NUKED! - A Radioactive Update
NondairyGiant and I just got a glimpse at the final version of NUKED! that Sam Sorensen (our layout artist) and it rips so hard! This was actually the first RPG project I ever published thanks to its brief stint on DriveThruRPG, but after the success of my Rangers of the Midden Vale Kickstarter campaign NondairyGiant and I to revisit NUKED! and see if we could A) put some polish on it and B) smooth out and improve the mechanics based on the experiences NondairyGiant and I had working on other projects between NUKED! initial publishing and our second visit. Since we’re getting close to NUKED! second (and altogether better planned) release, I figured I’d talk about the journey undergone by this game.
I had initially designed a role-playing game nearly 7 years ago in order to play Fallout games at the table with my friends. I had based it off of a d100 system that Jason Mical had designed that (I believe) was basically the mechanics from Fallout 2 and Fallout: Tactics put to paper. It involved… a lot of math and so I decided to simplify it for easier character creation and faster combat. The results were mixed, but we had a lot of fun and I decided to start converting into its own IP (rather than using Fallout’s lore). This also freed me up to add my own lore and ideas to the project. This would eventually become my first attempt at full game design: Under an Atomic Sky.
The results were… mixed. I had a lot of what I thought were good ideas, but I wasn’t satisfied enough with the results to move forward with it. While I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was at the time, in retrospect I was looking for something simpler. While I liked the ticky-tackiness of it in theory, it bogged down the gameplay. Character creation was neat and fun and there were lots of choices, but it resulted in players feeling limited when we actually started playing. Also because I was trying to replicate Fallout videogame combat on paper I had to try and balance damage and armor and an action economy and all sorts of annoying bullshit. In short, it was a mess.
After playing Masks: A New Generation and Blades in the Dark I tried to reinvent it as a d6 system that took bits and pieces from both Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games. Honestly, the less said about it, the better. I was trying to do something completely different than before and it just didn’t pan out. Convoluted dice counting systems abound that, while fun for a board game again slowed down actual game play for an RPG.
Fortunately my buddy NondairyGiant was one of my players for the one session I actually tried to run and we started talking shop regarding game design. Several months later I had played a few sessions of a hacked version of Knave and realized that it was the system I wanted to utilize. Instead of Knaves, the players were Skrappers, and instead of classic (or dying earth) fantasy, the setting was a gonzo, B-science inspired post-apocalyptic world that was equal parts Fallout and Mad Max. It didn’t take long for NondairyGiant and I to put something together, I reached out to an artist friend (James Windsor-Smith) to give us a simple cover illustration, and we published the game to DriveThruRPG. We sold a few copies and shared it on some social media sites and promptly moved on to our separate projects.
For me, said project was Rangers, and when NondairyGiant and I realized that we could, in fact, build an audience, we decided to give NUKED! another look. There were some mechanics we decided to simplify (ex. switching entirely to roll-under instead of doing roll-under for saves and roll-plus for tests), a revising of the character creation tables, and a refining of the Perks and Mutations. Also in the months since the initial release and our revisions to NUKED!, NondairyGiant and I had both met several cool, artistic folks and wanted to get some art far superior to my crude doodles (although we kept plenty of those as well). I reached out to previous collaborators HodagRPG and Eric Tonzola while NondairyGiant spoke with Perplexing Ruins to get some atmospheric art that adds to the spooky factor of the wasteland. I had also seen Josh McKelvey’s art on Instagram and spoke with him about potentially coming up with some post-apocalyptic portraits. All four artists came back to us with some absolutely bonkers stuff that really elevated the project.
With our kickass pieces of art in our proverbial pockets, NondairyGiant convinced me that we needed a legitimate layout designer, as neither he nor myself really had the chops for it. NondairyGiant had seen Sam Sorensen’s portfolio and after some discussion and NG and I sharing some items we wanted him to use for inspiration (including Shadow of Mogg by Panayiotis Lines). We had all the pieces we needed for the project, except the money, so NondairyGiant recommended we give itchfunding a shot and I agreed. We joined up with ZiMo22 to help spread the world, working with great people like Marx of Yes Indie’d Pod and the hilarious crew of Goonie’s World. It was a great experience working with all kinds of new folks and I look forward to doing it again next year!
Below you’ll find a preview of some of the new art as well as Sam’s work tying it all together in what could be a pamphlet a Skrapper could find in the actual wasteland. HodagRPG illustrated the Mad Max-like road warrior; Eric Tonzola illustrated the devastation of the Blast that created the post-apocalyptic wasteland; Josh designed the decked-out Skrapper (perhaps a Raidah?); and Perplexiing Ruins illustrates why you should touch Fungallids. The rest are the crude drawings of a poor Skrapper named, you guessed it, Mac.
I hope you like it as much as NondairyGiant and I do!
