Heroes of the End: Lizard Mutations

Like Beast, Lizard Mutagen was designed for military applications above all else. The difference is that Lizard wasn’t designed to enhance a soldier’s killing power, but to give them some of the endurance and particularly regenerative abilities found in some lizard’s tails. Hardened, enhanced scales provide better protection than anything in nature, from both environmental

Heroes of the End: Elf-A Mutations

Elf-A is one of the strangest mutations lines, developed as a personal obsession by its creator using the excuse of the XE037 outbreak. It was not successful, as some of the test subjects began to emit ionizing radiation, though whether that bug has since been worked out by Maiar’s insane experiments on his own or

Heroes of the End: M1 Powered Armor

M1 Powered Armor (In keeping with the US’s lust for naming things M1) is an absolute marvel of engineering, officially rolled out on July 4th, 2038. A few months before things started to go downhill. The military was still working out exactly how it wanted to use the stuff after taking delivery of the suits

Heroes of the End: Mark of the Yellow King

The Cult of the Yellow King is a completely different opponent than anything the players have faced so far. Ferals behave with a degree of intelligence, but they can’t buck the fundamental premise of ‘my actions need to lead towards killing surviving non-Ferals’. Zombies are idiot things unless a Master is nearby. Mi-Go are intelligent

Heroes of the End: Come into my lair

Come into my lair, said the spider to the zombie. It’s definitely not filled with webs, and webs hiding grenades, and poison, and extra arms carrying extra guns. Spider mutations give a character all sorts of advantages when it comes to slowing the enemy down and refusing to be slowed, themselves. They can get past

Heroes of the End: Exodii Tech

The players have struck up relations with the Exodii group that landed nearby, so it’s time to talk about Exodii tech. One of the baffling parts of the CDDA Exodii besides them siloing off cybernetics is that they’re meant to be an expeditionary wing of a large force with its own military, hence seeing things

Heroes of the End: Support and New Weaponry! Survival requires firepower!

The basic firearms and equipment are good at killing standard zombies and monsters. But as I scale back the Strategy Layer and focus on the tactical more, and as combat has been a lot of fun in this game, it’s been time to examine a few things. One: They don’t have a good way to

Heroes of the End: The Death Road to Boston

The team has decided to go on the Death Road to Boston. This isn’t an especially long journey in terms of miles; going from southern New Hampshire to Massachusetts would be easy in a time when the roads weren’t clogged with abandoned vehicles and towns weren’t crawling with the dead. It’d be about 2 hours

Heroes of the End: Update on Play So Far

Given we’ve been playing for quite awhile now, I thought it’d be useful to give an update on what’s worked, what’s been cut, and what’s been adjusted in Heroes so far. One of the biggest things has been cutting the Goals system and simply upping EXP per session. I get the design logic of the

Heroes of the End: Dimensional Fatigue

The creatures that strike during Portal Storms generally leave when they are over. The Person, the Appendages, the Absence, etc all attack when reality is weak and then fade away when things stabilize. Creatures I’m terming ‘Marauders’ do not. These creatures come through the tears and weakpoints created by reality destabilizing, and they’re here to

Heroes of the End: Oh Deer

One of the insidious strategies of XE037 for causing gaian collapse is its mutation of random wildlife. On an individual level this often makes the mutants more suited to surviving in the world the way it is now. However, it also causes them to ravage the ecosystem. A moose who is even larger and more

Heroes of the End: You Feel A Buzzing In Your Senses…

The Portal Storms continue, even if they are not as enormous as the blow that collapsed the world at the true ‘cataclysm’. XE037 has weakened the barrier between worlds as part of its general strategy, and now dark things periodically break through areas of dimensional fatigue. Note not everything that comes through a Portal Storm

Heroes of the End: Zombie Lifecycle

An individual zombie is not a world-beater. The standard XE037 Zombie is slow, stupid, clumsy, and unarmed. Some bipedal animal corpses will retain their mobility better, but even then, they’re uncoordinated compared to a real dog or wolf or moose. They have sharper nails and teeth than a normal human, but an uncoordinated person flailing

Heroes of the End: In Hindsight, Perhaps We Resorted to Cannibalism A Little Early and Often

It seems like every post-apocalyptic story has rampant cannibalism. There’s always roving bandits or madmen who are farming humans for food or eagerly eating captives. In actual CDDA being a Cannibal is a huge advantage to the point that it costs character points if you’re using the points system, because you get mood bonuses for

Heroes of the End: Research and Production Basics

R&D is a critical part of progress in the story. Understanding what the hell they’re fighting and how to survive against it is an important overarching task for the Heroes. As they encounter strange things, alien technology, high tech equipment, etc, the players will have the ability to examine it and try to learn about

Heroes of the End: Mi-Go Stats

I wrote up the dark aliens that are the Mi-Go before, but now they’ve got mechanics. They’ve shown up, menaced the players, kidnapped survivors, and narrowly gotten fended off with a shotgun. Ironically, guns are far less of a surefire way to deal with Mi-Go than they were in CDDA! Standard Mi-Go were easily dispatched

Heroes of the End: Haven Basics

The heroes having now rescued 40 people holed up in a high school gym and brought them to their stolen mansion, they’ve established their first base. It’s not a true haven yet (that’ll take time and more people) but 40 people is enough to start building stuff and digging in. Havens will be encountered around

Heroes of the End: Fast and Slow Death

One of the oddities of normal CDDA is how thoroughly the human race is dead, how quickly. To the point that the protagonist is generally surprised at the beginning: They’re asked to come into work on a day off or something, arrive, and find everyone dead and madness reigning. The explanation in the official fluff

Heroes of the End: High Tech Hustle

High Tech stuff has a few caveats. Much of it was under development when the world ended, so much of it has plenty of kinks to work out. The players have the location and codes to get into the black areas of the Rivtech Innovation Campus if/when they make their way there for bonus dungeon

Heroes of the End: Moving Around

They’re getting close to unlocking the campaign map (after all, the initial story is in XEDRA-03 and its environs; their first base is being established in Director Salacia’s mansion and they’re about to go rescue whoever they can from Steuben as it collapses to bring them there) and so I thought I’d write up my

Heroes of the End: Home Alone, Zams

Okay, turns out I have another rules post I need to get finished for Heroes. We’ve seen grenades, thrown rocks, guns, fists, claws, and the 3’ Steel Pipe, Ever The Friend of Humankind, but what about another obvious way to deal with extremely stupid zombies? That’s right, traps! Given these things come straight at whoever

Narrative Theory: The False Romance of the Lone Survivor

This isn’t strictly a Heroes post, but rather a more general one about survival and post apocalyptics and the romantic concept of the lone or small group of survivors with no other backing. One of the things I enjoy in stories like Phoenix Point is their relentless disdain for the concept of the lone survivor.

Heroes of the End: Starting Location: XEDRA-03 White Hills Facility, New Hampshire

XEDRA-03 White Hills is located in New Hampshire, housing some of the largest portal generators in existence. It is one of the primary bases for exploration of other worlds, and the first base to bring back samples of XE037. XEDRA-03 White Hills was established way back in the seventies, when XEDRA was first being established;

Heroes of the End: Grab Bag of Grenades

A grab bag of final rules before we get started on the map and mission stuff this week! I know I’ve been doing a lot of Heroes of the End and people are generally here for the Hams or campaigns, but we’re actually playing now so it’s been eating a lot of my time preparing.

Heroes of the End: Agents of the Enemy, the Archdemons

The name for these creatures in CDDA is the ‘Lieutenants’, but that implies a sort of hierarchy, command structure, and intentionality that simply isn’t there. Particularly in my version of what’s happening. Thus, in keeping with the Exodii calling XE037 The Enemy in a religious sense, and the fact that they’re the ones likely to

Heroes of the End: Alpha

I admit, Alpha gave me some trouble finding a theme for it. Human+ is a little harder to do in a system where Gifts already improve your human abilities. For instance, in CDDA, Alpha has a bunch of mutations that are just ‘+2 to a stat’ or something. Which is immensely significant in CDDA, where

Heroes of the End: Chimera

Fight. Feed. FORWARD. Chimera are driven to destroy the undead and other horrors, capable of surviving on the flesh of the mutated and normally poison enemies to fuel their powers. They have a wide array of natural weapons and ways to attack with more than one of them in one turn. A fully powered Chimera

Heroes of the End: Feralization

Ferals are humans who have proven vulnerable to XE037. One of the interesting parts of CDDA’s apocalypse is that it doesn’t rely on the zombies. The zombies didn’t help, but unevolved zombies are a threat even a completely untrained person can handle one on one. Had everything been firing on all cylinders, the zombie situation

Heroes of the End: We Are Here To Protect You

Before the end, there were significant strides in unmanned defense technology. Both for police and military use. Part of what drove the initial riots and protests was the rollout of the new police bots; several ‘robotic officer involved’ deaths hit the national news. This is because the robotics have extremely sophisticated programming in the sense

Heroes of the End: Beans, Bullets, and Barter: The differences between commodities and currency

One of the interesting aspects of the Cataclysm is that it isn’t exactly post-apocalyptic. The End just happened. Civil society had been teetering for months, but the final blow just came as the game is starting. There hasn’t been time for a total realignment of economics and most economic activity is barter by necessity. All

Heroes of the End: Legions of the Dead

As anyone who has played CDDA knows, there’s way more than the basic zombie. Most zombies will be variations on the basic template, having some slightly boosted abilities, different gear in the case of people who died in body armor, and in the case of still human-ish mutated zombies, some additional unusual abilities. Let’s look

Heroes of the End: Gifts and Soaks

Gifts are the building block of characters in Cardinal. However, if you look through the Gifts in Urban Jungle, for instance, you get far less ‘power set’ style Gift trees than you did in Myriad Song. I suspect this is because the ‘powerset’ approach in Myriad Song was to account for people coming from an

Heroes of the End: Tooth and Claw

Guns and knives aren’t the only way to fight against the doom that’s come to New England. If need be, if you’re cornered, even the most untrained survivor may have to resort to their fists and feet. Thankfully, survivors who know what they’re doing (or have crazy mutant powers!) can do far more than flail

Heroes of the End: The Skills to Survive

The only Skill not in the game from normal Cardinal is Transport. It simply wasn’t going to come up enough as something you check against, especially as vehicles will not have a role on the tactical missions. Besides, the Vehicles skill in CDDA itself is mostly useless, too! (It just affects how well you recover

Heroes of the End: Sample Professions

So, I originally pondered replacing Type with Drive, the thing that keeps you going at the worst, but then I remembered I don’t really like Type to begin with and hey, we’re using Skill Marks so there’s no need for it. Honestly, one of the (several) issues I have with Actual Urban Jungle is that

Heroes of the End: The Map and Resources

So, one of the other concepts for Heroes is that time passes. The story will be taking place in a map of a section of New Hampshire that was, because of the presence of the XEDRA-03 White Hills facility act 1 takes place in, quite important to XEDRA’s work and contains multiple critical points. Things

Heroes of the End Faction: The Exodii

The Exodii are one of those things in the original CDDA that is rather controversial. I’ve given my own take on it before; I like their concept a lot and think they as a faction add plenty to the setting, I just dislike moving much of CBM acquisition to them both fluff and mechanics wise.

Heroes of the End Faction: Hell’s Raiders

For the most part, combat against other humans is rare. Most humans have no desire to get into fights with other humans right now. Firstly, if you want to loot and pillage, there’s tons of abandoned property to break into. Zombies are notably easier to distract, sneak past, or steal from than human beings, given

Heroes of the End: Background Concepts

So, while we don’t have ‘you are a wolf’ (well, we DO, but it requires exposure to mutagen) we do have a variety of backgrounds a character spent much of their life in. One of the important things about Cardinal’s stats is that having a d4 in a stat is not bad. If you don’t

Heroes of the End Fluff: Symptoms of XE037 Infection

Humans infected with XE037 (which just means humans, by now) display a variety of effects. The most common, pre-revivification, is a degradation of impulse control and an increased propensity for risk taking. Complete and total psychosis appeared in a relatively small portion of the human population, though some of those affected by lesser symptoms at

Heroes of the End: Tag Sketch (Subject to change)

There’s no extensive system of modifications because we’re doing guns in a much more abstracted sense. In reality, the basic merits of various small arms systems against one another aren’t usually that important militarily; what matters is having the same capabilities. An AK-47 has worse ergonomics, it’s older, etc, but it’s still an automatic rifle

Heroes of the End Fluff: The Whisperers in the Darkness: Mi-Go

The Mi-Go are one of the consistent plagues that will dog the heroes. They have nothing at all to do with XE037, save that they follow it (and other interdimensional disasters) like opportunistic scavengers. They are somehow able to avoid infection, and they do not suffer some of the side effects of interdimensional travel that

Heroes of the End Fluff: The Absent Horror

XE037 is something the researchers at XEDRA never anticipated. They had encountered sapient near-earth creatures before. They had run from surveys on planets overrun by carnivorous plants or strange fae. They’d nearly brought back lethal viruses before. But much of their work had stayed rather Stargate, so to speak. Go through the portal, scamper about,

Heroes of the End: INJECT THE OMEGA SERUM, THERE’S NO TIME TO TEST: Mutation Basics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwO5hAwg5jI (I’ve found what I want to use as the game’s general theme, I think!) They’ve chosen a mixture of Portal Storm and Lab, using a location I remembered existed called a Distorted Lab. Someplace that was working directly on the portal/extradimensional travel tech that exploded in a very bad way when the Portal Storms

Heroes of the End: My Me Is Augmented

Cybernetics. CBMS. Augmentation. In the last forty years (and especially the last ten) these have become an increasingly common part of life in this timeline. From the advanced medical prosthetics that started it all (for lost limbs and spinal injuries) to the modern compact power systems and direct augmentations installed by pre-programmed ‘auto-docs’, these augmentations

Heroes of the End: Tools of Destruction and Salvation

Actual Cataclysm is a game full of an enormous number of hand-to-hand weapons, guns, and forms of armor. I’ve used everything from a simple rock in a sock to an experimental plasma cannon, from wrapping heavy carpeting around my arms to ward off bites a little to heavy military armor to chainmail. So naturally, you’d

Heroes of the End: 2039 and the Fall

The 2039 of Heroes of the End is different from ours (well, from what I suspect of ours; I do not have a time machine), changed by encounters with extradimensional technology and slight differences in the time stream starting in the 1970s. The very first encounters with other dimensions happened then (this is a bit

Heroes of the End: Basics of Zombie Biology

Let’s start the actual mechanical work by examining one of the core enemies that players are going to be fighting: The Zombie. You know them. They’re jerks! A decaying human corpse, swaying as it walks, its eyes dripping with a strange black fluid and its face contorted by a constant expression of rage. You know

Heroes of the End: The Scenario Options

The first thing the players will need to decide (someday; we’re in the middle of a group hams game right now so I have a lot of time to work on this probably) is what Scenario they’re starting in. This affects who the PCs can be, what sorts of abilities they start with, and how

Heroes of the End: Intro and Design Goals

Since there’s some interest in modifying Urban Jungle here (I apologize for not continuing the Mercenaries for awhile; I both got a new Warhams idea on that trip that sent me back to writing it, plus it’s harder to write-up than I expected because so much of the table-talk was done over voice including action