FGU's Aftermath! Buyers Guide

I never knew this post would be that popular:

https://sbrpg20.blogspot.com/2015/07/design-room-fgus-aftermath.html

But it has, and I am so happy people love my semi-joking take on what this game was like for us. Coming from D&D and early-80s RPGs, Aftermath! was gonzo, crazy, high-powered military weaponry versus characters raw survival. It started with flint-tipped spears and caveperson clothes fighting over the last scrap of rat-meat, and ended in something out of Space Opera with power armored knights and robots fighting each other with 20mm autocannons, laser cannons, tanks, VTOLs, and missile launchers.

This was like our version of the game Civilization VI, but instead of a wargame spanning a planet and thousands of years from cavepeople to the space age, it was one group of characters in a single pen-and-paper campaign.

I have a 40-year relationship with this game, went through a nasty divorce with it, and we hooked up later in life only to discover what we felt at the start was true love. I am also brutally funny about it all, which helps. None of what I say regarding Aftermath! should be taken seriously, since we are like one of those couples who can brutally joke about each other's shortcomings and failings in life, laugh, and still love each other. The game, from me at a very young age and through life, helped define who I am, and it framed a lot of what I seen in life in the Aftermath! view of life.

Since then, others have discovered what fun this game is to play. It is brutally complex and demanding without requiring a huge page count in rules to understand. Book One, Basic Rules, which is basically a characters and combat book, is only 58 pages long. That is "rules light" these days compared to other games. The game also introduces flowcharting on how to handle combat, which is really a first, and this ensures that "you are playing it right" considering you can grasp all the situational rules that come into play.

Book Two, Survivors of the Aftermath, which is the heart of the game describes skills, guns, gear, survival, and vehicles for a total of 82 pages. This book only requires you to dip into the part you need, like the gun rules, understand how it works, and then you go back to suffering and surviving. It also has the cannibalism rules, which again, is a first for any pen-and-paper RPG. Take that B/X. Again, compared to a lot of new RPGs, this is a short section. Dense and gamy like mutant elk meat, but edible in small bites.

Book Three, World of the Aftermath, is where it all falls apart for the characters. This is the referee's book and it covers, environments, foraging, encounters, hazards, monsters, NPCs, technology, mass combat (wow), mutations, reputation, and ends with the gun list. This is 84 pages, and the total game is about 224 pages long - and compares to the 1,000+ page three-book mainstays of today, is quite a tight and concise game in total. This book sets the stage for all the referee's evil, and is a cookbook of post-apocalyptic mayhem. In Aftermath! treasure is defined as new ways to kill each other with or ways to avoid being killed.

So the question arises, to play the game by the way we experienced it, what other books are resources do you need?

Operation Morpheus

This book is a must have. To understand my jokes about robots and technology trying to kill you, just reading through this book is enough to get you in the mood for what underground government installations should be like in a great Aftermath! world. Armored warbots roaming the halls with M-60 machineguns with underslung 40mm grenade launchers? Check. Turrets with security cameras and attached megawatt laser rifles? Check. Wall mounted flamethrowers? Check. Robots too unconcerned about collateral damage they hop into tanks to fire at intruders in underground garages? Check. After the players survive an armed VTOL with Maverick missiles and 20mm Vulcans hovers up and vaporizes them and their loot? Check.

Before the collapse, the government's sole purpose is to hide trillions of dollars of defense spending underground, and protect it with sadistic glee and robotic manslaughter.

To understand this part of the game, this is the "high level play" as it exists in D&D. Only in D&D it is "going to war with the gods" again. In Aftermath! we are having a lot more fun because this is basically like a D&D dungeon, but instead of melee combat and magic taking up the combat round, it is World War III in every room and hallway. Do not feel like you are being a bad referee for having a robot fire a quad-mount 0.50 caliber AA machinegun at the players, instead, your players will thank you for getting Aftermath! high-level play right.

Because someone should have head-shotted that robot between the eyes with their 0.44 Automag loaded with AP incendiary bullets before the robot's action ever came up.

Why go so deadly? Well, this gives the players something to work towards. When they are out there fighting diseased marauder cannibals with pointed sticks over a can of beans, they are going to look at the "hidden government installation" and drool. They know there is no way they could ever bust in there and get all of that sweet weaponry, armor, and gear - but they know someday they just possibly could. Maybe someone repairs a high-powered hunting rifle and they could blast a wandering robot's head off. Maybe that robot has some worthwhile gear to loot, and electronics parts to sell to the local (either fascist, marauder, or communist) survivor communities. Maybe they repair a vehicle of their own and get mobile, and find an old World War II recoilless rifle to mount on it.

Slowly the pieces fall into place, and that Mount Weather of Doom (or a part of it) can be cracked upon like a delicious oyster to be looted for all sorts of goods. For us, just the basic books and this module were all we had, and frankly all we needed for 20 years of this being our go-to system.

Once you defeat the gods in Aftermath! what do you do? It is obvious, find a way into space where you can die instantly and the loot is a hundred times better. Or...into another dimension...

Aftermath Technology & Magic

Newer books came out that added a lot of new material to the game. While these were not a part of our experience, since 90% of our fun came from the basic books plus Morpheus, if you want a post-1990's ruined world the newer guides are a must have. The first of these is Aftermath technology, which despite the name has more than just new gear and guns in the book.

We have fantasy races, aliens, cybernetics, space travel, netrunning, new gear, vehicles, and robots. I would have liked the fantasy elements to have been in the other book Aftermath magic, but they are here and these two books are kind of a brother-sister pair of expansions for the game. The magic book adds spells and fantasy monsters, and is not really as useful as Technology if you are running a non-fantasy post-ruin game. If you are doing a more fantasy-inspired game, both of these books are a must have.

Added into Aftermath, this creates a strange, messy, post-ruin world where elves, halflings, orcs, tiger-men, dwarves, and demons walk alongside humanity in a brave fight after the bomb. Perhaps nuclear warfare merged two realities into a frightening whole, and the other world - angered by having their destroyed - takes out vengeance on the world of technology that shattered these parallel worlds. Perhaps the fantasy elements exist in a parallel dimension opened during the alien invasion. Perhaps nobody knows how or why the world ended and all of a sudden dragons are flying around, aliens are shooting blasters at humans, zombies roam the night, vampires stalk prey, demons crawl up from Hell, ape-men run around enslaving everyone, and evil robots and an orbital computer system try to wipe out humanity.

Aftermath! is as close to D&D's kitchen sink fantasy as you can get for a post-ruin game without owning a shelf full of GURPS books, and it does the job in a lot less pages. You have the freedom here to pick-and choose. Aliens only? Got it. 200-years after fantasy game? Coming up. Nuclear war? No problem. Asteroid impact? Coming in. Plague? Just set your calendar to 2020 and open the books. The game can do as little or as much as you want, and it can get as gonzo or as serious as you prefer.

Aftermath Survival Guide

This is another interesting book since it gets you into the survivalist mindset. It is a good primer for survival and different end-world scenarios, and it accurately reflects the "prepper" frame of mind. If you are doing a campaign set at "year zero" and the world goes from normal to destroyed during the game, this book is invaluable.

If you fear nuclear war, stay away from this book. It goes in-depth on the effects of these weapons and also potential targets. It is sobering and makes you want to support arms-control treaties, sister cities, peace agreements, and cultural outreach programs fervently. Why did we ever make these weapons? Please, give peace a chance and end the use and production of these weapons. That said, if you are doing a straight after-the-bomb game, this book is indispensable.

For some reason dinosaurs are added to the creatures lists and now this book is a must-have for my gonzo campaign. You thought the homicidal bears were bad, wait until you get a load of these guys. We also get vampires and werewolves, and a part of me desperately wants the material in the add-on books to be cleaned up and organized - but this is Aftermath! so leave it ne and enjoy the mess everywhere.

Campaign Pack 2: Sydney

For us, this book is optional, and worth it only if you are setting your game down-under or you are wondering what all the references are in Operation Morpheus. It is good as a sample campaign structure of civilized settlements, and provides some interesting artwork and ideas for structuring a larger, more survivor-focused game with various warring factions.

My advice is to pick an area, have an idea who the warring factions are and what they are fighting over, and let players pick a side, stay on their own, or do what they want. Assume neutral cities, if there are any, have all been subjugated or destroyed. Add in a fear of outsiders and an evil occupying army draining the local resources for extra tension. Throw in some unexplained and unknown. Keep it simple and let the players carve a path through your world, and then slowly expand out as things are resolved or just fled from to find greener (radioactive) pastures.

Also, what's cool is you can pick up all the above PDFs for just under $40 on drivethrurpg, which is a huge haul for less than the price of a new game. Sure, it is dated, but super cool and retro and it is all great stuff.

More Soon

I will write up more on this game soon, since my experience seems to have struck a nerve in the pen-and-paper community, and helped rekindle interest in the genre and game. I am happy it has, since this game provided endless hours, if not years, of enjoyment for me and my small group of players. I will write up more experiences and thoughts on these books soon, and also some more humorous stories of how we played this as a group of crazy kids and a gonzo gang of post-ruin survivors.

Would I like to see a revised, new edition of the game? That is a huge maybe. Keep the rules the same. Clean up errors or inconsistencies. Improve presentation. Add compelling artwork. Organize the content better. Modernize the gear and technology. Simplify just a little. Keep the toolkit approach. And do not succumb into "changing the entire system" for some dice pool mechanic or other major change.

Aftermath! is what it is. This is the game you saw advertised in the back of Dragon magazine in the 80s that you always wondered about, thought it was some crazy survivalist prepper handbook, and then smiled after it came in the mail and you realized what doors were just opened and all the fun you could have with a toolbox and sandbox system second to none in the post-apoc genre. Gamma World this wasn't, and the game put you in the moment where "the world changes forever" like no other.