post-apocalypse Archives - Nerdhaus Games

This game was a first for me, a GM-less experience without specific PCs that functions as a world building exercise as well as an rpg experience.

The Quiet Year by Avery Alder follows a community after things have collapsed, in a lull between their conflict with a group known as The Jackals and before the arrival of the mysterious Frost Shepherds which ends the game on a random card during the winter. The game is available for download and can be run as a print-and-play or by buying the printed copy which has you looking fewer things up. Either way, you’ll need some paper and writing implements to plan your community. Hopefully, your community fares better than ours did… more “Midwest GameFest 2018, Pt. 4 (The Quiet Year)” …

KantCon, in Overland Park, KS, is my hometown convention. It was my first tabletop con four years ago, and is the only nerd event in town that I will absolutely plan around. This was its 10th year and had a big jump in attendance. The major effect of such high attendance was multiple games filling up, waitlists, and my playtests getting more attention than usual. Given that I was pretty excited to share Heist at this con (and had new buttons!), this was great news for me.

I’ll discuss the playtests in detail soon, but will briefly say I got great feedback and plenty of information for the next printing. Also had a lot of questions about my other projects, so that’s great, too.

My first session as a player was Red Markets, a zombie post-apocalypse game built around hustling for resources. The dice mechanic is clean and fits the theme: A red d10 subtracted from a black d10, plus skill modifiers, is the core mechanic. Any positive result is a success (or “stays in the black”), and any even doubles are critical success. Any odd doubles are a critical failure. A stat called Will allows you to spend a point and flip the two dice. That’s all we got in the session for mechanics.

more “KantCon 2018, Pt. 1 (Red Markets)” …