Campaign Toybox
The Story: Right now, American lawmakers are debating allowing robot cars onto our roads. That was our first mistake. Pretty soon we were living in an automated paradise – and not long after that, we had a full Skynet-slash-Matrix singularity scenario. The robots decided they didn’t need us, and in the ensuing war, the land and the sky were scorched to ruin. They thought we would be helpless without our technology, so they switched to battery power and burned down the electricity grid – and sealed off the internet to all but the best hackers. To survive, we had to go back to basics – but not too far. We cornered every fossil fuel resource we could to run generators, keeping power running in our enclaves and bunkers, so humanity might endure.
Then they came. Turncoats, maybe. The thing is, although the smart cars had been designed to drive themselves, they weren’t designed to run without a driver. They needed a destination, a purpose – and somebody to deal with unique situations outside their programming, like outrunning a fifty foot scorpion. What’s more, the cars still ran on good old American petrol. They needed us. And the truth is, we needed them. Humanity is scattered. Resources are scarce. And the enemy has all the cybernetic tanks and smartplanes it needs to run rings around even the fastest horse. Getting up to speed is our last hope of being more than just trapped rats, waiting to die. And of course, before they defected, the smartcars were on the grid – and they have some idea about the machines’ final plan…
Style and Structure: Post-apoc is the gaming genre that refuses to die. It was big in the eighties because it was big in eighties films, and it has come back into cinema recently (see sources below) and RPGs were ready and waiting. The appeal of post-apoc as a gaming genre is that it shares a lot with fantasy – tiny points-of-light enclaves in a terrifying and mysterious world, lone adventurers exploring, killing things and gathering stuff – so it’s easy to get into, but has its own wonderful patina and feel, grim and gritty with a tinge of familiarity and regret.
Post-apocalyptic settings are all about realizing how structured our modern lives are, and how much we depend on massive systems or production and infrastructure to keep it all going. And nothing exemplifies all that so much as the automobile. So it makes sense to put the emphasis on cars, and there’s no better way to do that than by making them PCs. You can either have half the group playing cars and the other people, or take an ensemble approach (ala Ars Magica) and give every driver his own vehicle, being played by another player. That also solves the problem of cars not being able to open doors or go inside, as the player can just switch to their human PC instead.
Cars also help add more action and excitement to shuffling around in a radiation-filled desert, and give you an all-purpose macguffin to hunt in fuel. Sure, you need ammo and food as well, but having a fixed, scarce thing to hunt makes plotting a lot easier. It makes your PCs feel less like scavengers and more like treasure-hunters, which makes for a more fun game. And playing cars makes car-chases that much more exciting, because now the stakes really matter. Normally, any crash you walk away from is a good crash. When the bullet holes in the framework cause lost hit points, everything changes…
PCs and NPCs: The post-apocalyptic badlands need gunbunnies, mechanics, scouts, medics and scientists, as always. It’s also going to need drivers because sometimes, an intelligent car just won’t be up to the job. However, you should probably allow the cars to reprogram themselves to be able to handle doing cool jumps and other car-fu otherwise they’ll have nothing to do. Cars are going to need detailed stats to set them apart from each other but don’t be afraid to just use your system for humans: Agility is maneuverability, Strength is raw speed and horsepower, Constitution is fuel efficiency, and the mental and social abilities are stats for the AI. And yes, cars need charisma because the cars can do the one thing the meaty organic humans can’t: disguise themselves as loyalist robots and spy on the evil machines. Again, time to split the party, which also makes the dual PCs idea make sense.
If you’re doing a wandering campaign, you don’t need many NPCs except the occasional fellow wanderer. If there’s a home conclave, most of the residents will be much like the PCs – survivors and explorers. Throw in a few dirty-faced children and old timers who remember the old days to give them something to fight for, of course. And if the PCs lack their own medics or mechanics, that’s what the home base is for.
Plots and Villains: Evil machines are a cliché, but like most clichés, that’s because it works. We find something inherently fluffy and familiar in organic things, even if they’re creepy spiders or snakes; the sharp angular precision of the manufactured seems unnatural because it pretty much is: maths may govern the universe but it’s a random and dirty process. Clean, straight lines are made by man, not God, and we distrust them. Although we also find them compelling and sexy. Use these drives and make your robot enemies gorgeous nightmares of chrome and steel, glass and neon, function and form. Devotion to pure functionality is a good way to play up the inhuman nature of the enemy (they don’t need a face to talk) but the occasional bit of human mimicry gone starkly wrong (a simulated, blocky robot face) can also go a long way with the creep factor. Plus, it gives you something to punch, and hate. In short, if they are nothing but whirring howitzers on treads they will appear too boring to hate, and a bad guy without hate is like a car chase without explosions.
We’ve already mentioned the plot potential of being fuel-hunters; the other plots of post-apoc are fairly obvious: explore and fight. Don’t skimp on either. For exploration, keep the players guessing about history and indeed geography. Joe Hovel has no idea what the United States were, so maybe the game isn’t even set there. Maybe the war happened on Mars, and they’ll only figure that out the day they find the old abandoned planetarium. For fighting, remember the battle is always ongoing: the robots didn’t figure they’d won just because the sky and land were scorched to nothingness. They don’t care about skies and lands. Only victory. Every time your players seem to be getting bored with wandering around, throw the threat of extinction back in their face not from the hostile environment or the fifty-foot scorpions but a still-dedicated and hate-filled enemy with a purpose and a final solution.
Sources: More than one person wondered about where all the people went in the Pixar film Cars (and its sequel). It’s not a great film but if you want ideas on car-society it’s a good start and a lot of it is set in a desolate, empty badlands that could easily be post-nuclear. The grand-daddy of talking cars is of course Herbie, and the 200-pound gorilla is his talking descendant, KITT. Knight Rider was a hell of a fun show because the car was so awesome (voiced by the excellent William Daniels). The recent reboot with Val Kilmer was almost as good and the earlier Team Knight Rider had lots of people and lots of talking cars! Since KITT there’s been a whole host of similar smart vehicles afterwards: other cars like Viper, the cyberboat of Thunder in Paradise to the smart plane of Stealth, and motorcycles like Heat Vision. Transformers - yes, even the Michael Bay film, although only the first one – is a good source for how humans and cars can work together to cause bigger and better explosions. Of course, the cars don’t even have to be intelligent to be awesome: Speed Racer needs the Mach 5 to do anything, Tank Girl needs her tank and Batman without his Batmobile would be the sad guy taking the bus. Then there’s Mad Max and its sequel, the Road Warrior. Lord Humungus and friends are your textbook for style and look, refer often (the Smokers of Waterworld have the same schtick but are much less wacky). And speaking of Australian films, try Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris. Those also provide windows into the apocalypse; you can also try eighties classics like Hell Comes to Frogtown or Mindwarp or modern epics like the Book of Eli or the Road. For bad robots and nuclear futures, the Terminator is the bible. Just avoid tying yourself in time-travel knots.
RPGs: For the apocalypse, you’ve got two big highlights on the marker right now: Barbarians of the Aftermath and Atomic Highway. Gamma World is the post-apoc game that will never die, over six editions and thirty plus years, stretching right back to the early days where it joined Metamorphosis Alpha and Aftermath as one of the originators. Palladium still publishes After the Bomb if you don’t mind the mutant animals, and for comedy you can still find the free RPG Mutant Bikers of the Atomic Wasteland, and perhaps others like Roadworld, Wasteland Hero and Love the Bomb. And if we’re talking mutant bikers and sentient cars, we have to be talking OctaNe, the indie game of grindhouse petrol-burning madness. Speaking of Indie games, there’s quite a few about the apocalypse (like Helix) or cars (like Ribbon Drive). A lot of systems have rules for car chases, whether you want to go to whole hog with miniatures with Car Wars or Savage Worlds, or abstract like Doctor Who or Feng Shui; with rules that go into the mad detail of GURPS Vehicles or TMNT’s Road Hogs, or something simpler like BESM’s Hot Rods and Gun Bunnies or Cartoon Action Hour. It doesn’t have to be cars, of course: a car is just a mech on wheels, after all, and the number of RPGs with mechs in them would take longer to list than this entire column…
