Cast Away sets players in a classic survival situation. They are part of a shipwreck and wash ashore on a desert island. They have to do all the things one might expect in this situation such as find food, build shelters, make fires and put together a plan to get off the island. That means doing battle with dehydration, heat exhaustion, food poisoning and other basic survival issues. There are several conditions to worry about on top of the issue of fatigue. Taking action to survive is exhausting and the fatigue stats acts a little like the morale stat in Mork Borg. You test against it as it slowly increases until the character gets a full night’s sleep. Players have to find a tricky balance between taking action to survive, resting to remove penalties and figuring out how they are going to get off the damn island.
This being a fantasy RPG there’s more to the island that meets the eye with strange creatures, hidden temples and other issues beyond survival. The implication is that the setting is somewhat equivalent to the age of sail based on the equipment that players can begin with such as flintlock pistols and cutlasses. Exploring the island can mean magical artifacts and resources that can be used to make life easier but it also means coming face to face with beasts like the hermit crab the size of a shipwreck or the blank masked cultists looking for victims for their volcano god. Hiding out at the camp isn’t the best idea either; one of the conditions is cabin fever and the best way to cure it and regain the lost Presence points is by heading out into the jungle. If the authors wanted to keep the naming conventions of other titles, Lost Borg might have been a good fit. Fans of that mystery show could probably do a pretty good version of it with these games by updating some of the starting equipment and locations.
On its own, Cast Away seems like it would be fun for a short campaign of folks interested in survival gaming. I never thought I would have been charmed by a book that dug down into different difficulties for lighting a fire with a tinderbox, flints and rubbing sticks together. The key is that the mechanics still adhere to the light touch of the Borg family. Tracking multiple conditions seems fairly easy since each tops out at four levels to track. The book could use a touch better organization but it's small enough that finding things doesn;t get too complicated.
It also seems like an excellent resource to lift mechanics for other games in the family as well. Pirate Borg is the most obvious choice given the nautical themes. I could even see the game shift from high sea adventure to survival on an island after the player’s ship gets wrecked in a naval battle or an unnatural storm. There are more traditional elements to steal like the monsters, locations and treasures too. But I can also see these rules being used for something like Death In Space for players trapped on a space station over a dying planet.
Cast Away digs into the survival aspect of survival horror with some interesting options. If Mork Borg games are about choosing how your character dies in an apocalypse, some players might opt for hardscrabble survival to the bitter end rather than sliding down the gullet of an impossible monster.
