Thursday 27 August 2015

RPGaDay 18: Favourite Science Fiction Game

Image result for atomic highway

There's only one answer I can give to this category: Atomic Highway.

A post apocalyptic game, with a light system and a devil may care attitude towards setting (it's very much a toolkit which assumes there's been a nuclear war and humanity is starting to recover in a world that's stranger than it ever was before), Atomic Highway covers the bases and throws in some sweet treats to make things interesting. Character generation is based on a background (nomad, rancher, remnant etc, which reflects how your character was raised) and then adds a job to it, rounding out skills and equipment. The system is a dice pool in which you spend your skill points to raise dice rolls to six. Naturally rolled sixes can be rerolled to garner further successes. It's a fun twist on a pretty standard mechanic.

The lack of setting is a boon, as it allows you to cook up your own. Mine sat at the edge of the Great American Desert, around a town that had sprung up from an old motorway (freeway) services. We didn't play for long but what we did play was fun and the system was surprisingly easy to comprehend and rather brutal in its own way; the action points provided a way to stave off death rather than do lots of cool things. The players usually spent them to halve the damage they'd taken from their enemies. I like it too, because the nature of the game allows you to go whacky without it being too weird - giant animals and insects are part of the setting, as are mutants and other forms of oddness. It also allowed me to throw in weird communities and gangs, which were all good plot fodder.

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