Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder: a spoiler-free mini-review of The Last of Us.

The Last of Us is a really great video game about post-pandemic America. It’s also a perfectly written story about being a man —one that makes good on promises that stories like The Walking Dead or the film adaptation of The Road failed to keep.

Audiences have come to accept Hollywood’s reliance on spectacle to obscure its own mediocrity. And because of that, stories this engaging are too hard to come by. We find ourselves in a near-constant state of having to mentally fix stories in order to love them. 

In response, The Last of Us is almost anti-epic. Its apocalyptic themes are really just set dressing for a small, visceral, very human story. The questions it poses are complex and it understands that you’re smart enough to answer them for yourself. And the merciless brutality of the world it depicts confirms every suspicion that the minutia of life in the Western world might be just that.

I don’t have children, and it would be preposterous for me to claim that a PS3 could provide any real sense of what paternity must be like. That said, last night I awoke suddenly from an exhausted sleep, and in a moment so elusive that only its absurdity prevented it passing from my mind, I wanted to check on Ellie.

Brought to you by the Yummy Gorgon Snack Food Company

As a clone, your genetic material is versatile enough to make biological upgrades fun and easy! Insert credits and let's get started.

-instruction panel, Chemi-Cola vending machine.

Chemi-Cola is a DNA-enhancing snack drink made by the Yummy Gorgon Snack Food Company, a subsidiary of Alamo Industries. The drink is effervescent, refreshing, and mutation inducing. It comes in ten flavors, all of which are quite popular among blue-collar clones. The effects of a ten-ounce last 1d6 turns.

Let's see what's on the menu:

Tri-clops: A third eye sprouts from the forehead, providing 60’ Infravision.

Extra arm: Allows an additional attack every 1.5 rounds.

Digestive upgrade: Any organic matter (including corpses) can be safely consumed. Also provides a +2 bonus vs. Poison.

Emergency Cardiac System: An additional heart grows inside your bod. If you’re reduced to zero hitpoints while this chemical is in effect, your backup heart comes online for 1d6 emergency hit points.

Chest Face: Your head collapses into your bod. Meanwhile you grow a giant face across your chest, preventing most decapitation situations.

Clobberin’ Time: Your skin hardens into calcified dermal plates. +2 to AC, -2 to DEX.

Iron Lung: You can close your lungs against vacuum or toxic atmos. You only need to breath once per turn as long as you don’t speak.

Barf Bag: Allows you to projective vomit 1d3 times. The ten foot, cone-shaped blast has the same attack properties as Green Slime.

Brutal Sex Organ: What it says on the can. No mechanical effect. More of a role playing thing, I guess.

Rubber Neck: Your bod becomes stretchy and pliant, and you can squeeze through tiny spaces as if you were 1/4^th your body size.

Note: repeated exposure to Chemi-Cola is known to produce addiction, insanity, and permanent mutation. Please drink responsibly. Not suitable for children under 3.

The Tears of a Clone

Vat Goon

Requirements: INT and CHA cannot exceed 10

Prime requisite: STR

Hit Die: 1d8

Welcome! You and your vat brothers are the property of Alamo Industries, Inc. Our award winning proprietary genetic recipe, as well as this brief training video, will prepare YOU for an exciting career of hard labor under harsh planetary conditions. We’ve also supplied you with a diminished prefrontal cortex to relieve you of complex burdens such as moral decision-making or feelings of existential worry. Happy birthday!

-orientation video, Alamo Industries.

Vat clones (often called Goons) fight and save as Fighting Men. They have large simian frames and sloping foreheads. Their dense musculature and heavy skeletal frames give them a +1 bonus to unarmed combat.

Goons are always male, and are decanted in groups of nine. They are bred for unfailing loyalty to their corporate sponsors, but recent events (i.e. a full-scale galactic apocalypse) leaves them without purpose. Thus, many take up the adventurer lifestyle either out of boredom or the need to pay for chems.

Cloning is expensive, thus the corporations responsible for their production usually install a recovery protocol in their DNA hack. Any time a Goon PC is killed, the nearest clone brother will be alerted to take his place and carry out any remaining assignment. The new clone is telepathically alerted to the location of the corpse and will show up by the next game session.

When the new clone arrives, randomly choose an attribute (using a d6) and reroll it. If you end up breaking the INT or CHA requirements, your new clone is free to choose another career path like Science Priest or whatever.

Hex Descriptions for a Map Undrawn.

Hex XXXX: gene bandit hideout. This gang of 66 clone brothers possess bad attitudes, primitive weapons, and a bad case of genetic drift. They're led by The First Hatched, a 6HD puddle of DNA with psionic abilities and a vaguely human face.

Hex XXXX: Phasic Swamp. A brood of Pennangalans dwelling amongst the giant Mangroves are said to possess an IOUN stone.

Hex XXXX: Radium desert. Hidden deep in this red waste are several entrances to a vast fungal arcology thriving beneath the planetary surface. However, roving clouds of sapient nano-pollen make finding them difficult.

D12 Things What Just Fell Out Of The Orbital Rust Belt.

for Carcosa and other barbaric space fantasy games.

1. An alien sarcophagus. The mummified remains have been replaced by an unconscious Space Princess, who climbed inside in the hopes of surviving planet fall.

2. 1d6 undead Rocket Men. Their suits are still intact and largely functional if you can get the current owners out of them.

3. The damaged AI core of the HMS Balrog, soon to be worshipped as a deity by your local tribe of subhuman creeps.

4. An unshielded chunk of reactor core that will go all Colour Out of Space on your shit for the next d4 weeks.

5.The gigantic corpse of a Flame Aurochs. A crazed Space Berserker will cut his way out of the corpse d4 rounds after impact.

6. 80 liters of Jale Ooze. This shimmering puddle of nano-goo attaches itself to the nearest life form, assimilating their mass in 2d6 turns but also providing a +5 bonus to their AC for the remaining hours of their gelatinous-armored life.

7. A hive of d8 Insectronauts separated from the Unimind.

8. The massive body of a Space Jellyfish beaches itself on the planet. Local activists gather, pointing and shaking their heads at the cruelty of life.

9. The genetic library of a Space Hulk. The gene seed has been corrupted by Gamma radiation, resulting in actual green skinned Space Hulks.

10. An enormous robot large enough to serve as a decent-sized dungeon. Several large hull breaches provide entrances.

11. A hillbilly family of Space Prospectors forced to ride a piece of Space Junk down to the surface when their salvage operation went off the rails. Space Pa is friendly enough as long as no man touches his beautiful Space Daughters.

12. A time-displaced Fighting Man from the Terran Federation. He hopes to recruit able-bodied adventurers to escort him back in time so he can assassinate himself and thereby prevent the return of the Great Old Ones.

In which several life cycles converge to reveal a collective destiny

Last night I'm hanging out with a few of the players in an upcoming game. Bourbon is consumed, and a startling fact arises.

None of us has ever actually played Keep on the Borderlands.

Actually, that's a lie. I've played it, but I've never run it. The rest of them haven't played it. Yet.

It's probably the bourbon, but I am suddenly vaguely aware that this is my dungeoneering destiny.

A tiny lightbulb sparks to life somewhere inside my skull. 

Everything is going to be okay.

The Island

I added a few more updates to the D100 Rumors about Island of the Unknown. I'm starting a new tabletop game soon (first game in a year!) and I feel like it might end up taking place on the Island. Some of the new entries are a bit on the weirdo side since I felt like the previous 60 or so were leaning a bit too far into the melodramatic side.

Anyway, there are ten spots left if anyone else wants to add to it.

A hexcrawl might be a bit sprawling for this, i'm not sure yet. If I don't end up running something set on the Island, I might settle on ASE, which I think kind of straddles my needs for gonzo weirdness with  what most people think of as D&D. And I love big ass dungeons. AND I'm not that good at map design, so it might be a good option.

I need to pull the trigger on one of these soon. Your experience with either Isle of the Unknown or ASE would be worth hearing. EDIT: Solved in next post.

I've also been working on a notebook-only barbarian space fantasy setting idea that I'll start sharing soon but I'm trying to keep focus on what I need for the actual gaming looming ahead.