We’re all in love with the wasteland of Fallout thanks to the new Amazon Prime TV show and the graphical update to Fallout 4, but budding Wasteland Wanderers can find plenty of ghoulish joy in these five TTRPGs that explore post-apocalyptic worlds.
Gamma World
An absolutely wild game of acid-green nuclear nonsense, Gamma World has been around since the 70’s. Its most recent incarnation, a boxed set from Wizards of the Coast based on the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, is sadly no longer available in print, though you can still get it in pdf. It was filled with the same joyful chaos as Fallout, with mutated animals, treacherous wastes and an enjoyably cartoonish sense of humor. The 4th edition rules, while controversial at the time, find an excellent implementation in this tactical RPG.
Apocalypse World
The big daddy of all Powered by the Apocalypse games since, Apocalypse World leapt onto the scene ready to blow people’s minds in 2010. The striking black and white images, the fast rules that constantly pushed the story forward, and the leading questions that empowered players to share the responsibility for building the world have been hugely influential. Apocalypse World has had an undeniable impact and inspired many other games, including the more community-focused apocalypse narratives of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins.
Fallout: The RPG
Of course we had to mention Modiphius’s Fallout TTRPG. Based on their own 2d20 system and now supported by a vast array of gorgeously-produced books, the Fallout RPG is stuffed with references to the classic and modern video games. Solve problems with your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, target hit locations in a callback to the VATs system, and delve into a deep scavenging system. You can also get Virtual Tabletop (VTT) versions of most products produced by Modiphius, and the art evokes the setting perfectly.
Rifts
Gamma World and Fallout are weird, but Rifts? Rifts is really, really weird. While it takes itself a little more seriously than many post-apocalyptic settings, it is also a perfect example of pure unadulterated 90’s TTRPG strangeness. The original TTRPG, published by Palladium, had more than fifty supplements for different parts of the worlds, dimensions and big events in the setting. It was also a completely unique post-apocalyptic setting in which the apocalypse was rifts to other dimensions filled with sci-fi monsters that bordered on the eldritch. Earth was divided into massively detailed factions and many places had returned to idealised sci-fi tinged versions of mythological eras, such as the griffin-riding cyberknights of England, and the dinosaur swamp that took over parts of the east coast of the United States. Pinnacle Entertainment created Savage Worlds Rifts using the well-loved Savage Worlds system, and so the absolute weirdness of Rifts lives on.
Mutant: Year Zero
Based on a TTRPG from the 1980s, Mutant: Year Zero from Free League literally empowers the player characters with bizarre mutations and places emphasis on exploration as well as building a home base. Mutant: Year Zero combines the dark humor of Fallout with the grim horrors of the STALKER series of games, creating a world where the player characters are constantly escaping by the skin of their teeth but still get to throw fireballs. Overstretch your resources and you’ll have to risk more to restock, and the question becomes: what’s worth fighting for in a world where everyone is out for themselves?
