How Do You Like Your Post Apocalyptic RPGs?

[Reynard]

When it comes to games set in the post apocalypse, what sorts of setting elements and themes do you prefer?

As usual, I have tried to be comprehensive with the poll options, but I am sure I have missed a bunch of stuff.

 

[Reynard]

For my part, Deadlands: Hell On Earth is pretty much the perfect template for me: Fallout meets the Cthulhu Apocalypse!

 

[kronovan]

Afraid there's just too many tick boxes I'd tick, so I only ticked one. Post apocalyptic is one of those genres where I can imagine and enjoy a lot of different variants in play. The only thing in my mind a setting for the genre shouldn't have, is space travel. Although I suppose in a time frame where a collapsed civilization had highly advanced/high TL of space travel, an apocalypse could blast it back to a less sophisticated form. I've GMd campaigns set in the Battletech verse, and although there's a heavy enough loss of tech by the succession wars era for that setting to consider it PA on at least some planetary systems, I've never run a campaign for it that verse embraced the PA genre. Once the capability of space travel is there, to me it just seems to take the setting out of the PA genre.

I'm curious about any existing PA settings that feature space travel that was a far less sophisticated form than what existed at it's zenith?

 

[GuardianLurker]

Eh. PA can even work with space travel, as long as you adjust the scope. As an example: Shepard wasn't successful in Mass Effect. The Reapers came through and blew everyone out of space, and back into the pre-industrial age. But the [PC race] remembers. They remember that once they flew through the space between stars like birds fly in the air. They've started reclaiming an ancient space station in their system for use by their interplanetary mining colonies. They've reached the Mass Effect Relay, but they still haven't figured out how it works. Nor have they discovered any Eezo outside of the relay (yet!). And they know there's something in the Big Dark that hates life. But they're still VERY much aware that they are still children compared to the giants they were in the old days.

Now, it's a very "light" PA setting, but it still fits. And that "Musings on..." thread has a lot of useful info.

 

[Reynard]

Space travel can also just mean up the the lunar colony or an orbital station.

 

[payn]

I've been thinking really hard, but I don't think I have ever played a true post apocalypse TTRPG. So, I guess I dont know. Though, my tastes are towards the mundane with folks doing heroic stuff as opposed to being supers doing super being stuff.

 

[Tonguez]

All of the above EXCEPT space travel, I think once ypu’ve got space travel its no longer post-apocalyptic, since space gives respite from resource scarcity.

For me resource scarcity and survival (including rebuilding) are the core theme of post-apocalyptic fiction. But everything else works fine

 

[Reynard]

All of the above EXCEPT space travel, I think once ypu’ve got space travel its no longer post-apocalyptic, since space gives respite from resource scarcity.

Not necessarily. I used a collapsed Mars colony as a major plot point. It was supposed to be up running and the new utopian home of mankind. Instead it was a handful.of skeletons and a bunch of autonomous construction bots building building, waiting for the colonists to arrive.

 

[Tonguez]

Not necessarily. I used a collapsed Mars colony as a major plot point. It was supposed to be up running and the new utopian home of mankind. Instead it was a handful.of skeletons and a bunch of autonomous construction bots building building, waiting for the colonists to arrive.

So could the PCs choose to get on a ship and leave - head back where they came from? If so then in my mind its not really post apocalyptic. Even if they cant, they now have a colony ready for them to explore, exploit and populate - imho thats space exploration/colony building rather than post-apocalyptic.

 

[payn]

All of the above EXCEPT space travel, I think once ypu’ve got space travel its no longer post-apocalyptic, since space gives respite from resource scarcity.

Does it though?