I don't know if you remember this game.
I know I barely did. Until recently, as I was looking through old
projects and ideas and came across my notes for it.
In the time since I last worked on this
idea, I picked up Supersystem, made by the same folks, West Wind
Productions. And the rules are compatible...
You see, I like the idea of Road Kill.
At the time, it was the only skirmish, post apocalypse miniatures
game that I'd seen that also included rules for vehicles. Add in the
horror element of vampires and werewolves, and it ticked a lot of
boxes for me. I mean, werewolves and vampires on motorcycles, riding
around the ruins of the world, fighting zombies and human survivors,
is that not enough for you? Of course, the rule book was a mess,
you'd have to buy some models to get the vehicles and stuff, and the
system had some flaws. I've talked a lot about this in the original
review, so I won't go over it again.
Now, I had this big plan of what I was
going to do, how I was going fix everything and make it even better
and... Yeah. And then some stuff came up in my life and I kind of
quit a lot of tabletop gaming stuff. My models collected dust, I
rarely gamed, and so on. No need to bog things down.
As I said, I've been looking for things
to keep busy while everything is going crazy. Sure, I'm still
working, but I'm not doing much else. I've been kind of gaming on
Discord, but I do want to get back into other hobbies. So, here we
are.
What I'm going to do is restart this
project. But, I'm going to expand it. With the rules I found in
SuperSystem, I can add more. I've been wanting to use some “closely
resemble but are legally distinct” from The Terminator as well as
some demons and devils, and a “bring any mini you want” type game
is a perfect fit. I mean, it only adds to how messed up the world is.
And I'm going to work on the rules.
Clean things up. Make it easier to read, easier to understand, fix
the problems and make it easier to play. Which is, you know, the
point of playing games. Because of the problems the book had, I could
never get someone to play this game with me. And that sucks.
What am I going to change? A lot. Let's
break it down:
The setting -
There's a lot of interesting ideas in
here. But, if I'm going add stuff in, I have to make some changes in
the background. First off, I'm adding in the demons and robots.
Because I can. When it comes to the Shadow stuff, I'm probably going
to change that. I'll try to keep some of it, but the premise behind
the Shadow Bomb and the Vatican and all that always felt weak to me.
Not really fleshed out. But, let's talk about the groups in the book.
The Brotherhood and the Sisterhood are only okay, but make them a
little more mysterious and I think they'll work. The vampires and
werewolves in the book are very much tied to their locations, which
doesn't quite make sense for a game that doesn't actually have a set
location, so I'll change them a little bit. I'll probably throw out
some ideas for major players in both races. As for the zombies, they
felt... Tacked on. Like they said “oh, we should probably put
zombies in there, they're popular.” That's not wrong, and the idea
isn't bad, but it needs some more. The human factions are... I think
it's very clear that these are Brits talking about America. It's a
little too simple. But, salvageable.
As for the other characters, I'll
probably keep most of them. They're fun and interesting. But we'll
see.
The Rules -
I'm keeping the basics of the Goal 4
system, as it works. It is simple but also fun and fast. It works for
what I need. There are some problems and I'm trying to solve them as
best I can. The Initiative system is the first thing to change, I
just don't know what I'm going to do yet. I'm thinking about using
playing cards but keeping it simple. I'll figure it out.
I'm also going to add in a ton of
Special Traits. Some from Supersystem and some from my own ideas.
There's a lot to add because there's so few in the original game.
Honestly, there was no reason to not take the most powerful and the
best guns. I think by expanding them, it'll make people want to have
each model have a focus. A purpose, I guess. Well, beyond the need to
just have models on the board.
I'm going to tinker a little bit with
the vehicle rules. I was already going to add in some ideas I had,
but it's going to be tough to find balance. But, I think I've got it.
One thing that I'm really working
towards is letting people take any mini they have, having them
reflect what they want it to do, and have it stay balanced. Got a
werewolf mini for your D&D game? We'll make it work. Want to drop
down a squad of Space Marines? It'll be expensive, but I got it. I
hope this makes sense.
I don't know if anyone cares about
this. I'm mostly doing this for my own fun. And a distraction. When
I'm done, I'll make a PDF and put it in the Links page, as a free
download. Maybe you'll read it. Maybe you won't. And maybe I won't
finish it at all. But at least you'll know why things are erratic
again...
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