So there is this game I self-publish called Rubble and Ruin and I think a few people my find the history of how the game came to be interesting.
I grew up in a large house in a temperate rain forest. We used to joke that it only rained once a year there. It would start in October and end in April. In the mid-late 1970s I was already a "fantasy nerd" (but we weren't called that back then), but D&D hadn't made it to our little town--or at least not down to my age group. But the place was crawling with an eclectic mix of hippies and shell-shocked war vets (we didn't call it PTSD back then) and everywhere there were Tolkien-obsessed people.
During the rainy season I started building a massive fantasy diorama on a 4' by 8' sheet of plywood in our attic. I'll likely post more about my lived-experience with the early fantasy culture of Northern California, but for now lets just say that when D&D hit my friend group, it hit hard. Being in Northern California we had all three game, D&D, Runequest, and Arduin (I linked the last in case you haven't meet it yet). It was a wonderful time, but out of scope for this story.
What is important is that all of these are games and interests are based on fantasy. They all focus around magic. But I was also a science nerd. I read science fiction, I took every science class at my high school (and even a few independent studies). When I graduated and moved to the local university I studied science and engineering--long before it was the trendy thing to do. I also had a bunch of personal trauma in this time and one thing that came through was that I found no evidence for magic.
I am a humanist. I was raised a humanist. And I have never had a crisis of faith. It looks to me like we live in a world without magic.
So why can't I have a table-top RPG without magic?
There were lots of options and I have played lots of different games over the years, but I keep coming back to one thing. Near future, post-apocalyptic -- slightly gonzo -- but science based.
It started with not exactly liking Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha. Something was wrong with those, but I didn't know what. Then came Morrow Project which was almost there, but the characters were too super-human for me (the PCs all started with a jumpsuit that made them practically immune from damage). Then came Aftermath, rules as written, and I found it. I wanted to run a game like all the D&D games I was playing in. One where the adventures were exploring lost and forgotten places. Fighting horrible monsters. Finding powerful treasures. The whole cannon fantasy, but based in science instead of magic.
And I developed that. Over the years I added GURPs components and bits from Morrow Project and as I refined my understanding of science and technology, I increased the overall realism. But basically, I was running a humanist fantasy game.
By around 2008 I was a Senior Scientist working in biomedical research, yada yada yada, and it was getting almost impossible to find people who would play my PA game. House rules were out. People wanted published rules.
So I published my house rules. The original Rubble and Ruin monograph was just me codifying the world I had developed so when I went to attract players, I wouldn't be running a home-brew, I'd be running a published game. And that was nice and I didn't want to do much more with it.
Then we had the pandemic. Do you kids remember the pandemic? Of course you do. ( ;-) ). Early in the pandemic we were all switching to on-line games. We were mastering VTTs and Discord and Zoom and everything was kind of crazy. And someone asked me to help out with a certain problem. There were a few young people who couldn't spend time with the Special Olympics and they really loved D&D 5e and would another friend and I run an on-line game for them.
Sure. But I didn't know 5e. But we did our best and we got things going and before long we had a group of heroes in a hole in the ground fighting a swarm of giant rats. And one of the players asked, "What does the spell Burning Hands do?"
And I told them.
But why did I know that. I didn't look it up. I hadn't reread the spell. I had remembered the basic use of the D&D Burning Hands spell from forty years earlier!
After the game I thought, if people are going to be remembering things from games for decades, wouldn't it be better if they remembered real things? And so my project over 2020, the first year of the pandemic, was to rewrite the Rubble and Ruin monograph. This new version doesn't have nearly as many nit-picky rules as my old Aftermath-Morrow Project-GURPs hybrid. I abstracted the handling of the bits-and-bobs of old technology and the creation and restoration of machines and other pre-fall stuff, but it has generally realistic Old Technology rules.
And I published it, and enough other of the required small books that I think I have a fairly complete TTRPG.
Now this story should end here, but I also did one more thing. I added modern science.
Science in the last century was dominated by physics. This century is being dominated by biology. In my day jobs I am continuously, deeply embedded in biomedical and translational science. I can see where we are going and few people seem to be writing about it. In the past, science fiction would talk about the discoveries of physics and engineering that went with it. But few, if any, are writing about the massive changes in our understanding of, and ability to control, the living world.
Think about your Covid vaccines, they should have been the science fiction of twenty years ago, but I don't think anyone wrote it. What I wanted to do with all my TAGs and transhumans and uplifts was to get people thinking about the technology that will likely be in our world within the next century and maybe put a little thought into how humanity will have to react to these changes.
And this is probably more than anyone wanted to read about me and what I am trying to do with my writing, but I don't want it to be a secret, so I've put it down here. Thanks for your time and hopefully you got something from reading this.
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