Poison Fire and Thirty Feet of Snow (a post-apocalyptic setting/game)

Radiation concentrations in New Mexico in the year 2047 or so.

 

Once upon a time I was thinking about making a Stand Still, Stay Silent RPG, but then it got really boring and the author became a bit of a crazy, so that's not happening. Fast forwards to now, I just read Station 11. It's pretty good. Gave me some ideas.

 

I'm not going to write a timeline of the apocalypse or anything, just suffice it to say that climate change really fucked things up for a lot of people, and then the nukes started flying, and a really big volcano blew up somewhere, and then things got really cold for a while and a lot of people starved or got sick and died. This took about 25 years or so, 20 of which were fucking freezing, and it's still pretty damn cold now but not as bad as it was. And man-made climate change is gone! Gotta look at the positives. Anyways, there's like 100 million people left on the Earth now, which isn't really very many.

So you live in a little village somewhere in the upper reaches of the Rio Grande Valley, north of the clouds of radiation that still fester over Santa Fe and Los Alamos. Peñasco, maybe, or Ojo Caliente. Who knows how the hell you ended up here, in the middle of nowhere, but a lot of people went a lot of places in the past generation of unceasing chaos, and some of them even had children along the way, so you could really be from anywhere. In all likelihood, your old family is dead, if you ever had one, unless you managed to stick together the whole time or your ancestors have been living here for ten (or a hundred) generations, but at least you know every single person who lives within 50 miles of you, and probably like at least one or two of them. It's not an easy life up here—the winters are cold and long at the best of times, which these are decidedly not—but it's better than most ended up with.

   

The actual game, then, is managing your little village and trying to keep everyone in it from starving to death or otherwise dying unpleasantly. You might also be a traveling caravan, traders or other itinerants, but your goal remains the same. You'll have to venture into the irradiated ruins of cities to scavenge for what few supplies haven't been scrounged up yet and deal with all the various asshole cultists and bandits running around making life hard for everyone, in addition to the constant dangers of the cold, the heat, food, water, disease, wild animals, and everything else that could possibly rear its nasty head up to fuck over not only you but also everyone you care about.

 

 

A Sketch of the System

 

Your character's got... call it 5 ability scores? Strength, Coordination, Endurance, Intelligence, Charisma, maybe. Intelligence might just be used for languages, Charisma for reaction rolls and such. Combat is Boot Hill-like, probably (of course it is, it's me), with wounds instead of hitpoints, but maybe a little more nasty, a little more impactful. You really don't want to get hurt. Maybe a chance of infection for every wound? Might be a bit harsh. Otherwise everything is skill-based. Something like:

• Agriculture
• Animals
  
• Bows
  
• Brawling
• Brewing
• Carpentry
• Chemistry
  
• Fishing
• Firearms 
• Foraging
  
• Instrument 
• Machines
  
• Medicine (Herbal)
• Medicine (Modern)
  
• Memorization
• Old-World Knowledge
  
• Singing 
• Stealth
  
• Throwing
• Tinkering
• Tracking
  
• Woodcraft
• Anything else you can think of

I think the main wilderness travel mechanic will be ability score damage. Spend a day tramping through waist-deep snow? Lose a point of Strength and Endurance. No gloves while you do it? Coordination too. Get surprise-attacked by someone you thought was friendly? Lose a point of Charisma, as you're not going to be too friendly to strangers for a bit. Diseases and radiation sickness will affect ability scores as well. Recover by resting in comfortable and safe places, or as close as you can manage.

As for the village management, let's say you've got a number of supplies and attributes: Population, Food, Medicine, Water, Cloth, Tools, and Morale. These will fluctuate randomly as time passes, lots of random tables and such, and they'll determine what you need to scavenge for and deal with. I think I want lots of specificity with this, so you can come up with creative solutions. It's not necessarily, "We're low on Medicine, go find us any medicine at all and that will be fine," but perhaps more like "We're low on Medicine, so Joanna needs you to get some amoxicillin to cure Ángel's infection. It can't be penicillin or sulfa, he's allergic to those." Population and Morale are probably mostly dependent on the rest of the attributes, with Food and Water being the most important. This might be too fiddly but maybe tracking every single member of the village individually would be good, so you can really dig your teeth into the social situations and individual issues which will arise.

Starting Equipment: a blanket, 2 liters of water storage, 3 dried rations, and:

 

d10 weapons:

1. Spear

2. 3 javelins 

3. Club

4-5. Tool (hammer, machete, crowbar, hatchet, etc)

6. 3 daggers

7. Bow and 20 arrows

8. Crossbow and 20 bolts

9. Improvised gun and 1d6+3 rounds

10. Pre-collapse gun and 1d6+1 rounds

 

d8 cartridges:

1. 9mm Parabellum

2. .45 ACP

3. .223 Remington

4. .30-06 Springfield

5. 7.62x39mm

6. 7.62mm NATO

7. 12 gauge buckshot

8. Something weirder

d20 pre-collapse miscellanea, roll twice:

1. 200 feet of dynamic nylon climbing rope

2. 100 feet of steel baling wire

3. Folding knife with liner lock

4. Needle-nose pliers

5. Hand saw

6. Copy of your current favorite book (you, the player)

7. Sewing needle and roll of thread

8. Portable solar charger, 5V (for charging mobile devices)

9. iPod Shuffle previously owned by someone with terrible taste, 47% battery

10. An instrument, miraculously well-maintained

11. 2d6 alcohol wipes

12. Half-filled notebook and 2-inch long #2 pencil with no eraser

13. 1d8 pills, 80 mg oxycodone

14. 2-person ultralight tent

15. Tarp and 30 feet of paracord

16. Child's school backpack

17. 65L hiking backpack

18. Umbrella

19. Compass

20. 2d10 hurricane matches

 

d20 other miscellanea, roll twice:

1. 100 feet of hemp rope

2. 3 tallow candles

3. Brick of oil-soaked kindling

4. 5 clean cotton bandages

5. Plastic soda bottle filled with raspberry wine

6. 3 blunts of shitty marijuana cut with sage

7. Bow drill

8. Bar of homemade lye soap

9. Mortar and pestle

10. Knife crudely made from a truck spring

11. Handwritten copy of your current favorite book (you, the player)

12. Jury-rigged hand-cranked flashlight

13. Wooden whistle

14. Little whittled statue of your favorite animal

15. 3 charcoal writing sticks

16. Stack of poorly made parchment

17. Case of herbal makeup: eyeliner, eye shadow, blush, and lip paint, all natural.

18. Very grumpy mule and saddlebags

19. Handcart

20. Loyal canine (the lines between dog, coyote, and wolf are rather blurred nowadays)

d6 footwear:

1. Handmade moccasins

2. Socks and birkenstocks

3. Fashionable boots with a 3-inch heel

4. Rubber snow boots

5. Running shoes

6. Leather hiking boots

d6 tops:

1. Sundress

2. T-shirt

3. Tank top

4. Flannel shirt

5. Button-down shirt

6. Blouse

 

d6 bottoms:

1. Torn nylon leggings

2. Long skirt

3. Rain pants

4. Jeans

5. Cargo shorts

6. Short shorts and fishnets

d6 outerwear:

1. Woolen peacoat

2. Leather jacket

3. Raincoat

4. Down coat

5. Poorly made bearskin coat

6. Fleece and fleece pants

d6 headwear:

1. Beanie

2. Baseball cap

3. Straw hat

4. Kevlar helmet

5. Bandana

6. Fedora

d6 ornaments:

1. Gilded locket engraved with a name that isn't yours

2. Braided friendship bracelet

3. Silver ring set with a gem

4. Spiked black choker

5. 1d8 tattoos, roll again

6. 1d4 piercings, roll again