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A long, long time ago, something bad happened to Earth. Long enough that it doesn't matter for this story. And if it ever does matter, we'll find out together. They say the sun was yellow when It happened. The sun is red now.
Some call It the Great Catastrophe. Some call it the Big Mistake. Some call it the Unmaking.
Nobody knows what It was. But that doesn't matter now.
The world is not what it once was. In its place is a mosaic of alternate realities, super-science run wild. The people are twisted mockeries of what we, the players would consider human. They are augmented, somehow. The landscapes are war-torn, remnants of wars long past, and wars from after the Unmaking.
To learn more about Mallubimbah, the primary setting where the game will take place, read on…
Mallubimbah is on the eastern coast of Australia. The name is taken from the ancient indiginous name for the area around Newcastle, NSW - Malubimba. I took some liberties with the spelling and some of the pronunciation due to the fact that quite a long time has passed.
As far as the characters are concerned, Mallubimbah is a lush river valley on the eastern coast of a land known as Oz. The crumbling, mostly-intact ruins of an Ancient city sits at the mouth of the river, on the sea. The sea is called Tetai Rehua by the locals. The city is called “the Knuckle,” and is the de-facto capital of Mallubimbah.
Chief Koen Bungaree rules with a fair and even hand from his home in the Knuckle.
The population of Mallubimbah is mainly human (mostly mutant), with a smattering of mutated animals and plants.
The majority (or more precisely, a plurality) is a race known as the Yaroma, a hairy, humanoid species that's closely connected to nature. Perhaps a third of the population are Yaroma. Although they're the dominant species, they are known pejoratively as “Hairies.”
A breakaway sect of the Yaroma are called “Apes,” as they try to mimic the humans/Ancients, that came before.
Chief Koen is Yaroma and tries to bridge the gap between the traditional sect and the Apes.
About 25 klicks south on the coast is a bustling coastal settlement in the ruins of another Ancient city. This settlement calls itself Macquarie (some corruption thereof). It sits on a saltwater lagoon, which has access to the sea. This lagoon is called Arawa.
Above will be put into a settings category, once I figure out how to do subcategories on this wiki.
Below is musings on system:
Since I'm not going to use gamma world 7e in its basic form, since its skeleton is D&D4e, which is great for D&D type games, which are all about combat type situations and not really about stories, I'm walking back from that. But I like their click and lock origins, and if we use those origins as as basic skeleton, we still have the six attributes:
- Strength
- Constitution
- Dexterity
- Intelligence
- Wisdom
- Charisma
and ten skills:
- Acrobatics (Dex)
- Athletics (Str)
- Conspiracy (Int)
- Insight (Wis)
- Interaction (Cha)
- Mechanics (Int)
- Nature (Wis)
- Perception (Wis)
- Science (Int)
- Stealth (Dex)
That's two for dex, one for strength, none for con (Con is useful elsewhere, just for basic survival). Three for intelligence, three for wisdom, one for charisma. The implication in the book is that these are everyman skills (or more speciflcallly, skills every hero can do - later books introduce the idea of vocations, which I'll also probably adopt).
I like dice pools, and exploding dice, so I'll probably adopt those. I also like platonic solids, and dislike those pretenders, the d10s. They don't belong (I'm a mathematician with an appreciation for aesthetics, so what?)
So here's what I have:
Attributes are rated in numbers. Those numbers correspond to a number of six sided dice that are rolled. The average character starts with 3 in each. Here's how I imagine it:
- 3 is average character
- 2 is average human from our world (we're soft compared to the post-apocalypse)
- 1 is basically infirm
Skills are ALSO rated in numbers. Those numbers correspond to four-sided dice. When one rolls a skill roll, they roll the six sided dice from their attribute plus the four sided dice from their skill. Each die explodes. Pick the highest.
Because d10s are not platonic solids, those aberrations are rolled by the GM as difficulty dice. They do NOT explode.
We shall call this the Timaeus mechanic.
