OSR D&D As a Post-Apocalyptic Setting
[NB: The following are threads or other sources that you might want to read as background material. Or because at least some of them contain great posts.]
- Some thoughts on Mad Max
- So who wants to talk about OD&D?
- The Opposite of Zipper GMing
- The Original D&D Setting by Wayne Rossi, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
- The West Marches
In the search to further differentiate one’s own classic D&D1 campaign from others, it’s possible to mutate the setting assumptions in a lot of different ways without actually changing the rules much. I think we’re mostly familiar with those ideas. What’s maybe not as familiar, though, is that D&D can feel a hell of a lot different if you go back to original or later classic D&D and follow the game’s rules as written, and figure out what the world looks like given that.
In the run-up to the newest Mad Max film being released, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it would take to make D&D feel post-apocalyptic. Most of my campaigns have already been what I like to call “polyapocalyptic,” which means that they clearly take place after an indefinite series of world-altering and civilization-destroying disasters. At a certain point, people might take a somewhat nihilistic point of view about the phenomenon, and accept that everything they’ve ever built might be destroyed by insect deities or meteor strikes tomorrow. If you love the Dying Earth books as much as I do, this might feel familiar.
The thing is, you don’t have to do a whole lot different. The DM builds a hexmap and doesn’t show it to the players. There are few cities, far apart and with very little communication between each other. The PCs have at best rumors of where those settlements might be. You could walk through the wastelands for days and see nobody, or you could run into a rampaging tribe of 300 orcs/bandits/whatever. Seriously, look at those wilderness encounter charts, they are insane.
If your horse dies while you’re out in the middle of the desert, we hope you like walking. So, if you really wanted to make things look more like this kind of setting, the following are things that I would do.
1. Bands of marauders are important and need to happen. However, if the PCs do in fact run into 300 orcs that turn out to be hostile, this doesn’t mean that 300 orcs jump out from behind a bush and attack. It probably means that the PCs stumble into a scouting party or part of the vanguard, and the main body is over a ridge or something. This gives you a fight with some stakes or an opportunity to run away, makes things feel a little more realistic, and also prevents the entire party from being slaughtered quite so suddenly. Also, now you have a plot thread dangling. The marauders led by Renf the Red-Handed have seen the party’s face, and may track them across the wastelands in addition to sacking any settlements that might happen to be out there.
2. Treasure takes a nose-dive in practical value. I think that gems and jewelry are still at least somewhat important, because bling (more on this later) is a vital survival tool. However, huge chests of coins are not useful outside the largest cities. In any smaller settlements, with their relatively narrow survival margin and slim expectations of seeing a traveling merchant any given month, something you can use to stay alive is worth more than coins. Now, if you can get back to one of the few large cities with a big score…you might have hit the jackpot.
3. Make encumbrance matter. I would suggest importing one of the more closely-tracked encumbrance systems from any retroclone you like. Food and water need to be heavy. Carrying enough water to get through a desert is a big, big deal. Animals need water too! Your horse is vitally important for carrying more weight than you could by yourself, but that means you need to spend an appropriate amount of effort taking care of them. The next town you encounter might not be willing to let a horse go for mere gold.
4. Market Classes: One of the oddities of D&D is that it isn’t uncommon for a gold ring to be worth 100gp, when that amount of coins might weigh ten pounds. I have generally assumed this to mean that the coinage is highly debased, whereas the metal used in jewelry is close to pure. I’d stick with that, and maybe say that coins are worth even less than usual. You could use something like the market classes from ACKS, and rule that a market counts as one or two classes lower if you are trying to buy things using coins. This means that, basically, you won’t be able to buy much stuff if all you have is GP. However, markets could be treated as their actual class if you are using gems/jewelry, and maybe one class higher if you are attempting to barter with things that people can use to live. A sack of gold coins and an oxcart full of steel ingots might have the same theoretical value, but in fact people are much more willing to trade goods for the latter, since you can do things like make a plow out of it. Now, that isn’t quite the way that supply & demand work, but it’s a starting point for a post I’m writing off the cuff.
5. Bling: One of the things that D&D has historically not paid enough attention to is playing dress-up. I don’t mean that the players should show up in costume. I mean that the PCs should be spending much more time on fantastical Vancian couture, terrifying battle-masks or makeup inspired by various parts of real-world history, necklaces made of their enemy’s teeth, and actually wearing the jewelry they’ve pulled out of various tombs in order to advertise that they are successful stone-cold badasses. I’ve instituted a rule in a lot of my campaigns that if you openly wear articles of jewelry, they don’t count towards your encumbrance. Ten CN worth of encumbrance here and there can make a big difference when you want portable wealth. Also, you can use it to modify reaction rolls (people can immediately tell that a sorceress with a 5,000gp crown of onyx and platinum is a VIP, and they’d probably better not fuck with her, or anyone else who can accumulate and keep that kind of wealth) and morale rolls (enemies might fight harder for a chance to loot the PCs’ goods.) So! Add rules for this. I suggest moving reaction rolls and morale rolls to 3d6 instead of 2d6, so you can make the range bands a bit wider and have room for a 1 or 2 point modifier without breaking the tables.
6. Goods. Going back to market classes. There are tools in ACKS (and probably other systems) for converting treasure into trade goods. So, if the PCs beat some bandits and the treasure table gives them 3,000gp, then what you might actually want to do as the DM is to say that in fact they just have 3,000 gp worth of trade goods, and then convert all of that to incense sticks, spices, valuable monster parts, wine, furs, et cetera. In a literally postapocalyptic campaign, I can’t recommend that highly enough. One, it makes encumbrance way more of a problem. They can’t just run off into the night with a purse full of jewels, they really need to get to that next big city while guarding a caravan of ox-carts full of whatever if they want their XP.
7. Slaves. This is kind of important. Forced labor is a huge economic driver, and also it gives you a powerful excuse to take PCs captive. You might want to insert some variant of the rules that let PCs survive being reduced to 0HP, so that they can wake up in shackles with all of their shit stolen. Furthermore, it’s close to always justifiable to kill off slavers, and lets you thematically wonder about if civilization is really worth rebuilding after all.
8. Constructions from different eras. I would strongly recommend a bit of historical grounding that the PCs can use to get a practical read on things. New settlements are wooden palisades, earthworks, log cabins, sod houses, crap like that. They’re crude but honest. The newer but still decadent cities are made of big stone blocks, quarried and hauled into place by slaves that live in thatch longhouses or something. Probably a lot of dry masonry there. The perimeter of the old civilization might have well-mortared fortresses or similar types of structures that are still standing, maybe occupied by tribes of people who couldn’t rebuild it if they wanted to. The dungeons underneath them are possibly still intact. The actual cities of the ancients might have glowing towers of crystal that are hard as steel, domes of pearlescent glass, remarkable types of concrete that none now know the making of. Those places aren’t typically squatted in because they’re full of weird alien horrors. It’s also where the miraculous devices of the ancients are to be found, of course, or piles of gold simply laying where it was left, never more than a bauble in the first place to the High Men who once lived there.
Well, that was a huge post, and I’m not sure if I actually said much of anything useful. I just wanted to get some more of my weird ideas written down while I had a bit of time.
1 OD&D with or without supplements, Basic Set, B/X, BECMI, most retroclones.
Author’s emphases in italic. Mine are in bold.
