GURPS: Aftermath

Aftermath was our game in the early 1980s, and it did everything we wanted in a hyper-realistic set of survival-focused rules in a DIY post-apocalyptic setting. This was "AD&D for survivalists" and the rules skirted the line between real-world Cold War survival manuals for nuclear war, and it had that "scary element" to it that put the fear of God into you.

This game is going in the bunker with me. This game could be very useful some day if the Soviets ever decided to threaten Western democracies.

Huh, I wonder why that is so familiar? 

These days, Aftermath still survives and you can still get this in print and PDF, but GURPS has replaced the game for me almost entirely. GURPS is the more complete, easier, less math, and more complete set of rules that can simulate gritty realities far easier than slogging through the flowcharts and fractional math of Aftermath. The Aftermath PDFs are great source books for the genre, too, and get you into the specific weirdness and world the game tries to create.

GURPS can get plenty detailed and gritty enough, and as long as I have hit locations, sectional armor, critical damage, and sever results for limbs I am fine.

I love the setting of Aftermath, the world was destroyed in 1980, so there was no "consumer Internet" and no cell phones. There is some advanced science fiction technology in here, but the baseline tech is that late 1970s post-Vietnam-era technology with M-16A1 rifles, UH-1 Huey helicopters, M-1911A1 0.45 pistols, and M-60A1 tanks. The highest-capacity commonly available 9mm pistol was the Browning High Power with 13 rounds, and the SMG of the day was the 9mm Uzi. Plenty of World War II weapons were still in use. The weapons were this 1970s retro-tech and iconic for the TV shows of the day. The game also had advanced laser weapons as rare finds.

 

The game does have intelligent mutant rats, killer AI robots, rad-zombies, wild zoo animals running around everywhere, androids, AI computers, and a selection of "Not the Ape Planet" humanoid apes. It also had "walkers" like from War of the Worlds. It was sort of like D&D in a way in that it pulled together common post-apocalyptic tropes and put them all in one game, creating the "fantasy" world with all the best options. Like D&D simulated any fantasy, Aftermath could simulate any post-ruin world pretty easily.

And the world hated you in Aftermath. An old ATM with security systems could try to kill you, before the bears sneak up on you, you are forced to run, you hole up in an old building, accidentally trip a grenade trip wire, and the building is so old it can't stand the force of the explosion and collapses on you. If you survive, you will be buried alive in the water filled basement, drowning, and the water is contaminated with cholera and radiation. Maybe there are rad-piranhas in there. The flamethrower and M-60 machine-gun equipped killer robots will be by later to torch the pile of rubble and fill it full of lead.

In D&D, the traps are usually in the dungeons.

In Aftermath, the whole world is a sadistic trap.

Even if you were lucky enough to be a super character frozen before the end of the world, you would wake up in a cryogenic pod and have to fight off laser-pistol armed war-bots with a rolled up copy of Playboy and a jar of Vegemite.

Get outside, and bandits are riding kangaroos and firing poison crossbows at you. You may find a box of sweaty TNT to throw back at them, but be careful not to drop it or fall down. The game ended when you stepped on a land mine. Finding a case of canned beans was a magic treasure, and you put those on a bandoleer on your vest as extra armor and a statement you were a bad-ass.

The world was like AD&D through the lens of the old Soldier of Fortune magazine, mixed in there with High Times. Everything could kill you, show no mercy, what is mine is mine, and always be prepared. As I said, there is a weirdness to the entire genre like a paranoid drug trip through the end of the world.

Trust is the best currency in the world. Just finding a survivor village where you could sleep was worth more than a magic sword or bag of gold in D&D. Often, you traded helping them out for food and shelter. 

We have solid source book support for the genre too, including the excellent After the End 1 and 2 books for GURPS. These books are like a "best of the best" of topics the Aftermath game covers, and are indispensable. The first book covers characters, and it a great resource and inspiration for building your survivors. We get barter and common gear tables, along with reloading rules.

There are rules for mutations here, but not the freaky superhero mutations that Gamma World has. Though, to be honest, you could do a Gamma World easily with Ultra Tech and GURPS Supers.

The second book covers worlds. They even suggest other GURPS books for "killer robots" or zombies, and have topics on diseases, gangs, survival, scrounging, repairs, and other post-apocalyptic concerns. This is all great stuff, and it goes beyond the original Aftermath rules in many areas. We get speculative tech in here too, like nano-tech disasters, and that is a great modern update for the genre.

Aftermath is a sub-genre of post-apocalyptic fiction from 1950-1980, everything from War of the Worlds to Planet of the Apes, and including the 1980s nuclear war movies like The Day After and Threads. Mad Max was not a popular part of the genre yet, as that is the start of the modern "hero era" of post-apocalyptic genre, but it is an influence.

There is a theme of the downfall of civilization, and the "original sin" of the Vietnam War serving as a catalyst for the punishment for the coming final judgment of mankind. This is mirrored today by the "original sin" of the Iraq War, and many internalizing that guilt and trying to destroy today's society in a subconscious guilt response.

Don't laugh, this is a larger societal shift that happened during Vietnam, and it is happening today and you see this manifested by population shifts and encouragement from enemies on the world stage who finance these destructive forces. Like the Cold War, this is a shrinking world pitting history and societies against each other.

You need the almost puritanical and quasi-religious guilt, along with the concept of overseas enemies of an almost alien society, to have this genre. Otherwise, we aren't being punished for anything, there is no "big bad" who caused this, and we might as well be playing opiate fantasy games to relieve the pain of daily life.

In contrast, today's zombie post-apocalyptic genre does this without the "overseas enemy" and "we did this to ourselves." This is why the Walking Dead genre intentionally makes humans worse than walkers, since "we did this to ourselves" and "we will keep doing it." Zombie stories have that self-hate of mankind, and you even saw this in the original 1950s Living Dead movie.

There is always an enemy responsible in these stories, be it the Reds, aliens, apes, nature itself, or ourselves. In Aftermath, it can be all of the above. Today, we can add AI to that list.

Another game close to Aftermath is the excellent Mutant Epoch (ME). this game leans into that weirdness of the genre, and is one of the best examples of that feeling of "strangeness after the end of the world" out there today. If you are not trying to simulate Aftermath in GURPS, this is also one of the best games in the genre today and worth your time. If you do not want the intelligent plants and holographic AI characters, and the X-Men like superheroes running around, you may want to stay more grounded in GURPS.

Aftermath walks a line between realism and strangeness, and GURPS does that very well. GURPS also does the aspect of "mental survival" much better than ME, with the internal mental disadvantages driving character motivation, where ME characters can be more collections of random skills and powers. GURPS does the "realism" very well, and the skill system is also much more detailed and flexible.

Plus GURPS gives you far more source books to pull from for the fantastic and strange. I could incorporate GURPS Horror in a post-apocalyptic game for a unique twist, and make the work beset by vampires and werewolves which brought down society. GURPS will have the greater range of disasters and strangeness to put into the mix.

GURPS is my choice here, the rules are modern, consistent, but have enough grit and depth to satisfy the deadly crunch and medical detail of wounding the genre requires. Aftermath itself is the inspiration of the  strange fantasy of that post-apocalyptic genre, and is one of the hallmark games in the genre. Gamma World and Mutant Epoch lean too hard into the fantastic and science fiction elements, where Aftermath and GURPS can do that realistic tone this specific genre requires.

Story Mechaincs

Story mechanics sound like something you call in when your story is broken.

We have so many new games now with "narrative mechanics" as if tens of thousands of years of human storytelling were somehow broken, and game companies need to reductively sell us the most basic of game activities. 

Storytelling does not need narrative mechanics. 

GURPS gets it, since it is more an old school game, it puts all the focus on the most important pieces of the puzzle - the characters. My character has a weakness or compulsive behavior, and these are the same things an actor needs to know when making a movie, then the game gives us rules for that. There is a slight gamification on the power of these "inner motivators" and the story is the combination of the referee reflecting the current state of the environment, the plot the NPCs are trying to drive, and the natural chaos of the characters inserting themselves into the situation.

While there is no "script" in GURPS since the game is more of a "simulator" - there is a "script" for the adventure for NPCs, motivations, maps, keyed locations, and events that will happen in the future at certain times. So it is not a "set story" that the referee is trying to tell, and there are no "pool mechanics" that players use to alter the course of events.

So the referee is like the director of a movie, but the script does not lay out what is to come as strictly. That is up to the players.

GURPS gives the players the best character backgrounds in role playing. This is the stuff actors need, the strengths, weaknesses, skills, history, and background of the character. Who they are. Where they came from and what they have done, and the choices made during character creation reflect that. A game like Traveller may have random tables for life events and service terms, but GURPS goes a level deeper, not using the charts but giving us full control to "write" a character and reflect that with our choices for them.

There are times I am struck by a typical B/X style OSR character, you know, class, race, and 3d6 down the line for character statistics, and how hard that is to role play. Who are they? What got them here? What are they like?

We need to fill that in ourselves, and nothing in the rules reflects our choices. Sometimes this "100% role playing" is hard to get started with, and I can see why people like the "life-path generators" of Traveller, or even the funnels of DCC. We are taking nobodies and turning them into somebodies.

The "nothingness" of D&D is what makes the game great for some, and impossible for others. 

But past that, when we have our character, and we are like the actor trying to bring that "person only on a sheet of paper" to life, we have complete freedom. We don't need pools, dice, story points, or anything else to interact with the world around us. The world acts as it should. Just like the world.

We have a generation of games with "doom, fear, malice" or other points that gamify the story and world, as if we needed to put another set of training wheels on creativity. Perhaps being a game master is that hard, and nobody really knows "how to do it" and the industry is dumbing down the experience to a board-game where everyone has rules for what they can do.

Refereeing isn't refereeing anymore, it is the "story master" who has cards and can never imagine something into existence, they can only pull a card from a deck and "make the text on it happen." I can just see the Kickstarter for that game now, and it making a few million dollars as another snake-oil solution for all our imagined role-playing problems they keep telling us we have.

This is also why D&D YouTube is so toxic, the constant barrage of referee advice makes you think you are not doing it right, and that you are somehow inferior to the anointed masters. YouTube advice channels hurt your self-esteem and willingness to "just get out there and do it" and force you into a dependent habit of buying more and more advice. These charlatans of self-improvement and professional advice came from the books telling writers how to write, and how to unlock the magic formula for a bestselling novel. Amazon is flooded with them, and they all end up endlessly complimenting you and telling you the same thing: get out there and do it.

All the "how to write a story" frameworks are horrible. You will follow a scaffolding and your story will be just another similar empty shell. The story won't come from you, it will come from the framework, and the author of that supposed self-help book. Same thing with story mechanics. While you may "fill in the blanks" the story tools tell you to make happen, the story won't be yours anymore. Or the players. The story will be what the game wants it to be.

Humans don't need to be told how to tell stories.

We are born with that ability. 

GURPS: Battletech

A GURPS: Battletech conversion is surprisingly easy mod to create. First up, use GURPS for all personal combat and character rules. Second, play Battletech using Battletech rules. Why change a good thing? This is a fun tabletop game, and if you have the hex maps, figures, and rules, why not just use that?

Battletech uses the six-sided dice we already have. The game is tested and works. We are not designing hundreds of mechs in GURPS Vehicles. Things work and fight as they do in the real game. Why change a good thing?

The real problem is mapping the skills. Battletech uses a skill system of 8 down to 0. This is your base target number for a 2d6 roll, such a gunnery skill of 4 meaning the pilot hits on a 2d6 roll of 4+, and this most always get modified up for range, movement, terrain, and so on. I would map the GURPS to Battletech skills like this:

• GURPS 3-6: Battletech 8
• GURPS 7-9: Battletech 7
• GURPS 10-12: Battletech 6
• GURPS 13-15: Battletech 5
• GURPS 16-17: Battletech 4
• GURPS 18-19: Battletech 3
• GURPS 20-21: Battletech 2
• GURPS 22-24: Battletech 1
• GURPS 25+: Battletech 0

Skills in Battletech cannot go below zero, so the game does have a hard cap. In GURPS, a skill level of 14-18 is an expert, which maps into a Battletech skill of 5-3, and masters are 20+, which covers the 2-0 range. GURPS says skill levels of 25+ are extreme (B172), so setting zero to 25+ makes sense.

Battletech skill rolls do not change.

Could you, inside the cockpit, need to make a self-control roll or some other GURPS skill roll? Yes, you could. Anything that does not touch the Battletech rules and dicing systems is fair game. 

The only two skills you need in Battletech are piloting and gunnery, and those would map into GURPS as Driving/Mecha/TL 11 and Gunner/Mecha/TL 11. That Gunner skill is different than GURPS' specialties in rockets, machine guns, beams, and so on, so this is a minor rules tweak to group all mecha weapons as one skill.

The only two other skills in Battletech are Driving Skill and Anti-Mech Skill, and those can be easily mapped from GURPS skills, with combining all anti-mech weapons under a Guns/Anti-Mech/TL 11 skill.

That skill mapping table is all you need. Now play Battletech as Battletech, and when you are outside the cockpit, use GURPS for everything else. Since mech combat is at a different scale, the conversion works well and both games coexist nicely.

The Tech Level of Battletech is about TL 11, with typical personal weapons and armor covering a few levels below that. The Battletech RPG does have lasers, blasters, and Gauss weapons, so this is firmly TL 11 in personal weapons and armor. Just use GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Ultra Tech for your weapons, armor, and gear list, it will be easier.

This is a quick, easy, simple, and fun mod that lets GURPS be GURPS, and Battletech be Battletech. Now go forth, make your mercenary band some credits, fight for your house, and repel the clan invasions with some heavy metal gaming!

And, of course, have the best RPG powering the personal game.

GURPS and Traveller

I have been doing a bit of Traveller reading these days (for my new 2d6 gaming blog), and exploring the new version of the game a little more. I like the original 2d6 game, and to be honest, a "d6 game" could be used to describe either GURPS or Traveller, the similarities are there. One is roll under, the other roll over. One uses an extra die in its rolls, one uses just the two you took from the Monopoly set. Damage in both games is a number of d6. Both are skill-based games. Both have no concept of class or level. Both have deadly combat. The two games still share a lot of DNA.

Also, the original GDW Traveller is close to Car Wars for myself, as that was my RPG system for the original 2d6 vehicle combat game. That campaign lasted 30 years, and it is a part of me.

And yes, I do run quite a few gaming blogs. There is such an amazing world of games outside of D&D 5E, that having little dedicated places for the games that interest me is a part of my hobby. My main site, SBRPG, started in 2012, so I have been blogging for the last 13 years, and I was originally inspired by the original great, the legendary Grognardia blog.

One of the huge differences between the games is Traveller's random generation versus GURPS' point-buy character creation. In Traveller, I have no idea who I am playing, I will pick a career and watch the pachinko machine go, with the terms ticking by, skills being picked up, and to the eventual mustering out at the end where we have a completely randomly generated character. A few choices may be made along with way for possible career changes, but it is mostly random.

I get the feeling Travellers, along with most people in this universe, go from star to star, picking up random jobs and careers, doing what is needed at the moment, and being pushed into roles they may not be ready for, but they were the best choice at the moment so here they are. People's lives can't be planned or perfectly designed, and you can pick up odd skills along the way from any source. Some of these may have been practical experience, classes paid by your employer, on-the-job training, not knowing a thing and picking up on it from others, college, vocational school, boot camp, or self-learning.

The random generation system for all characters creates a color and texture to the universe and those who live there. That system defines not only characters, but the entire population of the stars. Anyone you may run into may had a few random skills that could be helpful, just since in far-flung star colonies, you don't always have an expert on hand or even in the system, and you make due with the best you got.

We even did this in Car Wars, since that world shared that trait. People in the ruins of the world did not know where they would end up, what jobs they would take, and they sort of existed as "people who lived on the road" going from place to place as they battled in arenas, worked at truck stops, fought bandits, took side jobs, and generally did the transient life out on the open highways.

There is a romanticism in the concept, and it is sort of like an Old West feeling.

A lot of the newer games borrow Traveller's DNA, especially randomized character backgrounds. You see this in Dungeon Crawl Classics with the randomly created "funnel" characters that go on to be the game's heroes, and also in Shadowdark with its extensive use of tables.

 

GURPS, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. We are the writer of this story. Nothing is random. We have complete control of our character's past and present. We pick and buy every skill they have, and if we decide "one was picked up along the way" then we make that choice ourselves and buy it. If we say "Han Solo is X, Y, and Z" then that is all he is. We know his character, we wrote his backstory, and there is nothing random in it. Why should there be?

This is our story, our character, and we are the writer.

This design theory even extends down to the game's core. We don't see "random tavern name tables" in GURPS like we do in Shadowdark, since that feeling of "use being the writer" is part of the game's DNA. We can name the tavern and design it. No table needed! If taverns could be given advantages and disadvantages, and designed using point buy systems, we would. If you think hard enough, you could design anything in GURPS with point buy, even cities, with a Boston accent being a 1-point quirk that is transferable to characters.

GURPS is the game of the writer, and we get that deeper character immersion just because we can get inside a character's head and backstory all that much deeper. A game with random generation does not develop the connection that we need, but picking the skills and abilities of "someone we know" will give us that stronger connection to the character and their story in the world.

No table is making this story, we are.

The flaw in the GURPS system is twofold. One, the average person is just not that imaginative. I am not talking about current GURPS players or those on the GURPS Discord! This is like "getting my sister to play GURPS" and sitting there with her and trying to get her to think about a character backstory and map that into skills. Some are creative enough they could, but most will have no clue about the GURPS skill list and be effectively able to use that massive list of skills as a character design tool.

This is the two-headed hydra that often comes up when introducing players to GURPS, they do not easily grasp character backstory creation, and they never know the game well enough to use it as a design tool.

Give my sister a random table, like the careers in Traveller? She can navigate that well, just like playing Monopoly or Yahtzee. Give her the four or five basic steps, and she could sit there and create dozens of characters and not even know the game. She could probably roll up for or five by the time we get playing, and she could pick the one she likes best, or use them all for her crew.

Her attachment to them will not be on the "I am the writer" level.

It will be on the "I made them by myself" level.

This is another level of attachment, one not as deep as we are used to, but for a new player in a new game, it is a great feeling of mastery and accomplishment. Traveller and most 2d6 games are picked up very easily through that random character creation system, and you do not need to know the game, or even memorize the skill list, to "play" it. I know, for us GURPS players, we want full control or everything, but taking a step back, for someone like my sister? She would love her random characters and have that quick feeling of ownership immediately, which would create the "I want to play this" feeling very rapidly.

Who cares about the rules. Who cares about the design theory. A quick initial feeling of success and mastery is the best way to make a new player a lifetime one.

And this would not happen with a pregenerated character! Those are almost like "walls of text" to some players who want to feel early system mastery, that they had a "quick victory" over learning the game very early. I know if I give a GURPS pre-gen character to my sister, her first reaction will be confusion, followed by that sinking feeling of "I am never going to learn this." I will get her through, but it is a lot harder than it should be.

Her "quick victory" will be something very minor, like a skill roll, ability check, or rolling a to-hit in combat. that is not the same as the feeling you mastered an entire area of the game, like character creation. this size of that early win is huge for 2d6 games. D&D 5E now character the GURPS problem with all of its complexity, sub-classes, choices, point-buy attribute system, and the hundreds of pages you need to read to get started. the older versions of D&D, like B/X, were much easier to feel system mastery over in character creation.

GURPS still beats the pants off D&D 5E, though, as the pay-off for mastery is exponentially higher. GURPS is a programming language you can create anything from. D&D 5E is a software as service subscription service where you take what you are given, and keep paying for it all, no matter the quality level, month after month.

D&D 5E is the best concept of the negative aspects of "streamification" in our hobby. Just like the metric tons of garbage that come out on Netflix and Amazon Prime month after month, the 5E market is a subscription service to ton after ton of garbage books and crowdfunded content with very little shelf life, zero balance, and very low quality overall.

And we pay monthly fees to make it all work together and design characters for the mess. As long as we keep paying streaming services, the garbage will keep coming. There are always gems in the piles, but 95% of what we are fed is pure garbage.

GURPS? A very curated selection of the best of the best. Every book, even if I have little interest in the topic, is a winner. Traveller? The same. A good game with solid books, written well and curated by those who love the game. A narrower, niche focus compared to the more ambitious GURPS, but still excellent quality overall.

GURPS and Traveller are strong sister games. It is no wonder they work so well together, since they do not have class and level, and are strong skill-based systems. They are not d20 games. They both have that strong human-level baseline character type.

For every game I can play in GURPS, I can play with a 2d6 system, and it works the other way around. GURPS works as-is for everything, where 2d6 games need career character charts and gear lists to have support. A 2d6 game is more initial setup and design work than GURPS, since those parts are needed for genre support. GURPS loads complexity on character creation, without needing those frameworks.

Where they differ is in design philosophy and character creation. Past that, most of the rules are similar, the damages are in dice, and the special rules that GURPS has go into more depth. Traveller is the easier game, and where it spends its "depth" is in the extra genre systems, such as ship design and combat, planetary and sector generation, alien generation, and other support systems. Stripped free of those, the core 2d6 system is the same one as the original Car Wars game, another sister game from the same era, with an X+ to-hit roll.

I enjoy GURPS more, and it gives me a greater sense of satisfaction in character creation. There are also times where a 2d6 career chart creates a character I want to die during character creation, and the charts make a character I can't do anything with. There are pitfalls to random creation you do not have in GURPS.

Still, I enjoy the random charts of 2d6 games, and they can surprise me with characters I would have never thought of. There is a grit, dirtiness, and realism about unoptimized characters with strange and odd skills. Those can also be inspirations to taking that character and later creating them in GURPS, with all the quirks and odd skills they picked up along the way.