Having just seen Mad Max: Fury Road, I’m thinking – once again – about post-apocalyptic settings and scenarios. Fury Road has a lot in common with Max Max: the Road Warrior, and to a lesser extent with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It’s that non-stop chase that fuels so much of the excitement in the movie.
At its heart, the war rig on which the characters fight is just a setting piece. In a movie, the setting only creates hazards or benefits when narratively convenient or to help move the plot forward. In a game, this may work the same, or the setting may create benefits or drawbacks that apply to all or most of the characters’ actions.
In the Mad Max movies, fighting on a moving vehicle – be it a train or a war rig – leads to plenty of complications. The vehicles in the movies are unstable platform when narratively useful, but in an RPG that is kind of a binary rather than a convenient plot device. In something like D&D, there are penalties for unstable platforms. It might be interesting to actually provide a bonus for those characters who have specific skills or other mechanical indicators that they are trained or better prepared for the difficulties than your average thug. Maybe allow Acrobatics to remove penalties equal to the character’s proficiency bonus. I’d probably due the same for a character with a sailing backstory (like the deck of a ship in choppy waters) or similar.
But that’s me.
For a game like Centurion or Nefertiti Overdrive, in which you can place Conditions on opponents, something like unbalanced, poor footing, or even falling down would work well with the setting. Otherwise, for a very abstract system like Nefertiti Overdrive, I wouldn’t be applying any penalties, but I would really try to have the players use this feature in their descriptions, and I would be using it when character’s fail as a nice excuse. In this sense, it works much the same as it does in the movie – it doesn’t really hinder the characters unless it is dramatic for it to do so.
In the end, I like situations like fighting on the back of a speeding train to add ambiance to an encounter rather than use it to penalize my players. I think this kind of setting detail can really help differentiate encounters and will let players exercise their imagination trying to weave it into the action.
You can learn more about Mad Max: Fury Road at Wikipedia and IMDB.
You can find out more about SEP’s games here.
You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.
There is no doubt right now that I am going to Gen Con. I’m running four Nefertiti Overdrive games through the Independent Game Developers Network, and they are all sold out. However, I am also part of two seminars: 
Having a teleporting bad guy hideout helps with a few things. It makes the baddie extra mysterious and dangerous, considering he can appear anywhere and therefore nowhere is safe. Even if the PCs can gather an army big enough, there is no geographic focal point to attack. And if they do get in, where will they be when they get out.
Let’s start with the Glaive from Krull. This thing was cool because it was part ninja throwing star, part switchblade, and part guided missile. What’s not to love about that? I saw Krull before I started playing AD&D, but once I got the Player’s Handbook, I saw that the Glaive wasn’t a glaive, which is weird. Still, I of course had a character with exactly that weapon. When we went through the ICE Middle Earth sourcebook, the Court of Ardor, an enchanted axe became a very similar weapon for one of my character’s, lacking only the switchblade effect of the retracting blades.
And then there’s the Mindsword from Hawk the Slayer. That weapon had a very cool design, and among my group of gamers, became the standard image of a bastard sword – oh AD&D and your misappropriated naming conventions. There really wasn’t much to this sword except that it looked very light and had some kind of psychokinetic power. That was enough – given that Hawk the Slayer was my go-to RPG movie until the 13th Warrior came along – for the Mindsword to inspire many an imitation.
While it’s actually a rip-off a lightsabre, Thundarr the Barbarian’s Sunsword fit much better into D&D. We didn’t really know too much about lightsabre’s at the time, so the Sunsword’s wealth of abilities – cutting through anything, deflecting anything, having some kind of anti-magic effect – made it a much preferable weapon. And when one was to enter someplace without weapons, well, that’s just a decorative icon that looks like a hilt.
Finally, of course, there’s the Ranger’s bow from the D&D cartoon. All of the character’s had something magical, and while the Thief’s cloak of invisibility was cool – and may have actually been a cloak of immaterialness, if such a thing exists – it was that rockin’ fire-arrow launching bow that I ripped off. Again, like the Sunsword, such a magical bow could have a host of abilities, not just flaming arrows of flame.
These days, my RPG imagination is fired mostly by modern weapons, as my playing is mostly High Plains Samurai. Originally, my character – Mauser – had two Mauser C96s (Broomhandles) that were based on the .45 M1911A1s used by Orson Randall in the Immortal Iron Fist. Mauser channeled his Chi through them and he did so in very imaginative ways. The game has had a couple of re-skins, and now Mauser is a totally non-powered bounty hunter, who nonetheless has a special weapon – a Mare’s Leg, copied from the one carried by Steve McQueen’s character in Wanted: Dead or Alive. He’s also got a longarm – naturally a full length Winchester 1892.
But how do you use power armour in your game. What does it do?
You can use this conceit as well. As discussed in earlier articles, this might be to train up characters or to change their intent or outlook. They might live the same event over and over again, unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to reach the preferred outcome, until they find a solution with which they are happy. This might be teaching them skills, or forcing them to examine their own motivations – which also happened in the movie. Cage didn’t just learn to become a warrior, he accepted self-sacrifice as necessary. He became willing to give it all to save the human race, something he had not accepted at the outset of the movie, in contrast to even the worst of the soldiers which appeared as supporting characters.
The time travel in Edge of Tomorrow is interesting because it isn’t voluntary. Much like Groundhog Day (the most common comparison), at a certain point time resets back to another point. In Edge of Tomorrow, it’s the main character’s death.
The character of “Cage” in Edge of Tomorrow really only has the talker part of that. He grows into a gunner and a fighter, but that is the point of the movie – his character arc to becoming a warrior in order to save the world. There is no point in dividing Cage up into multiple characters except you get multiple characters who are emphatically not soldiers.