The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Before I begin with the review, I’d like to explain the designation of “affiliated with the company or writing a review of your own work” that I’ve given this review. While this is not my work nor am I affiliated in any way with Scapegoat Games, I am affiliated to some degree with Tyranny Games (see the end of the review for that) and I’m hoping to be writing future material for The End. Be warned: this review is an attempt to generate interest and awareness about a game I not only enjoy, but hope to work on extensively in the future. Whether you take that as a good or bad thing will vary.

Post-apocalyptic games have always had a special place in my heart. There’s just something about blasted wastelands or struggling survivors or just the corpse of a fallen civilization that tugs at my heart, like pictures of babies or kittens. But if other games were like cute little pictures, then The End is like having your very own kitten to hug and kiss and squeeze and love. It’s just that much better.

Originally published in 1995 and now long out of print, the game presents something of a unique end-time scenario. The horsemen are still there, old familiar faces still culling humanity as always, but it is the Reckoning itself that stands apart. The End is not a world ravaged by war or climate change or caught between warring angels and demons, but simply a world abandoned. God has taken the faithful into Heaven and struck down the sinful to Hell, leaving those who had not committed to either path behind. “The meek shall inherit the Earth” was not a promise, but a warning.

Now those scattered few have to struggle to survive in a world returning to nature, no longer under man’s dominion. There are only a handful of settlements left, desperate collections of desperate people doing what they feel they must in order to survive. And they are still better off than the lone wanderers in the wilderness, slowly going mad from sheer isolation.

To some extent, it’s that element that separates The End from many other games. It’s not about looking cool like Mad Max or high adventure fighting radiation mutants across the dusty plains - it’s simply about what average people do after the world, their world, has ended. The truly virtuous were taken into Heaven before the seals were broken and suffering was loosed upon the Earth and the sinful were destroyed with the Sixth Seal. All that is left are the “plain folks”. The people who did both good and bad in their lives, the people who tried to walk the middle path for whatever reason. It’s a game about you and your neighbors, and that sense of humanity pervades the entire book.

Oddly enough for a game about the end of the world, this makes for a very small scale game. Instead of sweeping actions and epic tales, you have tales of a handful of survivors and the few hundred people they are lucky enough to meet up with at any given isolated settlement. There are nearly a dozen colonies scattered across the former United States that the book speaks about, and none have really built themselves into post-apocalyptic empires of any sort. Some are strong, some are weak and some of set up for a fall.

The game is certainly wide open for more epic adventures, but this focus on humanity and people is very much at the core of the game for me. It’s very reminiscent of my feelings for Unknown Armies, Blue Planet or Continuum in that regard. It’s a story about people, first and foremost, not about powers or conspiracies or anything else. This kind of “dirt level” gaming is certainly not for everyone (I’m sure it’s the epitome of boring for many) nor is it always easy, but I think it’s a level of gaming well worth investigating.

The Ways and the Means

The system of The End is a rather odd one. I’d definitely classify it under the “interesting idea, but not really worth the complication” category.

All tests are a two-step process in the game, hence the perhaps unnecessary complication. Of the die-pool school (specifically, pools of d10s) of gaming, players roll a number of dice equal to their Potential (i.e. Attribute) trying to get equal to or below their skill rating. This determines success or failure. Then they take the dice that succeeded and re-roll them. This time the target number varies depending on task difficulty. Any die that is higher than the difficulty is worth 1 success point, but any equal to or below that target number are provide success points equal to their face value.

See what I mean? It’s an intriguing idea that provides an interesting probability curve and makes average success very likely, but I don’t think that the level of complication (2 rolls, and how many of you completely understood that on one read?) are really worth it.

The End characters are built using a point-buy system to get scores in Potentials (Attributes, as I said, and generally low numbers – below 5 for starting characters) and ratings in Skills. There isn’t much that is exceptionally outstanding about the character traits. Damage is handled in a manner somewhat reminiscent of ShadowRun’s health tracks. Anyone who’s played that or similar games, such as any of White Wolf’s Storyteller games, should be able to pick it up rather quickly.

The one thing that does stand out about characters in The End, however, is the trait of Ennui. One of the game’s basic assumptions is that man is a social animal – and extended isolation will, ultimately and unavoidably, lead to madness and death. While certainly not the most elegant of mechanics (I prefer the sanity tracking in Unknown Armies personally), it is in keeping with the mood and provides a mechanical backing to GMs trying to convince obstinate players to not simply become roving bandits and scavengers. They quite literally need a community to survive.

Regarding the game’s physical appearance and quality, it’s something of a mixed back. Adorned with an evocative cover by the ever popular Richard Kane-Ferguson, most of the art in The End is pretty good. There are a few stinkers, but most of the artwork remains dark, emotional and very human (detecting a theme here?). Steve Brown’s watercolors, used as openings for most of the chapters in the book, are particularly nice. It was a pleasant surprise to find an artist index in the back of the book, giving credits for each piece as well as contact information for the specific artists. Unfortunately the layout was not nearly as good, and there are a few organizational problems in the book along with a few outright errors, such as pages out of order and similar. It was really a rough diamond that could have used some polishing up before it would shine.

The End Has Come

The End is a game about the end of the world that is very strongly inspired by Christian apocalyptic stories and legends, but it doesn’t follow them exactly, something that has caused some confusion, actually. People expecting a literal translation of the Book of Revelations into an RPG may not find what they were hoping for. The End comes close, though. Close enough for me.

To give a brief history of the end, it, of course, starts when thousands of people receive the mark of the beast. In this case it’s the WonderChip – the S.U.C. This is a kind of passport, credit card, license and everything else bundled into one microchip and implanted into thousands. Just the kind of thing to make any number of conspiracy theorists heart attacks at just the thought. Not long after that, a tiny number of people just up and disappear as the virtuous are taken bodily into Heaven.

The first seal, Pestilence, is broken when a coalition of Middle Eastern nations wage war on Israel, but this time they release a biological agent in Jerusalem itself. The second seal, War, is the American retaliation. A short-lived war killing millions in the Middle East. This is about when demons stream onto the Earth, possessing whoever they can. The third seal, Famine, comes in the guise of tainted fertilizer distributed throughout the US and a number of ecological disasters throughout the world. The fourth seal, and the last horseman, was Death. A disease/toxin from Japan is exposed to the fertilizer from America and mutates into deadly red fog of death,

Shortly there after, Babylon Falls as the coast of California slides into the Pacific and the Antichrist rises as the head of the UN. The fifth seal slips by almost unnoticed as a young nun dies brutalized as the Last Martyr. God made his wrath apparent in the Sixth Seal, when the Earth and heavens shook and all the sinners of the world went to Hell. The final seal was a dream for the survivors, showing them the gates of paradise closing off to them.

From that point on, it becomes a story of struggle and survival as those left behind, the Meek, scramble to make a life for themselves. Colonies and refuges rise and fall. Heroes emerge, trying to shelter those around them, but far more people simply do whatever they need to survive, or even revel in sin now that God (and all danger of punishment) has left the building.

In all honesty, I’m not that enamored by the choices made for the different seals. While I did really like the Antichrist and the UN, much of the rest of this history seems like it belongs more in a different game. They are just much more overt and simply overstated than much of the rest of The End. Thankfully they are all also entirely part of the past and really have no influence upon the world anymore – thus they are more than easily changed with only the most minimal of effort.

The rest of the book provides nicely detailed information about various colonies around the United States, bastions of humanity, both good and bad. A nice variety is presented, and there is a nice variety from near-paradises to gritty military camps to debauched new cities founded on slavery and pain. Each write-up not only includes a fair amount of detail on the most important residents and the history of the colony, but a nice short list of what each colony needs to trade for the most, and what it has to offer in return. There is are innumerable plots hooks right there. Each section also serves to reinforce the small-scale I mentioned earlier. The End is a game about man and society, and each colony is something of a working case of this.

My biggest complaint about these colonies is that there are no maps and little sense of the distance between them. They are strung out from coast to coast, it would be exceedingly hard to have a game involving more than a two or three of them that didn’t seriously stretch the bounds of believability.

The final element of the setting is the supernatural, and The End deals with it in a rather round about way. By its very nature, the setting is in the realm of the supernatural, but the game manages to escape from being bogged down in that (and distracting from humanity) by leaving that issue in the background, implying more than it says. The book speaks about rumors of Beasts in the wilderness or the return of magic (and even provides a few outright paranormal NPCs), but they don’t dominate the game by any means. Instead, it is things like talking about how animals have become larger and more aggressive (mankind has lost their dominion over the beast of the world) that creates a very strong undercurrent of the supernatural in The End. There is the feeling of magic and the mysterious without powers and monsters and simply labels to pin things down.

This is a very tough line to walk, however. One man’s “feeling of magic and the mysterious” is another man’s “Goddamnit! Why the hell didn’t they include rules for magic in this game? What were they thinking?!?!?”

The End Has Gone, and Come Again

All in all, I really enjoyed The End, although I went through a cycle of love and then indifference and finally appreciation again as I read the text. I definitely think that this is one of the great, lost games that never got the attention they deserve. The setting history isn’t perfect and the system is one step more complicated than I really care for, and this is certainly not a game for everyone, but I really do enjoy it a lot. Any fans of human-scale role playing or intriguing and innovative takes on the apocalypse are strong encouraged to check it out, if they have the opportunity. It may take a bit of work to get everything looking nice and running smoothly, but I think it’s more than worth it.

Finally, I’m sure some of you are wondering why I’m bothering to talk about this game at all, seeing as how it’s long out of print. Well, for one, I got this game off of eBay not too long ago, so there is still hope for people who want to snag themselves a copy of their own.

More importantly, however, The End has been picked up for release by Tyranny Games, and should be printed and ready for purchase within mere months. Hopefully, that is.

Here is the recent press release that I posted in the general RPGnet forum (prior to my associated with Tyranny Games, for those interested, and who followed the discussion there).

THE END IS COMING...
(Wauwatosa, WI, November 8, 2001)- Tyranny Games announces the March 2002 release date of the deluxe edition of the sourcebook for the post-biblical apocalypse role-playing game, The End. Known for its groundbreaking role as the first post-apocalypse role-playing game based on the Book of Revelations, The End received critical acclaim for its bleak setting and creative background material.
Please visit THE END portion of the Tyranny Games website (www.tyrannygames.com) and check out our preview art, message board, and fiction over the next few months. Tyranny Games will be posting passages from the new source material and other interesting notes.
The deluxe edition of The End will feature a leather cover and will contain a revised system and new source material. The release of the sourcebook will be complemented by the release of a series of The End adventures and supplements on the following tentative schedule:
Adventure- Salvation’s Tears- March 2002
Adventure- The Boston Massacre- March 2002
Sourcebook- Cry Havoc, Washington D.C. After The End-August 2002
Sourcebook- The Dark Arts, Magic in the New World- October 2002.
Sourcebook- The Digger’s Guide, Scavenging the Scraps- December 2002
Return to THE END and Live Again!
Tyranny Games is the owner of the license for the fantasy role-playing game Of Gods & Men and the new tabletop "boardless" board game- Sack Armies: Expeditionary Force. Expeditionary Force. Tyranny Games is also anticipating the release of its newest "boardless" board game- COLONIZATION!.
Tyranny Games can be contacted via email at jet@tyrannygames.com. Tyranny Games invites you to visit its website at www.tyrannygames.com. Tyranny Games mailing address is 804 Robertson Street, Wauwatosa, WI 53213.