From my Adorable Creatures universe, which grew out of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness RPG campaign from the late ‘80s. It’s set in the early 21st Century of a world where WWIII happened in 1995, and wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone had expected. It was still terrible, hundreds of millions of people died, but it turned out that the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapon stockpiles… were fake. Politicians in the great powers had requisitioned trillions of dollars for defense spending over the decades, but had spent it on the same things politicians throughout history have spent taxpayer dollars on: ale and whores. Missile silos were top secret party caves for top military brass, with endless beer and nachos; nuclear missile submarines were underwater casinos for the rich and not-so-famous; strategic bombers were kitted out for Mile High Club joyrides for wealthy campaign donors; many of the real missiles and bombs had warheads made of carboard and aluminum foil and filled with sand. Enough warheads were real that most of the world’s major cities got at least one airburst, and national capitals and financial centers were targeted for big enough saturation attacks that they were destroyed, but by Day Two it was obvious that civilization had been wrecked but hadn’t completely collapsed.

In the aftermath of The Bomb, the whole world learned what Japan had known since 1945: All Radiation Is Mutagenic. Many humans began developing bioenergetic powers and became superheroes and/or supervillains… and many began mutating into animal-like forms. Millions of animals worldwide also began mutating, growing into larger, more bipedal versions of themselves, with functional hands and human-level (or greater) intelligence. These Beast Folk were common enough that most of the world’s nations, both surviving and newly formed, were quickly forced to acknowledge them as citizens to prevent mass uprisings.