Reclamation

Welcome to the apocalypse.  Reclamation is a roleplaying game set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future.  Radiation has created heroes, but of the monstrous variety.  Many people, heroes included, can’t afford real weapons and armor, so they fight with whatever they can salvage.  It’s a roleplaying system with grit and horrifying truths where no one can be trusted and it’s every man, woman, child and mutant for themselves.

The Reclamation roleplaying system is a product of Kickstarter and creator Chris Griesinger.  Instead of traditional classes, each player chooses from five “fall out marks” or can opt to combine two of them.  Survivors are normal humans with greater than average tenacity, Magi build a spell list to cast rites from, the Host are ever evolving cyborgs, the result of trying to cure the radiation sickness with sentient nanobots.  The Pariahs are mutants reminiscent of ghosts, angels, and frost giants, while Paragons are exemplars of human evolution.  When you include hybridizations, this allows for quite a huge range of character concepts.

Bad-ass art is a must for such a system.

This system has a novel gameplay mechanic where it uses a card deck in place of dice.  Black suits are successes, and reds are failures with numeric cards acting at face value, jacks are 12 points, queens are 14, kings are 16 and aces are a whooping 20 points.  For every point you have in a skill, called talents in this game, you get a chance to declare you don’t like the card you flipped over, and to flip another one.  So if you have a 3 in diplomacy, you can get up to four attempts to flip over the top card.

I have a friend who often complains that in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition, spellcraft is an intelligence based check for all characters, even though a sorcerer’s magical ability is innate and thus based in charisma.  In Reclamation, each time an individual makes a talent check, the trait which adds it’s score to the outcome of the card flip can be adjusted by the gamermaster, or ‘FateDealer’ as they’re called in Reclamation, to suit the situation.  So a two characters attempting to convince an NPC that they are fortune tellers would both use the ‘deceive’ talent, but one might use their ‘manipulation’ trait to get the target to do most of the work, while the other might use their ‘perception’ trait to infer information from the target’s person.

I’ve played post-apocalyptic games in a couple systems: Dark Sun campaign setting for D&D, a GURPS zombie apocalypse adventure but this is the best I’ve played.  I will admit the card deck mechanic takes a little getting used to for someone who has always played dice systems, but once you get used to it, it’s no problem.  If you’re going to run a post-apocalyptic campaign, snag yourself a copy.

Matthew Bryant, aka Baker Street Holmes, prefers to plan for more than just the zombie apocalypse.  Aliens, zombies, plague, world wide flood and nuclear holocaust are all included in his survival plan.  You can follow him on twitter at @BStreetHolmes or e-mail him at HMCrazySS@gmail.com.