The Fallout show on Amazon Prime is actually good, the latest video game property to successfully push back a decades-old curse that has sent similar adaptations plummeting to the bottom of box office rankings and critics’ opinions. And, like any good mass media property, the Fallout TV show has inspired interest in other formats. The contemporary video games were already big hits; with the newest one being six years old the tail effect has been relatively modest (both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 did re-enter Steam’s top 10 most played games, but that impact has already abated). In the smaller TTRPG world the impact on the official licensed Fallout RPG has been a bit more pronounced, with both the game’s core rulebook and its most recent supplement staying in the DriveThruRPG top ten for weeks now. Much as happened for Cyberpunk Red in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout is seeing a wave of renewed TTRPG interest.

The problem is that the official Fallout RPG is, like a large swathe of licensed RPGs, not that good. Rushed to release and full of ill-considered design decisions, the Fallout RPG is at best executed messily. To make things even more complicated, the game came after a number of other adaptations, even including a complete other RPG also published by Modiphius (Wasteland Warfare)! So if you want to get Fallout to your gaming table, what should you do? Admittedly a lot of the worst qualities of the official Fallout RPG had to do with its rushed and badly executed launch; a lot was fixed in the (fairly hefty) errata for the game. And, in a world where D&D Fifth Edition is the most popular RPG, most of Modiphius’ sins with Fallout are merely on the same level of Wizards’ sins in the space. That said, ‘not bad in comparison’ doesn’t mean good. In addition to revisiting the official Fallout RPG, I’m going to take a look at an indie entry which has some strong potential for helping you and your group play around in a wasteland of your own, Aaron King’s After the Bomb.

Fallout 2d20 with fresh eyes

War never changes, but RPGs do, and luckily for all of us, ‘Fallout the RPG’ has changed. The Modiphius 2d20 game which is the official Fallout game is not quite in the sorry state it was in when I first reviewed it, but don’t mistake that for me saying it’s now good. Let’s discuss what has stayed the same. Fallout the RPG is still a game focused on the Fallout 4 setting within Fallout’s canon, and stays laser focused on the Bethesda interpretation of said canon. As anyone born before 1996 can attest, this isn’t great. First off, the Interplay games had more nuance and were simply closer to tabletop games in their breadth (cue the anecdote about Fallout using GURPS at some point in its development). Second, even if we concede that the Bethesda games did some good work in expanding the setting, Fallout 4 is the weakest of the mainline games (Fallout 76 is not a mainline game and, while middling at best, has an at least interesting setting and doesn’t mess with the faction backstories too much) and the one with the most ‘gamey’ mechanics.

And that brings me to the second issue. The Fallout RPG takes a relatively light, high-level system (2d20) and tries to use it to emulate video game logic. You know how your favorite part of Fallout 4 was carrying around 20 different ammo types and never having enough of the one you needed? Yup, there are literally 20 ammo types in this game. At the very least scrap was distilled a little bit so you’re not scrabbling around to find adhesive the whole time, but the level of detail was not thought through; I’d even argue salvaging could make a satisfying mini-game in a way that cursing the random table for giving you railroad spikes instead of 10mm ammo won’t.

And that’s the final thing, the element that really threw sand into the gears when I reviewed this for the first time. What little GM support there is was either bad (and I’ll talk about that with the errata in a moment) or placed off in a poorly considered and worse packaged ‘Gamemaster’s Kit’ where Modiphius has given you the privilege of spending 36 dollars on three sheets of cardboard gewgaws and a stapled booklet that has all the rules for location creation in it (and by the way, it’s sold out! Hope you weren’t expecting to actually GM an original campaign in this). It is the most rankly cynical, money-grubbing, and self-serving product decision I’ve ever seen in roleplaying games, both for the absolute pricing of the product as well as using adversarial economics to get most GMs to buy modules instead.

At the time I wrote my original review, the Gamemaster’s Kit face-slap was augmented by an utterly loathsome bestiary, arguably the nexus point of my complaints about the editorial quality of the game. Since I last reviewed the game, though, there have been two rounds of errata. The errata document starts with a single line stating that all the missing page references have been fixed. In other words, if you already bought a book, they don’t care, because they already have your money. So already the errata is useless for anyone with an original version of the physical book. The rest of the entries are better, but they’re pretty awful given what they imply. Errata should not have replacement stat blocks in it. Cyberpunk Red had one misprinted difficulty table in it, and it was a big oopsie and they were very apologetic about it to those who got first run books. The Fallout errata fixes six tables, three entire stat blocks, and four enemy abilities, making me wonder if these changes were from really bad first round play reports as opposed to typos. Not since actively playing Exalted (where the errata got its own product entry it was so large) have I seen error correction with such galling implications.

In short, the Fallout RPG remains bad. It is a cautionary tale about buying licensed RPGs, even more so than my absolute favorites Root and Avatar. Is it better? Technically yes; the errata did fix many of the mechanical problems that made the version I first read so offensively sloppy. Can you play it? Well yeah, but millions of people play D&D 5e so that’s hardly a high bar. Is there a better choice? Now that’s a good question. Yes. Yes there is.

A potential alternative: After the Bomb

It’s worth noting that After the Bomb is an option I find compelling for playing Fallout, but it’s hardly the only one. The first Fallout hack I ever read was for GURPS, and I believe it predated Fallout 3 (and as such was for GURPS 3e). This is just to say that Fallout has been popular in the TTRPG sphere for a long time, and there are a wealth of options out there across the crunch spectrum and the story-driven spectrum as well. What makes After the Bomb particularly interesting, though, is that it’s a contemporary design, splits the difference between emulation and abstraction, and focuses on the exploration that to me has always been one of the elements that has set Fallout apart from other video game RPGs of its age (the late 90s). And, just to add one more inducement, it’s free, which serves as a great foil to money-extracting Modiphius and their sorry excuse for a Gamemaster’s Kit.

After the Bomb is a relatively light game, using a d20 for resolution and adjudicating most challenges in the game by rolling said d20, adding an attribute, and comparing to a target number. Beyond that, characters can earn advances as they level up; advances cover equipment, special abilities and skills. Currency is all boiled down to junk, which can be used to purchase consumables and power abilities. Like many OSR games, the mechanics are sparse but serviceable. Where After the Bomb sings is in its exploration support. After tracing a map of your home city onto hex paper (a cool idea, and one you can do digitally using my American Roadtrip campaign guidance), you populate the hexes with various threats, resources, factions, and settlements. The factions and settlements provide a lot of the meat here. Factions are generated via seven short spark tables and a few different suggested ways to combine them, but the work that goes into making them interesting in the game is captured in both the faction’s needs as well as questions which get at how they feel about other factions. For settlements, the government and status quo establish what’s going on when players first discover the settlement, while resources and lacks drive how the players can interact with the settlement. There are also random services for characters to visit while in town, and even some settlement building mechanics if the characters either get attached to a settlement or strike out to create one on their own. While none of these subsystems are all that expansive they still all seem to get to the heart of what makes a faction or settlement interesting in a Fallout context, interspersing the typical post-apocalyptic ‘resources and lacks’ with the kind of weirder ideas that help give Fallout so much character.

After the Bomb is a fan game. It doesn’t have the polish of Modiphius’ offerings, but even so it provides everything a group would need to have a fun game set in a Fallout wasteland. And as much as it doesn’t have the same systemic depth as 2d20, it still succeeds at providing a game that a GM could and would want to run, and does so much better than the Modiphius offering. Beyond poor execution, the Modiphius Fallout RPG feels like a lacking RPG overall because it doesn’t inspire or incite in the ways good RPGs should. Reading After the Bomb, especially the settlement section, got me excited thinking about how a plot arc around a settlement would play out, and how characters would make that story interesting. Meanwhile, Modiphius went straight into the weird end of Fallout for their starting adventure with the Zetans, and it just…doesn’t feel that interesting. Fallout should feel a little weird. Mid-game ghoulification should absolutely be a mechanic in the book, like it is in After the Bomb.

There is a certain key market for licensed games that just want their experience to look and feel like the property the license is for. If you’re able to sit down at the table, play The Ink Spots and say ‘war never changes’ while pretending to be Vault Dwellers then it’s all good; even better if the art includes some pictures of Vault Boy. The problem is that the bar set by ‘consuming more content from the property’ is so incredibly low. While I blame Modiphius for creating a cynical, corporatized game, I also kind of blame Fallout fans for going out and buying this game in droves. These purchases aren’t driven by asking questions about what you’d actually want Fallout at the tabletop to be. Instead, they’re driven by the right names on all the items and monsters and then by adventures that imitate plot lines from the games that we’ve all already played. Even when the core game is serviceable, being fan service is a goal that should be beneath a role-playing game. The point is to create our own adventures, our own characters, and our own stories. Good licensed games, whether trad ones like FFG’s Star Wars games or more narrative ones like Cowboy Bebop, all make that possible and add to the original story. And hey, if the game is actually good, it still works for fan service. No one loses when we don’t settle for mediocrity.

If you’re interested in Fallout, I’d go check out After the Bomb. It’s a free game and, between liberal use of proper names and sharing a name with a Palladium supplement, it’s not quite up to standard to be sold. Even so, the game in there is incredibly solid, focusing on how the most interesting conflicts and characters of the wasteland can be generated instead of copied. I also think After the Bomb is a useful conversation piece at a gaming table that’s interested in the Fallout setting. Do you want to play-act Fallout 4 over again, or do you want to generate a new map with a new wasteland? If a lighter game like After the Bomb doesn’t work for your table, what will? A more narrative, tighter experience like Apocalypse World, or something more simulation-based like Savage Worlds or GURPS? In cases like Fallout, having the official license doesn’t make your game better, nor does it suddenly erase the fan works that came before it. Unfortunately, though, many people don’t care, and especially for those who will be playing instead of GMing, just having the right art and the right content, no matter how sloppy it’s executed, will be enough. As an RPG critic, continually pushing on licensed RPGs to be better is like an unceasing war. And as we all know, war never changes.

After the Bomb is available on itch.io.

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