In the distant future of 2004 the
administration of the court-appointed and deeply unpopular President
Shrub found itself in dire political straits (collapse of the
financial sector, three quagmired wars in the Middle East, the
infamous Peckerwood scandal). Wingnuts funded by the billionaire
Cocke brothers make good on Operation Patriot, a series of organized
destabilizations made to scare the country 'straight.' In the
resulting chaos, most major cities and strategic sites are destroyed
by dirty bombs, suitcase nukes, biochemical/mutagen agents, bank
over-draft surcharges and suburban rioters demanding a return to
convenience.
Then some even crazier shit happened
for decades. And now Road Warrior.
Wasteland 2 is out today and I'm
booging over...no...
Get thee behind me Satan.
There is a small mountain of writing to
do for Slumbering Ursine Dunes and I am going to buckle down and
finish (dammit) before I whip out that credit card. To get some of
that Post-Apocalyptic gaming out of my system instead I am going to
post about a start on a game that I wrote up a couple months ago to
get me out from the evil spell of Fallout New Vegas.
Titled not-at-all-facetiously
Anarchy--or alternately and less immaturely Fucking Anarchy and
Shit. The outline of the game
is a straight-up mod of Feudal Anarchy,
the hardcore medievalist d100-like game that we expect the Hydra
Collective to take up and finally produce in full technicolor glory
after the Dunes project.
Tone-wise I imagine it laying at some impossible point between
Fallout, Road Warrior, Car Wars and Kung Fu 2100. It's pitched at being tad less gritty (and
fiddly) than say Aftermath or Twilight 2000 but less
goofy and fantastic than Gamma World. So you know guns, karate
chops, car chases and scrambling for duct tape and rusted cans of cat food in a
cannibal-infested bunker.
Like Feudal Anarchy, I started
outlining a heavy emphasis on a player character's background and
vocations. Traveller has always been my second game and it showed in
the writing of FA. There was a heap of charts guiding you from your
birth station, class, and of course zig-zagging pre-adventurer
careers—all of which modify your attributes, starting skills and
gear.
Oh hell, I will stop jawing about it.
You can download the ultra-rough draft here and see for yourself.
It's just enough (barely) to run a
couple playtest sessions. When things chill out in the next month or
so I will likely run a test-balloon session (or the Traveller Coupbox
II depending on mood). I've decided on a sandbox area in an area I
have spent a lot of time tramping up and down, the desert and
mountains around Guadalupe and Carlsbad Caverns national parks. Lots
of adventure in there I reckon and plus I can reskin/recycle much of
my Boot Hill material.
Naturally it needs--and will get later
this year or early next--a good deal of expansion. More vocations,
more guns, more junk of the Pre-War to go gaga over. I'm also looking
forward to knocking out some simple vehicle chase and combat rules
and a few surprises.
But first the Dunes.
My first thought was "oh how awesome to rely so heavily on Past Career Experience because the whole point of the genre is the way pre-collapse life did or didn't train you for the new world." And then I read in and the second thought is, "oh, double awesome, time since the collapse is a modifier so it can model everything from The Road to Hiero and beyond."
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