Thursday is GURPSDay, and much like Christmas time, I was gifted with the transcript that someone did of the conversation between Hunter Shelburne and +Rev. Pee Kitty (PK Levine, Jason Levine) regarding the GURPS worked-example series After the End.
For an absolutely shameless set of plugs, if you want some comprehensive reviews of each volume, check out After the End 1: Wastelanders (review) and After the End 2: The New World (review) that I did previously.
But what was the interview, you ask? It was part of SJGamesLive.
(I should note that these transcripts, whether it be this one or those on The Firing Squad, are pretty intense piece of work. As an example, the AtE transcript is just shy of 10,000 words long. That'd be about a 12-page Pyramid article, which is on the longer side of things. So there's a lot of content here.)
Hunter Shelburne (HS) interviews PK Levine (PK) on YouTube
Hunter Shelburne (HS): Hey guys! I'm Hunter, the Community Manager here at Steve Jackson Games. Welcome to SJ Games Live. I'm here with PK Levine, our Assistant GURPS Line Editor. How you doing, PK?
Jason “PK” Levine (PK): I'm doing well, Hunter. How about you?
HS: Doing awesome. Very happy to be here, interviewing you. I guess, I'm not technically interviewing you; the fans are interviewing you, it seems. We collected some questions on our forums over the past few weeks, trying to get an idea of what people wanted to know about the After the End and some other things that we've been doing with GURPS -- specifically, what you've been doing with GURPS -- and you're going to answer some of those questions today. So, you ready?
PK: Yeah, absolutely.
HS: Awesome.
PK: Let the fans speak through you; be their proxy!
HS: Beautiful. I'm pretty good at letting other people speak for me here. So, we have EvilEeyore from the forums -- I say "from the forums," but that's pretty much everybody here -- he's got a couple of questions. Let's start with, "What should the presumed TL be for a bog-standard ATE game (After the End) and what do you mean by 'for economic purposes' when discussing TL4?"
PK: Okay, actually something that just occurred that I probably should have brought up earlier: should I give a really brief summary in case anyone doesn't know what After the End is?
HS: Sure, yeah, let's go through it. That's perfectly fine.
PK: Sorry about that.
HS: No, no, you're fine!
PK: Yeah, rewind one notch here. So for anyone who doesn't know, After the End is a recent series that I created for GURPS which allows you to -- it makes it *easier* for you to run a post-apocalyptic campaign, where the focus is adventurers journeying through the wastes, scavenging old treasures, and dealing with the crazy hazards that are out there. So it's kind of a mish-mosh of everything. And it can run anything from kind of realistic to completely gonzo -- pretty well, actually, in my humble opinion, which is completely biased.
BOTH: (laugh)
PK: Okay, so he was asking, sorry about that, EvilEeyore, right? You were asking what I meant by 'economic purposes' of TL4, right?
HS: Yeah, that's correct.
PK: Okay. I know the exact passage you're talking about. This caused a little confusion on the forums; I actually went back and edited it a little bit to try to make it a little more crystal clear. The actual tech level of an After the End game is "whatever the old world achieved." So if the world got to tech level 8, tech level 9, you know, modern or a little past modern, and then everything collapsed, then your game is a TL8 or TL9 game. It just is. The tech level 4 is strictly for establishing *prices* and that's it.
The value of any item that's low-tech/medieval-tech is going to be the same because anyone could still make that. It's just that, as you go higher up the tech level and you start to get to things that need industrial work, electronics, things like that, their effective *value* increases, but it doesn't mean that the world is at tech level 4.
It just means that that's the level that kind of sets the economic baseline. So it's really *just* about prices, nothing more.
HS: So not as complicated as it sounds, honestly. Okay, cool. And the second part of two questions is, "Can we get a quick few words about TL (tech level) and how you've been handling it for your game? Skills, skill check penalties, repair, gear costs, etc.?"
PK: Sure, yeah. I will say, not to foist it off, but the majority of this actually, if you have After the End 2, in the rules for inventing and repairing and analyzing gear, that's all in there. I have tech level penalties, tech level bonuses -- obviously, it's easier to figure out what a firebow does, a caveman-style thing, than it is to figure out what a robot does, necessarily -- and that's in there.
About the only thing I can say regarding the high-tech gear is deciding how much of it to include in your campaign is kind of a GM call. If your world got to tech level 9, it's kind of up to you and your setting whether the whole world had so much TL9 stuff that it's everywhere, or whether that's going to be some extravagant, rare find.
I might be able to address something like that in a future supplement, but for the most part, everything else about how TL interacts with skills is basically straight out of the inventing chapter.
HS: Cool, so you said that was After the End 2 that would give you a lot of that information, right?
PK: Yeah, After the End 2: The New World, has the rules for doing stuff, including inventing stuff and analyzing it and fixing it and all that, and tech level factors very heavily into that.
HS: Cool, okay, so just in case you wanted to get an idea where to get that from, there you go. So let's see, next down the line--
PK: (inaudible)
HS: Sorry, what was that?
PK: On warehouse23.com, ladies and gentlemen!
HS: Yes! I'll throw a link down into the description actually on that one. Thanks for reminding me. Next up we have Douglas Cole. Douglas has done a lot of stuff with us on GURPSday; he's done a lot with the GURPS blogs and things like that. He asks, "If you could wave a magic wand, what creative support from the exterior writing base would you like to see? Adventures, characters, more gear, worked examples of disasters, etc.?"
PK: Oh man, okay. I could go on.
HS: Please do!
PK: Well first off, shout out to Doug because I have to say your GURPSday collaboration and compiling all the GURPS blogs every week is beautiful. Beautiful. Love it. Okay, I would say what comes to my mind with where this can go and where I'd like to see it go:
I think among other things, we do need some sort of book about building settlements and communities, because a lot of people want that. I know that there's a lot of people who want to focus on building up an area, and I think there's adventure to be had there. I don't ever want the game to not be about adventures and fun stuff -- I don't want it to be accounting, that's lame -- but there's a lot of adventures that can be had in defending a settlement and things. So a book like that, which might be an ATE book, but might also just be a general supplement book that also covers post-apoc would be nice.
I think if anyone wanted to do a loadouts book, I could get behind that. Traditionally in this game, characters start with very little gear. You don't give them a lot. I'm actually a little more generous than what I suggest in the book. I kind of just capped it at $500 worth of gear so if the GM wants to give more, no one will complain, but they'd complain if the GM said $500 and they'd be like, "No, PK said we should have had $1,000!"
HS: (laughs)
PK: So figuring out how to load your character on a tight budget? A loadouts book that was just like, "Here are some $500 gear kits that you can start with. If you're a hunter, start with this." This would be great, you know?
I'd like the game to eventually have a supernatural side. I didn't go into supernatural stuff because there just wasn't enough room. I'd love to see a fantasy magic apocalypse, a religious apocalypse straight out of Revelations, expanding the game that way.
My first thought when I wrote books 1 and 2 was that the third one might be detailed scavenging rules. Though to be honest with you, I'm just a huge fan of the scavenger as a concept. Kind of like what Dungeon Fantasy did with Treasure Tables, just detailed lists of all the different stuff you can get.
Maybe a dirty-tech book where it focuses on inventing stuff and realistically what could be turned into what, if that makes sense--
HS: Oh yeah.
PK: --the idea of "let's grab a tire and turn it into" . . . um, I don't know what you'd turn a tire into!
HS: Well, I guess that's what that table would be for. (laughs)
PK: Yep, exactly! Like a dirty-tech book that covers that. There's more, but I'm going to shut up there because that's a pretty wide range of ideas. Anyone pitching one of those ideas, I'm probably going to be behind you.
HS: Nice. That's actually a really cool question because I know one of the big draws of our community is we have so many people contributing in the community to supplements and things like that. We have so many people doing homemade, fan-made stuff that's a huge boon. Plus personally, of all the GURPS stuff that I've seen and gone through, this is one of the most interesting worlds to me personally because I'm a huge fan of post-apocalyptic stuff. So hearing you talk about making a religious one, possibly a Revelations-type thing? I didn't even think of it in my mind. I'm used to the more traditional stuff, so now I'm thinking that's a totally different slant to it. You can totally have supernatural things in there, that makes a lot of sense. Like, that's crazy, I like the idea. That's a really good question, Douglas.
PK: Yeah, I definitely want to go there at some point.
HS: Cool. Well, we've got a big one here, we've got a few questions here. We'll go through them one at a time. This is Ghostdancer. Let's see, "Tell me why you chose to leave the supernatural out of After the End 1 and 2." Well, we already covered that.
PK: Yeah, that was just space and cohesion. I would have had to include so much extra stuff to include the supernatural, the books would've been twice the size. That's got to be a later book, it just does.
HS: Honestly, having one that's just focused on supernatural makes sense too, from just a thematic standpoint. It doesn't always go with all the tech and stuff. That makes sense. The next question is "Lots of people are buzzing about your gadgeteering rules." This is all from Ghostdancer, by the way. "How did you arrive at them? What makes them different, better, or worse than the Basic Set's rules?"
PK: Actually, they're really not that different. They're just more detailed and presented differently, with a couple of changes to address the fact that a post-apocalyptic game doesn't really have a tech level; it's super fluid. You could be whittling arrows one day and then working on a fusion engine the next day. You know what I mean? So they had to be very broad. I started with what I did for Monster Hunters 2, my previous series. I had expanded the gadgeteering rules and drilled them down to focus on -- I kind of expanded and simplified at the same time (or tried to, at least) so that you had more options, but that it was very straightforward what options to pick. And a lot of people liked that; I had people tell me, "I understood the gadgeteering rules for the first time when I saw them in Monster Hunters." So I started with that and then just expanded it a bit, because Monster Hunters was over the top, crazy cinematic. So this, I had realistic inventing over here, and then [quick] gadgeteering over here, and there's a level in the middle called "regular gadgeteer" that's just basically right in the middle. So you can have the totally realistic inventor, the crazy over-the-top inventor, or just the cinematic one that kind of fits, say, the Fallout setting where you're not an "inventor" but you can craft a gun. You know what I mean?
HS: Yes, essentially giving you a few different options, a few different avenues to take on that. I like it.
PK: It's kind of like three different "power levels" of gadgeteer, based on how crazy the GM wants to get.
HS: Yeah, it tends to be, at least in games where I'd be involved in, would want to get as crazy as possible. So giving us many options is pretty solid! So again from the same poster, "Mutation is interesting. Where did the ideas for Freakishness come from?"
PK: I'm pretty proud of that one, actually! For anyone who doesn't know, the idea behind mutations and Freakishness is -- in GURPS, usually things have a power modifier, which reduces the cost by a fixed percentage. The way I did it here was that all mutations come bundled with a new disadvantage, Freakishness, and the more you get, the more terrible things that happen to you: you become uglier, you gain side effects, you gain weird oddities and such. And originally, it started off as a power modifier, just like any other power, and I'm thinking, "Well, it's a power that shouldn't have a Talent, that seems weird. But it should have a power modifier." But then I was basing the effects on how many points you saved, and then I realized that I'm just going the long way around to give someone a disadvantage. So I just converted the whole thing into a disadvantage and just added it on. So the idea was, "Okay, you have a -10% discount on this power that saved you 3 points; we take those 3 points and put it into a disadvantage." And then I realized, why not just add the disadvantage, straight up? Does that make sense?
HS: Yeah, so you took the system that was a point-based system and essentially just negated the points out of it and said, "Here's a disadvantage," and hand it to them. Which makes sense.
PK: I did the math ahead of time, "These are the points, we just bundle it right in." It's like a direct effect, like I just kind of taped it to the side, which is ugly but it seemed to fit mutations.
HS: Actually, I'm kind of the opposite. I think that's actually, I hate to use the word when it comes to this kind of game, but that's actually more elegant to me. It's simplified. It's easier to understand. It's just, "You get this good thing, here's the bad thing." It's easy to teach people, it's a simple concept, they don't have to do any math or anything; you've done all the math for them.
PK: And there's this table. that you can see, as your Freakishness goes up, bad stuff is going to happen. And some people have called out the fact that if you have Freakishness 7 and you go to Freakishness 8, nothing changes. And people have asked, "Why is it worth an extra point of disadvantages?" But it's not that, it's that you're getting scared the more this goes up. It's not that going from 7 to 8 doesn't change anything, it's that do you dare go to 9? Because at 9, bad things happen to you.
HS: (laughs) It's the fear of what's coming. And that is Freakishness 9.
PK: The mounting terror.
HS: I like it. Still the same poster. "What was the reasoning behind choosing the apocalypse of generations before, instead of apocalypse now, right now, or recently?"
PK: I made a point, in both books, to make it clear that the game should be set at least a couple of generations after the end -- hence the name! -- because I want people to be focused on "this is the new world." Let's kind of accept it. And you can make it better, but let's try not to go back to the old world, because that's a different genre. You know what I mean? So I guess that was just a personal preference there. I could have done a book where the apocalypse was happening right now, but that's not, in my mind, post-apoc. In my mind, that's like a disaster movie, you know what I mean? If it's happening now, you're trying to *stop* it. Does that make sense? You're trying to hold it off.
HS: You wanted people to play within the apocalypse. You didn't want them to try to rebuild the world, essentially. Or at least rebuild the world they knew, necessarily.
PK: Exactly! Building a new world? Awesome. But going back and rebuilding the old world? And if you want to play that, that's fine -- I actually think the rules will help you with that -- but it was never my focus. I actually recommended, I said that the minimum should be within about two generations. But really, if you're the second generation, that's only 20 years after the apocalypse. And you can go even less than that. It's more just a social contract with the players, so that they're not trying to go back and fix the world, but they're embracing the new one. If you don't think your players are going to do that, then you can set it two years after the apocalypse and be fine. I just found from experience that 20 years is about the minimum buffer where people stop assuming that everything can be fixed and reversed and we can go back to the way we were in 2016 and happy. The world has changed.
HS: Well, that makes sense to me honestly. I just had some questions in our chat here; we'll get to those questions, just to let everybody know. Feel free to ask questions in chat and if we have time at the end and we can answer them I'll give those questions to PK as well and we'll go through those as well. Let's see, we've got one more question from Ghostdancer. It is, "Your rules for radiation and long-term fatigue are brilliant simplifications with mechanics that could easily be ported elsewhere. Where else would you port them?"
PK: Well, thank you for the compliment. (laughs) I don't know if I can go with "brilliant" but they work well. We actually already ported them, a little bit. Roger Bell_West wrote this great supplement, Disasters: Meltdown and Fallout, which was a very realistic take on radiation, nuclear plants, and such. And during the playtest for that, people actually said, "Is there a way to get simpler radiation rules?" and I offered them up. At the time, we didn't even have a release date for ATE. We didn't know for sure if or when it was coming out, but we figured, let's port them in there and they seem to work pretty well. They're a little bit cinematic if you let people -- basically, it turns radiation points, they're like hit points. The more radiation you take, you lose radiation points. You get too low, you get sick, you get too much lower, you get dead, because radiation's bad. So if you're running a cinematic game, then you let people heal all their radiation points. If you're not, then the rule is you can only heal 90% back. Like if you lose 10 radiation points, you can recover 9. That 1 is gone. Because you're going to die eventually. It's fair.
And long-term fatigue, I had been playtesting that for a while. I'm actually surprised it never made it onto -- I have a website where I post a lot of my house rules. I kept meaning to post it! Never did. And it just ended up in there. Basically, it turns starvation and missing sleep into -- they lower your fatigue pool's possible max. Like, if you have a fatigue pool of 10 but you missed a couple nights of sleep, your pool drops to 7. Not just your pool and what's in it, but how big it can get. You know what I mean? It lowers your maximum. It's a lot like how the new Fallout handles radiation, which is funny considering this was written way before Fallout 4 existed.
HS: Nice. You're a trend setter. That's how it works though. I like that; it makes sense. It'll all make sense thematically.
PK: Yeah, it totally fits.
HS: Nice. Cool, well thank you for those questions, Ghostdancer. Quite a few of those are really good questions. We've got a few here from Anders as well. Got a Kromm drop. "Kromm made a classic post on 'everyman skills,' skills every character should have. How would you amend this list for an ATE campaign?"
PK: Oh, so what skills do you need to survive in an After the End game? Well, first off, I've got a list of the important skills in the first book, After the End 1: Wastelanders. And I'll flat-out tell you, what I did was, we have this thing called the GURPS TraitSorter that lets you tell the sorter what advantages, disadvantages, and skills fit your game and what don't, and it just spits out a page that's all nicely formatted and all that. I just straight up used that to make chapter two! So that has all the skills that I think will be useful.
But I would say if you want to survive, you would need some sort of skill to get the lay of the land, because you're probably going to be traveling. Even if you're doing a settlement, you need to know the land, so Area Knowledge, Current Affairs, Navigation, something like that. If you're going to live off the land, you want Scrounging to find stuff, Survival skill or Urban Survival, Weather Sense. I'm not sure if that was one group or two I just gave; "living off the land" and "lay of the land" are kind of related. Some way to travel, like a vehicle skill, Hiking, Riding, if you have an ice age, Skating or Skiing; that would be a category I'd throw in there. You have to be able to win fights or avoid them in some way I guess. If you build a character with no combat skills at all, you're probably going to die! Even if your character's not a combatant, this world is harsh and things want to kill you. So if you don't have any weapons skills or at least unarmed skills, you'll be missed.
HS: (laughs)
PK: I usually recommend you want some sort of close combat skill, some sort of ranged combat skill. Probably something high-tech and low-tech, like Broadsword and Rifle; it works, because wherever the one doesn't work, the other one does. And then, some sort of knowledge of the world, like the Expert Skills, Archaeology, Anthropology, Current Affairs. And the last thing I'd throw in there, I would say you almost have to have *some* sort of social skills, even if you're not the face person, even if you're just an angry hulk with Intimidation, that is at least a way to deal with people. Because sometimes social skills are the only option that you have.
I tried to hit all this stuff; I mean, this is basically just coming out of how I build the templates. Every template kind of covers all of this, but some focus more than others. Like some are combat monsters with no social skills, the trader is a social monster with very few combat skills, but it all balances out.
HS: Makes sense. The intimidating hulk sounds a little bit more like my type of character, personally. I like how that's a social skill, but it makes sense!
PK: Yeah, it totally is. It's awesome actually. In our current game, the player of the hulk talked me into letting him skip Intimidation and he has regretted it ever since because he needed it continually and it just doesn't work. He's good at being menacing, but in a way that people aren't sure. They think, "I could probably still take him."`
HS: He's not big enough! Anders has another one here, "Also, some settings would incorporate cyborgs into the setting, like [blank] character's arm in [redacted]." We're not going to do the license on that. "But any thoughts on how to treat cyborgs? Would the Freakishness mechanism be a good fit for a street cyborg wearer as well?"
PK: You know, you could use Freakishness, but Freakishness focuses a lot on the social, but also a lot on changing and being morphed. And the mutation rules tend to assume that you can hide them and then people get a bonus to tell that you're a mutant. I figure with the cybernetic stuff, most of it's going to be pretty obvious, like if you've got a cybernetic arm or leg. I would actually use the Ultra-Tech rules. I think they're great; I really do. I think David did an amazing job with them. Basically, you take the advantage (what does it give you?) and then you apply the Temporary Disadvantage of Maintenance, like you have this extra strength in your arm but it requires maintenance every week. You take the disadvantage One Arm, and then you put Mitigator on that, so it's like disadvantage One Arm but Mitigator: As long as I have my my cybernetic arm attached, it's cool. So it's like the good and the bad. So I would use the straight up Ultra-Tech rules. I think they're great.
HS: There you go, Ultra-Tech rules it is. Another one from him, "If you used a magic system for ATE, how would you decide which one to use?"
PK: (laughs) Hell if I know! We have a lot of them! Man. At some point, I expect in the future, I'm going to be sitting down with someone -- either I'll be writing it myself or sitting down with someone and talking about a magic book for this, about magical fantasy apocalypses, and we'll hash through that then. I have no idea.
HS: Okay, fair enough. Let's see, last one from Anders, "Why are there no stats for flame-throwing guitars?"
PK: (laughs) Which is undoubtedly the most important question that is going to come up in this thing, I guarantee you that. Because the license that we're not mentioning in question? That movie was released after this was written, okay? So if that timeline had flipped, I promise there would have been stats for flame-throwing guitars. Actually, one of my players, he's a trader -- that's T-R-A-D-E-R, not traitor as in Benedict Arnold --
HS: Well, he hasn't shown that side yet. You don't know. He could be both.
PK: He built a trader, who are the more social characters, and he actually said, "I don't like any of the options; can I be a rock star instead?" And I was like, "Oh, that's an awesome idea!" So I helped him design a custom rock-star package. So I've got that and some equipment ideas kind of boiling around in my head to eventually be a "Ragnarok-and-Roll" Pyramid article that I imagine I'll get out some time.
HS: Cool. Well, there you go. If you have a rock star in your party, we've got the rules for you, hopefully.
PK: Who knows when? But they're in here somewhere.
HS: Let's see, NinjaMonkey. This one, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, because I always do this with these, but, "I think Caravan to Ein Arris has some great elements for use with ATE. What are your thoughts on how to go about converting it?"
PK: For the record, I've only seen it written. I think you nailed the pronunciation; I don't know.
HS: We'll call it nailed then.
PK: Exactly. I think so. That would work good; traveling across the wastes is like traveling across the desert. Dealing with social intrigue and going between two cities, which could be settlements? I could see that. You'd just want to reskin the whole thing. Don't underestimate how much reskinning it takes to make something come across as post-apocalyptic and not fantasy. Basically, if you did that, spice up the encounters a little bit? If it's like the party's attacked by wolves, then no, they're attacked by *mutant* wolves. A sandstorm comes in? No, it's a *fallout* storm. Just spice it up a bit. I think it would actually work pretty well. I'd run that!
HS: Just run some of the ATE rules like the radiation for a rad storm or something? Makes sense.
PK: Exactly, yeah.
HS: Well there we go. Pretty simple reskin there. Bruno's got a question here. "You mention that you've run or are running an ATE campaign. What can you tell us about it?"
PK: (laughs) Okay.
HS: Oh boy.
PK: I can tell you that my players are insane. All right, so the setting I use -- because one of the things about After the End, for anyone who doesn't know, is that it's a "choose your own apocalypse." It doesn't have a fixed one. You choose what the apocalypse was. So what our group came up with was the idea that it started as a civil war but also brought in robots and radiation. The idea was the military was using advanced robots and drones and nanotech weapons, and then when they went into the hands of the police and the state, people revolted, there was a civil war, the revolutionists used mininukes. So artificial intelligence was never invented, but there's these poorly misprogrammed robots, glitchy nanobots, and nuclear radiation craters all over the place from this war. I mean, that's the buildup for anyone who's curious about my world-building, basically. So there's robots and mutated creatures, because the nanotech mutates the creatures and turns them into weird things.
Our group basically, I'll try to summarize them. There's an unsocialized hunter and two docs that he's traveling with. One of them is this naive, mutated one called Dr. Cool who, in game, we don't ever stop making fun of, just because he chose the name "Dr. Cool," he's a 16-year-old brain surgeon and--
HS: (laughs) That's amazing.
PK: --his most heavily used mutation is a Flesh Pocket which just . . . I'm going to stop there, but it lends itself to all sorts of jokes. We'll just move on. And the other doc is basically a meth-head who's based on Hunter Thompson. Straight-up "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." And they run into this charismatic rock star and his mutant hulk bodyguard, his techie mechanic, and their mutated scavenger assistant. And they fight crime! Wait, no. They explore.
It's been fun. The general plot of the first arc, which we're just now wrapping up actually, is they heard about this flying vehicle that crashed into a mountain. And of course everyone is like, "Oh my god!" Some of them are smart enough to know, "There were planes, but planes don't still work. How are they doing that?" So they figure they can gain lots and lots of valuable resources if they go check that out. They go on this long journey, they run into this crazy racist group called the Redeemers who just absolutely hates mutants, and then one of the Redeemers stows aboard on their wagon, and the other Redeemers are trying to track her down. They have to get rid of her, and then negotiate their way through these mutants; there's this mutant camp called Aftershock that's on the mountain they're trying to reach. They finally talk their way through it, they get up, and now they're fighting robots and mutant plants and deadly mold. That's mutated mold, I mean it's not just -- it's creepy.
HS: (laughs)
PK: And they finally get in, and finally get to the room where they figure is where the plane crashed into the side of the mountain. And there's not a plane; there's a *tractor*.
HS: What?
PK: And everyone is completely confused, until they sit down and look at the place, and realize that this is a missile defense silo with these microwave beams that would also shoot down missiles. And those were powered by this massive magnetron that was just hit by lightning a week ago. Got hit by lightning?
HS: Oh man.
PK: The dishes pulled the tractor from a mile away--
HS: Wow.
PK: --and everyone saw it streaking across the sky. I'm proud of that because none of them saw it coming. They still, I made sure they got so much cool stuff that they don't hate me. They have broken robot parts and they found a laptop and night-vision goggles, all these things that are really, really useful. So no one's upset about it, they were just amazed.
HS: That's a good twist. You just telling me that, I didn't see it coming.
PK: Yeah, they're like, "PK, you're a jerk." I've got to mention one more thing that I was actually just ranting about. I don't know if you've seen the mutant chapter of the book, but there's these creatures called "teddies." They're killing machines. They're these mutated bears. They're fast, they're strong, they're cunning, they're *deadly*. They had to fight a couple of them. And then they found a young teddy back at the camp, because they tracked them back to the camp, and two of the characters decided to adopt it. As a pet.
HS: Oh my god.
PK: This has not worked out well for them. But they are stubbornly, steadfastly clinging to the notion that this teddy will one day be their pet and love them. Her name is Babette and she is beautiful and she will love them. They are sure this will happen. Point of fact, the last game session ended mid-combat because Babette broke free of her chain.
HS: I have a feeling, one more session, they're not going to have a nice pet anymore.
PK: The nice thing about having two docs is that they are pretty good at whipping up sedatives and getting them in her. So there's a wrestling match where they're trying to wrestle her to the ground and inject her with chemicals.
HS: Perfect! I hope Dr. Cool has something for that, I guess. Still my favorite character, I think.
PK: Oh yeah, Dr. Cool and the hunter are the two ones who -- the hunter is Dick. Dr. Cool and Dick are the ones who are just convinced this is going to be their pet. And they've been doing a good job of training her, as good as you can do, but she's still a wild animal and she's a mutant and freakish. And the rest of the party basically has reluctantly accepted it and just apologize every time they go somewhere.
HS: (laughs)
PK: And they have to give this warning to the people in the settlement, "Look, there's something in the back of the wagon that's going to scare the crap out of you. Just don't look. Or if you do, just know she's chained."
HS: "We're here to help. We promise. Maybe."
PK: (makes air-quotes) Yeah, "Help."
HS: Great question, Anders, or no, that was -- that was a really good one. Here's a funny one--
PK: Yeah, that was Em.
HS: --John Dallman, "Will you continue Kromm's fine tradition by explaining ATE via interpretive dance?"
PK: (pause) No.
HS: Perfect! There we go. That was easy enough. (laughs) We've got Humabout has a couple of questions here. (tries different pronunciations) The first one is, "Was it a conscious decision to avoid using simplified chase rules from Action 2: Exploits? I noticed range bands surfaced again and was expecting to see something chase-related to," an example being the desert chases through the movies that we are not mentioning.
PK: Hmm, I don't know if you can say it was a conscious decision. The books are just stuffed. I crammed in a lot and that just wasn't one of the things that I thought necessarily made the cut. I think I can see where there'd be a need for it. I'm hoping that -- actually, let's add this to the list of possible supplements or support -- would be some sort of vehicle- and nomad-focused book would be nice, with those chase rules with those kind of range bands, too. I think there's definitely room for that, a post-apoc vehicles thing.
HS: Cool.
PK: I think it could turn up there. But it wasn't so much a conscious decision as just -- man, I went over page count already and had to apologize and get permission, so I couldn't go further, sorry.
HS: At a certain point, you have to cut it off. But you guys got a lot of stuff in there so I mean that's -- you crammed it full of stuff. And there's always room for more supplements. Hey, always a thing out there so you guys can work on that. Let's