Life among the ruins: A Wreck Age review

Wreck Age download

I’ll admit to a degree trepidation as I fired open my PDF copy of Wrecked Age. I had no previous knowledge of Hyacinth Games, knew their ~250 page RPG used a post-apocalyptic setting and had its own rule system.

I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic settings. I’m not a big fan of tackling new rule systems – especially on the speculation that the attached setting is a good one.

As it happened; Wreck Age has a few surprises. I finished reading the PDF and knew this was a game I wanted to play. The question was how much I wanted to play it. I wasn’t sure about that at all.

The first surprise is that Wreck Age is both a narrative style RPG and a skirmish game. It’s a 28mm tabletop skirmish system from America. Just a heads up to fellow Europeans; Wreck Age uses the old imperial system of measurement – inches.

There’s a really clever thing Wreck Age does that blends the RPG and the skirmish setting is the use of Communities. The world nearly ended; civilization as we know it certainly did but pockets of community held on and survived. Before Wreck Age talks character generation they talk about community generation.

The communities the PCs come from have a significant influence. GMs/narrators will recognise how many problems having all the characters from the same community and with background overlap solves. This is especially true in a post-apocalyptic. It’s a tick in the storytelling box.

Communities also provide a root to the skirmish game. Community vs community; especially as mankind begins to expand again. Community vs raiders and other threads provide the backdrop for skirmish encounters.

This single and simple element that’s hard-wired into Wreck Age’s core ensures a strong fusion between the two gameplay styles.

The decision to give Wreck Age its own system makes sense given that it’s both a narrative RPG and a skirmish system. For a start this is not a complex system; its d6s and target numbers. It also means Hyacinth Games aren’t trying to retrofit an established RPG system into a skirmish game or a skirmish system into an RPG setting.

The surprises don’t end there. Wreck Age is a post-collapse RPG without mention of mutants or monsters. I ran a word search on the PDF; not one match for mutants. There’s plenty of radiation and people can be monstrous at times but there’s no Fallout system warping of biology. There is a class of survivor known as “Stitchers” who use their medical knowledge and the remains of advanced technology to keep themselves alive; stitching body parts harvested from others to supplement their own. Perhaps they’re similar to mutants but they feel different; less feral, more calculating and cold.

I think it’s also fair to say that Wreck Age is a post-apocalyptic setting without an apocalypse. Hyacinth Games use the phrase “post-collapse”. The world died slowly.

The pivotal background event in the game is the year the rich and elite blasted off to space and the rest of the world discovered there would be no “phase 2” on the evacuation.

The world, though, has been screwed. Oceans rise. Plant-life wilted away. The landscape of the world has forever changed. The remains of once great cities are now used solely as dangerous scavenging sites.

There’s a lot to like about Wreck Age. My big question is whether the post-collapse setting hits as hard as it could. The game begins with a history of events that led up to the mess the world is now in. It then follows on with an atlas of what’s left of America. This makes sense but I found myself struggling for a theme and flavour. Just how grim and gritty is Wreck Age (combat’s fast and brutal)? Is it a game of hope – as mankind comes back from the brink? Is it a game of despair – the history of events is like a slow motion rollercoaster of struggle and flavour?

I wanted more flavour pieces in the core rules. The RPG industry has a horrible phrase “crunch or fluff”. I think it was used first by gamers who cared only for level stats, critical hit tables and such like – as that’s the crunch. Text used to paint the picture, to describe the mood and feel of the game or backgrounds on characters and location was labelled fluff. I find the term derisory. Wreck Age helps prove my point. If early on in the book; even if just in sidebar shoutouts, we had had some brutal encounters between survivors then Anton Zaleski, author, would have had a canvas to paint the world he and Matt Sears have created.

Then there is the actual artwork of Konstantinos Skenterdis who illustrated the cover, my favourite in the whole book, and the internal pieces. It’s from Konstantinos that I draw most of my mental pictures of what a Wreck Age game would be like. I see an almost empty world. A landscape filled with rubble and the wreckage of a failed past. I see very few people.

Wreck Age is a game I’d sign up to play if offered at a convention. Wreck Age is a game I’d suggest if the local GM said he wanted to do something different for the next month or so. I want to test and sample Wreck Age a little more. Right now Wreck Age isn’t a game I want to dump my incumbent settings for. This is a challenge that all new roleplaying games face. Wreck Age is new; just added to DriveThru RPG’s catalogue this year (and there’s a softcover available too).

This will be a game I watch. I want to see how it develops. I want a better idea of what it tastes like. It might almost be worth Hyacinth Games’ time to run a Pinterest account and share inspiration imagery. I sense this is a good game. I just need a bit of a push or perhaps a bit more confidence in my own judgement to give roleplaying in the second-age of man, in the Resurgence, a try.

My copy of Wreck Age was provided for review but has been updated since. This is not a play test review.