Dice Before the Chain

 Dice Before the Chain: Aftermath! and the Proto-Dice Chain

One of the quieter joys of digging through the original Aftermath! rules is stumbling across ideas that feel startlingly modern. Buried in the discussion of Saving Throws is this little gem:

OPTION An alternate method for modifying difficulty: The Gamesmaster may assign a die with a greater or lesser range than 1D20 to be used for the Saving Throw, instead of modifying the number needed for success. If he wishes to increase difficulty, for example, he might require the Saving Throw to be rolled on 1D30 instead of 1D20. (Aftermath! page 7, Book 1, Basic Rules)

There it is, plain as day, in a game released in 1980.

Thirty-two years later, Dungeon Crawl Classics would popularize the “dice chain” and the liberal use of Zocchi dice—d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24, d30, and the rest—as a core mechanical language for adjusting difficulty, damage, and effect. What many players treat as a signature innovation of the 2012 game was already sitting in the Aftermath! toolbox, waiting.

The parallel is not forced. Both systems recognize that shifting the die type itself is a cleaner, more tactile way to raise or lower the bar than endlessly fiddling with target numbers. Need a tougher Save? Hand the player the d30. Want to ease the pressure? Drop them to a d12 or d10. The math is immediate; the physical act of rolling the unusual die underlines the stakes, and the table feels the difference without a single extra modifier.

The dice in Dungeon Crawl Classics are directly compatible with the Aftermath! game.

Because the underlying principle is identical, the two systems remain directly dice-compatible today. An Aftermath! Gamesmaster can freely borrow the full DCC dice chain for Saving Throws, Ability Checks, or even weapon damage without breaking anything. Conversely, a DCC Judge looking for an older pedigree can point to that 1980 optional rule and smile.

It is a small thing, perhaps. But it is one more reminder that Aftermath! was never content to stay inside the conventional polyhedral box. Even its optional rules were already reaching for the strange dice that would not become fashionable for another generation.

Aftermath! Restrospective

 The year was 1980. We had all three Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardcovers in our hands. The brand split would become official the following year when the Moldvay Basic Set and Cook Expert Set arrived. Fantasy still dominated the hobby, and the other major systems of the moment were RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, Bushido, The Fantasy Trip, and Chivalry & Sorcery.

Outside of pure fantasy sat a solid selection of alternatives: Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha for post-apocalyptic play, Traveller for interstellar adventure, Top Secret for Cold War espionage, and FGU’s own Space Opera for detailed science fiction. And then there was Aftermath!.

That last title is the reason this archive exists. Released in 1981 by Fantasy Games Unlimited, it arrived right in the middle of the early-’80s boom—a dense, simulationist post-holocaust game from the same design team that had already given us Bushido. While Gamma World leaned into mutants and gonzo survival, Aftermath! aimed for something grittier and more grounded: realistic firearms, resource tracking, lethality, and a flexible “you decide the nature of the Ruin” approach.

This was the landscape it entered.

My brother and I were die-hard Aftermath! fans all the way through 1989. For a full decade that single system drove nearly every game we ran—modern, science fiction, and fantasy alike. We never jumped on GURPS when the first edition appeared in 1986, and we only discovered Champions later, so Aftermath! became our first true generic toolkit. It handled everything we threw at it.

That flexibility is one of the design's quiet strengths. The same core mechanics that let you track calories and ammunition in a ruined city could just as easily support a high-tech scavenger campaign or a low-magic fantasy setting. Once you internalized the skill system, the combat tables, and the resource rules, you had a single engine that could power almost any genre. For us, that was more than enough.

Sure, the focus was gritty survival, but the core skill mechanics were straightforward: d20 roll-under. Once you understood the system, it played fast and clean. Most of the heavier math lived in the hex-grid combat rules. Learn your character’s basic speed value, and you could run theater-of-the-mind fights without ever touching a map or a calculator. That combination—detailed when you wanted the detail, quick when you didn’t—was a big part of why the game stuck with us for so long.

The math was never as bad during actual play as popular opinion later claimed. Most of it lived on the character sheet as a handful of straightforward calculations you did once and then used. Balancing a GURPS character has always been more work than the handful of simple figures Aftermath! required—numbers you could handle with a basic school calculator if you even needed one at all.

Today, a clean d20 roll-under system feels familiar again thanks to games like Dragonbane. Aftermath! was already doing that approach smoothly more than forty years ago. Character improvement was dirt simple—use a skill, get better at it. The game also included solid vehicle rules and covered every kind of military hardware you could imagine, long before Twilight: 2000 arrived to claim that territory.

And the game sat firmly in the middle of the Cold War and the nuclear scare of the late 1970s and early 1980s, right at the peak of Armageddon fears. We were still a few years away from The Day After and the wave of Cold War scare films that followed, so every bit of enjoyment—TV, music, gaming, ordinary life—carried an unspoken urgency. It felt like something we were obliged to do, in case we lost it all tomorrow.

These were the early 1980s—a time I lived through and loved. The Atari VCS sat under the television, Car Wars was the hot new board game on the table, arcades still felt like the future, Reagan was in the White House, MTV had just begun beaming a nonstop stream of neon and synthesizers into living rooms, and Miami Vice was turning pastel suits and synthesizer soundtracks into high style. Everything seemed loud, colorful, and urgent at once. For a few short years, the culture carried a strange, electric optimism even while the nuclear shadow hung over it. That bright moment was never going to last. The Challenger disaster in 1986 marked the era's spiritual end for many of us. The neon glow dulled, the confident swagger of the early decade faded, and the more cynical, self-aware 1990s began to take shape.

And Aftermath! was what you reached for when Monty Haul AD&D started to feel boring and you wanted a real challenge. This was a world where your character could go into shock and bleed out from a single .22 LR round fired from a cheap hunting rifle. There were no levels to protect you, no rising hit-point totals that turned experienced characters into walking tanks. A lucky shot, a bad roll, or a moment of carelessness could end a campaign in seconds. That lethality forced better decisions, tighter teamwork, and a constant awareness that the world itself was the enemy.

Aftermath! showed us what we had to look forward to if we lost it all. So we enjoyed life, went to church, ate healthy, worked out, did our homework, had parents with jobs, took care of younger siblings, and participated in society as responsible citizens. We had a lot to lose, and our lives depended on everyone taking part in something we all believed in.

In the end, Aftermath! was more than just another post-apocalyptic game on the shelf in 1981. For us, it became a lens—one that made the fragile world outside the game table feel sharper and more precious. Its unforgiving rules, straightforward d20 core, and relentless focus on survival never pretended that characters were special or destined for greatness. They were simply people trying to stay alive in a broken world. That honesty is what kept us coming back for a full decade, long after other systems came and went.

Looking back now, the game still feels like a pure product of its moment: the early 1980s, when the neon was bright, the stakes felt high, and the future was never quite guaranteed. Aftermath! didn’t just simulate the end of the world. For a while, it helped us appreciate the one we still had.

The Dawn Rises...

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