Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Roleplaying

Discussing all roleplaying games
Post Reply
User avatar
ScS of the Fraternity
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 2409
Joined: Fri Nov 28, 2003 10:46 pm
Location: Toronto
Contact:

Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Roleplaying

Post by ScS of the Fraternity »

Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Role-Playing
By Glutton Creeper Games

War... War never changes. In the early days of 2007 the world erupted in a great battle. Interplay fought Bethesda, video games fought and pen and paper RPGS, copyrights battled cross-industry licensing, and monkeys fought all challengers. This is the fallout of that war....

I am a huge fan of D20 and a nut for all things post-apocalyptic so, I was doubly excited when I flipped through my issue of Knights of the Dinner Table and found a review of Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Role-playing. With a little bit of research, I discovered that Exodus had been the licensed RPG for that great gaming explosion known to one and all as Fallout 3. The resulting nerd-gasm levelled 3 square blocks.

I’m a latecomer to the world of Fallout, but I’m a major fan of Fallout 3’s dark, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Skulking through the DC wastes hunting super-mutant masters is awesome enough, but set it to the dulcet tones of the Ink Spots singing “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” and you’ve cranked my dial all the way to 11. To this day, I still want to buy an ice cold Nukacola.

Buzz has it that Glutton Creeper originally licensed the Fallout setting from Interplay, but Bethesda shot the deal down after the fact. Glutton Creeper kept the product, changed a few names and altered the art. Glutton Creeper is little company, and seems to have but one single product line. They offer their books both in paper format and as pdfs, but since I’m a traditionalist, I shelled out the extra caps for the basic book Exodus: Survivor’s Guide. So I was in good spirits and eagerly awaited the arrival.

WARNING: The contents of this review are contaminated with radioactive bitterness

Exodus: Survivor’s Guide is an amateurish attempt to mix Fallout references with a bad adaption of D20 and Post-apocalyptic clichés. The book frequently copies the D20 Modern System Reference Document. There is shockingly little original content in this the book

Specifics:
Rules
Players may choose from three character races; human, Gul (a Ghoul from Fallout) and Transgenetic mutants (a supermutant). Once a character chooses a race, he or she must choose a Background, which gives them abilities and bonus class skills. After selecting a background, Exodus allows players to choose between one of two classes; the offensive or defensive class choice. This is essentially the same mechanism from Call of Cthulhu D20. A player might instead opt to use a custom character class, or, at higher levels the character may take advanced classes. After picking a character class, the player may select a Trait, each of which gives both a bonus to one skill or save and a penalty to another.

Once the player chooses a Trait, he or she must now choose an Occupation. Almost all of these occupations are identical to those found in D20 modern. Now, the player chooses a Talent, which is almost identical to the Talent Trees in D20 Modern. We still haven’t even picked our skills and feats. The extra steps in character creation seem needlessly complex. The advanced classes, like so many other things in this book, are lifted directly from D20 Modern and other previous books.

Exodus also offers players the option of customizing their own class. Players can select their progression in Attack Bonus, Hit Dice, Defence bonus and Saving Throws, and balance those factors against lower or higher skill point progression. It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t quite capture the same adaptability of Fallout 3’s point buy system for levelling up. In a game with so many advanced classes, it’s kind of superfluous. Still, nice work.

Beyond character creation, the book reprints nearly every rule from D20 Modern. There are a few new feats, changes to skills, and a few new combat options. Still, this book spends the vast majority of its space rehashing rules from D20 Modern, and doing a worse job of presenting the information. Even the equipment section is a poor pastiche of previous D20 productions.

Setting
For a book that purports to being a “Survivor’s Guide”, Exodus spends nearly no space describing the setting. Unlike many other D20 productions, this book offers no sample monsters or NPCs. Glutton Creeper does offer advanced modules for download, for a cost. I feel that they should have included something to wet a reader’s appetite.
Like just about every single post-apocalyptic setting, Exodus is set in the American Southwest. Granted, it’s a law of nature that every ‘Pocalyptic world must be set against a background of endless deserts. Exodus breaks the Geography down by the state and gives a very short description of some settlements and power groups. Aspiring DMs will need to work from scratch.

Sadly, Exodus skips over one of the most fascinating parts of the Fallout universe: The Vaults! It’s as though these hidden shelters vanished, or were never uncovered. This is a big disappointment to me, since I loved poking through the ruined vaults in Fallout 3.

There is a single solitary page in the back of the book that lists the popular brand names of products from around the time of the Exodus. This was a fantastic idea, and certainly one that I would have liked to have seen expanded. Part of the charm of the Fallout world was the aftershocks of American culture and consumerism. Amidst the ruins of civilization, survivors clamour for the taste of an ice cold Nukacola to wash down their box of tasty frosted Sugar Bombs. Exodus did come up with their own brands for drinks, cars and even guns. I would have preferred to see more brands, and more than just one single page devoted to the topic. It may be silly, but that’s the kind of thing what makes Fallout, and Exodus, more than mere rips off of Mad Max.

Art Work
Exodus mixes a variety of different art styles. The character races, classes and vehicles have a nice comic-style illustration. The style captures the dark but fun style of the game. Many of the feats, skills and traits come with their own illustration reminiscent of our beloved Vault Boy from Fallout 3. Given the time constraints, I think Glutton Creeper made a good compromise between the familiar smiling Vault Boy and their original creation. There are also a few war time draft posters scattered through the book. The artist masterfully captures the spirit of old World War Two flyers, encouraging pre-apocalyptic Americans to contribute to the war that would inevitably consume them all. It’s patriotic and ironic at the same time: I dub it Patrirony!

The very back of the book includes a number of advertisements for guns and armour, drawn in a cartoonish 50’s sci-fi style. I love the idea of advertising heavy weaponry to a ’50 style citizenry. The concept reminds me of Bioshock, where the citizens of Rapture were encouraged to buy ammunition and genetic mutations out of vending machines. Still, I would have preferred to see ads for a wider range of products, too. After you see an ad for Tesla Armour, the ¼ insert for Combat Armour seems kind of superfluous.

In addition to the wonderful commissioned art, the book features a number of stock photos. The USA maintains magnificent free public-domain photo archive. This is a wonderful resource for anyone working on a period-set RPG. I assure you, this Canadian is green with envy. I have seen a number of products utilize those archives to great effect – most notably Pinnacle Entertainment’s Weird War II: Blood on the Rhine. Exodus includes a few well chosen shots from the archives. I think that most of the shots are from the devastated World War II Germany, though I could easily be mistaken. In any case, including real photos of real destruction is a great way to convey a sense of realistic desolation.

Layout
Let’s get this unpleasantness out of the way right now. As a professional tech writer, document layout is kind of my bag. First off, this is a book with an elusive title. The website and copyright information suggest that this book is titled “Exodus: Survivor’s Guide”. However, the cover and cover page label it “Exodus: Post-apocalyptic Role-playing”. This is a minor gripe, but it’s indicative of the confused layout within.

The book is divided up by chapters, and large chapters are divided by sections. The book lists the chapters, and sections as headers on every even numbered page. This is a good idea, but the headers neglect to include the chapter number. This isn’t too bad of a problem, though for reasons that escape me, every right-hand page features a header that announces “Glutton Creeper Games”. It’s as if the Glutton Creeper team were terrified that a reader might forget who published the book. For some reason, page numbers are located on the top of the page rather than the bottom. It’s actually a little confusing, and might lead a reader to think that there are no page numbers at all. This might explain why the table of contents doesn’t list the page numbers. Fortunately, there is an index.

This is all small potatoes, but Glutton Creeper made a significant error in one department: page backgrounds. As I mentioned, Glutton Creeper made use of archive photos. Unfortunately, most of these were used as background to the text. The photos are only partially transparent, and thus many pages in the book are made marred by the dark and dynamic backgrounds. The text is still legible, but reading is a chore. This is a mistake I’ve made myself, once or twice, but it still should have been ironed out before the draft was finalized.

A character sheet is included in the book. The sheet is lovingly drawn, in the style of a control panel, harkening back to the PIP Boy screen from Fallout. Sadly the sheet is scaled much smaller than the standard 11” x 8.5” sheet, and the artist chose to draw the character sheet background in black and dark greys. Consequently, copying this sheet will be extremely difficult. This might protect Glutton Creeper’s work from the evil Xerox machine, but it also makes the sample sheet useless to players.

Summation:
Exodus: Survivor’s Guide is nothing special, and certainly not worth buying. If anything, I wonder if Bethesda got a copy of the book and decided that they didn’t want it to tarnish the Fallout brand.
I wanted very much to like this product. Exodus tries to make an impression in a market dominated by giants like Darwin’s World, Metamorphosis Alpha, and, of course, Gamma World. To meet this challenge, Glutton Creeper put forward a pale and tepid effort.

There are a number of different modules for Exodus already available for downloading. However, given the overall poor quality of the core book, I couldn’t recommend anything produced by Glutton Creeper Games.
Anyone interested in purchasing Exodus would be better off putting that money toward a copy of Fallout 3, or one of its amazing Add-Ons. Fans of Ravenloft might especially enjoy the Point Lookout expansion. I also recommend downloading the D20 Modern system document, and buying the book D20 Apocalypse. There are a vast number of resources online to assist any games master in building their own post-apocalyptic wasteland.
For now, those who are looking to recreate the world of Fallout for their role-playing pleasure must fight that war alone.

And war... war never changes.
Evil Reigns!!!!
Post Reply