Mutant Epoch (ME) is a spoiler game for me. While I love Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC) and the whole Zocchi-dice post-apocalyptic vibe, ME does a level of detail in characters, gear, and loot that satisfies me in a way only the classic Aftermath game did, but with a more straightforward core system.
MCC does a lot right, and it is an excellent game. Is it the king of post-apocalyptic play?
For me, I have two systems that I played back in the 1980s, Gamma World and Aftermath. Gamma World was the first, and we only started playing this in the 2nd edition. We owned the first for a while, but the 2nd caught our imagination. The characters we had carried the setting for us, but the rules were okay, and the fight to survive never really grabbed us in this world.
The 2nd Edition captivated us with its fantasy themes. It was sort of a mistake, since while they were fun at first, the fantasy elements struck us as "imitation future D&D" after a while, and the novelty wore off. They had dragons, fairies, orcs, gnolls, and all the standard fantasy trope approximations. The characters in this edition were interesting, but they still lacked something.
MCC feels closest in spirit to Gamma World 2nd Edition.
Classic Aftermath elevates the difficulty of the world, layering on the inhabitants, where even small things like a lack of food and water, temperature extremes, disease, booby traps, and collapsing structures can be just as deadly as a random wandering mutant or bandit gang. ME does the same thing, plus a whole lot more. The entire environment is a fun sandbox, a dangerous place waiting to be explored to find relics, loot, weapons, supplies, and lost technology.
How do you mitigate the danger? Skills, mutations, gear, and imaginative play. Classic "sandbox-style" 2D post-apocalyptic survival games, such as Fallout 1 and 2, Wasteland, and other games, come to mind. The later Fallout games were less about survival and the world, and more about collecting weapons and armor for 3d fights. Part of the fun is surviving in a deadly sandbox world, and dealing with factions and monsters comes on top of all that.
MCC is a softer game, where the characters are more prominent, and the environment serves as a backdrop for stories and tales of adventure. You are not using skills and gear as much to mitigate world danger, and that shifts into the background. Story and combat are more crucial to the overall gameplay experience. Like the assumed fantasy world in Dungeon Crawl Classics, the setting is not as important as the characters. Some of the tropes, such as vehicle combat, are not well handled by the rules.
Any of Goodman Games' products share a similar theme, where character and power advancement are primary, and world and gear advancement are secondary, a characteristic also found in 5E.
This is one trait of modern games that I dislike. They deemphasize gear and wealth, dismissing the world as a dangerous, living sandbox. They are "power collection and character advancement" games, intended for use in "any generic world," which are half a game at best. These generic "any worlds" are boring, your typical D&D generic kingdom, with zero weight and nowhere worlds offering no low-level game or distinction from anywhere else.
ME's collection of characters, races, gear, hazards, monsters, and dangers creates its own world. It is a lot like the psychotic, insane, crazy world we played in our Aftermath game, where laser-armed killer ATM machines and bears with hand grenades tried to kill players constantly. It was almost a Looney Tunes level of violence where feral plague-zombie tigers and intelligent gorillas roamed a destroyed office building looking for the last can of beans, and the entire building teetered on the verge of collapse as killer robots patrolled the streets with M-60 machineguns while riding on M-48 tanks.
Intelligent rats wearing saucepans as helmets built disease-tipped crossbows in the sewers. The rivers were filled with rad-piranhas and electric eels. Bandits would randomly fire mortars at you. Cockroaches the size of dogs would try to jump on your face from 10 meters away. Thinking computers with 64K of RAM wanted to kill all living beings. If it was good loot, it was booby trapped with enough explosives to wipe out the city block.
Why?
We were kids. The game had those things. Therefore, those things went into the game.
Turn off your brain. This is fun stuff.
And ME is that game, but with even more stuff. Give people stuff, mutations, monsters, factions, high-powered weapons, bandoleers filled with cans of beans, and scarce resources, and you have yourself a game. Weak characters? Let them find good weapons. And ME is more straightforward than Aftermath, and gives you a crazier, more insane hit.
ME is also a game that works on a lower level. Where Aftermath had mass battle rules that required a character to find 5,000 rounds of 7.62mm NATO, ME is more personal, with armies and settlements fighting with primitive, easy-to-craft, archaic weapons and armor. Crossbows and volleyed archery fire are the norm. If a community had primitive gunsmithing, it would be black powder weapons or cowboy guns
ME does the setting so much better, and the characters are much more detailed and interesting. Archaic combat remains critically important, and bullets serve as a form of currency. Finding a semi-safe haven to trade and rest is just as much of a challenge as trying to find salvage in dangerous, monster-infested ruins. This is the same hit that Aftermath gave me, where characters must survive in the deadly sandbox the game creates.
ME digs in deep, and even a box of paperclips can be bartered or used as scrap for item fabrication. ME also goes expansive, like dimensional travel in the expansion book. ME also goes wide, with characters that can be created from the least powerful to mutant combat gods. ME also does surface, with simple, straight human characters being some of the easiest to play. The game is similar to the first or second edition of Gamma World, with all the components included, and features greater depth and detail in character development and creation.
MCC is a solid game that complements DCC content well. At times, MCC feels like a DCC expansion book.
Mutant Epoch is everything classic Gamma World was, but it does it much better. Given how much I love classic Gamma World, the amount of fun and new content in ME eclipses that game and makes everything so much easier. The game appears complicated, but it actually has only two core mechanics.
The SV/DV combat system, a d100, roll-low, dirt-simple to-hit system.
The Hazard/Difficulty Chart, a d100 ability score versus difficulty rating system, is equally straightforward.
In play, the game is easier than a B/X system.
Character creation takes a little longer than most d20 systems, but it is far easier than those found in Rolemaster, GURPS, or other games with extensive customization options. Some characters, like straightforward humans, are on par with B/X in terms of complexity. The rest of the books are lists of stuff to use in character creation, gear, or referee guidelines. The game has more charts than actual rules.
MCC is more family-friendly than ME, as ME delves into mature subjects. If I were playing this in a game store or with my family, I would choose MCC. With a private group that does not care if they offend each other, and the safety sheets are tossed into the recycling bin? I would go all the way with ME. Why not? I am an adult, and I am allowed to choose what I want to see in entertainment. The same people who gush over Terrifier are getting upset at what happens to their D&D characters.
The post-apocalyptic world is neither clean, happy, nor friendly. If you look at some of the places in our world that are currently ravaged by war, famine, or hopeless corruption and under the heel of dictators, ME seems tame compared to these places in our world right now. Live in a TikTok and social media bubble of fakeness, and the real world will come along and shock you. No amount of supporting an emoji or responding to engagement farming will change this world or make it go away. That same terrible, destroyed, war-ravaged world of ours will be there tomorrow, and you will be seeking dopamine hits to try to ignore it for another day.
There is a moral argument against escapism. Real people are suffering.
There is a survival need for the same. Escapism is how we deal with our fears in a safe environment.
The truth lies in an equilibrium.
Mutant Epoch is the modern-day Aftermath.
Mutant Crawl Classics is the new Gamma World.
Both are fantastic games, but I grew up under the shadow of a mushroom cloud in the 1980s. And a fear of grenade-throwing bears, ice-covered lakes filled with piranhas, and killer ATMs with laser beams. We had a to-scale paper cut-out of an M-48 tank, scaled to one meter to the inch, with a fully rotatable turret, that we moved on a one-meter hexagonal grid. Aftermath was our game.
And back in those days, we hoarded cans of beans and bricks of government cheese and butter. We were ready.
And Mutant Epoch is ready, too.
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