Totally Radical NUKED! Update!
It took way too long for me to come up with that even halfway decent title. Hmm… I should work on that. Well, anyway, enough stalling.
I was surprised to look at the dates of my most recent blog posts and find that the most recent one was from July. Unfortunately until recently I just wasn’t in the mood to work on very many projects. I finally succumbed to Dungeon ‘23 burnout and likely won’t get back to the Castle of the Mad Sorcerer Ossifrage until 2024, work on The Elkheart’s Curse is done (I’ll probably Kickstart a print run in December - a seasonally appropriate time of year for an adventure about everyone freezing to death), the Wolves Upon the Coast campaign went on hiatus, and my upcoming novel is in stasis while I try to get a weird technical glitch with the cover and the printer figured out. Such fun.
Oh, I did get engaged, so that is actually very cool and fun. But you’re not here for that, you want to know about NUKED!
It turns out I wasn’t completely lazy during all that time. Merely mostly lazy. During the last few weeks I’ve been helping playtest an upcoming NUKED! adventure called Totally Radical Tales Issue #1: The Lost Valley of the Humanitarians that we hope to have ready for Zine Month 2024. We’ve been running through it as a play-by-post, which has been a lot of fun and nice change of pace for me. Met some cool people through it, which is a nice bonus.
NondairyGiant and I have a few more things up our sleeves for NUKED! including a few more adventures and a rules expansion which has been my main focus for the last few weeks.
As a bit of background, when we were writing NUKED! Giant and I wanted it to feel like its own thing and not a reskin of my earlier project, Rangers of the Midden Vale (which, amusingly enough I started writing after doing a lot of the groundwork for NUKED! with Giant back in the day). I think we were largely successful - sure they share a lot of the same DNA, but that was more a product of both starting out as hacks of Knave than anything else. That being said, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we got was the (for lack of better term) disappointment that NUKED! didn’t have the same robust travel tables that Rangers did.
This got me thinking and I started working on similarly styled tables, with a post-apocalyptic flair of course. As I worked on that project I also started thinking about new Relics that could be thrown into this fleshed out wasteland. That got me thinking about how the Backgrounds from the rulebook could be given a fresh coat of paint that further adds to the ““““lore””””" of NUKED!’s post-apocalyptic world. And of course that got me thinking about yet another project: more Perks and Mutations for players and GMs to utilize.
All of this started coming together in for the form of a potential supplement. An expansion, if you will, which we’ll be calling The Skrapper’s Guide to the Wastes. It’ll be chock full of extra toys for people to utilize (or completely ignore!) inspired not only by Rangers, but also by Electric Bastionland’s Failed Careers. There should be something for everyone in this supplement, which I’m hoping we’ll have ready by Summer or Fall of 2024.
Now that’s a pretty long ways away, so I’ll leave you off with a few samples of what we’ve written up so far:
The Big Brain Background
You’ve always been known for your intelligence and back home often took on the role of teacher, scribe, or scholar. Maybe you are a genius, or maybe you’re just one of the few people from your settlement that knew how to read. Either way, your skills are certain to come in handy out in the wastes.
Starting Gear: You begin play with:
A Pre-Blast Kevlar Vest (Light Armor, Ud6)
A Sturdy Walking Stick (Light Melee Weapon, Ud8)
An old Electronic Lockpick (Ud6) and a banged up Flashlight (Ud6)
A Tattered Copy of the Incredibly Voracious Worm (Children’s Book, Ud4) and a broken WriteRightTM Mechanical Pencil (Ud4)
A Ud6 of Rations (Expired Beefy LoopsTM Pasta Food), a Ud6 of Water, and a Ud4 of Gasoline.
d4 - Why’d you head out into the wastes?
The ignorant folks back home accused me of witchcraft and kicked me out!
I learned all I could from dusty old books - it was time to see the world for myself.
Raidahs burned the whole place to the ground. I barely made it out with my life.
Heard tale of a place filled with books and knowledge called a You-Knee-Verse-Tee and I aim to find it!
Starting Perks & Mutations: When you roll your Starting Perks & Mutations you can reroll any odd results until you get two Perks to choose from.
You can download all 20 playtest Background Starter Kits for free on itch.
Some New Perks and Mutations
We’ve got 50 more Perks and Mutations in store for you all, bringing the grand total up to 100! This also means you don’t have to roll a made up d50 (or worse, do basic division on a d100 roll). Here are a few samples:
Arachnodude(tte): You can shoot sticky webbing from… somewhere… out to a distance of Lx10 ft. The webbing is strong as steel and dissolves after 24 hours.
Beastmaster: While you can’t actually talk to them, you can inuit the emotions and thoughts of animals so well you can basically talk to them.
Glowing Green Ooze: You’re always covered in a thin layer of radioactive slime. Whenever you counter-attack in melee and hit, you deal an additional d6 radiation damage.
Junior Ranger Scout: You have advantage on all Tests made to track creatures and navigate the wilderness.
Shellbacked: A massive armored shell covers your torso. You can withdraw inside your shell, granting you a natural d10 Defense, but you can’t move or take any actions while holed up.
Way of the Road: Any vehicle you drive or pilot treats its Mobility and Hull as 14 and its Quality as Ud10 (unless the vehicle has a better value on its own).
Region: The Ashen Fields
Oh this? I drew this after Giant wrote a beautiful piece of prose about an NPC eating from a can of Beefy Loops Pasta Food™ with an Easy Pull Tab™. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
And I’ll wrap things up with a sample of the Ashen Fields, a Region of the Wasteland that your Skrappers can bravely venture in search of treasure!
Ashen Fields Events - Roll a d10
(1) - Dust Storm. Vicious winds kick up walls and clouds of dust and ash that cloud the eyes and plug the ears, inflicting disadvantage on all sight- and hearing-based Tests until the Skrappers manage to escape from the Ashen Fields.
(2) - Ash Lung. The caustic winds and arid landscape irritate and bother - each Skrapper must make a Guts Test or succumb to the dreaded Ash Lung, reducing their Hit Points by 1d4 and rendering any breath-based mutations useless while they remain in the Ashen Fields.
(3) - Hidden Well. The Skrappers happen upon a small well tucked away from the main roads of the area. Old and rusty, the handpump requires patience and elbow grease, but for each hour spent pumping the Skrappers can bottle up a Ud6 of potable water.
Ashen Fields Encounter - Roll a d12
(1) - Landsail Pirates. A small fleet of four landsails comes racing across the ashen wastes, each with 1d3 pirates aboard. They hoot and holler and sing… land shanties as they catch sight of the Skrappers and begin to close the distance!
Pirate - HD 3 / Light Armor (d2)
Light Melee Weapon (d6) or Handgun (d6)
Greedy and opportunistic!
More interested in bullying than outright fighting.
Loyal to their captain, unless a better deal can be struck.
Increase HD by 2 and give the Calming Presence Perk and a Shotgun (d8) for a Pirate Cappan!
Ashen Fields Locations - Roll a d10
(1) - Mournful Salt Flats. Endless howling winds have scraped away all soil and earth from this place, leaving a near unending stretch of salt. Pellets sting every exposed inch, drying and cracking one’s skin until it threatens to break away like ancient porcelain.
(2) - Ruined Highway. A monument to the engineers of ancient times, the highway stretches out over the Ashen Fields before disappearing into the distance. The rusted skeletons of pre-Blast vehicles dot the cracked cement - perhaps an opportunity to recover some valued skrap?
(3) - Verdant Oasis. A rare place of life and greenery in the wasteland. The water is brown and smells faintly of sulfur, but a handful of animals can be seen drinking it to seemingly no ill effect. It could serve as a potential haven for wandering Skrappers, but such a place is not likely to be unoccupied for long…
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. It’s been a lot of fun writing up this new content and I look forward to sharing more as it’s written. Oh yeah, I’m on Mastodon these days until everyone tells me that the cool kids went to BlueSky. Come check me out if you like bad drawings and screenshots of Google Docs.
