Listen to the Rain

I don't know if I've mentioned Reclaim the Wild, the fan-made Legend of Zelda TTRPG by one of the creators of the old Final Fantasy Returners RPG, but I read it a few months ago and other than Exalted, it's probably the system I most want to run a game of right now. And last night before I went to bed, I thought of a great game premise, starting with the same basic background as Breath of the Wild:

The Calamity is coming, all the signs are there, but it has been so long that anything more than that is legend. Instead of preparing to fight, the people of Hyrule decide to hide. Following the research of the goron sage Kenjoro, the wizards of Hyrule develop the Ritual of Harrow, which can be used to build an impenetrable Sanctuary underground beneath a Sheikah shrine. The gorons are the first to enact the ritual, burrowing into the slopes of Death Mountain to wait out the coming storm, but soon the other tribes do the same thing--the gerudo into caverns with walls of hardened sand, the zuna into hollowed-out spaces beneath desert oases, the zora into vast underwater grottos, the twili into shadowed caves, and even the rito overcame their fear of enclosed spaces and left their aeries. The hylians were the last, but eventually they realized there was no option but flight and sealed themselves away, watching the Malice Harbinger installed in every Sanctuary that would tell them when it was safe to emerge. Entire generations lived and died underground, locked away behind a magical barrier, never seeing the sun, hearing stories of the verdant lands of their ancestors.

And centuries later, the Malice Harbinger in the PCs' Sanctuary has finally indicated that it is safe to go outside, and the elders are planning to open the gates.

Yes, it's Legend of Zelda and Fallout. Or rather, it's Legend of Zelda and the TTRPG Earthdawn, which came out four years before Fallout and already did the fantasy post-apocalypse that looks like a magical nuclear war first. Much like both of those games, there'd be Sanctuaries that opened early, Sanctuaries that were breached by Ganon's minions (a naturalistic explanation for dungeons!), emergency Sanctuaries with members from multiple tribes--the PCs would come from one of these, to expand the range of character options--and a whole world of ruins and monsters and treasure, ripe for the PCs to rebuild society.

Reclaim the Wild is very focused on crafting and scavenging, with extensive rules for what kind of ingredients monsters drop and how to make food and potions from materials, and there's an entire supplement called "Rebuild the Wild" with rules for building and creating settlements, so the system is already perfectly calibrated toward the kind of hardscrabble treasure-finding that's common in post-apocalyptic gaming. If I make Malice more like 50s sci fi radiation, and have it mutate plants and animals and people from breached Sanctuaries into malevolent monsters, there's a bunch of extra angles I can take with that. Is there a cure? Is a corrupted hylian or gerudo still a "person" in a meaningful sense? How much can the land be saved? And is the Calamity still out there?

This lets me play to the system's strengths and get entirely away from the hero chosen by the Goddess, so I'm all for it. It's like the original Legend of Zelda, with the land a howling waste overrun with monsters and treasure. Perfect for adventuring.