May 23, 2017: A Year Of GURPS After The End

GURPS After the End, our "post-apocalyptic campaign-in-a-box" series, recently turned one year old, and I've been looking back at the highlights of my own ongoing "nano and nukes" campaign. The party has changed composition a bit, but always stayed weird and quasi-religious: they started as bodyguards of a Neo-Catholic bishop and are currently the entourage for a superstar singer who preaches the Gospel of Rock. They've fought their way past security bots and squirrel-pions, survived a forest of exploding apples, and created a network of friends and contacts. But perhaps their most notable acquisition was Babette . . .

As described in GURPS After the End 2: The New World, the mutant bears known as "teddies" are terrifying, hideous murder machines. A mated pair of them nearly did the party in. After they prevailed, however, they followed the tracks back to the beasts' lair and found a cub, which immediately attempted to kill them. For reasons I'll never understand, they sedated and abducted her, made a rug out of her mother's pelt for her to sleep on, and named her Babette.

Over the next year, they did their best to socialize and train her, which usually ended up in party-versus-teddy combat and/or got them labeled as dangerously insane. (Who could argue?) I kept expecting them to give up on her, but they never did, and even became experts at Animal Handling (Bears). So last month, I let them know that her Loyalty (which I'd been secretly tracking using the rules from GURPS Social Engineering) was finally high enough for them to take her as an Ally . . . and there was much rejoicing.

The wasteland is a weird place, and we wouldn't have it any other way. What's the strangest story from your own After the End game? Share it on our forums!

(For a peek under the hood, be sure to watch my YouTube interview about both After the End and GURPS in general - or read the transcript.)

-- PK Levine