and Alberta) laying a front line from deep into the state of Montana stretching almost to Edmonton.

It seems that with the Great Turning and the first desperate wars against the dead, state and country lines really weren’t a priority any more.  There were Americans and Canadians working freely crossing back and forth to patrol “The Deadzone”.  With hastily constructed walls and towers the free army that gathered there called themselves the Deadwatch, and they mowed down any corpses coming out of the hills.  This brutal stand lasted until 2024 when the first outbreaks began in Florida, sweeping up the east coast. Manitoba and Michigan were hit next.  Then it was everywhere.

## In the East…

At the start of The Turning, France erupted in violence overnight.  In two months the entire country was designated a national disaster zone with no more refugees being allowed to leave, and no more military aid going in.  They tried to seal off a country… and failed.  2019 the dead were reported in surrounding Spain, Italy and Germany.  By 2026 most of Europe was a war zone with countries falling apart as government after government slowly collapsed.  China went silent first with the last final reports coming out of Hong Kong in 2024 – news reports were telling the populous that it was the last safe area on the mainland even as the swarms were reaching the edges of the island province.  People were fleeing out into the water heading south and east just trying to get away.  When the dead finally punched through the last of the fires and blockades people were literally running into the South Sea crying out for help.  Not long after that it spread across the southern islands and by 2028 they reached the shores of Australia.

There was a strange blip of contact that began as the reports flooded news rooms and websites around the globe at the beginning of The Turning.  It came out of New Zealand.  On day one there were updates indicating that the dead were rising in Auckland and across the Otago Region.  One week after the first reports the entire country went Black.  While people were glued to their news feeds around the planet during those early days, most didn’t hear that a month later a strange signal was picked up on SW Radio.  It was a broadcast recorded loop in Japanese.  For a day all it said, “Confirm mission status complete.”  After that it began to transmit a strange series of low frequency sounds and blips.  Experts thought it was an error or just static noise.  In 2019 a computer software engineer from Iceland reported on his Blog that he had cracked the noise and discovered a message relayed in Binary that simply said, “Quarantine” over and over on a loop.  The country never stopped transmitting this static and to this day satellite imagery reveals nothing.  Attempts to send people into New Zealand have been repeatedly unsuccessful with not a single person ever returning to report their findings.

## After The Fall…

It was a long ugly siege of the dead.  Each year they pushed a little further and reports were always coming in about another place going dark. At first it seemed like every few months you’d hear about another place dropping off the map.  Then it was happening faster and faster and you waited in the dark hoping it wouldn’t be your turn next.

By 2031, driven by a drastically shortened life span that involved years of fighting just to survive and hold on to anything they can, two full generations of humanity have come and gone. Now, everything is a battle just to survive.  Rival factions began to battle for resources and territory.  People huddled together trying to survive against the Turned, Wastelanders, Brutal Gangs, rogue Mutates, sickness, disease and even the Elements themselves.