Wik said:
Yeah. In most wotc products, there's always something that I ignore and say "yeah, I'll never use that". In Apocalypse, there were times where I did that at first (Atomic Sunrise's compound, for example) but then I found myself running something where I picked up the rules and ran with 'em. Honestly can't think of something in there I wouldn't use.
There's a story behind the compound. About six months before this project started, I was working at WotC, it was summer, and I needed a vacation. A few months before, I had talked to a few of my childhood friends/gaming buddies to see what their vacation plans were that year, and we ended up all taking them at the same time, in our home town of Pullman. Since I had strongly urged Chris Perkins to let me work on Apocalypse, but hadn't actually been contracted for it or started working on it yet, I decided that the time was ripe to dust off some old Gamma World material I had come up with and run a game set in Pullman.
When I was in college, I lived in the dorm right across from "The compound," which is actually a gymn where you've got a swimming pool, a basketball court, a bunch of racquetball courts, offices, and other workout related rooms. It seemed like an interesting place to station the mutant overlord.
The premise of the game was that the characters had a vehicle and were passing through the area when they ran out of gas. In order to move on, they would need to either ditch the vehicle, or get some more gas. The only one in the area with gas to sell was the mutant warlord Radillos, and after their attempts to bargain failed, they fought their way into the compound, stole the gas they needed, and then ignited the rest. The resulting explosion was enough to throw the organization into chaos, but not enough to kill the mutant overlord.
Now, it's a few years later, I have since left WotC and moved back to Pullman, as has one of the guys who was on vacation that year. I've started up a new group made up primarily of the people who played in that session, and we're using True20 + Darwin's World + D20 Apocalypse and have returned to the town of Pullman with new characters. They would be up against the mutant warlord, except that there's an army of mutant frogs spreading through the area and they're trying to prepare for them, so they're working together.
By working together, what I really mean is that in the last adventure Radillos found out where a cache of forgotten pre-apocalyptic fuel was located and sent the party after it. It was on an old agronomy farm, and he also found records of a herbicide that was developed (but never released) out at the farm, which frogs were supposedly very susceptible to, hence the reason it was never released. He forcibly enlisted the group and sent them out with a tanker truck. Not trusting them not to simply take the fuel and run, he outfitted them with vests lined with explosives which could be activated by a remote that he carried. Nobody was blown up in the adventure, and they did retrieve the fuel and the chemical formula for the herbicide. One of the characters also accidentally blew up an old combine with him in it!
Next week: The frog army is getting closer and the PCs are squeezed between some allies they made in an earlier adventure and Radillos's forces.
I'm kind of curious, now that you bring it up - what was the stuff that would've been in the hard cover?
R&D never shared the outline for the 200+ page book, so I can only make some guesses as to what might have ended up in a larger version of it. I would imagine that you would have gotten larger, more detailed write ups on all of the settings, as well as one or two new ones. Personally, I would have liked to see a setting based on an asteroid strike/post strike winter, and one based on a disease outbreak. Aside from that, you'd probably see more rules content, such as more classes, feats, mutations, etc.
BTW, as far as I'm concerned, the best ongoing post apocalyptic line on the market is Darwin's World, but that's just my opinion. It's worth buying the PDFs and printing them up.
