Your Post-Apocalyptic Application

When the old world burned, was it in the searing flash of nuclear atomisation? Was it in the rage of disagreement turned to violence, war, and misery? Was from the unseen and insidious infection that spread on the air and felled millions? Was it at the claws and teeth of the dead, new arisen and hungry for the flesh of the living? Was it from environmental chaos that destabilised the world after years of unchecked development? Was from the weapons and technology wielded by an extraterrestrial threat that none saw coming? However the world came to end, the survivors can now look on a land made new and be challenged by simply eating and sleeping, in facing other survivors who want to take control unbidden, and threats that the Old World never had to face. There may be monsters never seen before, environmental threats never seen before, and situations that the survivors may never have encountered before—the latter especially if the apocalypse is days or weeks old or the survivors have been in cryogenic sleep for decades or even centuries. From the ashes, there is still the chance of survival, the chance of growth, the chance of renewal. In this new world, born of the ashes, the survivors will search the remnants of the old world for supplies and devices that can still be used, found and build new communities, confront and overcome threats, and in the process forge the world anew.

Ashes Without Number is published by Sine Nomine Publishing and is a post-apocalypse roleplaying game. Just as with the publisher’s Stars Without Number for Science Fiction, Worlds Without Number for fantasy, and Cities Without Number for cyberpunk, Ashes Without Number is a toolkit, one that is also compatible with those roleplaying games. Ashes Without Number provides the Game Master with everything she needs to create and run the post-apocalyptic world of her own design. Campaign ideas, campaign set-up and focus, creating regions, encounters, crises, and adventures, plus of course, the dangers of the post-apocalyptic world—disease, radiation, monsters, and other people—all of which is intended to be run in a sandbox style. Plus, a complete setting and extra content. All of which is designed to be Old School Renaissance compatible, but with a great deal of content that is systems neutral and so can be used with any post-apocalyptic roleplaying game.

Ashes Without Number focuses on three types of post-apocalyptic futures, two immediate and one in the far future. The first of the immediate campaigns is the ‘Deadlands’ campaign, the classic rise of the dead, zombie style campaign, with survivors from diverse backgrounds are driven together to survive and find respite against the wave upon wave of the undead, whilst the second is the ‘After the Fall’ campaign, in which a great calamity—global pandemic, meteor strike, climate shift, civil war, or even an alien invasion—forces the collapse of society. In either case, the survivors will be in search of somewhere safe that they can use as an enclave. An After the Fall’ campaign could become the third type of campaign, the ‘Mutant Wasteland’ campaign, typically set long after the apocalypse in which the landscape and environment has been radically changed. The Player Characters are likely to be or face mutants of all kinds amongst a variety of threats to their enclave, but also searching the ancient ruins for lost technology and secrets of the past.

It should be noted that unlike other roleplaying games by the same author, Ashes Without Number is not a Class and Level roleplaying game. Instead, it is Level roleplaying game, from one to ten, in which a Player Character is defined more loosely and by the choices of the player. A Player Character in Ashes Without Number has six attributes—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma—which range in value between three and eighteen. They can either rolled for or assigned from a standard array. He will also have a limited number of skills, the value for each ranging from zero to four, with a Level-1 indicating an experienced professional in that area of expertise. He will also have a Background that will determine beginning skills, which can be rolled for or selected, plus two Edges (and an extra if his total attribute modifiers are negative). Edges are categorised as either Universal or by the campaign type. The Universal Edges include ‘Comrade’, which as a pillar of the group, a Player Character can encourage—as an Instant Action—another Player Character or NPC to reroll any roll they have just made, or ‘Survivor’s Fortune’, which lets the Player Character potentially avoid a terrible situation through luck alone. For the ‘Deadlands’ Edges there are ‘Systemic Immunity’ against the zombie infection and ‘They’re Here' to detect them as a sixth sense. The ‘After the Fall’ Edges include ‘Forged by Fire’ in which the Player Character starts with no Edges, but gains more as the result of experience in play and ‘Cold Blood’ with which the Player Character becomes acclimatised to the horror of the post-apocalyptic future. The ‘Mutant Wasteland’ Edges focus on genetics. With ‘Hardened Genetics’, a Player Character cannot be mutated by radiation and other causes (the equivalent of the ‘Pure Strain Human’), but cannot take the ‘Mutant’ Edge, whilst the ‘Mutant’ Edge grants mutation points that the player then spends to give his character mutations. Lastly, besides equipment, a Player Character will have a Focus, a special ability or aptitude, such as ‘Armsmaster’ or ‘Scrapsmith’. These come in two levels and as a Player Character gains Levels, he can improve an existing Focus to Level 2 or gain a new one.

To create a character, a player either rolls or assigns the values for his character’s attributes. He then rolls for or chooses a Background and either chooses or rolls from its skills—he gains more if they are rolled for, and selects two Edges and a Focus. He also receives a fee bonus skill at the end of the process, which includes choosing starting languages, name, goal, and ties. The process is not difficult, but a checklist would have made it a little easier.

If a character has mutations after selecting the ‘Mutant’ Edge from ‘Mutant Wasteland’ Edges, his player receives a pool of points on which to spend on choosing or randomly determining what they might be. More points can be gained by taking negative mutations and a mutant also has a stigma that marks him as a mutant. Mutations are categorised into structure types that alter the physical nature of the mutant, sense types that enhance his awareness, hybrid mutations make him plant- or animal-like, cognition enhances his mental capabilities, Pseudo-psychic mutations mimic psionic abilities (but do not mean that the mutant is actually psychic), and exotic mutations are odder, uncategorised ones. There are sixty mutations detailed and enable the creation of a wide range of mutant Player Characters and NPCs.

Name: Tallula
Level: 1
Background: Courtesan
Skills: Connect-1, Notice-1, Perform-0, Talk-1
Edges: Mutant, Survivor’s Luck
Foci: Unnumbered Friends
Strength 10 (-1) Dexterity 9 Constitution 12 Intelligence 13 Wisdom 9 (+2) Charisma 15 (+1)
Armour Class: 10
Hit Points: 4
Mutations: Feathered Arms (Stigma), Voracious (Negative), Augmented Cognition, Predictive Analysis, Intuitive Leap, Functional Wings

Mechanically, Ashes Without Number is typical of the Old School Renaissance in that it uses a number of different subsystems to handle various situations. Or really, just two. Saving Throws and combat rolls are made on a twenty-sided die whereas everything else is rolled on two six-sided dice. In both cases, the aim being to roll equal to or over. Skill checks are rolled on two six-sided dice. The add player adds his character skill, attribute, and bonuses from technology and allies, plus any situational modifiers, difficulties typically ranging from six to twelve, with the average being eight. Morale is rolled on two six-sided dice and if the roll is higher, then the target retreats or gives up. Saving Throws, made against either ‘Physical’, ‘Evasion’, ‘Mental’, or ‘Luck’, are rolled on a twenty-sided die.

Combat begins with initiative, which rolled on an eight-sided die. A combat round lasts six seconds and, on his turn, a combatant a take a Main Action, a Move Action, and as On Turn or Instant Actions as the Game Master allows. A Main Action is typically an attack, but could also be using a skill or reloading. An On Turn Action is a simple, reflective action such as saying a few words or falling prone, whilst an Instant Action might be a held action or the use of a power. Instant Actions can also be done during another combatant’s turn. Rolls of one always miss, whilst rolls of twenty always hit. Damage is modified by the attacker’s appropriate attribute modifier and if the Traumatic Hit rule is being used, it is possible to inflict even more damage. Some weapons and attacks inflict Shock damage even on a failed attack, but use of a shield can block this damage once or even completed if the defender takes the Total Defence action.

The core rules for Ashes Without Number are straightforward and easy to use. Anyone with experience of the Old School Renaissance will find much that is familiar, and for anyone else who does not have that experience, the roleplaying game includes a very handy ‘System Quick Reference Sheet’ that summarises just about everything that a player is going to need to know to play the game.

In play, a Player Character can take damage from a number of sources, losing Hit Points in the process, but he is also limited by the amount of System Strain, typically biochemical manipulation, that his body can withstand. This can be from healing, the use of mutant powers, various poisons and diseases, the use of various drugs, radiation and other biological and chemical contaminants, and even something as simple as natural privation and hardship. The amount that a Player Character can withstand is equal to his Constitution and when equalled, he can longer benefit from healing or drugs, use mutant powers, and suffers the consequences of radiation and the like. The primary means of reducing System Stress is rest, but sometimes the System Stress gained can be permanent. Thus, the Player Characters can be heroes, but even with mutant powers, they are not always the equivalent of superpowered, meaning some mutations almost have to be harboured as resources.

The counterpart to System Strain is ‘Stress’, which is specifically designed for a ‘Deadlands’ or ‘After the Fall’ campaign in which ordinary men and women are pitched into a catastrophically unexpected situation—a zombie uprising, civil disorder and collapse, alien invasion, and the like—and forced to rely on themselves and each other to survive. It can be gained from killing others, witnessing a massacre, committing acts of theft or cruelty, and simply from period of extended hunger, and when it exceeds a Player Character’s Wisdom, it can result in a breakdown. Depending upon the cause, the Player Character might gain a death wish, flee, or be confused. Alternatively, the Player Character might become hardened and gain a psychic scar such as being self-destructive or self-doubting. This is the horror—or reaction to the horror—mechanic for Ashes Without Number and gives a space in which a Player Character can react to that horror as an ordinary person before becoming hardened to their new situation.

As a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, Ashes Without Number gives rules not just for the standard environmental problems, such as travel, scouting, foraging, hunger and thirst, but also radiation. There is an extensive equipment list, covering technological levels from neolithic stone tools and wood implements and ultra-advanced and mysterious tech, as rules for scrap and salvaging, building and crafting gear, modifying gear—backed up with modifications aplenty for armour, weapons, and vehicles. Plus, for the ‘Mutant Wasteland’ campaign, there are descriptions of lots and lots of highly advanced items, including consumer items, which together with the rules for identifying the advanced technological devices of the past, enables the classic scavenger style campaign set-up.

If the first aim of an Ashes Without Number campaign is survival, then the second aim is either founding and protecting, or simply protecting, an enclave. This will vary according to the campaign types. ‘Deadlands’ or ‘After the Fall’ will focus first on survival, whilst an enclave is immediately important in a ‘Mutant Wasteland’ campaign. The rules for enclaves are designed to support a Game Master’s campaign, one providing a base of operations for the Player Characters and a handful of other communities being used as a source background stories and hooks. Mechanically, an enclave can be anything from a refugee camp or small village to a multi-regional hegemonic city or multi-city power, each with its Power rating and action die, the larger the enclave, the bigger both of these are, from one to five, and a six-sided die to a twenty-sided die. An enclave also has a value for Cohesion, how resilient it is to outside forces or disasters. It will also have features and problems. The value of the problems is total as the enclave’s Trouble. If an enclave’s Cohesion drops to zero, it will collapse, as it will if its Trouble equals its action die.

Enclaves are further defined by tags that can be enemies, friends, complications, things, and places—and these are reflected in the extensive list of possible tags, as well as a Feature, something that is good at or renowned for. Creating an enclave involves assigning a tag or two—or more depending on its size, a Power rating, a Feature, and some Problems. It can also have points of Dominion, generated through enclave actions and the actions of the Player Characters, which can then be spent on actions that the enclave can take as a whole. It also has some points of Interest in nearby enclaves, representing its connections and goals with its neighbours. Lastly it has a goal.

In play, an enclave will be undertaking a number of actions each game month. These consist of a single internal action, such as ‘Build Strength’ to organise and build resources and give it points of Dominion or ‘Enact Change’ to establish a Feature or address a problem, or a number of external actions equal to its Power, including ‘Attack Rival’, ‘Remove Interest’ of outside agents, and ‘Aid an Ally’. The Player Characters can be involved in these actions, although how they influence the outcomes will be down to the narrative and the interpretation of the Game Master.

For the Game Master, there is advice on mixing and matching the various character types from other roleplaying games from the designer, handling various aspects of the rules and game play—kept relatively short, and on setting up a campaign. This includes determining who the game is for and what its scope is, and so on, as well as its themes and the elements that go into the three different campaign categories covered in Ashes Without Number. There Game Master is guided through the process of setting up her campaign sandbox, considering numerous aspects from crises, communications, and food to sewage and waste, transport, and water, and adding and detailing encounter sites, and on to creating adventures. The advice here is not to build more than a single session’s worth of play, to present problems rather than solutions, and make NPCs people too. There is a bestiary too, which covers beastfolk, cyborgs, humans, mutant animals and humanoids, robots, zombies (of course), and nemeses for the Player Characters. Ashes Without Number includes extensive tables for the Game Master to consult and make use of, giving her numerous prompts and ideas to spur her creativity. There is so much here that the Game Master will be coming back again and again for inspiration, and bar the stats and numbers, all of this material can be sued in almost any post-apocalyptic roleplaying game.

In terms of an actual setting, Ashes Without Number presents ‘The Albuquerque Death Zone’. This describes a region of North America sometime after the year 2665. In that year, an interstellar burst of psychic energy known as the ‘Scream’ wreaked havoc on the psitech-reliant Terran Mandate, isolating worlds and sent its arch-psychics insane and as the now deranged Crazed, inflicted horrifying changes from one world to the next, whilst in thrall to their own delusions. The Albuquerque Cultural Area, already turned into a Wild West playground populated by incorrigible malcontents drawn from around the world, neuro-imprinted to think they lived and worked on the frontiers of the nineteenth century USA, was also affected. Albuquerque was hit by a nuclear missile and the Highshine and its nanite Dust which had previously ensured the planet’s stability and the health of its inhabits was radically and chaotically reprogrammed by the Crazed. It mutated survivors and many species of animals, repopulating the regions with lifeforms unknown. The surviving inhabitants of what would become known as the ‘Albuquerque Death Zone’ proved surprisingly resilient, benefiting from the adjustments to a more primitive lifestyle made by their neuro-imprinting.

The ‘Albuquerque Death Zone’ is quite a detailed setting, covering an area of over three thousand square miles and describing its major settlements, trade, common weapons, and more, as well giving specific advice on starting a campaign in the setting. It includes the option for a Player Character to become a Cowboy, represented first by an Edge and then ‘arts’, such as ‘Cattle Wise’, ‘Lightning Hand’, and ‘Two-Gun Style’, sort of skills and tricks, that he can select over time. There notes too, to turn it into a Class, pushing towards the mechanics of Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number. What it does reinforce is that ‘Albuquerque Death Zone’ is post-apocalyptic Wild West setting. This could have been more simply stated, for the actual history to ‘The Albuquerque Death Zone’ is certainly the densest writing in the roleplaying game and is far from easy to grasp quite what is going on and how it relates to the setting. It does become clear once the reader gets to the actual description of the setting after the history, but it is an abrupt change in clarity in the meantime.

It should be pointed out that there are two versions of Ashes Without Number. Both include all of the content described, but the deluxe version adds extra content. This includes the Evil Techno-Wizard for the Game Master who wants a science-sorcerer nemesis style threat, whilst for the players there are Ash Sorcerers who wield the sinister arts of a half-damnable path similar to that of the Evil Techno-Wizard, but not quite; the Mentalist, a psychic Class; and Modular Power Armour for knights of the radioactive dust. These verge on Classes as per the Cowboy earlier. Lastly, the Hub Settlement Rules provides more detailed rules for settlements than the Enclave rules if the focus of a campaign wants to be on running the Player Character’s home and its survival.

Physically, Ashes Without Number is cleanly and tidily, if plainly laid out. The artwork is decent, but the overall look of the book is serviceable rather than engaging.

One of the impressive features of Ashes Without Number is the fact that despite it being located within the Old School Renaissance, it is not Class and Level roleplaying game. Or rather, it is not a roleplaying game in which a Class defines what a Player Character is capable of. Or rather, there is just a single Class which defines what every Player Characters gains at each Level, but leaves what a character is capable of in terms of skills, Edges, and Foci, firmly in the hands of the player, giving him the freedom to create and develop a character as he wants.

Similarly, the Game Master has a lot of freedom to do what she wants with Ashes Without Number. There are plenty of post-apocalyptic roleplaying games to choose from, whether that is a print-on-demand version of Gamma World or the more recent Fallout: The Roleplaying Game, and these will do many of the things that Ashes Without Number will do and Ashes Without Number will do many of the things that they do. They have the advantage of coming with ready-made backgrounds too and they will also do certain things better than Ashes Without Number because they are specifically designed to do so. Whereas Ashes Without Number is designed as toolkit and provides everything that a Game Master needs to create a setting of her own and handle the various elements of the genre. This it does in a solidly workmanlike and comprehensive fashion with an impressive multitude of options, prompts, and tools, all of which are easy to use, even if the Game Master is not familiar with the Old School Renaissance—and even easier if she is. For the Game Master who wants to create her own post-apocalyptic campaign setting, Ashes Without Number is undoubtedly a good choice.