Apr

Production on The Day After Ragnarok is moving along quite nicely, and more than a couple of questions have come up regarding this new Savage Setting. So, we’ve dragooned the author, Kenneth Hite, to address some of them. Without further ado, let’s get to The FAQ After Ragnarok!

Q: I heard this described somewhere (RPG.net?) as a cross between Conan and post-apocalypse … does that sound about right?

One of the two secret spines of The Day After Ragnarok is, indeed, “Conan the Barbarian: 1948.” In this setting, I’ve tried to capture as much of the Howardian feel as I possibly could, complete with giant snakes, flying ape-monsters, and a “Savage Short-List” of “The Top Five Places To Get Mercenary Work.” But in order for “the Barbarian” to be a viable character nickname, you have to wreck civilization pretty thoroughly. Hence, dropping the Midgard Serpent on the Northern Hemisphere, and knocking the Midwest down to the city-state level, and flooding the Eastern seaboard in post-apocalyptic fashion.

Q: Will it have a plot point campaign included?

No, it won’t. When I first started writing the book, I was aiming at its *other* secret spine: “One Last Thin Red Line.” I laid out a Plot Point campaign — because I love them — about servants of the Crown holding back the darkness: Stalin, war-apes, that kind of thing. But that only gets one of the plots told — and not the particularly Robert E. Howardish one — and would have given it an unfair, or at least misleading, amount of spotlight time.

Unlike great Savage Worlds settings such as Rippers, Necessary Evil, and Tour of Darkness, in Day After Ragnarok there isn’t one assumed narrative structure — this is a world more like Deadlands Reloaded, where all kinds of adventures can happen in all kinds of plots. Now, if The Day After Ragnarok is well received, I’ll obviously write a stand-alone Plot Point campaign, or two or three, and focus in on some of those possibilities.

Q: One of the reasons that I’m drawn to Savage Worlds is the idea of FFF; if I’m going to GM something, I need to be able to do it with a minimal amount of work. How does The Day After Ragnarok support that in terms of adventures (plot point, full adventures, adventure seeds, etc…)?

Instead of a single plot point campaign, I wound up writing four “campaign types,” one for each of four general narrative structures: “Wolves Beyond the Border,” which is your outlaws, barbarians, freelance trouble-maker sort of game; “Servants of the Crown,” which is your “mission-oriented” go there-shoot that sort of game; “Phoenix and the Sword,” which is your “rebuilding from disaster” story; and “City of the Emerald Night,” which is your location-focused “urban adventuring” sort of campaign.

Then, I wrote four “Savage Skeletons,” each with nine linked scenario seeds that form the skeleton of a campaign; one for each of those campaign types — globe-trotting pirates, British SIS agents, mercenaries rebuilding Davenport, Iowa, and criminals in Communist-occupied Istanbul. Then, I wrote a thirteen-page Adventure Generator, with random tables (“Hook,” “Location,” “Heroes’ Goal,” “Villain,” “Guest Star,” etc.) and lots of examples and advice for building adventures from them. Then, I wrote four worked examples of adventure generation, again, one for each of the four “Savage Skeleton” campaigns. One of these campaigns will be featured as a preview on the Atomic Overmind Press site soon.

Additionally, there’s another nine pages of Random Encounter Tables for the “Poisoned Lands.” That’s what’s left of the Midwest after all those giant snakes boiled up, and the famines killed off 90% of the people — this is your prime “barbarian adventurer” post-holocaust turf, here.

Plus, there’s something like 20 monsters all statted up, and stat-blocks for NPC types from bandits to secret agents to moody cannibal loners. And a few “named NPCs,” with Wild Card stat blocks, from the Queen of the China Sea Pirates to Howard Hughes to a certain immortal Egyptian Serpent-cultist who may seem familiar to Conan fans.

In other words, I think there’s some pretty good adventure support in the book, for almost any kind of adventure you might want to run in the setting.

Q: What’s the length going to be?

It’s looking like we’ll fill 128 pages pretty nicely, of the same size as a decent graphic novel.

Q: Will it be available in print, or just PDF?

So far, the plan is PDF, with a high-quality POD (print on demand) version also available.

Q: Please tell me that there will be a complete world map included with the game.

Your wish is my command: “There will be a complete world map included with the game.” We’re hoping to have it up for download in poster size in the not-too-distant future, but probably after the game comes out.

Q: How much of the Fortean-type stuff can we expect in this game?

Well, some of the monsters are based on real-life cryptids, and the setting has Deros coming up out of the Andes Mountains, but there’s not an Invisible Saucer Invasion or mysterious daily rains of snakes. Or rather, the rains of snakes aren’t mysterious when they do happen. It’s no more (or less) Fortean than a really good run of Dr. Who.

Q: “These peaks that Hitler tried to reach in 1942 (on what advice, learned from what unknown insects’ mead?” Any chance that might refer to the Mi-Go?

It might, but I really dialed the Lovecraft way down on this one, and the Robert E. Howard way up. There’s only one Mythos reference in the whole book. Well, maybe two. In the Ahnenerbe memo, they mention getting extinct herbs out of Pleistocene bogs in Finland; that’s probably where the mead came from, too. Probably.

Q: I’ve liked everything Ken Hite does, but I do worry he’ll add too many new mechanics. He does like to fiddle with things.

I do like to fiddle with things, but the Savage Worlds engine strikes me as pretty much perfect as is. I think I added like five Hindrances and five Edges, plus the Professional Edges, and I tweaked a couple of powers from Necessary Evil, but that’s about it. I did write rules for thermite, but if you’re going to tell me that hurling a coffee-can full of highly exothermic aluminum oxide at a giant snake is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Q: What is the starting date for the setting? Will it be 2009 or earlier?

The default date for The Day After Ragnarok is 1948, three years after the Serpentfall. We may, if the book does real well, do a sequel set a couple of centuries or so down the road — I like the title Rocket to Garm for it. Hal got very excited about the “Sons of Space” I mention in the opening, and I still have a bunch of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future ya-yas I need to get out.

Q: One question that I have is about the tone of the setting. From some bits I get a “heroic pulp” vibe and from other bits I get a Call of Cthulhu-like “you’re doomed” vibe. Is it one more than the other?

I tried very hard to walk the tightrope between those two vibes. It’s set in 1948 partially because civilization still hasn’t collapsed utterly, not everywhere. It’s a world teetering on a knife edge between Dark Age and Space Age. The British Empire might be able to pull through, or at least keep Stalin from taking over the rest of civilization. The scientists at Rhodes University might be able to use the Serpent’s unique biology to build a better tomorrow — or they might unleash something even more horrible. America just might be able to get back together, or at least get the railroads rebuilt to the “Mayoralties” in the Midwest. It really might be up to the heroes to throw in on one side or another and save the world, or to change it “into something rich and strange.” At least I hope so. Let me know!

Next: Introducing Ophi-tech!

Atomic Overmind News, Savage Worlds, The Day After Ragnarok