Campaign Toybox
Story: England is a land of islands of woodland. In the copses and the hedgerows, nature survives in its traditional form. But the cities are close by, and the small animals have learnt to move effortlessly between a forest and urban landscape. Urban foxes, voles, rats and others are clever opportunists, and can make a life out of anything. They say that insects will be the only things to survive a nuclear war, but maybe, so will the insectivores…
When the big one hit, the humans were wiped out. Now their cities remain: dangerous places of disease and chaos and monsters – and also treasure, if you know where to look. Deep in the forest, the upright, intelligent humanoid beasts have built tiny villages of their own – little points of light in a radioactive landscape - but without human refuse to live on, their new civilisations are running out of time. What they need are brave heroes to go out into the urban ruins, keep the monsters at bay and bring back treasures from the Time Before. Heroes like you.
Style and Structure: Post-apocalyptic games are not very far from fantasy games. You’ve got tiny settlements scattered across a wild, dangerous land, where badguy empires can rise and fall as needed. There are strange relics and ancient evils from the old times, a sense of lost but dangerous magic waiting to be reclaimed, the walking dead, bizarre monsters and ruined dungeons to delve. Shifting to the post-apoc wasteland gives things a slightly darker and different feel, and the fun of the old times being our times. Nuclear war also lets you justify any kind of weirdness, as Gamma World proved, and anthropomorphic races are a nice way to make thing that little bit unique – and hopefully without people getting squicked due to the taint furries have acquired thanks to the internet.
One of the fun things to do with games like D&D where the rules are mostly for their own sake, and don’t always have in-game meaning is to keep the rules intact and make them mean new things. I had a lot of fun turning 3E into a sci-fi game without changing any of the rules for a game I called Explorers of Freemoon: clerics became medics who could throw nanobombs full of healing bacteria (cure light wounds) or cures for those who suffered from the Undeath Plague (turn undead). (And if anyone’s interested, let me know and I can post the full scope of Freemoon as subsequent Toybox.) Now, 4E is even less tied to setting. For some this is a bug but it’s a feature if you want to recast the whole thing. Of course you can do the post-apocalyptic furry fantasy however you want, but post-apoc and fantasy are not far apart and 4E works so well for recasting, so here’s how I’d do it.
The amazing thing is how little you have to change to make this work. Our forest friends are going to be cultural throwbacks, relying on swords and bows because finding working guns is both unlikely and culturally taboo – which leaves such technology free to explain the powers of wizards and warlocks. Not that magic can’t exist, nor religion – the woodland creatures undoubtably have their own mysticism, but if you rely too much on magic you’ll swing too much back to fantasy, and all the references to the ruined freeways can’t help bring it back.
PCs and NPCs: We start with the races. With their flexibility and adaptability, the humans make a good model for foxes. Cunning and small, we can use Halflings to model rats. With their love of digging underground and strength when cornered, the dwarf rules model molemen nicely. Tough and given to roar and spit means badgers are perfect dragonborn (ixnay on firebreath, though). Graceful and elegant, cats make perfect Eldarin, and their nimbleness and speed make weasels and stoats good choices for the Elves. With their goat-horns and dark heritage, Tieflings are a good choice for mutants from the wasteland. We’ll leave Half-Elves out of this because that can get weird or icky when you’re dealing with furry-types.
Depending on what you want to do with religion, almost all the classes remain the same. Fighters and Paladins are burrow defenders, covered in harvested metal to protect themselves. Rogues and Rangers explore the ruins beyond, hunting down mutant monsters and bringing back food, and Warlords lead them in their efforts. Wizards have mastered the “magic” of men before, by reading the ancient texts. Warlords take this even further with their dark pacts: since Tieflings come from the Infernal realm, we can reimagine that realm and power source as Nuclear. It caused the dark times to come and can still kill with a touch but it has power for those who can master it. The Feywild, where the cats and weasels come from, is no doubt the realm of the perfect predator, given the killer instincts of those two beasts. The Astral realm can be anything beyond the world of the animals – perhaps the world of birds, or the aquatic. One day, the floods will come but for now these warlocks have learnt to swim and made pacts with the water creatures for power.
If you do bring in religion, you’ll need your own pantheon, but a lot of them still work. Even post-apocalyptic animals might worship things like journeys, honour, the sun and the moon, craftsmanship and knowledge.
Plots and Villains: Transferring genre tropes requires a light touch. You don’t want to do forced descriptions of dragons that everyone knows are dragons but you’ve decided to make them some sort of post-apoc mutants that just happen to look like dragons. So when borrowing D&D’s monsters, don’t be afraid to keep them as they are. No doubt the nuclear fires just woke them up again. Orcs you can rewrite as what happened to the humans (you can even call them Morlocks or some other cool name to reflect that), but it’s better to either switch the stats over to a similarly-en-weaponed creature or just use it as is than try to dress everything up as a mutant that just happens to look like an otyugh. The same goes for adventures. Nobody’s going to believe that the British Museum collapsed in just such a way to match your maps so just mention concrete and steel instead of stone and iron and leave it at that. Similarly, while it can be hilarious for you if the Orb of Prophecy turns out to be a Magic 8-Ball, that can get cheesy and annoying really quickly for the players, and suck all the real sense of meaning and majesty from the fantasy. However, a cult seeking the Lost Map of the Underground is wry and fun and obviously useful to the PCs – plus it’s something that already has a semi-mystical significance in our own time. It doesn’t undercut the PC’s heroism, but gives it context in a post-apoc world. The light touch goes along way.
Sources: For English furry types, there’s a lot to work with. There’s the original and brilliant Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: although Mole and Ratty don’t save the world much, they make a good model for species types and I can’t be the only one who would like to see Ratty turned nuclear warrior, his boater and vest scorched and torn and a murderous darkness in his Oxford accent. Or maybe I am. More towards the fantasy form can be found in Brian Jacques' Redwall series (rodents) and William Horwood's Duncton Sound series (moles) and the enormously awesome Mouse Guard (mice again) by David Petersen. For a world through the eyes of animals – and thus a perfect guide in how to recast fantasy as post-apoc as well – Richard Adams’ Watership Down (bunnies) and Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs Frisby and The Rats of NIMH (rats) are indispensable, as well as being two of the best books ever written about anything ever. For post-apoc London, there are equally great sources in Danny Boyle’s films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, and the dragon-torn world of Reign of Fire is a perfect blend of fantasy and apocalypse. As a rather left-field source, have a look at the wonderfully strange film version of The Wiz, Motown’s 1970’s all-black musical version of The Wizard of Oz. Turning the flying monkeys into half-human-half-motorbike creations that chase Dorothy through a desolate parking lot is just one tiny example of the clever way this film constantly rewires the fantastic with the urban.
RPGs: Besides rejigging D&D (of any edition) you can do this with most any decent fantasy RPG that has room to reclassify the mechanics as different in-game concepts. Warhammer doesn’t work, for example, but Burning Wheel works perfectly. Generic systems with fantasy options - like Savage Worlds, d20 and GURPS are also perfect, once you come up with your own racial bonuses. For furry fantasy inspiration, there’s IronClaw and JadeClaw, for furries after the bomb, there’s, well, After The Bomb. For a post-apocalyptic London RPG, there’s Fireborn (very Reign of Fire) and Mouse Guard just got its own RPG from the legendary Luke Crane. White Wolf furry options can be found in Werewolf (old and new), Changeling (old and new), the recent Changing Breeds and even Exalted in the Lunars. Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha are the classic old-school post-apoc RPG texts, and both were ripe with insane gonzo mutations and bizarre relics from our time. Gamma World was redone for d20 so isn’t too hard to get. Nor is Paranoia, whose Outdoors Sector is full of relics from the Old Reckoning is a good source of humour and inspiration. Giant mutant radioactive cockroaches are recommended, but not essential.
