11/08/2022
For the History Books:
A.C.: AFTER COLLAPSE® is a post-apocalyptic tabletop role-playing game that was designed to be a modular do-it-yourself system. From its inception, my intent was to produce a modular scalable framework that would allow GMs and players to experience their favorite form of apocalypse. This was never as easy as it might sound.
Ask any experienced gamer and they will gladly tell you what they don’t like about their favorite game or game system. They very often take for granted the aspect of published material that they do like. I’ve seen many people become speechless when I ask them what they actually like about the game or the system they were so happily badmouthing. As a lifelong fan of all things post-apocalyptic, I wanted to put everything I love about the genre into a flexible product that would let consumers have just what they wanted.
I realize that no game or game system is perfect. It’s been my experience that the underlying system that presents any scenario or campaign to you must be – by design – either simple, intermediate in its complexity, or highly sophisticated. To provide GMs and players with the widest possible range of options, I chose to make A.C.: AFTER COLLAPSE® as “crunchy” as it needed to be.
My first introduction to role-playing games came in the winter of 1979, when a good friend gave me a copy of first edition Gamma World. I played that game with a close-knit group of friends all the way through high school. Over and over again, we kept bumping into the limitations of that straight-forward game system. It didn’t address many of the new technologies we encountered in the real world. As the GM for my group of would-be salvagers and scavengers, it was my responsibility to draft house rules to address what wasn’t covered in the published material. The necessity of this administrative homework was not lost on me. It was important. It had to be done to ensure that the participants retained their interest in, and fascination with, the post-apocalyptic world we were all imagining.
Role-players have many inputs to inspire them. The teenagers of my generation had hundreds of books and movies about nuclear war to influence us. As children of the Cold War, we devoured those things with just as much energy as people binge-watch their favorite content on Netflix today.
From the moment I embarked on the process of designing this game, I knew it would end up being a large multifaceted system rather than an interesting storyline with a simple framework. I have enjoyed many streamlined game concepts over the years. Under the right circumstances, I am still partial to them today. If there was any single motivation that propelled me down this path, it was the desire to answer so many of the questions that post-apocalyptic GMs and referees have to deal with every day. Even with a multivolume systematized description of technologies and gameplay, I still won’t manage to codify everything that a cataclysmic crusader would ever want to know.
Aftermath!, Gamma World, and The Morrow Project were all conceived at a time when nuclear war seemed the most likely way that human civilization would end. Going to college in the late 1980s broadened my perspective. I began to realize just how many different ways the world as we know it could end before the Soviet Union collapsed. As I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on television, I threw away dozens of pages of carefully collected notes. Starting over was a ten-year process that allowed me to refine all of the task completion formulas and skill parameters that are in circulation today.
I did understand before we launched that A.C.: AFTER COLLAPSE® was not going to be for everyone. As a deep game system, it wouldn’t appeal to those that prefer simpler, faster game play. In an effort to acknowledge that preference, we spent several years developing a hybrid task completion system based on Basic Skill parameters and Advanced Skill proficiency advantages. This turned out to be a lot more than just throwing a bone to potential skeptics. We were pleased to discover that it was possible to have gamers of different experience levels at the same table at the same time. You can play A.C.: AFTER COLLAPSE® as a quick and dirty game if you want to. All you’ve got to do is limit game play to the options and parameters assigned to Basic Skills.
The most positive feedback we’ve gotten so far has come from the grognards who are sometimes called “game lawyers.” Role-players with decades of experience should never be faulted for asking complex technology-oriented questions. Even when the GM has no answer, their curiosity should be encouraged.
There was no internet when I started to play these games. Desktop computers were just starting to be a thing. As time passed, these technologies became a more important part of our lives. That broadened understanding increased our curiosity about the technological loot we might find in post-apocalyptic situations. I cannot fault a computer-literate person for being curious about certain things, even when the character they are playing has a very limited grasp of those concepts. If you present player characters with any piece of equipment, they will always try to do something with it, especially when they don’t know what its original purpose was.
It took me a few years to realize that I was trying to map and define the technological foundations of my game universe. It’ll come as no surprise when I tell you that several hundred pages of draft documents were deleted with just a few clicks of my mouse. Over the span of something like 25 years, I plastered the walls of my office with huge sheets of paper that were full of diagrams and handwritten notes. A hundred times or more, I wanted to quit, especially during those late nights when I hadn’t slept and the math just wouldn’t add up.
I am a storyteller. It’s the one job skill that comes most naturally to me. When I wasn’t tearing my hair out over the game mechanics, I was busy writing the characters and history of the big backstory that now fills all of the sourcebooks.
Math has never been my best subject. For many reasons, you could say that I was the wrong person for that part of the project. I used my lack of understanding as a benchmark. If I had a problem with it or didn’t understand it, other people would probably have a problem with it or not understand it, too. I have always been concerned about the ways in which game mechanics can slow down the pace of gameplay. The D20 architecture we chose to employ was linked to a scale of severity or difficulty that commonly ranges from one to sixty. As the lead designer, I can tell you sincerely that this proved to be the most fluid compromise we could put on paper.
From the moment I saw that first edition copy of Gamma World, I knew it would be possible to create the mechanics and backstory of an entire universe. It seemed so very logical to me at the time that it would be possible to write anthologies and novels based on the aforementioned backstory. The symbiotic relationship between the game and the fiction inspired by it seemed so very tangible. It feels a little silly for me to admit that it took 36 years to make the dream a reality. Along the way, I have interacted with quite a few game designers who were motivated by their own goals. It’s been a pleasure to know all of them.
There is no one right way to climb this mountain. For every person whom you successfully entertain, you’ll meet another one who just wasn’t satisfied with what you did. My advice to anyone who wants to try their hand at this is to just do it. Don’t think about it in terms of timetables. Don’t obsess over the amount of money you will or won’t have to do the job. Take it one piece at a time. Don’t worry about continuity until you start putting your puzzle together. Slowly, gradually, over time, you and those you work with will be able to see what more needs to be done.
In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I tried to focus my energies on other professional endeavors because I didn’t want to be a starving writer. The many twists and turns that are so common to our lives kept leading me back to this monumental project. Even in hindsight, it still feels like A.C.: AFTER COLLAPSE® was always going to be in my future.
That fact really came home to me when I wrote Haven’s Legacy, the first novel set in this fictional RPG universe. From the first chapter to the last, it seemed to write itself because I knew so much about the overall backstory. Seeing that book in print, holding it in my hand, I found myself wondering if I was always meant to do this. Putting all that speculation aside, I’m very glad I did. I hope you will chase your dream, too!
Do you have what it takes to survive in a ravaged post-apocalyptic world?
![From a recent Amazon review of A.C.: AFTER COLLAPSE BASIC RULES: "I love [crunchy] games, but I like [my] complexity to ...](https://img4.medioq.com/439/871/3858268214398712.jpg)
