The recent release, from Game Designers' Workshop, of Twilight: 2000 marks the latest chapter in the development of holocaust role-playing games, a genre dating hack to TSR Inc.'s publication of Gamma World in 1978. Since 1978, we have also seen the release of The Morrow Project in 1980 from Timeline Ltd., Aftermadi in 1981 from Fantasy Games Unlimited, a second and third edition of Gamma World in 1981 and 1984, and, also in 1984, Tri Tac Inc.'s publication of Rogue 417 a game module intended for use with their Fringeworthy or Stalking die Night Fantastic role-playing games.
What binds these games is the basic premise, the common theme, that they all share: Each is set in a world where civilization has crumbled--a kind of modern remake of the Dark Ages, where the very foundations of our society have been left exposed, and humanity Must struggle for its very survival. And each of these games has its own approach to the subject.
The Holocaust
Gamma World presents a fanciful future where the United States was ripped asunder by nuclear, biological, chemical, and geological weapons during the "Social Wars" of the early 24th century. The game is a chaotic postscript to 24th century civilization, where science fiction and fantasy walk hand-in-hand down the road Out of Armageddon, and where biogenetic chemicals and radiation have brought about the rapid evolution, in just over a century, of many new species, such as "jackrabbits the size of horses" and "a mutated form of shark adapted to life on land," filling the vacuum left by civilization.
The Morrow Project is also set in what was the United States, over a century later in the wake of a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1989. The players are more likely to encounter other humans, and what evolutionary deviants do appear are less preposterous than those often encountered in Gamma World.
Whereas the other games in this genre are set after the holocaust, Twilight: 2000 is set during the holocaust, in the midst of the Third World War in Europe, still in progress after five years, though it seems to be winding down due to a lack of fuel, food, spare parts, ammunition, and a general lack of interest as the world slowly dissolves into total anarchy-this is a war which fewer and fewer people bother fighting.
Aftermath leaves it up to the Gamemaster (GM) to decide how civilization collapsed, giving you the flexibility to write your own personalized holocaust. The rules generally assume "that civilization continued to develop until sometime in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century" and that play begins "about twenty years after the collapse of organized society." However, the game does offer limited advice on setting the game up to 200 years after the unspecified holocaust. To accommodate the variety of possibilities, the rules are broader in scope and often less specific than any of the other holocaust role-playing games (RPGs).
Rogue 417 is a game module for roleplaying in the wake of a biochemically engineered plague that kills the majority of the human race. Play can actually begin during the plague itself and continues into the years immediately after the plague. Though the date is not specified, the plague clearly strikes in the present day. Most of the encounters are human, though the plague has left some of its victims as mindless killers. The Survivors
There are three basic types of player characters (PCs) in Gamma World. First, there are Pure Strain Humans, normal individuals like you and me, who are generally in superior health to other character types. However, your Pure Strain Human might have a brother or sister who is a mutated Humanoid, while other PCs can be Mutated Animals with human intelligence. Humanoid and Mutated Animal characters have from 2-8 beneficial and/or disadvantageous mutations; such as Chameleon, Multiple Body Parts, Teleportation, and Periodic Amnesia, and it is the variety of colorful mutations that gives this game much of its flavor. Generating your first character will take about half an hour.
Players of The Morrow Project are members of a secret organization, founded in 1962 by Bruce Edwin Morrow, which quietly recruited teams of men and women who were cryogenically frozen in hidden bunkers across the United States. The PCs will be members of one such team, waiting to be waken from their deep sleep, shortly after a nuclear war, to help rebuild our shattered nation. Plenty of the best hardware the modern world has to offer has been put into storage with the teams, and they can be expected to have a significant technological advantage over the mostly primitive population they will encounter. Generating your first character will take about half an hour.
The PCs in Twilight: 2000 are soldiers, and like Morrow Project personnel, may have something of a technological advantage over what remains of the civilian population. Though the production of new equipment is almost non-existent, the military still has advanced weapons and vehicles (converted to run on alcohol) and other equipment. But the military is slowly disintegrating; the PCs will begin play as members of what was the United States 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized). Generating your first character will take about an hour.
The character generation process in Aftermath is more involved than any other game in this field, giving you a very strong feel for what your character is like; age, background, psychology, and talents directly influence the number and type of the character's skills, the character's attributes, possibility of mutations, familiarity with advanced technology, and the type of equipment with which the character begins play. Mutations are more realistic than in Gamma World, making the character stronger, quicker, tougher, smarter, enhancing one or more of the senses, or giving the character psionic ability. Generating your first character can take close to two hours.
Player characters in Rogue 417 are "normals" (humans who did not contract the plague) struggling for "day-to-day survival." Rogue 417 is only a module, however, and does not have character generation guidelines; characters will have to be created with some other game.
Into the Ruins
The Gamma World is fairly well thought out universe, providing you with a map of the United States as it appears in the 25th century, a better than average introductory adventure that should make it possible to begin play and familiarize the participants with all of The Basic Game mechanics as soon as the GM has had time to briefly read the rules, a chapter devoted to guiding even a novice through the steps of setting up a simple campaign, and a short chapter giving the GM limited advice about outlining his own adventures. The Basic Rules Booklet is full of information telling you what the Gamma World is like, including descriptions of the different mutations, about 60 Encounters and Hazards (mutant monsters and other nasties), about a dozen Cryptic Alliances (secret societies such as the Restorationists, the Knights of Genetic Purity, or the Animal Liberation Front), and a little over a dozen robot types.
The Morrow Project is presented something like the opening chapters of a novel, freeing the GM from much-of the initial work usually involved in setting up a campaign by telling us where the PCs are, how they got there, and what they are supposed to be doing. But, lacking an introductory adventure or guidelines for creating your own adventures, the game provides limited specific advice on finishing what the game has begun for us. How much fun the players will have with this game depends largely on the experience and initiative of the GM. The nearly three dozen Human Encounter Types, some 30 examples of North American wildlife, and over two dozen Mutant Encounter Types provide some of the more interesting and yet believeable random encounters found within this (or any other) genre. But beyond this, the GM is on his own.
Twilight: 2000, along with Escape from Kalisz (the beginning adventure included with it), is similar to The Morrow Project, in that it also begins like an open-ended story. Every Twilight: 2000 campaign starts in the very same circumstances: The PCs are trapped behind enemy lines in war-torn Poland. Escape from Kalisz is not so much an adventure as the introduction to this campaign, which leaves the characters free to go in any direction they want, while providing the GM with general information on what they'll encounter in each direction. Inexperienced GMs, however, are likely to find this beginning adventure of too little help, because of the lack of detail, or advice on how to flesh it out into a genuine adventure.
If you're a GM with your own vision of what your post-holocaust world should look like, you should consider Aftermath. Though the text could be organized better, the game provides guidelines for most circumstances, including a very good chapter on mapping out a ruined city (preferably the city you live in or near!) and another chapter dealing thoroughly with searching and foraging for artifacts and supplies in these ruins.
Rogue 417 is essentially a pre- packaged holocaust campaign, providing everything the GM needs to get started. The Rogue Night scenario (one of two starter scenarios) is complete and simple enough to be played as soon as the GM has read once through the rules. It's Time Table presentation is simple enough for a novice GM to feel comfortable with it, but is still exciting enough to introduce the most experienced of players to the plague-ravaged world. The game suggests 18 Survivor Groups, and provides perhaps the most playable guidelines and tables within the holocaust genre for survival (shelter, scavenging for supplies, etc). Furthermore, it is the only one of these games to provide an area population generator, providing the GM with an easy means of expanding the campaign as the PCs venture into uncharted areas. These features should make Rogue 417 of interest to any GM running a holocaust campaign.
Mechanics of the Apocalypse
Gamma World, without question, has the simplest game mechanics of the holocaust genre, having Dungeons & Dragons like simplicity: There are no skills so all weapons and equipment can be used equally well by most characters, armor acts as an effective barrier against mental attacks, and the distance to the target has no effect on the chance of hitting it with a projectile weapon (i.e. rifle, pistol, bow, rock).
At the opposite end of the complexity spectrum is Aftermath, whose involved game mechanics all too often lead us the long way around a short hurtle. After going to the trouble of calculating a skill score between 0- 100, we must divide this number by five to get a Base Chance of Success (BCS) between 0-20; rolling a d20 below the BCS will result in success but we could just as well roll a d.100 below the score to determine success, or we should have calculated a score of 0-20 in the first place! This is needless complexity, adding nothing to the realism of the game, and demonstrates nothing but sloppiness on the designers' part. Buried in all this clutter are some innovative mechanics, but the game would benefit from a general rewrite, streamlining the rules.
The Morrow Project also has complex mechanics, though not so convoluted as Aftermath. The Morrow Project's rules make sense, and though the combat and damage systems are more involved than many RPGs, the slowness of play is offset by greater realism, taking into account individual dexterity and accuracy, target distance, visibility and size, armor penetration and hit location, unconsciousness and death caused by shock, and blood loss. All this gives the players a very real sense for what takes place in combat.
Twilight: 2000 lies somewhere between The Morrow Project and Gamma World in terms of complexity. Skill determines the characters' chance of success at most actions, and target distance and hit location are both taken into account in combat. The rules are logical, though not always as realistic as The Morrow Project.
The games Rogue 417 is meant to be used with, Fringeworthy and Stalking the Night Fantastic, were designed by two of the three people who designed The Morrow Project, and they achieve a similar degree of realism, most notably with the use of an all inclusive hit location table detailing damage to tissue, bones, organs, and arteries, as well as the chance of death from shock. However, it is worth noting that 95% of the content of Rogue 417 could be used with any role- playing game, and the other 5% can be ignored without taking anything away from the module.
Picking an Apocalypse
I would recommend Gamma World, or possibly Twilight: 2000, to novice gamers, The Morrow Project only to serious and experienced role-players, Rogue 417 to any one interested in a holocaust campaign, and Aftermath only to serious holocaust roleplayers; wargamers might very well appreciate Twilight: 2000's setting or The Morrow Project's realistic coverage of modern weapons and combat.
Back to Table of Contents -- Game News #10
To Game News List of Issues
To MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1985 by Dana Lombardy.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com