They will want propaganda, patrols, excommunications and inquisitors, and will hate you for not giving it to them. You don't force any of the Laws the people do, and they will violently and gruesomely murder dissenters who saw the red flags. The scary thing isn't that both paths take you to totalitarian dictatorship it's that your citizens demand it.

Order immediately has supporters, but also dissenters who know all too well how authoritarianism starts - and then the nightmare fuel happens. Faith, in particular, is a slow boil, and it takes several days before the City has any amount of religious followers. Both involve giving your citizens something to believe in (unity in purpose and toil in Order connection through religion in Faith), and in both cases, people are slow to accept it. In the Frostland, your scouts can find not one and not two sites where entire settlements have fallen because of this. At first you simply allow covertly cooking dead bodies (or, if the relevant law is passed, using them as fertilizer), and then people will do it themselves. It's a rather long chain of events starting with food riots, then starvation, then your guards catching cannibals in the streets, and then people storming the cannibals' hideout - even your guards requesting permission to intervene are not sure if this is a lynching of the guilty or an attempt to get some of the meat for themselves.

If food runs scarce, you get the option of passing a law to eat the dead.

Given this story takes place with London having been at the relative height of its Imperial Age this is quite likely as London was both a center of commerce as well as having relatively recently had settlement from the Mediterranean world at least in terms of genetics. Now granted in this situation we don't have pristine genetics or deliberate selection for diversity but presuming some assortment from different districts of London with different genetic backgrounds such as having some level Greek ancestry, African ancestry, Asian ancestry, Celtic ancestry, and some other varieties of European are mixed into the gene pool that could easily drop the required number to one or two hundred. note The human population presuming pristine and deliberately varied genetics can actually go as low as 8 theoretically and still be viable. If you survive at the cost of human lives, you can end up below the minimum level of 500, which means that if the cold does not kill your descendants, the inbreeding will.

And that's not even getting into that from the genetic standpoint human population must be at least several hundred strong to even have a chance at survival.

ItВ’s implied throughout the story that your region is possibly the last inhabited one left on Earth, and until the expansions came out, that your city may be the last. As the temperature dropped and it started to snow the first places to fall to the frost was the southern equator unprepared for heavy snowfall and the waves of refugees from Europe, the southern parts of the planet fell into disarray and eventually fell silent. The reason for this is found in the lore.

In the city the population is entirely white British.

How much of the current Crapsack World state was really caused by nature, and how much by the human factor?

there was a possibility it wouldn't happen), before the Frost came over the course of weeks. The preparations were originally made 'just in case' (i.e. Then a theory about The Saffron Cloud appears, forbidden to even talk about by the pre-Frost governments, a chemical/climate-altering weapon of mass destruction. Even with all the factors from ash clouds to the Sun dimming, it should have been impossible. Scientists across the globe trying to find the cause (and possible ways to reverse it), since the catastrophe seems to deny the very concept of physics. As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy.

Frostpunk refugees