[RPGPOTA] Planet of the Apes Hexcrawl Map in Progress

I love the new Planet of the Apes RPG. It is awesome! As I posted elsewhere:

The game design is a modified version of the West End Games D6 System used with the original Star Wars RPG. It cleaves fairly closely to that system, making a few adjustments due to the less tech-oriented nature of the setting. It is a skills-based system, where you roll a set of d6s based on your attribute and subskill, seeking to match or exceed a target number. You choose your race and skill set when you start play, then improvement continues with skill use or practice and training. As with Star Wars, this system works very well with a cinematic style of play. Characters suffer damage as wounds rather than as hit points, for example, with effects that adjust their abilities in play.

It hits the sweet spot of balance of system and setting; the authors really, REALLY know and love the POTA (I've been a fan since before Star Wars, have seen all the movies and TV shows, read all the comics and books, etc., so I can tell they REALLY know their stuff). The knowledge and love of the material really comes through.

Adventure and campaign style and direction can vary greatly, depending on which era you set your campaign and what your mix of characters are. The eras span everything from all the films, from the 1970s to the 40th Century. The RPGPOTA core book provides all the basics needed to run a game and start your own campaign; The ANSA Files sourcebook provides all the details, including amazing depth of history, tech, and NPCs, for all five films.

There are hints from the comic book and the live-action TV show as well, but those are not delved into in any great depth.

There are several primary character types: Apes, Modern Humans (Astro-nauts in the far future), Primitive Humans (the mute humans from the first two films), and Mutants (from Beneath). Guidance is provided for groups of one or mixed types, and all sorts of adventures can be had.

You could, for example, run Escape from the Planet of the Apes with your own ape characters! You could run Conquest or Battle with a mix of allied apes and humans. You could run Planet and Beneath with your own Astro-nauts. Or develop something in-between, like the TV series or even the animated TV series... the possibilities are endless, and between the core RPGPOTA book and The ANSA Files, you have everything you need for infinite campaigns or adventures.

Into the Forbidden Zone is a boxed set campaign that provides even further information on the Forbidden Zone, a complete series of campaign adventures, and a ton of additional random tables and other information to develop even further adventures and campaigns.

Like any other RPG, it is whatever you make of it. You can create one-off adventures, a series of related adventures, a sandbox campaign -- whatever you and your players want to do. You could even use the Star Wars RPG or other D6 System based RPGs to add in other flavors... maybe the POTA is actually a planet in the Star Wars Galaxy. Maybe instead of mutants, there are super-heroes? Maybe you can add magic, and the orangutans are real priests with magic spells, and there are chimp wizards?

The RPGPOTA provides enough to make your own campaign; The ANSA Files gives you everything you need to fit that campaign or any adventure perfectly into the frames of any movie (with your PCs as the new stars or as new side characters); and Into the Forbidden Zone provides a solid example of how to design and run a campaign.

Essentially, if you love POTA, you MUST HAVE THIS! If you like science-fiction in general, especially PA sci-fi books or games (such as Gamma World), this is also a must-buy.

And here is my WIP on a campaign map in the area of the original POTA (New York). Scale is 5 kilometers/3 miles per hex:

Right click to embiggen

[Review] Project Oasis by Joseph Bloch -- 5 out of 5 Stars

Project Oasis, written by Joseph Bloch (Adventures Dark and Deep, Castle of the Mad Archmage) and self-published through BRW Games, is a 36-page PDF campaign supplement for Mutant Future and Apes Victorious, both being post-apocalypse (PA) games by Goblinoid Games.

Set 1000 years after the Devastation, it is a “kitchen-sink” style setting, containing all the themes and ideas from a wide spectrum of early PA literature, film, and television, focusing on the materials developed in the 1970s. Planet of the Apes, Ark II, Omega Man, Logan’s Run, Twilight Zone, Mad Max – it’s all here in a fantastic melting pot that gives you an entire continent of possible adventure.

 

 

The two-page introductory section explains the basics of the world and how it came to be; speaks of technology and geography; and gives some basic guidelines for the kinds of campaigns the setting is designed for (very different from many modern PA settings, due to the strong influence of the middle-era of the PA genre). Details are brief, but give a game master more than enough material to get started.

 

We then get to the meat of the booklet, the 22-page gazetteer. This covers every major power in the PA setting, a mix of stone-age savagery to high-tech insanity. Virtually every kind of PA trope is covered in this, with lots of opportunities for a game master to start a campaign in exactly the kind of setting he wants, then move the adventure on to other regions. There are ape realms, human-friendly, human-neutral, and human-enslaving; there are high-tech mutant realms hidden under wastelands, low-tech mutant wilds, human-mutant cooperatives, and mutant-power domains; there are hidden high-tech cities of wonder where the people are dedicated to recovering what was lost, high-tech cities of wonder where the people are kept in dystopian decadence, and there are low-tech kingdoms dedicated to keeping things exactly the way they never really were in chivalrous glory. And that’s just for starters!

 

I’m being a bit nebulous here, as I believe that it would give you, the reader, far greater joy to discover the world of Project Oasis on your own, rather than have me list off the regions chapter and verse.

 

Two things I will discuss are "Project Oasis" itself and the inclusion of adventure hooks with each region. First, Project Oasis is not simply the name of the book, it is also a major faction in the PA world. Project Oasis is a very high technology organization, operating from a secret base, that seeks to bring the world back from savagery (echoes of Ark II, Earth II, and Planet Earth); to this end, they send out teams of adventuring types to help uplift goodly domains and bring down or stall villainous ones. This provides an excellent hook on which the game master can hang her campaign, as it enables player characters to travel all over the continent (and beyond) with as much technological support as the game master wishes them to have at the time. Second, each of the region entries has three adventure hooks included, at least one of which deals with Project Oasis and how it, and its representatives, might interact with the peoples and powers of the region. So the book itself, as mentioned in the introduction, really gears play toward a Project Oasis-based campaign, though myriad other options are readily available.

 

The volume finishes with three short appendices, two dedicated to new monsters (one for Mutant Future, the other for Apes Victorious), and the other a listing of inspirational material. The new monster sections include everything mentioned in the work that was not otherwise found in Mutant Future and/or Apes Victorious, each section covering the same monsters. The list of inspirational material provides most of the books, films, and television shows you would need to read or watch to better understand the setting. Personally, if you have no experience with the middle-era PA genre, I’d watch Ark II, the Planet of the Apes movies and television series, and the Logan’s Run movie and television series; these give you a complete overview of the relevant material and, most especially, style of the genre.

 

Finally, there is the continental map. Created using Hexographer, it shows the relation between the new geography of the continent and all the various regions, including cities, major towns, ruins, and other notable locations. The only problem with it is that I have not been able to find a scale for the map anywhere on the map or in the book… I think it is 30 or 40 miles per hex? [NOTE: Confirmed from Joseph that the scale is in fact 30 miles per hex.]

 

Click to embiggen; this is a small and shrunken snippet of a full continental map!

 

The upshot of the review is that this is the best PA campaign setting on the market today, if you are into the middle-era PA genre. If you aren’t, well, get on the bandwagon! The PA middle-genre provides you with all the action, adventure, seriousness, and wild and wacky wahoo you could ever want out of a PA setting, and this book distills it all down for you. Project Oasis plus Mutant Future and Apes Victorious can provide literally years of PA adventures. With Project Oasis Joseph Bloch has presented the PA gamer community with a PA campaign “Greyhawk Gazetteer” upon which to build and develop their own campaigns.

 

Project Oasis is a book I wish that I had written. And really, I can’t give it better kudos than that.

 

Five out of Five Stars

 

Project Oasis
by Joseph Bloch

Published by BRW Games
36-page PDF with PNG Continental Map
$9.95

Buy Project Oasis at DTRPG

Buy Project Oasis at RPGNow

 

Note: I purchased Project Oasis with my own money. I have not been offered anything in return for a review. The links above go through the Affiliate Program at OBS, so if you buy something after clicking through, I get a taste of the action. Hope all the cyber-cops are happy with this disclaimer.