Aftermath!

It’s the end of the world as we know it!

Aftermath! by Fantasy Games Unlimited was a ground-breaking RPG when it came out in 1980. It was the first game system to provide a generic rule system for a post-apocalypse scenario. The TSR system Gamma World had been published in 1978 but that game was focused on a mutant-filled far-future where civilization had been destroyed in a nuclear war. What made Aftermath! different was that it placed no constraints on how the world should end or indeed how long after its destruction the game was set.

This was Aftermath!’s great strength. The world might end with a bang in a nuclear war or asteroid strike or with a whimper as the oil runs out and civilization slowly declined. A campaign could focus on the immediate events around the apocalypse or several hundred years after. This gave the GM a great scope in creating worlds and adventures.

The rules of Aftermath! were complex and advanced for the time. The combat was particularly well modeled and to this day they remain one of the most comprehensive systems around. Firearms played a big part of the game and hundreds of different weapons and ammunition types were available. Often characters would have half-a-dozen weapons but only a handful of rounds of ammunition for each leading to careful cost-benefit analysis before firing a weapon.