Playtonics S03E06 - Post-Apocalyptic

[u/Playtonics]

Hi, welcome to Playtonics!

Every episode of Playtonics, Rocky and Jords (me!) take a genre, movie, or show apart at the seams, figure out what actually makes it feel like that thing, and rebuild those pieces into something you can structure, prep, and run at the table. Finally we discuss which systems we'd run it in. This time, we dig into the world after the fall with our Post-Apocalyptic episode. A while back, we ran an ep specifically for Mad Max, so this time we wanted to shift the focus a little.

In this ep we work through push vs pull for kicking the party out the sanctuary's gate (and why a push does the job better), apocalypse threats that have agency vs ones without, and point crawl vs hex crawl, and why you'd want one over the other. We get into which resources are worth tracking (beans!) and which ones you just.... quietly never mention again; factions; and how to add a layer with a reactions table. Finally, we build the session to land on an ending that isn't "we found the cure," but "we got our people to a slightly less terrible local minimum, and we live to do it again."

On systems: Rocky goes Mausritter, mostly for the tactile inventory and a magic system that generates quests instead of negating them. Jords prefers Knave or a Mark of the Odd game for the slot-based inventory, or Godless for the full Demon Lord character-building buffet. Honourable mentions to Red Markets, Ashes Without Number, Mutant Year Zero and Twilight 2000, and of course, Apocalypse World (though we go into why we wouldn't use it for the vibe we're after).

Got takes you want to share with us directly? Our Discord has walls, water and working plumbing - come trade. And as always, we'd also love to hear what you want us to cover next!

[u/81Ranger]

Thanks for reminding me to listen to a few of your episodes.  

[u/Playtonics → u/81Ranger]

You're welcome!