Design Room: FGU's Aftermath

"What's that, a cast iron kettle? Great, put it on your head and duct tape it on, you need the armor."

Let's dive into the ruins of civilization with FGU's Aftermath game. Oh yes, you can STILL buy this one along with FGU's other products in their online store, and we have shopped there as well. Just use the link.

This one has the notorious reputation of being one of the only games in the late 70's and early 80's of rivaling AD&D for complexity. It doesn't just rival it, it severs AD&D's arm and beats it over AD&D's head, getting a further sever critical and knocking AD&D's head around a hex map clumsily superimposed over a square room.

And then Aftermath keeps AD&D's arm because it is such a cool weapon and also useful as food later.

I'm not joking. This game takes a -1 on a d20 off for every wall within a meter of you. I'm getting a -2 just writing this review, and a further -1 distraction just for using a second monitor. The complexity is brutal, with hardcore math and division being overlaid on top of a segmented combat countdown type turn with interlaced actions. You may take 4 segments to complete an action, in which a faster enemy (or a slower on who's turn has come up) getting a chance to act and lopping your head off.

Violent? This game has it in spades. In addition to all of the loss of limbs, this game had detailed weapon special effects charts for crushing, shooting, blow through, and other weapon special effects. These weren't as complex as say, Rolemaster, but they were simple and gruesome enough to insta-kill you 5% of the time when you were hit.

Before Fallout and the Walking Dead, there was this. And this was even more brutal than the offspring of both of those franchises. You could literally walk through an irradiated area with poisonous chemicals and diseases and not know it until your character starts disintegrating before your eyes. And that's just because you went scavenging for radioactive cans of beans. And an intelligent mutated rat gave you a nasty infection from a knife wound. And then the building collapsed on you.

And no, this isn't Gamma World, so the mutations from being irradiated were not fun.

If you were lucky, a homicidal walking robot would come along and sanitize your remains with lasers and flamethrowers.

We had a joke that the game's cover was in yellow and black as a warning label to players against referee sadism.

Character Creation

As long as you did not use the character creation rules out of Operation Morpheus, you were pretty well much okay. As your character got older, they tended to turn into massive skill lists with strange skills such as "Aircraft Maintenance 6%". It was also very much possible to play a primitive in this game without the "tech use" skill that lets you operate can openers efficiently. What you didn't know you could learn though, and skill books and trainers were at a premium.

It was the only game that made me see teachers and knowledge in a whole new light - these are absolutely necessary to society and survival. Teachers are to Aftermath what seat belts are to Car Wars.

With the Operation Morpheus rules, they introduced the concept of "smart people" who were frozen in cryosleep. They often woke up naked in cryosleep chambers underground next to Australian copies of Playboy. These smart people had something like five times the skill points, and they sucked as characters because they were so complex. They were good survivors, but just making one was a real pain since you could fill up half a sheet of paper with that many skills. Supposedly, they were trained and chosen for this mission, but we found them bloated and unwieldy (since you could already spin up pre-ruin older people with great skills).

It is probably a good thing the cryosleep chambers were underground and guarded by robots that would kill anything going in or coming out. You think you could sleep through this and have it good? Try fighting an armored combat robot with an M-60 machinegun while naked and wielding a rolled-up magazine.

Gear, Guns, and Loot

A modern assault rifle and ammo? That is your +5 Holy Avenger. Modern Kevlar armor? +5 Platemail. A resurrection scroll? A fully-stocked medical kit, and a doctor to use it. 100,000 gold pieces? Enough food and water to last the week.

You got to get your priorities straight.

You start out with no guns, and you are lucky to find pieces of rusty metal to grind into spears. Rocks are your friends and your ammunition. The armor you find is a mix between crafted medieval pieces of gear, riot gear, and sporting goods. A normal melee weapon, such as a sharp knife, is a real find. A gun that works? A treasure worth dying for. And the guns you do find are typically crap, like wooden single shot 0.22 plinkers that are rotted through and in desperate need of repair. But even a gun like that...is power. It is your magic item, your Excalibur.

Or you could loot all the good stuff off of enemies trying to kill you with it. This isn't like some D&D game where you roll the +1 sword and +1 chain on the treasure table after you defeat the bandit and you wonder why he didn't use it against you. No, in Aftermath, the term "treasure table" is replaced by "list of things they try to kill you with."

And if you see a pristine rifle lying there in a room untouched? Oh yeah, that thing is actually broken and booby-trapped by a grenade. Or the floor will fall into a pit of rusty spikes. Or there is someone watching with a poison tipped crossbow nearby. You get the picture. Loot is used to draw stupid people in, and it works both ways - for PCs and NPCs. That can of beans could be used to eat for a day, or it could be used as bait to lure some unwitting sucker in to get his stuff.

"Aftermath Guy" - Artist's Rendition

The World

The world ended in 1980. I know, that is 35 years ago, so this is kind of like a Fallout for the Miami Vice crowd, but trust me, the world ending in 1980 is pretty cool. There are no cell phone towers. Computers use giant tape reels, and the personal computer is something so primitive it has like 4K of RAM and no disk drive. You don't need to worry about computers. HAM radio and CB radios are how you communicate, if you had power and radio gear. Batteries suck in radios and flashlights, like an hour of power. There are no high-tech LEDs, just light bulbs. Televisions still used analog waves and tuning dials. Cable TV was high tech, and the Internet was some government computer system nobody used.

I know, this is very much like how Canada is today.

Okay apologies, but seriously, like parts of the idealized Great North, you know, those back woods cabins and lodges where there is no technology, they still have pay phones, and it always seems to be snowing outside? That. And if you were a grizzled unshaven mountain man with a hunting rifle, snowshoes, a 0.44 revolver, a machete, sticks of TNT and cans of beans strapped to your vest, and metal strapped to your parka you were boss.

It is very much Unshaven Survival and the game loves it. If you are a high-level character in this game you are ugly, hairy, smelly, and a beast of a monster with more scars and wounds than a map of the history of Europe. You carry a straight razor taped to your arm. You keep a scoped target pistol with hollow points in your boot. You own a club for beating squirrels. You keep a grenade handy should you need to blow yourself up.

Cigarettes are chocolate are your gold pieces. Food and water are how long you live. Everyone you meet is trying to steal your food and ammo, or they are trying to eat you. Survival groups are either neo-Nazis, paranoid socialist utopias, bloodthirsty bandits, or crazy survivalists who want to enslave you and put you into slave labor camps. Civilization after the ruin is a sick and cruel joke. Sometimes you are better off alone.

Technology is scary and its sole purpose is to try to kill you. Robotic soldiers, remote security cameras with guns and lasers, metal security doors that lock you in a bunker in the dark to starve to death, invisible IR beams and pressure plates that trigger deadly traps, rooms filled with gas, and genocidal computers wanting to destroy what's left of the world lie under the ruins of irradiated buildings.Technology hates you with a passion, and it is almost as if it senses and hates the fact that you are alive.

The best way to run this game is to take everything that is supposed to help you in our modern world and use it as a weapon against the players. Civilization, social order, technology, civilized behavior, law and order, medicine, computers, transportation, people, chemicals, and everything else that makes our life better is a danger to your survival. Things that hurt you in the modern world, such as hazardous weather, animals, temperature, exposure, and the basics of survival such as food and water? Even more lethal.

You have no friends, and you must learn to deal without.

"Robot Attack" - Artist's Rendition

Monsters

They had every monster in this game except the walking dead, although  making biological zombies would be a snap (and make life even worse). The only zombies they had were the irradiated horde, and the game covered a lot of ground with all types of animals, robots, and mutated rats. Due to the proliferation of city zoos, lions, sharks, rhinoceroses, elephants, bears, snakes, and all sorts of wildlife roamed the ruins of society to take out nature's extinction agenda on humanity. Like the I am Legend movie, actually. Oh yes, revenge was the name of the game when a tiger kills half your party and you escape by jumping into a flooded basement infested by plague-bearing piranhas.

And the animals have custom hit location charts, because that bear is going to be so pissed off when you shoot his tail clean off.

Robots? Yes, there are all sorts of robots in this game waiting to kill you, from metal humanoid can bots to Westworld-inspired replicants. They all seem to hate humanity as much as the wildlife does, so there is no Asimov inspired "serve humanity" BS going on here. I think all the robots in this game collectively decided that since humanity destroyed the world, humanity is unworthy of surviving. This even applies to robots such as ATMs or factory machines, which try to kill characters with alarming regularity.

Others mentioned but not spun up include aliens, three-legged walker death machines, and monsters from fantasy. There are vampires too if you know where to look. As if your life weren't difficult enough.

Adventures?

Basically survival. Scrounging for supplies. Hunting. Exploring. Looking for good stuff. Raiding other survivor's caches. Avoiding bandits. Judging the random people you encounter in the wilds and wondering when they will try to kill you or if you can trust them. Spotting people and animals from a distance and hunting them. Scoping out settlements and seeing if they are safe to go into. Getting your weapons confiscated at a gate to a settlement and wondering if you'll ever get them back.

Trust. Building relationships. Who you could trust, and how far that trust could be pushed in a bad situation was your currency. Good roleplayers could get away with a lot, and making friends when the chips were down you could go back to their camp and sleep off a bunch of wounds and a disease or two. Having those people you risked your life for help you, watch you when you slept, and kept an eye out on the camp. Don't think this game was all referee gotcha instakill, if played right, there was a remarkable human element of trust and uplifting and redeeming survival to it as well.

But  many times this game was about getting into a terrible situation where you are wounded, the temperature is dropping, rabid wolves are hunting you, and the house you took shelter in is ready to collapse. If you aren't barely alive, you're not living.

If your referee is cool, Road Warrior stuff. These types of games typically make resources more available, but gas becomes the thing you need, and you are scrounging again for car parts, tires, and oil.

The game does include some great scrounging tables, and the good modules typically have even more tables for loot. The entire game really is about scrounging, and sifting through piles of rubble while making sure no one is sneaking up behind you is the name of the game.

"Bear Attack" - Artist's Rendition

Our Experience

As disturbed as this may sound, Aftermath was our first generic game. That should tell you something about us when we were kids. We played science fiction with this game, GI JOE, fantasy, Car Wars, and all sorts of other genres. We simplified the turn structure and combat rules and things worked almost like any other d20 game does today, which should say something about the complexity of d20 games today, and nothing about our game design and simplification skills.

As you can imagine, science fiction was the most fun with characters flying out of holes punched through starship hulls with high-powered lasers and the character then exploding from decompression. Starship boarding actions were brutal and lethal, with grenades in starship halls causing more chaos than talking about Pathfinder in a D&D 5 forum. Blasters blowing apart bodies, lasers slicing off limbs, and flamethrowers torching the rest of the zero-g meat purees.

Modern spy games or GI JOE style military RPGs? File these under "fun with vehicle weapons against player characters." Your character learned a new level of hate for your enemies when the bad guys showed up in fighter jets to a fistfight. You ran, you dodged, and you put as much concrete between you and the bad guys as you could. It was pure action-movie bliss living on the edge of one lucky hit vaporizing your character.

It also made the CR system look like it was designed by a bunch of pussies. No, it wasn't fair. It was like a rage game in RPG form...but when you survived?

Absolutely heroic. A rush.

You were the man.

And you had to be an absolute genius and devious SOB to avoid fights and put the screw to the bad guys. You had to be good too. Not just "my to-hit is great and my character is optimized" but no, you had to have a spiritual guardian angel rolling your d20, know the rules, know where to shoot the enemy fighter jet with a pistol based on its make and model, and keep shooting until you got lucky. Your character had to train before they even got to the fight, spending hours on the practice range shooting everything from slingshots to bazookas. You had to lift weights and train every day, and your stats and skills mattered, even above 100% skill level.

You had to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger that Arnold Schwarzenegger would look up to.

Battletech with these rules was absolutely metal. It required a lot of conversion work, but it was cool, and gave you a new appreciation for man-carried SRM-2 rocket launchers. In the Battletech rules, SRM-2 launchers are near worthless. In Aftermath, they are an efficient way to end a bar fight.

Aftermath as our house system lasted for a while with us, and eventually we gave in and it was Star Frontiers that did us in. We realized that sometimes simple rules got the job done, didn't require huge character sheets and record keeping, and the game played just as well without all that detail. After that, the dominoes began to fall, and we went back to D&D for fantasy, and we started playing games to enjoy the design of their rules and systems. Star Wars d6 captured our imagination, and games like Vampire and Shadowrun showed us new ways of doing things while merging the experience with the rules.

And then our Aftermath books saw little use after that.

"Grenade Fishing with Bears" - Artist's Rendition

What Did We Lose?

Well, we gained an appreciation for the simple rules, the concise, and the cleanly presented experience. Every game couldn't be Aftermath, and in fact, many games were enhanced by the rules they used. We gained an appreciation for a game's rules to shape the experience of the players, instead of every world feeling like the same death-match meat grinder. Some games were lighter in spirit and made to play a certain way to enhance the fun, and we saw that when we converted back.

We gained an appreciation for how the rules shape the experience.

Some games, such as D&D 3.0 and 3.5 were inspired by non-RPGs, such as Magic the Gathering. To us, D&D changed at the 3rd edition, taking on a "rules interrupt" complexity of layered exceptions and special cases that felt more like MtG and less like D&D. The original beer and pretzels experience of D&D was gone, and the feeling that the original game's Monopoly-like rules and play experience was gone and it never really came back.

We saw D&D lose it's feeling when we converted it to a more complex system, and we saw it return when we converted the game back to its original rules from Aftermath. When D&D went 3.0, we saw it lose its charm and how it played. The OGR games nowadays that play like the original appeal to us more because that feeling is familiar. D&D doesn't need "story rules" or "balanced challenge ratings" for it to feel and play like D&D to us, it needs what it had, simple rules and dungeons where the fights weren't fair and you had to use your wits to survive.

The Game is Still Supported and in Print!

Aftermath really is a game that refuses to die. You can still buy this game and they produce new material for it to this day over on the FGU website. There is a survival guide that looks fun, and a much-needed modern arms guide. They even have a fantasy supplement with spells and monsters. That sounds fun, because I always wanted unicorns to impale ruins explorers with, and a dragon with a minigun and grenade launcher strapped to its head.

Surviving Aftermath

This game is strangely enough a huge part of our gaming history. We played it in its complicated original form, and then a simplified house system for many games. When we left it, we gained a great appreciation for how games played, and why certain rules systems were designed the way they were designed. We understood feeling and complexity, and saw how changing rules systems to something more complex affected players around the table.

I still hold a candle for this system, and I am happy to still see it being sold today. My players are happy these days are over with, like the Cold War that inspired this atomic-age relic. But still, a classic game and one that has been forgotten in today's world of...

...The Walking Dead.

..The Hunger Games.

...Divergent.

...The Road Warrior.

...Fallout 4.

How little we remember where our hobby came from, and I still feel this game was one of the greats, alongside AD&D back in the day.

Oh, and here's your arm back.