First post! I’m just going to just in and start from the book that’s sitting in my work bag right now (there’s always one). Mutant year Zero
So this is a game set in the broken rotting ruins of post apocalypse Earth. Characters are part of a small society of mutants struggling to survive in a little gap of relative safety.
The game it’s self isn’t your traditional adventurers meet in a tavern, all the players live the the same community the same “ark” as it’s called, as you build characters you define your place in and links to the society. The players spend their time dealing with the internal turmoil of their home why guiding community actions to improve it. You can do this by introducing ideas like farming, theatre, defences, or if thing get dull cannibalism.
Outside of the Ark players can explore the toxic ruins of a once great city. The city in question is up to you, the book uses London as a base suggestion which is great for me as I know London and after going home through the city on a Saturday night I can easily imagine it as a wasteland full of monsters and rot.
The characters have a few interesting options, first you have your role on the Arc you can be a fixer, enforcer, dog handler, or a selection of other options. The Roles give a nice base for characters and their place in the world and are different enough that you shouldn’t struggle to spotlight individual players.
Next you have attributes and skills which work just how you’d imagine. Finally you have the good stuff the mutations. Usually starting with just one but gaining more as the game progresses the characters have a mutation that helps them cope with life in broken world, but also sets them out as clearly not human. You get so great possibilities here that can definitely liven things up. Things like acid spit, four armed, reptilian.
So as I think I mentioned the game is going between Arc activities and adventure activity. You decide as a group where the society is going to focus its attention in the Arc and then work towards that. Outside the Arc you decide what you’re looking for and that’s what you go hunting for.
When you know what the goal is for the session you can decide how your going to deal with it, so if you want to focus on building a barricade around the Arc you can do that while RPing things at home. Or you can go hunting for food in the wastelands and hoping you can make it home before someone steals your bunk, and while doing either of these things you can task NPCs with doing the other. What complicates things for players are threats and dangers that can be randomly generated so the who table are reacting as the story progresses instead of just following a story.
So with a rough (very rough) idea of how it works, what do I do with it?
I’m thinking this is isn’t a game I’d want to run just for a couple of sessions, it’s a game that really wants to be a long messy campaign. You have plenty in the book to run for a while and then there are supplements that add loads to the world including underground cities, robots, wolf people which can also be character options.
I’d love to run this over a couple of years with the option for players to drop in and out, big “end of season” events and changes to keep things moving.
I think that’s enough for a first post. You can do your own Mutant Year Zero research from here, obviously shout with what I got wrong and if there’s anything cool in missing.
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