Anybody ever played a post apocalypse game?

[Siberys]

I like the idea. Reminds me of the Amoco shaman mentioned in the Dark Tower series.

 

[William Ronald]

These New Dark Ages

I remembered this being linked to at EN World, and spent a little time searching.

These New Dark Ages is a campaign set on an Earth where magic returned, and our civilization collapsed. It has a detailed history, which begins to deviate from our world around 2000.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Don't forget the Black Gods...Amoco, X-Haan, Sher Vran, Shellal...and their warriors who dwell eternally in the Hall of Burton.

 

[Tetsubo]

I played a post apocalypse FR years ago near the release of 3E where Shar had rended the Weave and assasinated Mystra with the help of Cyric. Seriously, I wonder who stole my notes . . .
Anyway because my players had played FR a lot before and I had shunted them into the future through a spell, seeing the world they loved corrupted and destroyed was awesome. Tons of drama and great comedic potential.

In my my last FR campaign I was building towards an apocalyptic type of event. I was planning on dumping the Dragonstar Empire onto Faerun. Sadly the game ended before I could pull it off.

 

[Andor]

Sacrifice

Shannara[/I] books are post-apocalyptic fantasy set in our world, which is being made more clear now that Brooks has linked them to his Word & Void trilogy and his Genesis books.

2) S.M. Stirling's novels of The Change are set in a P-A version of our world that has a more low-fantasy feel. They are also linked to his Islands in the Stream of Time books.

This made me think of Lois Bujold's recent Sharing Kinfe quartet. The books are post-apocalptic, but the apocolypse was long enough ago that the world is starting to pick up and regrow, and the feel of the books is actually very close to the settlement phase of the american mid-west. (Lois notes that her australian readers said it all sounded very exotic and otherworldly. )

So that's what brought it up in my mind, but it's the monsters of the books that I'm thinking of. They're called either malices or blight boggles and they seem to be bits of some giant uber-demon that brought about the apocalpyse. When they first spring up all they know how to do is eat. And as they eat they learn new tricks and can take new shapes, and they grow steadily more terrifying. The trouble is they don't know how to do anything they haven't tasted. And that includes dying.

In order to kill one you first have to teach if what mortality is. And that's where the titular Sharing Knives come in. The lakewalkers are the decendents of the old mage-lords who caused the catastrophe in the first place, and they have devoted their existence to fighting the malices. They make the sharing knives from the thighbones of their own dead, and in order to 'prime' a knife with the taste of mortality someone must die on the knife. Their warriors carry unprimed knives with them, hoping that if they are wounded in battle they'll have the chance to kill themselves with the knives, thus creating a primed knife, and a weapon that can destroy a malice. The old, and the sick too also will share their deaths if they can.

So in order to take down a malice it first take the deaths of two good guys. One to provide the blade of the knife, and the other to prime it.

Has anyone ever set something like this up in a game? Where to destroy a monster takes some very real sacrifice on the part of the heros, not merely a trip to magic item wal-mart to get the right alchemical metal for the fiend de jour?

 

[Mr. Wilson]

My favorite game settings are post-apocalypse settings actually; Rifts and Deadlands: Hell on Earth, with Eberron probably coming in a distant third (technically, could be considered post-apocalyptic given the fall of the Galifar).

Rifts, the setting is amazing, while the gameplay....well, I'll be polite and shut up.

Hell on Earth is my favorite setting, ever. I own all the original HoE supplements and have run 2 very long campaigns based around it.

DnD may be what I play most these days, but HoE owns my heart.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

The gods idea sounds a bit like some stuff from Moorcock's Hawkmoon World, which has things like Chishill (Churchill) as gods. Also very post apocalyptic, but society has rebuilt.

 

[jdrakeh]

I've started one campaign with an apocalypse before. I took Eberron, FR, Greyhawk and a dozen or so nameless worlds, smashed all of them together in a planar catastrophe and scattered the fragments of all the worlds across an endless sky, linked by flowing threads of rivers winding thru the air.

That was a fun one, and my players really enjoyed the whole feel of the place.

I started to do something very similar to this about a year ago with OD&D but, unfortunately, work got in the way. As fate would have it, at about the same time this thread was started, I received an email from the forums that I set up for that game notifying me that they were about to expire. . . so I renewed them this morning for the aforementioned Risus campaign

 

[darjr]

Gamma World is my second love RPG behind D&D. I would bring it back in a heartbeat if I thought it would sell. I love the real world tech meets mutant/fantasy elements.

I'd love a new Gamma World in the style of the 1st and 2nd editions.

 

[Tetsubo]

I'd love a new Gamma World in the style of the 1st and 2nd editions.

Do a search for Mutant Future.