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Probably the best RPGing I have ever experienced was Gamma World. I was in high school and had been playing D&D red starter box for a few months when I was invited to join a new RPG for a one-shot game. Back then I was a stickler for rolling up my own character but there wasn't time, so one of the players offered me a pregen he had been using. It was a humanoid shark---which I thought was stupid at the time---with I don't remember what mutations. The GM was a master and truthfully that probably had more to do with my experience than the rules. Soon we were sweating bullets as we explored a darkened corridor in the Mojave desert, the rasp of giant scorpion claws on the sheet metal air ducting we were scaling giving us only the faintest clues as to their deadly location. Since then, RPGs have been good but never quite that good (same river, you can never go home again, etc., I guess).

Fast forward twenty years. I'm at the only LGS on Guam that sells RPG stuff and I find d20 Apocalypse, a supplement for d20 Future, which itself is a supplement for d20 Modern. I had flipped through it before and decided to drop the duchats. I am happy with my decision. The back cover notes that both of these core books are required to fully use d20 Apocalypse. Like most WOTC books, Apoc (I hate spelling it out) has high production values. The soft-cover book has glossy covers and excellent artwork throughout. Fans of the art in d20 Modern and its supplements will likely recognize the same artists making yet another repeat showing in this supplement---and I think they do a great showing.

Okay. We've established that the book's pretty. Turning to the table of contents, we find six full chapters packed into 96 pages. Chapter 1 is all about how your post-apoc world could have come about. If you're familiar with Logan's Run, Independence Day, Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, Terminator, Thundarr the Barbarian, Left Behind or Gamma World then you're probably familiar with most of the ways in which the world can end. In addition, ideas on how ‘it’ happened, you get ideas on what society might look like after the bomb (or whatever) rocked the foundations of sanity and civilization; from total anarchy to jack-booted Big Brother type governments, there's a number of ideas presented. Nuclear attack and radioactivity are covered in a little more thorough detail than the other means of not-niceness that ended civilization as your game world once knew it.

The next chapter has a lot of meat in my opinion. You get rules for scavenging, bartering, jury-rigging, making items, modifying vehicles, vehicle combat options, environmental dangers, mutations and some cool examples of robots and creatures to encounter. The scavenging and mutation rules remind me a lot of Gamma World games I've played. Mutations, I should note, is only a piggy-back on the actual foundation mutation rules found in d20 Future (you need access to that book or its SRD to get an appreciation/full use out of these mutation rules which provide some new ideas). The robots and creatures are really nice and include first-rate artwork to get the feeling of how scary or weird or interesting these things would be if they truly existed. Another aspect of this type of world that the rules examine is bio-warfare. Apoc talks about super viruses and how you can spin fun games around them (scaring the pants off anyone who's exposed to Agent Q or Y, for example). Can the team find the cure in time? Is the virus a government conspiracy? Will Martin tell Betty that he really loves her? Just making sure you're awake.

Chapter 3 deals with starting occupations, feats and advanced classes. Maybe I'm not the target audience but I find a lot of this stuff to be repetition of things in d20 Modern or variations on a theme you could think up on your own as a natural progression of a base character type. The road warrior is (surprise) good at fighting while in vehicles and using vehicle combat to his/her advantage. The salvager is like MacGuyver, able to dredge up just the right bits of this and that to make a useful weapon or tool. For feats examples, you get stuff that would be handy in an unfriendly world such as being a better bargainer or being particularly resistant to radiation. The new advanced classes are road warrior and salvager. There are also suggestions for modifying the personality, investigator and techie advanced classes---sold separately in d20 Modern and/or d20 Modern supplements like d20 Future.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are mini-settings. You get a demonic-angelic war (Earth Inherited), a post-nuke-war world (Atomic Sunrise), and an alien invasion/disease scenario (Plague World). Earth Inherited imagines a world where the really good and really evil have been taken to heaven knows where (get it?) and waves of angels and devils that came out to war now find themselves vulnerable and cut off from their ever renewable sources of power. The remaining humans are left to work out deals and/or fight with these heavenly and hellish orphans. You get some nice examples of angelic/fallen angelic creatures and artwork that, in my opinion, is some of the best in the d20 Modern series.

Atomic Sunrise is Mad Maxville defined. Somebody detonated a bomb, which convinced everyone to lob their stockpiles, which ended up in a pretty glowing, warm future. This mini-setting has several organizations that remind me of the cryptic alliances from Gamma World. It also introduces its own advanced class: the lawbringer. The lawbringer is the new sheriff in town, expert in tracking down bad guys and working with post apoc communities to protect, serve and restore order. Kind of vanilla for my tastes (the alliance-like organizations are kind of neat) but very workable.

Last, is Plague World. Basically, aliens decided earth would be cool to own. They mix it up with humanity and wind up as a much weaker military force following some bad luck and bad strategic decisions. Now those crustacean like critters are stuck here and it's humanity's turn to start kicking lobster tail! Human governments stowed away and equipped a bunch of literal sleepers called Rip Van (ala Rip Van Winkle, that cat who slept for decades) teams. Armed with whatever was left in their bunkers, the RV teams now face a world they are going to have to win back, bit by bloody bit.

The alien, Spanthi, come in two forms: big, bulky, tear-your-head-off variety (not too bright) and smaller, still nasty but smart and tech savvy. The Rip Van teams have a standard bunker detailed including a map of the layout and descriptions of the various areas inside. You also get another advanced class, the evolutionary--a mutant that specializes in, well, mutating. The viruses and other nasty surprises that the Spanthi have unleashed have had some unplanned effects on some humans who survived exposures (and their children, too). Evolutionaries hopefully will use their abilities for good and to fight off the invaders who caused them to become mutants in the first place. Last, but not least, you get a few more cryptic alliance-like organizations that arose in response to the unique challenges of the plague world.

Excellent things: The artwork and layout are very well done. The cover art especially captures the look and feel of the types of settings included. The mini-settings and apoc rules adaptations (e.g., scavenging and cryptic alliance clone organizations) really are a value-added and help make Gamma World type play possible.

Improvements: More examples of monsters, creatures and characters. At least one more setting could have been included with just a little editing OR the multiple mini-settings could have been scrapped to focus on one larger, coherent whole. Either way, I was left wanting a little more.

Trivial note on the cover art: One of the things that drew me to this book were the characters depicted on the front and back covers. Like other d20 Modern supplements, Apoc features three characters posed dramatically on the front and an 'action' scene highlighting these same characters on the back. The female cyber centaur and mage-woman riding a mutant mount really look 'kewl' and made me want to dig further. Unfortunately, while the mage-woman could be explained as an evolutionary, the cyber-centaur is nowhere to be found inside. Shame, too, since she is wearing out a bunch of robot baddies (I’m certain that they are the bad guys) with a cybernetic mini-gun that has replaced her right arm. I've been told by owners of another supplement, you have to buy CyberScape to get more information on this cybernetic gear. Having gone through that book, I’m not sure I want to buy it just to get that bit of info---especially since I’m not that big into cyber/grid/matrix type gaming. Not that WOTC did anything wrong, I just kind of felt cheated that this awesome character idea wasn't detailed inside the book on which it stars. Can’t have everything with, I suppose.

I would give it a 4.5 or even a 5 for content but I'm greedy. The art and layout have me sold on a 5, though. Overall, this book is worth the asking price and then some.