HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
Ah, the post-apocalypse, how I love thee. “When you have to have it there at the end of the world, send it post-apocalyptic!”
deadEarth was one of the last games in my extended flirtation with the end of the world. I was introduced to the game through Tony Monorchio, who illustrated the entire core book as well as the website. Tony went on to become the core illustrator for Ambient Inc. when we went into d20 publishing, and is indirectly the reason I’m writing these game a day entries.
The game takes the genre of the post-apocalypse and tries to turn it up to 11. It has all the feel of a labour of love where the author honestly feels that it is a hundred times better than any other RPG on the market. It is “a game of survival”, it is “as brutally real as possible” and is “simple to use”, “flexible” and offers players the opportunity to have their characters made a part of the official deadEarth setting once they advance to legendary status.
Unfortunately, the game fails to deliver on so many levels. Realism is a difficult claim under any circumstances, add in 1,000 different ‘radiations’ (effectively mutations) and it gets harder, make one of them the ability to urinate napalm, or to spend skill points (XP) to negate any lethal game effect (combat damage, radiation, mutations, illness, etc) and the concept can be tossed out the window. Throw in a horribly arcane, deadly and difficult impulse-based combat system and it collapses under its own weight.
The setting is laughable, a world 5 years after the third world war, where guns are for some reason incredibly rare, where a unified global currency remains in effect, and where all mutants are hated by the populace (especially since they are all mutants themselves)… The character creation system produces characters of varying ages, and for some reason older characters have more mutations than younger characters, even though they have both been exposed to this toxic world for the same five years since the end of civilization as we know it (but not the end of the new global unified currency). Character creation did, on the other hand, include an interesting (albeit time-consuming unless you had a program to do it for you) system to determine a character’s natural abilities and inabilities with various skills before actually spending points on said skills.
However, the game could be incredibly fun. It runs a lot like what you would expect from throwing Gamma World and the Fallout CRPGs into a blender with a lot of crack cocaine and setting it on frappe. We went to CanGames (the local convention in Ottawa) one year supporting this game, all dressed up in bright orange coveralls with spray painted logos on them, and I ran an awesome game at the convention loosely ripped off from the original slavers module for AD&D. The players were inventive and had fun, and the system encouraged not only violent approaches to situation, but attacking verbally also (with skills that deal stun damage through verbal interaction). In one scene, the PCs ran into the next to final room which was well defended, and the first PC pointed up and behind the guards and yelled “Oh my god! They are coming through the ceiling”. He rolled well, and the guards lost that turn of actions. We also had one of our favorite moments in gaming at that session, when one of the players who’s character had died in the first hour of the session dropped by the table again. I handed him back his character sheet with one new mutation on it… “undead”. They opened the door to a small room, and he stepped out and asked how the rest of the party was doing. The leader looked at him, said “now that just ain’t right”, pulled the shotgun down off his shoulder and blew his darn fool head off.
“Now that just ain’t right” is our code for it being time to decapitate someone. Especially someone inside the party.
Although the game ran well at the convention, attempts to even run that same adventure again always bogged down when combat began. In fact, any attempt to make the game work bogged down when combat began. The whole combat system was horribly at fault, and in the end I even made a document converting the whole game to the d20 system using the basic rules from Star Wars d20 and some house rules and house character classes from around the net.
We even secured permission to republish the game in a d20 edition from the original publisher, but never actually finished the work involved. We renewed the agreement a couple of years ago, but still have never moved forward on it.
In my playroom, I have not one, but 20 copies of this game still. And that’s after foisting off a dozen copies on GenCon ENnies volunteers last year. We didn’t manage to sell too many copies at that convention we went to…
And don’t even get me started about the fanatical on-line marketing this game saw – to the point of making LPJr’s spam assaults back in the old days of Haven look like top-notch behaviour.
- Footnote: I still have a deadEarth fansite on www.dreadgazebo.com
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About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
deadEarth was one of the last games in my extended flirtation with the end of the world. I was introduced to the game through Tony Monorchio, who illustrated the entire core book as well as the website. Tony went on to become the core illustrator for Ambient Inc. when we went into d20 publishing, and is indirectly the reason I’m writing these game a day entries.
The game takes the genre of the post-apocalypse and tries to turn it up to 11. It has all the feel of a labour of love where the author honestly feels that it is a hundred times better than any other RPG on the market. It is “a game of survival”, it is “as brutally real as possible” and is “simple to use”, “flexible” and offers players the opportunity to have their characters made a part of the official deadEarth setting once they advance to legendary status.
Unfortunately, the game fails to deliver on so many levels. Realism is a difficult claim under any circumstances, add in 1,000 different ‘radiations’ (effectively mutations) and it gets harder, make one of them the ability to urinate napalm, or to spend skill points (XP) to negate any lethal game effect (combat damage, radiation, mutations, illness, etc) and the concept can be tossed out the window. Throw in a horribly arcane, deadly and difficult impulse-based combat system and it collapses under its own weight.
The setting is laughable, a world 5 years after the third world war, where guns are for some reason incredibly rare, where a unified global currency remains in effect, and where all mutants are hated by the populace (especially since they are all mutants themselves)… The character creation system produces characters of varying ages, and for some reason older characters have more mutations than younger characters, even though they have both been exposed to this toxic world for the same five years since the end of civilization as we know it (but not the end of the new global unified currency). Character creation did, on the other hand, include an interesting (albeit time-consuming unless you had a program to do it for you) system to determine a character’s natural abilities and inabilities with various skills before actually spending points on said skills.
However, the game could be incredibly fun. It runs a lot like what you would expect from throwing Gamma World and the Fallout CRPGs into a blender with a lot of crack cocaine and setting it on frappe. We went to CanGames (the local convention in Ottawa) one year supporting this game, all dressed up in bright orange coveralls with spray painted logos on them, and I ran an awesome game at the convention loosely ripped off from the original slavers module for AD&D. The players were inventive and had fun, and the system encouraged not only violent approaches to situation, but attacking verbally also (with skills that deal stun damage through verbal interaction). In one scene, the PCs ran into the next to final room which was well defended, and the first PC pointed up and behind the guards and yelled “Oh my god! They are coming through the ceiling”. He rolled well, and the guards lost that turn of actions. We also had one of our favorite moments in gaming at that session, when one of the players who’s character had died in the first hour of the session dropped by the table again. I handed him back his character sheet with one new mutation on it… “undead”. They opened the door to a small room, and he stepped out and asked how the rest of the party was doing. The leader looked at him, said “now that just ain’t right”, pulled the shotgun down off his shoulder and blew his darn fool head off.
“Now that just ain’t right” is our code for it being time to decapitate someone. Especially someone inside the party.
Although the game ran well at the convention, attempts to even run that same adventure again always bogged down when combat began. In fact, any attempt to make the game work bogged down when combat began. The whole combat system was horribly at fault, and in the end I even made a document converting the whole game to the d20 system using the basic rules from Star Wars d20 and some house rules and house character classes from around the net.
We even secured permission to republish the game in a d20 edition from the original publisher, but never actually finished the work involved. We renewed the agreement a couple of years ago, but still have never moved forward on it.
In my playroom, I have not one, but 20 copies of this game still. And that’s after foisting off a dozen copies on GenCon ENnies volunteers last year. We didn’t manage to sell too many copies at that convention we went to…
And don’t even get me started about the fanatical on-line marketing this game saw – to the point of making LPJr’s spam assaults back in the old days of Haven look like top-notch behaviour.
- Footnote: I still have a deadEarth fansite on www.dreadgazebo.com
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
