What Aftermath! Does Well

What Aftermath! Does Well (and Where It Stumbles), Circa 1981

When Aftermath! landed from Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1981, the post-holocaust RPG field was still young and mostly split between gonzo mutation romps and more grounded survival exercises. Gamma World had already staked out the mutant-and-relic end of the spectrum with a light, adventurous tone. The Morrow Project offered a specific military premise and cryogenic team structure. Metamorphosis Alpha remained essentially a ship-based curiosity. Into that mix, Paul Hume and Robert Charrette (fresh off Bushido) delivered a three-book boxed set that tried something different: a serious role-playing simulation toolkit for life after the Ruin, whatever form that Ruin took.

It is worth judging the game by the standards of its moment—against AD&D, RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, Traveller, Top Secret, Space Opera, and the early post-apoc titles—rather than by the streamlined systems that came decades later.

What It Does Well

Flexibility as a toolkit. Book One presents a setting-agnostic core system. The nature of the catastrophe, the years elapsed since it, the residual technology level, and even the presence of non-human intelligence are left to the referee. Nuclear war, plague, ecological collapse, alien invasion, or a world of intelligent apes are all explicitly supported. This stands in contrast to Gamma World’s fixed mutant-heavy milieu or The Morrow Project’s specific frozen-team backstory. In an era when most games handed you a ready-made world, Aftermath! handed you the tools and said, “build.” That open-endedness remains one of its enduring strengths.

Skill-based characters without classes or levels. Six attributes (Wit, Will, Strength, Deftness, Speed, Health), seven Talents (Charismatic, Combative, Communicative, Esthetic, Mechanical, Natural, Scientific), and a large skill list form the backbone. Starting scores derive from attributes plus a relevant Talent; Development Points buy further improvement. Age actually matters for initial skills and points. There is no class list and no experience-point ladder that inflates hit points. A .22 in the hands of a desperate scavenger remains dangerous to a seasoned survivor. This was closer in spirit to RuneQuest’s skill emphasis than to AD&D’s class-and-level structure, and more simulation-oriented than Tunnels & Trolls’ light-hearted simplicity. For groups that wanted characters defined by what they could do rather than by an archetypal package, it delivered.

Detailed, lethal combat and equipment modeling. Firearms, piecemeal armor by location, hit location charts, and realistic wound effects receive extensive treatment. The combat sequence is laid out with a flowchart; the designers clearly wanted the table to feel the difference between a clean shot and a messy one. In a period when many systems still treated modern weapons as slightly more damaging swords, Aftermath! treated them as the decisive, often fatal tools they are. Scavenging, nutrition, disease, radiation, and the practical problems of keeping vehicles or high-tech gear running also receive attention. The result is a game that can model the scavenged, mismatched gear of a Road Warrior-style setting with unusual fidelity for 1981.

Encouragement of community and long-term survival. While the rules support banditry and warlordism if players choose that path, the text leans toward rebuilding and keeping hope alive. The referee tools for detailing the environment and the emphasis on non-combat skills support campaigns that are more than endless firefights. That tone distinguishes it from pure kill-or-be-killed fantasies.

Where It Is Weaker

Complexity and organization. The system is dense. Attributes generate multiple derived values; skills have hierarchical prerequisites reflecting post-Ruin knowledge scarcity; combat involves location rolls, armor interactions, and action-phase tracking. Contemporary reviewers noted the two-page combat flowchart and the sheer volume of calculations. Material is spread across the three books with imperfect indexing—some character-creation information appears in sections marked for the referee. Compared with the relative accessibility of Gamma World, the elegant skill resolution of RuneQuest, or even the denser but more focused systems of Traveller and Space Opera, Aftermath! demanded more upfront investment and ongoing bookkeeping. Groups that preferred “playable without a lot of work” often bounced off it.

Character generation time and lethality. Building a fully realized survivor can take hours the first time through. The point-allocation approach and the large skill list reward careful planning but punish casual creation. Once play begins, the same realism that makes firearms dangerous also makes characters fragile. A lucky shot can end a long-developed survivor. That was intentional—simulation over cinematic durability—but it sits uneasily beside the more forgiving (or level-inflated) resilience of AD&D characters or the lighter tone of many contemporary games.

Uneven emphasis. Combat and technical detail receive disproportionate space relative to social interaction, long-term community building, or narrative tools. The system can support those elements, but the rules themselves lean hard into the tactical and logistical. In an era already full of detailed combat systems, this focus sometimes felt like more of the same rather than a balanced whole.

In Its Time

Against AD&D it offered skills and modern lethality instead of classes and hit-point bloat. Against RuneQuest it shared a skill orientation but added far more post-industrial simulation. Against Gamma World it traded gonzo accessibility for gritty flexibility. Against Traveller and Space Opera it matched the period’s taste for detail while focusing the detail on survival rather than starships or interstellar politics. Against Tunnels & Trolls and Top Secret it was simply heavier.

Later designs would learn to capture realistic firearms and location-based damage with less overhead, and toolkit approaches would become more common. But in 1981, Aftermath! was one of the clearest statements that a post-holocaust game could be a serious simulation rather than a mutant dungeon crawl or a military special-ops scenario. Its strengths—open-ended setting design, skill-driven characters, and uncompromising lethality—still reward groups willing to meet the system on its own terms. Its weaknesses—density, organization, and the time cost of mastery—explain why many players of the era preferred lighter alternatives even while admiring what the boxed set attempted.

The Ruin is what you make of it. The Aftermath! game simply insisted that you do the work.