August 11, 2019

 

July 10, 2019

You have to understand that the Wasteland lacks all of the amenities we take for granted in our world. Not only will you not find much in the way of food or water, but you won’t find law, order, justice, or any of that shit either. You got to be careful these days. Plenty of people out there will fuck you over sideways. If you’re not paying attention, the bad guys will rob you, beat you, and, most likely murder you… if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you might become the playthings for degenerate mutants, sold into slavery, or find a nice and slow death with your skin sloughing off the bone, cooking in the invisible fire of the radioactive afterglow of a dead and dying world.

Today, we’re checking out some folks you might run across during your missions into the Wasteland. Hello nurse!

V Reich

No one really knows who established the militarized faction known as the V Reich. Operating out of a fortified stronghold in the Scrapbridge area known as Festung Germania, it’s surmised someone uncovered a vast stash of history books detailing the Second World War and became enamored with the national-socialist regalia they found. Straying far away from the anarch-punk attitude and look of other gangers, they established themselves as a highly-organized, militant, and hierarchical organization. Obsessed with stockpiling arms, they prepare for their eventual genocidal war against their most hated foe: the mutants. Since they had no record of whether or not a fourth reich ever came about, they dubbed themselves the Fifth Reich, just in case.

Losers and Outcasts

Despite their formidable appearance and organization, the V Reich arose from a bunch of losers who had their asses handed to them by just about every faction around Scrapbridge. Fate was on their side however and help lift them from their ignominious origins. In a military bunker they discovered old cryogenic chambers that contained genetically enhanced super soldiers, each stronger and eager to take orders. They became the elite shock troops of the new organization. Then, during a routine salvage mission, a patrol discovered a trapdoor inside the ruins of a mansion, which led down to the private museum of a long-dead Edward Berhart, who was an avid collector of World War Two memorabilia. His collection contained hundreds of uniforms and weapons, perfect for outfitting this new organization.

The V Reich despises mutants and they consider them animals unworthy of sharing the same land as humans. This organization also has the trappings of some fatalistic doomsday cult, believing the true end of the world to be at hand and that it is their duty to prepare for it. The V Reich welcomes anyone in their midst regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual persuasion: they just fucking hate mutants.

Members of the V Reich fight with army-grade weapons such as pistols, rifles, machine guns, as well as sabers, knives, and so on. They never use bows, crossbows, blunderbusses, or weird weapons from other factions.

Soldat

The basic troopers of the V Reich, the soldats are seasoned soldiers who perform reconnaissance, recovery, retribution, and strike missions. Well-trained, they hold obedience to be one of their highest virtues and follow any order without question.

Ubersoldat

The übersoldats are the genetically-altered soldiers discovered in a bunker not far from the ruins of the Pentagon. The Reich doctors were able to waken only a few of these improved humans (not mutants!) as most of the tanks had failed or been corrupted. For this reason, the V Reich uses their übersoldats sparingly and never waste them in battle. When deployed, these ruthless stormtroopers cut down their enemies with bursts from their automatic rifles or slashes with their sabers and combat knives.

June 24, 2019

There’s a fair bit of Demon Lord hiding inside PunkApocalyptic. If the engine works, it works. No point in reinventing the beer can. Now are there changes? You bet. Of course there are. My job as the designer is to make the system support the setting and that’s what I set out to do. I’ll talk about some changes in a bit, but I wanted to give you the chapter opening first along with the basics about doing stuff in the game.

The Rules

This chapter covers all the rules you needed to play this game. The main thing to keep in mind is that this is a game focused on telling stories and you’re expected to use your imagination to make it work. Most of the time, what you want your character to do in the game simply happens without you having to refer to the rules at all. Your character might walk down a road, crack open a can of beets and start eating, or bed down inside of an old dumpster where they’ll be safe from the feral dogs sniffing around for easy meat. These things usually happen without you having to pick up your dice or make a note on your character sheet. They just happen. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, damnit.

     As much as I would like to tell you to toss the rules out the window and have fun telling stories set in a weird post-apocalyptic wasteland, we both know that some stuff can’t be solved by talking and hopeful thoughts. This is a game, after all, and games have rules. The difference is that these rules won’t handcuff you or dictate how you play: they help you when you get stuck in the story because you’re not sure what should happen next. And so, here we are, me writing an introduction to another rules chapter and you reading it.

     Before we dive into the nitty-gritty about the rules, I want to remind you that everything in this chapter relies on common sense and your responsibility to use it. If you can solve a scene without having to resort to rolling dice or referencing something on your sheet, don’t roll the dice and don’t bother with your sheet.

     For example, unless you character has some sort of weird-ass mutation that lets him or her walk through walls, your character’s going to bounce off that wall when you try it. Dumbass. You don’t need a rule to tell you this. Similarly, you can’t shoot the moon with your rifle from the surface of the Earth, swim up a waterfall, or do any of the other goofy shit that might be rattling around in your head right now. Likewise, you don’t need rules for getting pregnant, pooping, walking around, or anything else that you’d expect a normal, capable individual to be able to pull off, so you’re not going to find that shit in this chapter either.

     Although, your character being knocked-up in this god-awful world might be pretty fucking interesting…

     What you will find are things to help you through the tough spots in the story. Does your shot take off the mutant’s head? Can you kick down the door? Can you get away from the gangers? You need these things to tell the story. So, pay attention, think about what makes sense for the story, but don’t sweat the small shit. Make sense? Good. Let’s do this thing.

Doing Stuff

As a player, you decide on the kinds of stuff your character does in the game. Sometimes, you tell the Gamemaster what you want your character to do, and other times you tell the GM how your character reacts to a situation. Whenever you describe something your character does in the game, the GM determines whether the thing you attempt happens (success), doesn’t happen (failure), or might happen (decided by an attribute roll).

Success

A success means that the activity you described more or less happens as you described it. You might succeed from describing something just about any asshole can pull off or you might have gotten a success on an attribute roll that only the most special fuckers make.

     The GM might decide you need multiple successes to do some activity. This can happen if you’re fighting against the venom coursing through your veins or you’re trying to hotwire an old car. In these and other situations, you just keep trying to get successes until you get the required number. Normally, you don’t have to get them all in a row. You can fuck around a bit in between your successes and still succeed once you get the last one. Rolling failures while attempting multiple successes, however, will probably result in some kind of setback, usually bad. Either way, the GM will keep track of the successes and failures. Good luck.

Failure

Failure means you suck.

     Nah, just kidding. Failure means the thing you wanted to do doesn’t happen. It might not happen because you tried to do something ridiculous or impossible and the GM just shut that noise down by telling you no.

     Or—and more likely since you’re a gamer of discerning taste and culture—you got a failure from a particularly shitty roll.

     When you fail, you might be able to try again or you might not, depending. If you’re rolling to see if you can pick a lock on a door and it turns out you can’t, you can’t. If you’re trying to smack some fucker with a crowbar and you get a failure, you can swing again next time you have a chance.

Attribute Rolls

The rules sometimes tell you to make an attribute roll to see if you can do a thing. The GM might also ask for a roll. In either case, you figure out if you can do the thing by roll a d20.

     Attribute rolls are called what they are because they all use one of your attributes. The rules typically tell you what attribute to use or the GM determines.

     There are two kinds of attribute rolls: basic rolls and rolls to hit. You use basic rolls to see if you can do something and rolls to hit when you would see if you can do something to someone else. So, if you want to shake off being drunk, you’d make a basic roll. If you wanted to shoot some asshole through a window, you’d roll to hit. Make sense?

     To make a basic roll or a roll to hit, just follow these steps.

     Roll the Die: Roll a d20.

     Add Modifiers: Add to the number you rolled the modifier from the attribute to that best applies to the activity you are attempting. The rules or the GM tell you which attribute to use.

     Apply Other Adjustments: Add any other adjustments to the die roll, such as bonuses or penalties, assetsor complications.

     Find the Target Number: If you’re making a basic roll, the target number is always 10. If you’re rolling to hit, the target number is the target’s Defense score, or the score of the attribute you would hit.

     Determine the Result: Compare the total of all the numbers to the target number. If the total is equal to or greater than the target number, the result is a success. If the total is less than the target number, the result is a failure.

Adjusting Rolls

Circumstances, talents, spells, and other effects can apply adjustments to your attribute rolls. Adjustments are bonuses and penalties or assets and complications.

Bonuses and Penalties

Some shit might grant you a bonus or impose a penalty on a roll you make. Bonuses represent advantages, while penalties describe disadvantages. A bonus is always a positive (+) number, while a penalty is always a negative (–) number. In both cases, you add all the bonuses and penalties that apply to the roll, provided those bonuses and penalties each come from different sources. So, if you have –1 penalty to a roll of a d20 and you roll a 5, the total would be 4. If you have a +2 bonus to a roll and a –3 penalty, you would add –1 to your roll.

Assets and Complications

Many effects can improve or worsen your chances when you make an attribute roll. You might have a talent that makes performing a task easier, or be afflicted by a disease or poison, which just fucking sucks all the way around. Positive circumstances grant one or more assets to the roll, while negative circumstances impose one or more complications.

     Assets improve your d20 rolls and one or more assets might apply to a given roll. For each asset, you roll a d6 and then add the highest number rolled on all the asset dice to the d20 roll. For example, if you roll a d20 with 3 assets, you would roll 3d6. If the dice come up as 3, 5, and 2, you would add 5 to the d20 roll since 5 is the highest number.

     Complications hinder your rolls similarly and, like assets, one will apply to a given roll. For each complication, you roll a d6 and then subtract the highest number rolled on all the complication dice from the d20 roll. For example, if you roll a d20 with 2 complications, you would roll 2d6. If the dice come up as 4 and 1, you would subtract 4 from the d20 roll since 4 is the highest number.

     Assets and complications cancel each other out, die for die, so you never roll them both at the same time. So, if you have 3 assets and 1 complication that apply to a particular roll, you’d make the roll with 2 assets (1 of the complications cancels 1 of the assets). Similarly, if 2 assets and 4 complications apply to the roll, you would make the roll with 2 complications since 2 assets would cancel out 2 complications. Savvy? Good.

Stacking Assets and Complications

All assets granted and complications imposed apply to a roll provided those assets and complications come from different sources. For example, if you have a talent that grants you 1 asset and a different talent that also grants you 1 asset, you’d make the roll with 2 assets. If, however, you are sickened after being hit by an arrow smeared in poison and then get sickened again after being pumped full of venom by a nasty mutant, you’d only make your roll with 1 complication from the condition of being sickened since the source of the complications come from the same affliction, “sickened.”

Luck

Your characters are a cut above the rest of the fuckers in the world. Your characters possess unique talents, special training, secret knowledge, and other traits to help you survive in the Wasteland. In addition to your capabilities, your characters also have more luck than do others, which helps you escape from deadly situations, avoid failure, and turn what would be a glancing blow into a deadly one.

     However, as lucky as you and your friends can be, your good fortune is not without its limits and sometimes, when you need it most, your luck might just run out.

     The game tracks your luck with luck tokens. At the start of each adventure, the GM secretly determines how many luck tokens your team has by rolling 1d6, adding the number of your team’s completed missions to the roll. The GM keeps the total number of tokens available a secret from you, so you never know when your luck will run out. Fun, right?

     At any time, you or any other player can announce that you’re spending a luck token. If the GM tells you there are no tokens left to spend, you are quite literally shit out of luck. If there is one to spend, you can use it to produce any one of the following effects.

     Grant Boons: You can make an attribute roll with 2 boons. You can decide to use luck after you have rolled and after the GM has told you the outcome of the roll.

     Heal Damage: You allow one character to heal 2d6 damage.

     Maximize Damage: You cause one creature that would take damage to take the maximum amount of damage. You can decide to use luck after the amount of damage has been determined.

Using Attributes

Making an attribute roll involves using one of your eight attributes. The rules and the GM determine which attribute applies, but the following guidelines give you an idea how you might use them.

Muscles

Muscles describes physical might, athletic ability, and brawn.

     Score: Your Muscles score is the target number for any effect that would force you to move, restrain you, or prevent you from exerting force.

     Attribute Rolls: You make Muscles rolls when you attack with a melee weapon, throw a weapon, use brute force to break an object, to overpower another creature in some way. You also make Muscle rolls when you would perform an activity related to athleticism such as when you would climb or swim.

Meat

Meat describes durability, overall fitness, and the ability to tolerate pain and injury.

     Score: Your Meat score is the target number for any effect that would directly harm your body.

     Attribute Rolls: You make Meat rolls when you would exert yourself for long periods, withstand the effects of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, and when you would fight off the effects of disease and poison.

Hands

Hands describes balance, manual dexterity, aim, poise, and steadiness.

     Score: Your Hands score is the target number for any effect that would unbalance you.

     Attribute Rolls: You roll Hands when you would attack with ranged weapons and when you attack with some melee weapons. You might also make Hands rolls when you would perform some sleight of hand or other physical trick that involves dexterity.

     You also make Hands rolls when you would move across many forms of challenging terrain, squeeze through a tight place, escape bonds, or perform a task that involves steady hands and dexterity such as picking a lock or disarming a trap.

Feet

Feet describes reflexes, swiftness, and ability to escape harm.

     Score: Your Feet is the target number for attacks made against you that you could possibly dodge.

     Attribute Rolls: You make Feet rolls when you would jump, leap, or perform any other task that involves speed. You also make Feet rolls to escape danger when caught in an explosion or to avoid a sudden danger, as well as when you would pursue a fleeing creature or escape your pursuers.

Brains

Brains describes cunning, wit, memory, knowledge, and intelligence.

     Score: Your Brains score is the target number for any effect that would deceive or confuse you.

     Attribute Rolls: You make Brains rolls when you would recall obscure information, use logic to solve a problem, or perform any other activity that involves knowledge. You also make Brains rolls when attempting to outwit or deceive another creature, and when you use certain mental mutations.

Eyes

Eyes describes the keenness of all your senses, such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, and so on.

     Score: Your Eyes score is the target number for any effect that would deceive your senses.

     Attribute Rolls: You make Eyes rolls when you would listen for sounds or notice details in your environment. You also make these rolls when you try to find a hidden creature or recognize an illusion for what it is.

Mouth

Mouth describes strength of personality, insight, and the ability to communicate with others.

     Score: Your Mouth score is the target number for any effect that would alter your personality or take control of your body.

     Attribute Rolls: You roll Mouth when you would interact socially with other creatures in order to befriend or threaten. You might also make Mouth rolls when you use and resist certain mental mutations.

Guts

Guts describes determination, courage, discipline, and willpower.

     Score: Your Guts score is the target number for any effect that would erode your confidence.

     Attribute Rolls: You make Guts rolls when you would use determination to overcome a challenge, when you would fight to stay alive, to overcome stress, and maintain your sanity in the face of horrifying situations. You also roll Guts when you would use certain mental mutations.

Defense

Defense describes how hard you are to strike with a weapon or some other object. Your Defense score is the target number for rolls made to attack you with a weapon.

Health

Most people and creatures have Health scores. The score tells you the most damage it can take before becoming incapacitatedor destroyed. A creature or object’s Health score can benefit from bonuses, which means it can take more damage, or suffer from penalties, which means it can take less damage. If a penalty reduces a creature’s Health score to a number equal to or lower than its damage total, the creature becomes incapacitated, while an object is destroyed. A creature whose Health drops to 0 dies, while an object whose Health drops to 0 is destroyed.

Grit

Grit describes your ability to recover from injuries. You can use an action to recover, which lets you spend grit to heal damage. You might also lose grit when you start dying or you suffer from hunger, thirst, and exhaustion.

Speed

Your Speed score tells you how far, in yards, you can move on your turn in combat. Various effects can increase or decrease your Speed score.

Size and Reach

Everything has a size score, which tells you about how much horizontal physical space it takes up. Most player characters are size 1, meaning they occupy a square of space, 1 yard on a side. Smaller creatures might be size 1/2 while larger ones could be size 2, 3, or even larger. Size does not account for height, which varies a great deal.

     Size also usually describes how far outside of your space you can reach. Your reach equals your size. Some creatures have a longer reach due to their anatomy.

June 12, 2019

This August, I’m launching the Kickstarter campaign for a brand new roleplaying game entitled PunkApocalyptic: The RPG based on the miniatures game by Bad Roll Games. This game promises a hardcore, fast past, down and dirty, vulgar descent in to ultra-violence, in which you play mercenaries fighting for bullets in the Wasteland of post-apocalyptic Earth. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be showing off sexy previews of what you can expect from this bad-ass game. Full warning, though. This game is ugly, full of cursing, and a whole hell of a lot of fun to play. Here’s a taste:

The Wasteland

The world as we know it is gone. The why and how of is subject to debate, but there are few left who have the time or ability to wax philosophical about it.  All that’s left is an extremely dangerous place, which, depending upon your point of view, is either a reeking open sewer, a radioactive shithole rife with wasting disease and lingering death, or a desperate place of hunger and want where anyone will trade anything just to survive one more day.

     Actually, your point of view doesn’t matter. It’s all of these things.

      Deadly and violent, much of the world has become a deserted, barren land dotted with the remnants of whatever came before. The Wasteland, as it’s called, though, is not as empty as it might first appear.

     Here live the wretched descendants of the undesirables, the impoverished, the castoffs, and everyone else deemed unsuitable for entry into the great and mythical Megalopoli: fabulous cities built during civilization’s collapse that became more myth than reality to most of the rugged shitkickers trying to scratch out a living in the Wasteland. Unless you’re one of those privileged few living in one of ’em, you’re pretty much fucked and have to figure out some way to survive in some of the worst places you can imagine, alongside all the other poor dumb bastards who will just as soon tear out your throat to get their mitts on your rusty can of beets as give you the time of day. Not that anyone has a working watch or really gives a shit about what time of the day it is. Beets, though? That’s another story.

     But as unpleasant as the world has become, opportunity abounds for anyone with the grit, determination, and moral flexibility to stay alive and maybe even thrive—well, at least by comparison to the other slags around you.

     In the Wasteland, resources are quite scarce. Electricity is nearly nonexistent, and those few who know how to build or even repair complex devices are rarer still. Therefore, just about everything has been reduced to the most of basic items, assembled from whatever can be dug and salvaged out of old landfills, plundered from the ruined cities of the Before Times, or simply robbed from some other weak, stupid bastards.

     Digging out salvage is no easy task as most ruins are overrun with roving gangs, mutant abominations, murderous cannibals, or fanatic disciples with insane beliefs. When you’re offered a few bullets to put an end to a local warlord, fuel to fill up the car you’ve kept running with bubblegum, duct tape, and hope, odds are you won’t have much choice other than to take the job.

     As tough as things are in the Wasteland, one can still find small settlements, often fortified, which somehow manage to survive the neverending hardship. Some outposts serve as commercial hubs, while others represent the best chance for the weak and feeble to survive. Some settlements have greenhouses and water collectors for growing crops and supplying clean water, while many host murderous gangs who trade only in bullets instead of goods and foodstuffs that would actually make life more livable. Go figure.

     Then there are roving hermits who collect odd pieces of useful junk and technology, or bands of mystic nomads in search of some arcane “truth” that often involves blood sacrifice (usually yours or that of your teammates), or the odd religious cult dedicated to bizarre gods of their own invention, bent on forceful conversion of any who they meet (also, usually you and your teammates).

     Anything and everything is possible in the Wasteland and you’re bound to discover something truly strange that would shock even your seriously desensitized and cynical world-view before you punch your ride ticket and call it an end to the miserable fucking life you’ve lived in this world of shit.