Furry Road - A Cypher System Homage to After the Bomb

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Oh man, that pun is gonna be all kinds of trouble. 

I've mentioned before on this blog that I got a lot of gaming mileage out of the old Palladium TMNT game line. Specifically the After the Bomb setting. It didn't make it into my Top 5 game settings when I wrote that blog a couple years back, but it probably should have been an honorable mention. Of course that whole blog is probably in need of a do-over at this point; two years brings a lot of new RPG settings.

Still, with Mutant Crawl Classics soon to come out I've been thinking more and more about the Post Apocalypse. Part of why I backed MCC at the level I did was because of After the Bomb. And for my Gen Con 50 after hours game I decided that I wanted to run something inspired by AtB. Since MCC isn't out and I just cannot stomach trying to make pre-gens and run it in the Palladium system. Ergo I am going with my go-to works for damn near anything system: Cypher System.

Specifically I'm going to go all Mad Max Fury Road on the After the Bomb setting by using the Road Hogs portion of the setting. In the post apocalyptic California there are highways aplenty, roving gangs of mutant animals, and fuel shortages. I think it shows remarkable restraint that author Erik Wujcik didn't do all this in Australia. It's also awesome because Mutants Down Under (the Australia portion of the setting) got to be all kinds of different weird.

I'll be making some subtle changes. Instead of New Americorp the "hero" government will be Calivada (since it's basically a sizable chunk of California and Nevada and this game doesn't hide from goofball place names). The Road Hogs gang will be mostly mutant pigs, because duh!, and a more genuine power than they are implied to be in the setting materials.

Of course the big work is on the pre-gen characters. I'll be posting these here in abbreviated form (e.g. no ability text, just names) starting next monday and going through July. Here are the 8 PCs. If I end up building anything new (like descriptors) or making changes I'll be sure to highlight that in a wrap up post.

• mouse - mechanic
• Bird - scout
• Cat - warrior (melee)
• Dog - driver
• rabbit - "the face"
• raccoon - scavenger/scrapper
• chimp - historian/sage/leader
• Horse - warrior (ranged)

Either way, I hope this proves to be as entertaining for you all as it is for me.