It's that last one, definitely, but it's the sort of coincidence that gets my brain working. So I'm not going to do the obvious thing and try to compare them. They're trying to do different things. However, I am now thinking about setting an rpg in the Horizon universe. Could I use d20 Apocalypse for that?
And the answer to that question is . . . "sort of." It has rules covering the traversal of ancient ruins, mounted combat, overland travel, and the barter economy. So it definitely brings value to the table. You're mostly going to want a weird combination of d20 Past and d20 Future, but d20 Apocalypse adds a bit of necessary spice.
The book works better if you're trying to recreate Fallout (because of its rules for fallout) or Mad Max (because of the Road Warrior class and new rules for doing reckless stuff with cars) but that's only to be expected. The post-apocalyptic genre had a different vibe in 2005, one shaped by the existential threats that seemed most pressing at the time.
Although, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the mid-aughts were a particularly fallow time for the genre. It wasn't an idyllic time by any means, but I can't think of a time in my life when the end of the world has felt less imminent. My early childhood was in the waning days of the Cold War, and those duck and cover drills made nuclear war feel like a real possibility. And my teenage years were at the turn of the millennium, which didn't carry a particularly plausible threat of global destruction, but did get people talking about the end of the world, more or less constantly, as if the universe were designed to end when the Christian calendar reached a nice, round number. And, of course, everything that's happened since the pandemic has felt like the prelude to a collapse in the global order. But 2005 . . . I guess the biggest apocalyptic anxiety I personally felt was the worry that some black swan event would come out of nowhere and wreck our shit - an undetected asteroid, an escaped bioweapon, a distant gamma ray burst, that sort of thing. Whether those fears were directed towards the right thing, I'll leave as exercise for the reader. It's entirely possible that my experience was not universal.
However, if I take it as a lens for examining d20 Apocalypse, I can sort of bend facts to make it fit my narrative. There are three mini-campaign settings in this book and only one of them feels like it's expressing any sort of anxiety.
The first setting is "Earth Inherited," the least religious rapture story anyone has ever told. All the notably good or evil people are whisked away to heaven or hell (respectively) and the world is left to "the meek" who are "noted for a lack of faith or belief in almost anything of a spiritual nature." Meanwhile, angels and demons are using the Earth as a battleground for their final celestial war.
It's too much of a mess theologically to be particularly offensive and too inoffensive to be particularly interesting, but it does have the advantage of being set in the not-too-distant future, so human beings have access to "advanced weapons, cybernetics, and mecha." It's not nearly as Neon Genesis Evangelion as you're imagining, but it could potentially be made into the good kind of trash entertainment if you're willing to heighten its absurdities. Lean into the morally uncomplicated violence of big machines vs the demonic hordes and the humanist soap opera of the central "rage against the heavens" theme.
But there's probably no version of this campaign that can properly be described as "anxious." That's what separates meaningful post-apocalyptic fiction from trash post-apocalyptic fiction (no slights on trash intended, mind you). In this case, it comes down to a basic failure to understand the role of eschatology in the Christian faith. The original Book of Revelations might be summarized (half-assedly, by me) as "Our oppressors control the whole world, but have hope - even the world's not going to last forever." And the modern-day rapture-theology that mutated out of that is essentially the same thing except that the "oppressors" in this case are the objects of right-wing cultural resentments, and they don't so much "control the world" as they maliciously continue to exist, despite the right wing's very clear preference that they do not. Revelations then becomes a revenge fantasy against a secular modern world that refuses to let religious reactionaries be in charge. And further, even beyond that, there's a branch of third-hand postmodern rapture fiction that is extremely anxious about the possibility that the right wing might be correct about the nature of God, and that we're all doomed to live through their revenge fantasy.
If you're going to tell a meaningful post-rapture story, you're probably going to have pick one of those three lanes. "Earth Inherited" doesn't come close to any of them, and it's an open question how much of that is attributable to the fact that 2005 was a little too late to be jumping on the millenarian rapture bandwagon. It would be immensely helpful to my thesis if it was a lot, but it's much more likely a result of WotC being risk-adverse in its portrayal of real religion.
The second setting is "Atomic Sunrise" and it's got a little bit of anxiety to it - "A rogue organization, friend to none of the great nations, detonated a nuclear warhead inside an American city and in the anger and confusion that followed, a larger war could not be avoided." But even that anxiety is just as I said - a black swan event. I remember having that conversation, in the post-cold war window where even our biggest fears were tainted by hubris. "What if something tricks us into using our nuclear arsenal accidentally?" Because, obviously, we were much too enlightened to think of them as viable weapons of war (although, to be fair, there was also parallel talk of developing ways to use nuclear weapons in limited wars, now that disarmament had been rendered obsolete by America's eternal victory over the communists).
On these matters, "Atomic Sunrise" is fairly agnostic. It's not quite like the previous chapter, which misses the point entirely re: its central disaster, but it nonetheless fails to take a strong political stance. It makes a very straightforward promise - roleplay in a world ravaged by nuclear war - and it delivers on that promise in a very straightforward way. It hits the exact right tenor for a generic book that is merely providing a scaffold on which to build more specific games, but outside that use case it's pretty forgettable.
The final setting, "Plague World" is the worst of the three, and by "worst" I mean "best." It's like someone once heard the theory that alien invasion stories sublimate the guilt felt by colonialist societies by allowing them to imagine themselves in the role of the victim and then instead of doing literally anything with that, they instead decided to keep adding themes until the allegory was unrecognizable.
The short version - Aliens invade Earth, overcoming our defenses with their superior technology. In order to reduce the human population and clear the way for their cryogenically suspended colonists, the aliens unleash terrible bioweapons. A mysterious private organization, convinced the governments of the world cannot defeat the aliens through force, builds a series of "Rip Van" chambers to cryogenically preserve an elite group of experts who will emerge and rebuild civilization after humanity unleashes its WMDs. Except that time never comes because alien nanotech was too good at targeting advanced weapons. So it would seem that all hope is lost, but then the aliens' biotech backfires, mutating to target the invaders' systems as well as Earth's. Foreseeing the loss of their technological advantage, the aliens then genetically alter themselves to become powerful predatory monsters, losing their intelligence in the process. Eventually, after 300 years, the orbit of the last alien ship (who's crew was long dead because they could not dare to resupply from the infected Earth) decays, triggering the Rip Van chambers to open and release the PCs into a ruined Earth where humanity clings to survival, the aliens rampage as near-mindless beasts, and remnant bioweapons still linger in the ruins of once-great cities.
It's total nonsense, of course, but I am almost perfectly balanced between thinking it's the interesting kind of nonsense and thinking it's the boring kind of nonsense. I suppose execution is really going to count for a lot, but I'm not sure how I, as a GM, would want to run this setting. The obvious campaign model - PCs emerge from the tubes, become adventurers - strikes me as the weakest possible entry point, but if the PCs began as regular future humans, what's the angle? I could see comedy, horror, or political intrigue, but not in a form that's useable right out the box.
But that's d20 Modern all over for you, isn't it? It's a series that's very generous about offering you suggestions, and very onerous in burdening you with the work necessary to bring those suggestions to life. That's honestly one of things I like best about it. It's a big toolset and a mandate to tinker. d20 Apocalypse remains true to form.
Ukss Contribution: The barter rules refer to various tables that categorize everyday items and assign them a Trade Point value. One table was all about food and it had a category called "Cheer Food."
"Luxury foods from before the apocalypse - candy bars, coffee, cans of soda or beer."
I like this detail quite a bit. It's very human. I'm sure I'll be able to find a place for it.
The After The End books for GURPS is a great toolkit for post-apocalyptic gaming, I’ve used it to run a still ongoing campaign since 2020. The AtE books cover all the usual aspects of the genre comprehensively for the GM and players, including discussing the various apocalypses that could feature.
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