What are your favorite kinds of post apocalyptic scenarios to run or play? Mutant wackiness like Gamma World, zombie hordes, natural disasters or civil wars?What systems do you find work best? Things more on the storygame side like Apocalypse World, OSR or adjacent stuff like Gamma World and AWN? Or more generic modern systems?Personally, I was thinking about running something in the spirit of a Canticle for Leibowitz with monks in the wasteland, but with the actual apocalypse being orbital megastructures hitting the earth.
>>98113665I tend to like a high level of strangeness mixed in with psychic or otherworldly intrusion that caused the collapse of life as we know it. Apocalyps World has been a go to for this for ages. Things like the moon being an alien base that exploded and rained mutating asteroids on the earth, angler fish with psychic lures, biker gangs with symbiotic alien appendages. AW isn't overly focused on realism and is for shorter campaigns so it holds together enough for about 10-12 and that's about all that kind of setting can sustain ime. The Quiet Year is a fun map making post apoc game. Only played Gaslands a bit but had a good time with it, very low barrier to entry and something about hotwheels gets people engaged.
>>98113665I liked Neuroshima because I used to be a retarded polack but I moved far away from there, changed my name and face to better justify my new citizenship.
>>98113665I like Mutant Future. It's simple.
>>98116003I thought it was out of print. What do you like about it over Gamma World, MCC, or Ashes?
I like AWN. I used to plug content from Mutant Future into Vaults of Vaarn and it worked great. Also, it is not exactly Post-Apoc, but I do love TTRPGing in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Zones is my fav right now.
>>98113665>What systems do you find work best?I'm using refluffed Myriad Song for a sci-fantasy post-apocalyptic game drawing a lot of inspiration from Destiny. It's working well enough I'm several years into it now.Planning a more gonzo 80-90s setting afterwards. Was going to try out RIFTs but I've been told it's mechanically clunky and dated. Might lean towards Savage Rifts or Genesys instead.
>>98113665I'm planning on running some Mutant Crawl Classics this summer. I have an idea for a weird sort of settlement management thing I want to fuck with. I really like the implied setting that MCC has.Vaults of Vaarn is tight as hell too.
>>98119110>>98119189>Vaults of VaarnI'll have to check it out if it's being rated so highly.I like that AWN is really flexible in the types of games you can run, and the tools for creating the crisis scenarios in addition to the hexcrawls is really playable.
>>98119355>I'll have to check it out if it's being rated so highly.NTA, the mechanics aren't everybody's cup of tea, they are based on KNAVE 1e but with to-hit and a little more crunch than anything Knave, but still less crunch that most OSR, I personally would not tolerate it if it wouldn't had to-hit rolls but it does. The GM tools are good, not the best, but encourages one to develop/homebrew better/taylored ones. The setting is kind of fun if you are into Post-Post-Apoc gonzo psychedelic sci-fantasy, also since it is so eclectic you can insert gonzo content from other RPGs and the tone will accept it and would feel natural. Leo's original art is charming in an amateurish way. The community is relatively large for a niche thing, and they share lots of content, homebrew and 3rd party, but the quality varies widely. So enjoying VoV is kind of an acquired taste, but is great fun if you get to adjust your expectations. I sincerely prefer it to Numenera (which is very close to VoV in genre/settng), for me it is better in both setting/lore and mechanics/ruleset than Numenera, despite not being as polished, Numenera despite its polish, feels clunky and doesn't "coagulated" for me as Vaarn did.
Are there any systems that handle irradiated or poisonous environments well? As in, mechanically interesting and not merely "put on radiation suit/gas mask and forget about the hazard entirely".
>>98119409Yeah, something about Vaarn clicks (in 50 pages) in a way that Numenera never did for me. It really captures that weird fiction, Dark is the Sun, Book of the New Sun weird fiction feel in a way that nothing else has.I'm hoping the newly Kickstarted edition actually sticks around for a second so I can pick it up, it's everything in the zines plus a bunch of new material like Settlement generators, which I'm very interested in, but I don't want to have to pay four times what it's worth on the secondary market.
>>98119414I mean, usually it's just damage and damage mitigation, right? A more gonzo system might have a chance for mutation as well. What would be a "more interesting" system, in your estimation?
>>98119355>I like that AWN is really flexible in the types of games you can run, and the tools for creating the crisis scenarios in addition to the hexcrawls is really playable.I like it too for the same reasons, but it's totally a different thing to VoV, I don't even consider VoV as post-apocalyptic. As you wrote AWN could be made into lots of post-apoc subgenres or franchises, for example I'm running a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. campaign with it right now and it is going great so far, I just had to do some little homebrewing and its set to keep going for long, we are using heart of chornobyl's zone map and I just added some hexes over it. That's a thing I couldn't do with Vaarn, if I would try to run a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. campaign with Vaarn it would just end being Vaults of Vaarn in the end, with an odd S.T.A.L.K.E.R. cherry on top.
>>98119110>>98119431I got Ashes Without Number around the same time as I started playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R Gamma and I really want to do something similar.Competing factions, radiation, strange artifacts, ammo and resource scarcity and mutants and the like.However instead of the chernobyl exclusion zone it would be a hard to reach island of the coast of the UK with random soul eating fog as opposed to blow outs.
>>98119702Check thismkn-publications itch io/zwn
>>98115914>Neuroshimabased & pierogipilled
We should do a post-apoc general from now on.Even a post-apoc trove too.
>>98113665>What are your favorite kinds of post apocalyptic scenarios to run or play? Mutant wackiness like Gamma World, zombie hordes, natural disasters or civil wars?All Flesh Must Be Eaten is dogshitDead Reign is what Eden wishes they had made instead of the Witchcraft abomination AFMBE
>>98115914>changed my name and faceTo where do you moved to? Fukushima?
>>98120033LOL that image>"What does a female feels when using dating apps">One of the zombies just facing away, not feeling the vibe, "Yeah, fuckit, I'ma outta here guys, the squeeze is not worth the juice.">Why the zombies aren't into attacking Chad? "I guess only foids are into Chad."
>>98120045take your meds
>>98120020I did see Zones but held off on buying it. This might be a good excuse, thanks!Big issue I'm facing is that Stalker seems to be dripping with atmosphere and that living world feel. Not sure how I would translate that over to not just a ttrpg and a different setting.How does everyone else make their players feel like they're in a larger world/wasteland?
>>98119702A lot of the tags and enclave/faction stuff are system neutral, and don't require the full version of Ashes. You can just lift them.
>>98120513Things shouldnt be static. The factions should be making moves behind the players whether the players are interacting with them or not. If the players clear a bandit camp and leave it, something else is going to move in. Factions are going to fight battles over territory even though the players are on the other side of the map.I'd also come up with generators for how the environment is constantly, subtly changing. Nothing should be static.
>>98120513>How does everyone else make their players feel like they're in a larger world/wasteland?Instead of them having random encounters, have they find the left-overs of someone's else random encounter. For example: caravan is trashed and barely anything organic is left. Checking things carefully shows a cut-off mandible here, a bit of non-human blood there. It seems they met a column of giant soldier-ants, which carved up and carried all the meat, plants and water, leaving the scrap, guns and clothing of synthetic fibers. It would be a nice loot if not for the issue that your group needs clean water more than ammunition right now. This particular species forms temporary hives out of themselves, hibernating around the organic hoard the roaming columns build up. How do you feel on entering a dungeon which is sleeping?Besides that, some of the caravan leftovers might point out they come from unknown lands, like open cans which say "Underbeaches Crabbies", or a pneumatic pistol engraved with "Good Peaks mark II". Names that suggest and might be expanded later, IF the players get enticed.
Besides "Objective: Survive" what makes a post apocalyptic game fun and different from a more typical campaign?
>>98122521Exploring the ruins of an unknown future? The ability to rebuild a society in any way you see fit? The power fantasy of the disintegration of the old ruling elites power structures? Why do people act as if the only post apocalyptic stories are the walking dead? As I said in another thread, if you look at most post Apoc gaming, it has a *lot* in common with the assumptions of old d&d. The biggest post Apoc franchise in the world (to the best of my knowledge, maybe there is some post Apoc Korean show that is massive popular in SEA) isn't really about "objective:survive" at all.
>>98122573I feel like even in more gonzo GW or Mad Max style games, privation and the harsh environment is a more serious and session relevant concern than even OSR style D&D.
>>98122903Not really? In osr style d&d, how much food and torches your brought with you is possibly the most important thing you've got to worry about at lower levels.
>>98120513>Big issue I'm facing is that Stalker seems to be dripping with atmosphere and that living world feel.Key is just drenching yourself with lots of lore, I guess lots of GMing is just more art than science.>Not sure how I would translate that over to not just a ttrpg and a different setting.Provide them props (even virtual, like images and such), Music (There's lots of exclusion-zone-related ambient), Help yourself with the wiki and steal moods, characters ideas and tropes from the lore.>How does everyone else make their players feel like they're in a larger world/wasteland?The zone's map helps a lot, it gives a spatial coherence to all that, then there's the zone's ecosystem, and I don't mean it by just the mutants and such, but also the factions, the anomalies, the radiation spots, the artifacts, etc. The usual game loop of improving little by little from going against all, etc.STALKER is kind of limited compared with other exclusion zone fiction, it is less "psychedelic", I guess because the video games are pretty self-contained stuff, but if you want to add more "weird" into it, you should check other exclusion-zone fiction outside of STALKER, like Area-X and the original Roadside Picnic. Other source of tools and inspiration could come from other TTRPGs like "Zone of Exclusion" and "QZ", these are more fantastical than the more self-contained STALKER stuff and have good GM tools in the form of tables and such.I loved the idea of that anon making his zone at an island in england, and the fog, etc. I had my own campaign originally set on a huge area between USA and Canada, north of Detroit, to give it a "Roadside Picnic" vibe, I used a program called Hexthingy to create hex overlays to use with actual google earth maps. Then I supported myself lots on the GM tools from Zones, QZ and ZoE. Made a compilation of "Zone" fiction, a single pdf at 2k pages, and when I feel stuck I just roll for a page in the huge-ass pdf, and get inspired by it.
>>98122955I actually want to rely a lot on resource management and such in my game but I've not actually played many OSR games before. Resource tracking and gauging travelling times and PLANNING a operation into a bunker sounds really cool but does it get tedious in practice? I imagine it needs the right kind of players.>>98120948This is really cool. Lots of potential threads for the players to note down to investigate or ignore as they desire. >>98123520There's a lot of good ideas here. Your zone sounds really cool, I'd love to hear more.I have...general ideas, mainly that fog island comes and goes throughout history and is very hard to access due to a permanant fog wall that surrounds it. It's been locked in place between England and Ireland for about 15-20 years now although was compelty cut off by the fog for about 10.Factions I thought up so far:Sovereign - Duty stand-in. UK detachment sent in 20 years ago before being cut off and basically self sufficient for a decade before recontact. Nominally "under the command" of the UK gov. Also, given that the island is closer to Ireland than UK, legally they've annexed the island from ireland.The Locals - Descended from pre roman britons and irish along later irish that arrived around 1600, fleeing from Cromwell when the island popped up again. Retained alot of iron age culture but are not primative. In an insurgent war with Sovereign.Mercs - Standard merc company with a small twist. The leader along with looking for the secret of eternal life for his super rich bosses is also investigating burial mounds and crypts for necromantic artifacts/knowledge. I was inspired a bit by loads of cool drawings of OSR mindless skeletons and wanted them in the game. Then I thought it would be cool if they wre in kevlar and kitted out with shotguns and lmgs and outsourced to Blackwater for sale to warlords. Some kind of robot faction - Still thinking on this one.Bandits - still thinkingMonolith standin maybe
>>98120033Here's the thing AFMBE and Dead Reign both don't want you to realize:Just about every freaking game out there has rules for zombies. Because of this a "zombie specific game" is about as necessary as an "attack dog specific game". The only question is how good is the system for general use, since both of those systems suck.AFMBE is good for when you don't know what kind of zombie game you want to run, and need some inspiration for use in a different and better system.Dead Reign is good for when you want to roll on a bunch of random tables to generate stuff for use in a different and better system.
>>98113665Depends on what I'm wanting I guess.Character focused kitchen-sink apocalypse? Deadlands: Hell on Earth for the weird horror with a 70's vibe, or Savage Worlds Low Life for the absolute bizarre ridiculousness.Faction driven world reclamation? Legacy Life Among the Ruins.Post-post-apocalyptic, where society has rebuilt and there are still vestiges of the super tech sitting around? Exalted 2ed.PA game I'm waiting to be translated into English? Tsukuyumi. Love the board game, looking forward to the TTRPG.Always hold a place in my heart: Rifts. The system is so bad it hurts the setting (which is a feat!), but I'm still too fond of the original to consider switching to Savage Worlds (even though it really does do a better job).
>>98124695>Also, given that the island is closer to Ireland than UK, legally they've annexed the island from ireland.Sounds touchy, heh.>The LocalsNice, gives "land of the lost" vibes.>MercsA modern merc lich lord sounds great, heh.>Some kind of robot faction - Still thinking on this one.I like gonzo settings, like Fallout, Rifts or Vaults of Vaarn, and those have robots too, recently I found Breachworld and the mini-six system is great.>Bandits - still thinkingIn my setting bandits are powerful, with ties to either corpos or mobs, they profit from the zone, and bribe the military, unregulated capitalism is a hell of a drug. And as in Anomaly/Gamma lore, mercs are their allies.>Monolith standin maybeYou need a monolith stand-in for sure, or at least some sort of weird religion/cult tied to the zone, people should be amazed by the zone's "miracles" and put religious connotations to it, or just be manipulated by paranormal agenda, etc.I liked the original idea of Shadow of Chernobyl development bible, it was going to have aliens and illuminatti, but they had to tone it down.
