Apologies and Apocalypse

Well I was hoping to have another post up about my Numenera game but it looks like real life happened a little bit this week. Two of my players could not make it in time to play the session so it looks like I will have to hang on a week until I get the next session off the ground. Mind you, that does allow me to get the plot better refined and allow me to plan out what I have in store for the characters a little better, so that's no bad thing.

On a slightly different note, one of the things that really attracted me to Numenera when Monte Cook first described it on the Kickstarter was the fact it was, in part, a post-apocalyptic game. This is a genre I have always enjoyed but never had enough of a chance to run games in. Back when I first started running games twenty years ago, I ran Twilight 2000 by GDW. This was a pretty straight forward scenario (not necessarily a straight-forward game mind) that was set after the world has slid into nuclear war one step at a time in World War 3, and the survivors are left wondering what to do come the year 2000, in the immediate aftermath. I have no idea now if I was running the game right (I suspect I wasn't) but it always captured my imagination, and set me wanting more post-apocalypse in my gaming.

Twilight 2000: no sparkly vampires in sight, but so very 80's in its art.

Fast forward a few years and D20 Modern comes out. This was a game I got hold of as soon as I heard about it (pretty soon after its release) and set about collecting almost everything that got released for it. One of the supplements was D20 Apocalypse: well this was exactly my cup of tea so I snapped it up, only to realise I needed D20 Future to get the best out of it. Later, when at university I finally got hold of a copy of D20 Future (in around 2010) and started to think I might finally be able to get that post-apocalyptic game I have always wanted off the ground. As of this date (31 July 2014) I am still waiting to get going! For what ever reason I have never managed to get enough players interested at the same time, whilst also not having something else running to really get this game going. I have had to satisfy myself playing Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas instead, but console games are a pale imitation of a good rpg (no matter how enjoyable they are to play) in my opinion.

D20 Apocalypse: I still want to use this! One day, one day....

So all this brings me back to Numenera: now I have another system, but with it's own setting, that I could use to satisfy my post apocalyptic craving. Whilst it does have that ability I think, I think I still want something that is more immediate in its apocalypse, something that has that Fallout, Book of Eli, Mad Max feel about it. This has set me thinking that perhaps I could look at a Cypher system hack in which I could get the game I want. It is certainly something I am thinking about...