Before the break, the city of Olympia had a number of officials located in it. Being the state capitol, it’s the centerpoint of governing in the state of Washington. The state website has a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan that is 69 pages long. For most disasters, these officials are more than prepared, the pages upon pages upon pages of planning is proof of that. Washington is hardly unprepared for emergencies. However, an event like the one that starts this ARG is unique. The emergency management division is quite funded, and in addition it provides a number of grants, which are spent on stuff such as Emergency preparedness planning and training, hazard mitigation activities to reduce vulnerability to disasters, and disaster response and recovery efforts. Additionally, they also have resources for helping tribal, local, and state emergency planners and other parties responsible for developing emergency plans.
Through these grants, a lot of the structures within the state are quite prepared for disasters and are capable of mitigating and recovering from disasters. These grants also extend to local tribal governments. All of this structure is very well outlined and set up, so that a disaster is unlikely to completely stunt the people of the state.
Since then: None of these plans prepared the state government for the disaster. Shortly after the disaster, the police were pretty much entirely overran, most of them dying, with a small number of surviving officers either in the capitol building or with the state officials, who are holed up in the archives building, which doubles as a bomb shelter. The officials are hiding, and thus unable to set any of the disaster plans into effect, although there is both not any real plan for an event like this and the effects of the disaster are largely hindering anything that could come close to being effective, as there’s likely no/little power and limited medical supplies.
Additionally, without the majority of the state accessible, the impact of these plans would be minimal in the first place. Whatever and whoever is in Olympia is all the government would have access to. Without the government officials to lead them, there would be a lot less order in the city, and, with the cops dead, no one to really stop the chaos. Some groups may step up to take up some imitation of the order the government officials brought, and would likely try to use the capitol building as it’s a landmark and people would be brought to it. Through this, they could establish a very simplistic government, built on both keeping order, and using the state’s emergency management plans as a framework for how they manage the city.
When the player characters unlock Olympia, they find a town with either no law or a very basic law system unrelated to the old world’s law, which is both a bad thing for the people in Olympia, but narratively allows us as creators to do whatever we want with no hindrance from the fictional government. Through making contact with this basic government, the players are able to make use of resources Olympia has that Evergreen doesn’t, and can perhaps even use the state resources to better manage Evergreen’s own very limited resources. While the officials themselves are gone, their plans and resources aren’t, which is a major boon for a group of people who have had to single handedly run an entire college on their own. Additionally, places like the capitol building would be a very useful kind of meeting place, and a major enough landmark that food and water could be passed out, which would go a long ways to quelling the chaos brewing in a city without law