Thoughts
What they should see on the road trip should be how things work, or in many cases don't work, in this altered world. One big thing about having a "city to live in" without the full infrastructure out in the contry is that we need highways, modern agriculture, refrigeration, preservatives, etc. to feed the people in the cities.
On the other hand, a classic medival-type society tended to have about 90% of the population involved in food production, with the slight surplus by that 90% going to feed the remaining 10%. Likewise, most of the population was in scattered farming vilages a few miles apart. When the world was rebooted, maybe a bunch of folks from the vilages got moved into the cities or maybe the population distribution stayed as was.
That leads to problems. Maybe there isn't enough food. Maybe there's a lack of means to get food to the cities. Maybe lots of farmers are now sitting on farms with tractors and such, and they can produce massive amounts of food, to the point that food prices are going into the basement and farmers are going out of business.
Social structure leads to questions: Are there still kings, emperors, and other nobles with the ability to rule as they see fit? A constitutional monarchy? Representative democracy? If the political system changed, do the people in office really know how to and want to work a system like this, or is it going to look more like the sort of "democracy" you get in the third world or maybe current Russia?
Medival societies and fantasy worlds tend to be violent places, ruled by some sort of warrior class, unless the warriors can't compete with a magic-based social class. Despite modern concerns about crime, briandry and piracy were more common back in the day. Do all those outlaws now have modern para-military gear? Is the warrior/wizard/priest class still in power?
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad. In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.
What they should see on the road trip should be how things work, or in many cases don't work, in this altered world. One big thing about having a "city to live in" without the full infrastructure out in the contry is that we need highways, modern agriculture, refrigeration, preservatives, etc. to feed the people in the cities.
On the other hand, a classic medival-type society tended to have about 90% of the population involved in food production, with the slight surplus by that 90% going to feed the remaining 10%. Likewise, most of the population was in scattered farming vilages a few miles apart. When the world was rebooted, maybe a bunch of folks from the vilages got moved into the cities or maybe the population distribution stayed as was.
That leads to problems. Maybe there isn't enough food. Maybe there's a lack of means to get food to the cities. Maybe lots of farmers are now sitting on farms with tractors and such, and they can produce massive amounts of food, to the point that food prices are going into the basement and farmers are going out of business.
Social structure leads to questions: Are there still kings, emperors, and other nobles with the ability to rule as they see fit? A constitutional monarchy? Representative democracy? If the political system changed, do the people in office really know how to and want to work a system like this, or is it going to look more like the sort of "democracy" you get in the third world or maybe current Russia?
Medival societies and fantasy worlds tend to be violent places, ruled by some sort of warrior class, unless the warriors can't compete with a magic-based social class. Despite modern concerns about crime, briandry and piracy were more common back in the day. Do all those outlaws now have modern para-military gear? Is the warrior/wizard/priest class still in power?
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad. In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.