The Fall has long since wiped out civilization, leaving the planet’s surface a savage land of radioactive waste crawling with mutant creatures, and forcing the few survivors underground to live as best they could. Your community – called Tau – has endured through the long years since the Fall, its inhabitants sheltered safely beneath the earth.
Until now…
Ever hear about the Ray Cat Solution? Check out 99% Invisible for an excellent introduction to Ray Cats.
Ray Cats are oddly-coloured domestic felines that considered to be good luck by wasteland-dwellers. Their most notable feature is that Ray Cats change colour when exposed to Creep.
This makes them the living equivalent of Rad Tabs – scavengers who observe a Ray Cat change colour are allowed an additional Skill check to avoid Creep Contamination (this does not stack with Rad Tabs or Geiger Counters).
It is unlikely that characters will ever seek to injure Ray Cats. Nonetheless, here are their game stats:
Ray Cat (#Enc 1 or 2d6): HD 1d4, AC 6, MV 6″, SV +0, claws (melee Atk +0, 1d2), 25 XP. Creep Detector.
Individual Ray Cats may possess additional mutations.
I’ve updated the printable player cards to include descriptive traits, which means they’ve lost the clipart.
I’ve also made two colour variants on old-school printer paper:
(Original design from artikid’s designs).
I’ve been playing games online lately using Roll20. I’ve actually spent more time building maps and character sheets than gaming, but I’m still having fun.
Yesterday I started playing with TokenTool and made a bunch of Post-Apocalyptic PC tokens from photographs I found online:
Pretty neat, eh?
I noticed that there weren’t a lot of Post-Apocalyptic games being run. Maybe I should start something up…
Okay – here’s a collected one-page version of my recent SPECIAL Abilities and Descriptive Traits posts, along with an updated version of Quirks.
(If I were to run new sessions of Tempora Mutantur today, I’d probably use Descriptive Traits.)
As a follow-up to my previous post, here’s another option for character customization…
As an alternative to SPECIAL Abilities, the referee may consider using more general “Traits” in his campaign. A Trait is a free-form descriptor of something notable about the character. PCs can have two Traits, and players are encouraged to write a short narrative (30 words or less) incorporating these Traits into their character description.
Traits can be inherent capabilities (SPECIAL Abilities, for example), crafts/skills (either self-taught or trained), specialized knowledge (history, science, and/or the occult), etc. Traits should not replicate specific class abilities, and referees must take care to ensure that Traits are realistic and that this narrative system is not abused.
Like SPECIAL Abilities, Traits can provide an advantage to Adventuring Feats. The player must describe how the Trait applies before rolling the dice.
Here is an example of a character stat block with descriptive Traits:
Stassen the Blunt. Human Enforcer 1, 12 hp, AC 3 (scrap metal plate), MV 6″, SV +6, metal I-beam (hvy melee Atk +1, 1d10). (XP 0, +10%.)
Stassen is simple, both in thought and action. A dedicated bodybuilder of exceptional STRENGTH, he also possesses unexpected WILLPOWER.
The referee might choose to grant this character advantage to deeds of raw power and on will-related saving throws.
Descriptive Traits are definitely more of a “new-school” system than most of the Tempora Mutantur ruleset. (See, for example, the Aspects approach in FATE RPG.) However, the referee is recommended to check out Blood of Pangea by Olde House Rules for a narrative implementation consistent with OSR principles.
Tempora Mutantur 