Roleplaying games dealing with Post Apocalypse and Survival

[Tarinaky]

I'm looking for RPGs with a post apocalypse or survival theme to pillage for ideas.

I think the adage was something like "Good writers research, great writers steal."

It's been my experience that it's very hard to do as counting calories and water rations is, well... not very fun but I have some other game ideas that need some extra padding.

Suggestions?

PS: I'm approaching this from a Science Fiction standpoint, not a Fantasy one.

[Totally Guy]

There's Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker. I think this'll be the next game our group does a campaign of.

[Tarinaky]

Hunh. I can't seem to find that on Drivethru.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

[Barbin]

Try this: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=147142&highlight=shadow+theory

[LibraryOgre]

A few from the top of my head:

1) Systems Failure: A relatively small print run game from Palladium; now about a decade old. It focused on an alien invasion at the same time as the Y2K stuff happened, resulting in destruction of the world infrastructure. We've been playing it for years and gone all sorts of gonzo with it.

2) After the Bomb: Essentially, the world ends, and mutant animals take over. There's the 2000s era big book, and the series of small books from the 80s. Again, a Palladium book.

3) Chaos Earth. Another Palladium one; they like to blow up the world. A prelude to Rifts (which is more post-post-apocalyptic), but it concentrates more or less on the immediate aftermath of a techno-magical explosion leading to billions of deaths and worldwide chaos.

4) Select Rifts titles. I'd take a look at Dinosaur Swamp, especially, since it's got a lot of "survive the hell that is the SE United States" going for it.

5) Eclipse Phase: More or less "If the world ended, and humanity tried to survive in space." If you've read Richard K Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series, picture that, but sans Martian technology and farcasting.

You might also take a look at novels; really, I think for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi survivalism, you could do worse than to steal liberally from Fallout.

[Tarinaky]

Aye. The problem is that everyone expects you to steal liberally from Fallout which makes it a no-go zone as far as plot goes.

My first thought was a post-apocalyptic Seven Samurai but then I realised this was the plot to Mad Max 2.

[TroubleBrewing]

My first thought was a post-apocalyptic Seven Samurai but then I realised this was the plot to Mad Max 2.

Or a well-intentioned 'Magnificent 7" re-shoot.

After all, the best apocalypses are wild west-ish. :smallbiggrin:

[The Rose Dragon]

There is the little known Summerland. Very poor system, but highly evocative book.

[some guy]

My first thought was a post-apocalyptic Seven Samurai but then I realised this was the plot to Mad Max 2.

Really? Dang. I wanted use the Seven Samurai for a Gamma World campaign. Oh well. I can still construct my death-race.
On that note; Gamma World is post-apocalyptic, but it might be a bit too zany.
Other than that? Adventure Time is post-apocalyptic but is not a rpg and might be too fantastic (fantastic as in containing traces of fantasy fiction).
EDIT: Check some (http://www.flickr.com/photos/84568447@N00/5680356385/in/set-72157624985646625) of (http://www.flickr.com/photos/84568447@N00/5680919744/in/set-72157624985646625) these (http://www.flickr.com/photos/84568447@N00/5515937702/in/set-72157624985646625) backgrounds (http://www.flickr.com/photos/84568447@N00/5527071797/in/set-72157624985646625) from Adventure Time, they might work inspirational.

[Tetsubo 57]

Morrow Project.
Aftermath.
Gamma World.
Darwin's World.
Blood Dawn.
Omega World.
DeadWorld.
Mutant Future.
Mutant Epoch.
Warlords of the Apocalypse (not yet released).

These are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head that haven't been mentioned.

[dsmiles]

Morrow Project.
Aftermath.
Gamma World.
Darwin's World.
Blood Dawn.
Omega World.
DeadWorld.
Mutant Future.
Mutant Epoch.
Warlords of the Apocalypse (not yet released).

These are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head that haven't been mentioned.HoL
Cyberpunk 2020 (kind of, but not really post-apocalyptic, and maybe not in print)
Dark Heresy (grimdark 40k role-play)
Rogue Trader (40k universe)

[Eldan]

Gamma World is really more pulp than science fiction, though. And it runs on comic book mutations and non-logic. Great fun, but not what the OP seems to be looking for. Of course, everyone still wants to play a psychokinetic turtleman and a four-armed cactus-man gunslinger with lasers battling flying T-rexes and
robots from time to time, but it's really not SciFi.

[dsmiles]

Gamma World is really more pulp than science fiction, though. And it runs on comic book mutations and non-logic. Great fun, but not what the OP seems to be looking for. Of course, everyone still wants to play a psychokinetic turtleman and a four-armed cactus-man gunslinger with lasers battling flying T-rexes and
robots from time to time, but it's really not SciFi.
Go back a couple of editions. It's really just the WotC version that's not sci-fi. But, yeah, who doesn't want to play a cryokinetic time-traveller, or a deific yeti.

[Eldan]

I only played a single, old edition. 3th or 4th, I think. Remotely AD&D based, from what I remember. No, that wasn't Scifi. Every game where you can play a talking flower with the power to shoot beams of lightning from it's eyes isn't SciFi. Radiation doesn't make you grow a second brain with it's own personality.

[Tarinaky]

In fairness - Fallout has the same kinds of comic book mutation silliness.

[Eldan]

It's much sillier than fallout, really. And I know how silly Fallout can be.

[LibraryOgre]

In fairness - Fallout has the same kinds of comic book mutation silliness.

Yeah, Gamma World is about a billion times sillier than Fallout at its silliest... and I mean the point where you're finding pictures of Elvis on a crashed alien spacecraft.

[Tarinaky]

Yeah, Gamma World is about a billion times sillier than Fallout at its silliest... and I mean the point where you're finding pictures of Elvis on a crashed alien spacecraft.

That sounds straight out of Fallout 2.

[Eldan]

True, that does sound like Fallout.
But Fallout, as far as I know, lacks humanoid plants, psychic powers, magic, dinosaurs and talking animals.

[Tarinaky]

True, that does sound like Fallout.
But Fallout, as far as I know, lacks humanoid plants, psychic powers, magic, dinosaurs and talking animals.

Broken Hills in FO2.

[dsmiles]

Every game where you can play a talking flower with the power to shoot beams of lightning from it's eyes isn't SciFi.
What, you never saw Day of the Triffids (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055894/)?

[SurlySeraph]

Twilight 2013! It is, in fact, a calorie-counting game, but the mechanics are quite well thought out.

[dsmiles]

Twilight 2013! It is, in fact, a calorie-counting game, but the mechanics are quite well thought out.
Wait. Calorie counting? Like in The Windup Girl?

[Tarinaky]

Twilight 2013! It is, in fact, a calorie-counting game, but the mechanics are quite well thought out.

When I made that Calorie-counting remark I had Twilight 2013 in mind. I am not a fan.

[Ozymandias]

True, that does sound like Fallout.
But Fallout, as far as I know, lacks humanoid plants, psychic powers, magic, dinosaurs and talking animals.

Well, there's a talking plant in Broken Hills in Fallout 2, and there are humanoid plants in Vault 22 in New Vegas, there are psychic powers in Fallout 1, actually (in the hallway leading up to the Master), there's "magic" in the prophetic abilities of the Elder and Sulik, and there are talking deathclaws and a talking molerat (in addition to the aforementioned plant) in Fallout 2.

No dinosaurs, though (unless you count the one in Novac in NV, which isn't real).

[Tarinaky]

Compared to everything else in the list Dinosaurs are pretty sobre...

Geckos will have to fill in out Dino quota.

[LibraryOgre]

That sounds straight out of Fallout 2.

Actually, the finding dead aliens with a picture of Elvis is right out of Fallout 1.

Gamma World was crazier than that.

[SPLH]

I know a very nice such gam but it is in French :smallredface:. It is called Vermine. The premise is that in a few decades, the agressivity/toxicity/lethality of Nature as a whole has grown exponentially (the titular Vermin, giants animals, megaviruses, toxic plants, giant fast-growing vines, basically everything you need to spice things up), leading to the collapse of modern civilisation. The game is set in Europe in 2037. The survivors are organised in small communities - with a large varieties of customs, religions (including shamanism), ressources.

The game distinguishes between : Survivalists (pragmatists, bent on autosufficiency), Humanists (trying to save/rebuild civ), Adapted (to the Vermin : living in giant bee Hives for instance) and Deviants (mystics, cannibals, what have you). There is potential both for gritty, harsh day to day survival and for larger than life characters.

Then there is a general pattern of eight Totems, which stand for attitudes/mystical influences (magical if the DM is so inclined) : the Predator, the Carrion Feeder, the Parasite, the Symbiote, the Builder, the Horde, the Loner and the Hive. These are used to characterise characters, communities and the Vermin itself. Shamans can be related to one of those Totems and fight against manifestations of the others.

Another important factor is age : in this setting, older characters have known the world "before", so they are both inclined to try to rebuild it and less adapted to the new realities, they also carry precious but sometime hard to use specialised knowledge ; youngsters have never known anything else and they are ready to embrace new lifestyles, including cooperation/symbiosis with Nature.

I would love to run a campaign for Vermine, but could never find the players :smallannoyed:

[Thrawn4]

Vermin sounds interesting...

Anyway, you could also have a look at the aforementioned Fallout Setting http://www.pamedia.com/rpgames/rpg/falloutpnp/

and this relatively unknown RPG Freeway Warrior http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books

Both are for free :-)

[SurlySeraph]

Hm, no one's mentioned Tribe 8 yet. It might be interesting for stuff on social dynamics.

Actually, what exactly are you looking for ideas about - organizations to include in the setting, things for the players to do, ideas of how to play out survival-related tasks? And would non-RPG media be useful?


Wait. Calorie counting? Like in The Windup Girl?

The normal rules have you calculate the number of meals you get by various foraging methods, but you can also calculate a character's calories per day requirements and use those to figure out how much food your character needs.
Part of the idea of the game was to include three different levels of detail that you could play at. However, they're a bit confusingly explained, and even the lowest-detail one has plenty of complication.


When I made that Calorie-counting remark I had Twilight 2013 in mind. I am not a fan.

Hey, it's more playable than Phoenix Command. :smalltongue:

[TheThan]

well there's always D20 modern apocalypse.

its pretty decent, take d20 modern, and rub it liberally with post apocalyptic flavoring.

[Tarinaky]

Non-RPG sources are good. I guess I'm more looking for GM advice than mechanics really.

I never really 'got' Tribe 8 though. It seemed really odd.

[SurlySeraph]

GM advice:
1. Don't try to stick too heavily to a single tone. Post-apocalyptic includes ultra-bleak stuff like Threads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads) and The Road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road); it also includes Gamma World and the silly parts of Fallout. Mix things up a little.
2. Travel is a major theme. Have stuff like rolls for foraging and descriptions of unique things they see as they travel to get across a sense of time progressing. In fact, you can get a lot of enjoyable play mostly out of travel - figuring out how to get through natural obstacles, hunting for food, finding things to climb so you can see farther so you can see somewhere that might have food, moving faster because you smoke started rising from somewhere after you climbed a tower and you suspect someone saw you and lit a fire as a signal, etc.
3. Here (http://hubpages.com/hub/11-Post-Apocalyptic-Adventure-Seeds) has some decent adventure ideas; you can probably google around for more.
4. Have both victories and setbacks. You want your players to feel like the world is a hard and desperate place, but that they can overcome and prevail. Don't pull punches too much, include encounters with both reasonable enemies they can beat up and near-unstoppable challenges they have to sneak around or run from or bargain with. Random encounter charts are actually a good idea here; you want unpredictability, not "Win, lose, win, lose" or whatever.

[Narren]

well there's always D20 modern apocalypse.

its pretty decent, take d20 modern, and rub it liberally with post apocalyptic flavoring.

I particularly like the barter system. I can't remember the details, but every item was assigned a value, and that was how you bought/sold stuff. We didn't use a currency, and my group had a good time collecting random stuff just for bartering opportunities.

[Jude_H]

One thing I keep running into that kind of brings down survival games is finding an interesting mechanism to model attrition. It seems like most games it's just a matter of striking out belongings or waiting down a metagame clock. Do any of the games mentioned here specifically make resource management fun?

[Tarinaky]

Resource Management is never fun unless you're an accountant. Hence the problem :p

[Morghen]

SurlySeraph already mentioned it, but The Road is just about the definitive work in written fiction on a post-apocalyptic world. I don't want to crown it with an absolute, but I don't know of anything that even comes close. Threads sounds like the only thing that does, but movies are a different enough medium to be discussed on their own.

Brilliant. Dark. Heart-breaking. I recommend it as strongly as I can.

[The Rose Dragon]

Resource Management is never fun unless you're an accountant. Hence the problem :p

I'm not an accountant and I disagree with your assessment.

[Jude_H]

Just rolling over an idea, InSpectres makes credit cards kind of fun. I could see its mechanics being reused as an abstraction of resources. There's already octaNe, an RPG that recycles a bunch of InSpectres mechanics for a post-apocalyptic setting, but it mangles them pretty badly (there's no rule that can make PCs fail, there's no system-based motivator for players to do anything).

It might be interesting to run octaNe with InSpectres's rules (where rolling low does mean failure) and framework (episodic goal-oriented raids or scavenging missions, instead of octaNe's default "do whatever, man" mentality). The stakes would need to be bumped up to starvation and death, instead of a failed business, but it could work. octaNe's tone is more Ralph Steadman than Cormac McCarthy, so it's not going to be appropriate for a grim or gritty, but it might be fun.