In the 1980s, my brother and I played the classic Aftermath game. This game got us out of AD&D and Top Secret, and we loved that system. So I saw pre-orders for the After the End books in physical copies, and I jumped at these.
The Aftermath game had a fantastic setting. It was not a "zombie" post-apocalypse setting; it was a gritty, hardcore, pick-the-end setting that offered two options: 20 years after or 200. The world could have ended due to nuclear war, plague, comet impact, alien invasion, societal collapse, or any number of other world-ending events.
Again, today, people don't get what an actual end-of-the-world setting feels like. There is far too much "Walking Dead" out there, which feels more like a videogame with infinitely spawning enemies that live forever, are always there for combat encounters, and never decay. I hate to be gruesome, but most of the "Walking Dead" would probably rot away within five years. You would see them naturally decrease over time. But because of television, they are immortal and infinitely respawn.
Like the Walking Dead, people are the reason we fight and the factions that oppose us. But the zombies in the setting are replaced by killer animals, androids, and high-tech warbots. Even a piranha can jump out of a river and bite your face, chasing you into an angry bear with a box of sweating TNT in his cave. We played that game with an insane twist, where even an ATM could try to kill you.
It was all worth it to get those cans of valuable beans.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/jagged_alliance
The original Jagged Alliance game on DOS felt a lot like Aftermath. You started out with small caliber pistols, scavenged 3-6 bullets here and there, used melee combat, and eventually found upgrades like hunting rifles, shotguns, and body armor. Everything had durability and wore down, needing repair or replacement. High-tech military weapons and ballistic armor were end-games +5 Vorpal swords and +3 magic plate mail. By then, you were fighting armored robots and androids in vast underground bunkers.
Jagged Alliance gets it, where finding one good quality crowbar opens up options to your party of mercenaries and explorers. That can be used to pry open doors, lockboxes, locked desks, storage lockers, and med-kits on the wall. The strong person in the group gets that, and possibilities open up. They could use it as a lethal weapon when in doubt.
And finding that pre-ruin crowbar is hard.
That incremental gear game is the heart and soul of Aftermath. You find something worthwhile, and raiders try to take it from you. You build a community, and raiders try to burn it all down. You explore the wilderness and ruins and deal with hazards from traps, radiation, bears, wild dogs, boars, weather, ambushes, and all sorts of other things that try to kill you.
It is like a puzzle game, where every critical gear discovery opens up more avenues and options for what the party can do, where they can go, how they solve problems, and how they proceed through the mission.
This isn't Fallout, either, at least not the "action game" new versions. These were the older Fallout games, where you never got in a pair of power armor or had personal nuke launchers. You had a single-shot pipe rifle and 20 bullets, and you learned how to repair it. Maybe some scavenged lamellar leather and metal layered armor that was heavy. Melee weapons were your mainstays. Archery and crossbows were viable alternatives.
Scavenging was a viable career if not a dangerous one.
The adventures here were simple and followed the familiar fantasy models. Bandits (orcs) raided trading caravans or stole animals or food. Someone was lost; a scavenging party hadn't returned yet. Rumors of a cache of weapons or other valuables circulated. A colony's water or power source needed parts for repair. Something strange was going on, and it needed investigation. The colony's radio picked up a SOS. Medicine was required to quell sickness. Dangerous mutated rats were sneaking in at night.
Or the model could follow the tried-and-true Western movie plots: bandits, bounties, sheriffs, gunfights, brawls, gangs coming into town, a lost horse, a remote farm or ranch sending a distress signal, or a messenger who needs to ride fast to an outpost or a nearby village asking for help. The mix of fantasy and the Western genre was fun, and you got to play with guns and high-tech stuff every so often.
Oh, and the Mad Max and Car Wars genre was not this either; that was way different, over the top and cinematic, with gas-powered mayhem and a Judas Priest soundtrack.
In those days, we did not need zombies or Fallout power armor; the post-apocalypse genre was better without them. The stories were more personal and realistic. The backdrop of the familiar world, now gone, compared with a future you make (or lose) is the drama of the setting.
It is good to see these two sourcebooks coming to print for the day when we lose all our electronic devices and need old-fashioned books to spend our time with after everything ends, and we find ourselves remembering a world that we knew once was.
