Answer to >>85795737 about what one would see in a land wasted by decades of industrial warfare

OP:

>What would the state of the world be like after centuries of industrial warfare on the scale of WW1 or WW2? Millions of men and thousands if not tens of thousands of tanks/planes/etc on the battlefield at once, bombing runs everywhere, hundreds of miles of trenches, the sea is drowned by the roaring of battleship guns. No nukes, but gas attacks and firebombings were common. Forget the why of it, the important thing is that it happened. What would be the state of the world after? What resources would be scarce? What innovations might have developed? Solar panels existed as early as 1883 for example. It might be that they become used much earlier as more potent fuels are confiscated for military use.
>>uhhh excuse me sweaty this isn't traditional games
>Players want a post-apoc game and I want something different than a nuclear wasteland. I want a depleted wasteland, where a conventional industrial war dragged on for so long that the infrastructure required to sustain civilization simply ran out of steam, and I want to impress that on the players by accurately showcasing the results of such a scenario.

My suggestions:

-Trench art might become the only acceptable art, using discarded materials that can't be recycled.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Trench_art

-Zone Rouge becomes the standard landscape.

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone-of-france-a-forbidden-no-mans-land-poisoned-by-war/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

-Hardy goats and camels become the common livestock, scrambling around ruins and other rough terrain to eat all the kudzu, old ropes, carrion and whatever they can. Goats navigate rough terrain better, but camels eat anything and can survive without food or water for months.

https://wildlifefaq.com/what-do-camels-eat/

-People are going to try to develop some sort of cloning and/or accelerated aging.

-Civilians don't exist. You fight by either producing materiel and supplies, or by using them to kill the enemy.

-A lot of round water ponds around. All of them are craters filled by rainwater. The bigger ones were made by sappers with tons of explosives under enemy trenches.

https://res.cloudinary.com/dtpgi0zck/image/upload/s--ZFnLtTdJ--/c_fit,h_580,w_860/v1/EducationHub/photos/zone-rouge.jpg

-The average community is mostly underground. But elaborate bunkers are for fighters. Workers have something more like the tunnels dug in Vietnam and Iwo Jima. The underground towns in Turkey are also a good inspiration.

https://openseadragon.github.io/openseadragonizer/?img=https://i.redd.it/y2fgoj2w7bt51.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Underground_cities_in_Cappadocia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy

-Fragmentation grenades and mines have glass/pottery casings, like the ones the Japanese were producing for defending Tokyo Bay. This allows for metals and wood to be used for more important purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_4_grenade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasmine_43

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfmine
(This one had a mildly radioactive paint, so enemy metal detectors wouldn't find it, but your soldiers could use Geiger counters to figure out where the mines were)

-Fungi, bugs and bacterial by-products will be the staples. Stuff like protein made by bacteria processing methane. The book "Feeding Everyone No Matter What" expands the options.

https://www.amazon.com/Feeding-Everyone-Matter-What-Catastrophe/dp/0128044470

-Trench "fauna" included slugs, frogs, millions of rats that could be as big as cats. Besides being part of the new post-war biomes, they might also be food sources.

https://www.firstworldwar.com/features/trenchlife.htm

-Food storage is going to depend more on fermentation, like they do in Vietnam.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fermentation-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay.html

-Literally millions of non-Europeans were recruited or drafted to fight and work in WW1. Even in a world where cloning is available, the nations involved would exhaust their options, using foreign sources of manpower. The last years of the "Eternal World War" might see armies and logistic corps having more colonials than national soldiers. The post-war wasteland peoples could be quite different from the pre-war peoples. If they care about such differences, that's your call. I can see it going both ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War_I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Labour_Corps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_Mule_Corps

-Compost storage doubles as house heating.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-greenhouse.html

-Shell-shock and dissent is treated by lobotomies, creating docile workers/slaves.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1933933/?page=8

https://gizmodo.com/a-disturbing-care-pamphlet-given-to-families-of-lobot-1481219125

-If there is no camera surveillance, panopticons are going to become more popular for the factories where workers live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

-Siege mentality is the common mentality.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-siege-mentality

-Stuff like the Austrian WW2 air gun would be widespread.

http://www.beemans.net/images/Austrian%20airguns.htm
(Second to last section)

-Trench folklore included things like scavengers/cannibals living in No Men's Land, hidden in tunnels, catching people and supplies at night. Such tales would be prevalent in the war-torn wasteland, perhaps even true.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/legends-what-actually-lived-no-mans-land-between-world-war-i-trenches-180952513/

-The sheer quantity and variety of ersatz goods would remain, perhaps become the norm. Like was the case with spam, some people might even like such options.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ersatz_good#World_War_I

-Nail Men could be the origin of religions based on ancestor shrines, the idolization of wartime notorious soldiers and commanders, and even a system for deciding who deserves more resources/food/luxuries based on the services they provided, shown by the nails they put on the statue/banner/pillar. Whoever helped the local community so much that they could pin a golden nail, deserves more of the surplus than the ones to pin wooden nails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_Men

-The corpse factory propaganda could become reality, during or after the war. Lacking even basic resources, the remains of the dead might at least become candles, besides rations, leather products and explosives. Tens of thousands of Human skeletons from the Napoleonic Wars were ground into powder and used as fertilizer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Corpse_Factory

https://shannonselin.com/2016/07/napoleonic-battlefield-cleanup/

-Trench slang could become part of the post-war languages.

https://www.firstworldwar.com/features/slang.htm