Road Warriors and Freeway Fighters - Preparing for the 7TV Apocalypse

Post Apocalypse (PA) is all the rage nowadays. However the overarching theme and context no longer tends to be the aftermath of global conflict or nuclear armageddon, but the encroachment of the walking dead or the dystopian future nightmares of settings first originated by the likes of Orwell and entrenched in popular culture by the likes of The Handmaids Tale.

This kind of speculative fiction tends to be reflective of current social and geo-political conditions. From a tabletop gaming perspective while many of these themes and settings are future based, you can easily identify the time period in which they originated and were written. However trends have a way of coming back.

Recently we have seen an upturn in the emergence of the traditional post-nuclear PA settings, particularly that wasteland populated by road warriors and freeway fighters inspired by a certain style of movies from the early eighties and starting of course with Mad Max. Part of this can be explained by the cycle of nostalgia that appears to work on 30 year intervals. Recent games and rulesets like Gaslands, Devils Run Route 666 and the upcoming 7TV Apocalypse capture this feel. If you want to roll back to the steps leading up to armageddon there is a renewed interest in Cold War Gone Hot and World War III with the likes of Team Yankee and the upcoming Battlegroup NORTHAG.

My current favourite set of rules are 7TV by Crooked Dice Game Design Studio. A great and most importantly fun game that effectively allows your to recreate TV shows (and films) on your tabletop with tongue usually firmly in cheek. In fact the game is effectively a game about making a TV series. You dont have armies or warbands, you put together a cast containing stars, co-stars and extras. You spend ‘plot points’ to take actions, the card driven event mechanic allows things such as continuity mistakes, special effects mistakes and issues with difficult stars to affect gameplay. Now in its second edition the game is primarily focussed on the spy-fy genre (think Bond, Gerry Anderson, the ITC action series of the 60s), is figure agnostic but is supported by a great range of 28mm scale miniatures available directly from Crooked Dice.

7TV is branching out soon into the Post Apocalypse, with a standalone game that takes the core mechanics of second edition and tweaks the flavour and setting. Most notably the existing vehicle rules have been expanded to accomodate those Road Warrior type scenarios. The full game is due to hit Kickstarter this Autumn, but I had the opportunity back in July to attend a play test / campaign day to try out these rules.

One of the coolest things about this sort of thing from a hobbyists point of view is the creativity that it allows for things like conversions and sourcing figures. For the play test day I had to put together a cast and include a suitably post-apocalypsed up vehicle. I went for a ‘big rig’ approach and with a nod to 7TVs cult tv background a cast based around Garth Knight and his Goliath truck from Knightrider (imaging after the fall of society Garthe would be a magnet for scavengers and marauders).

Since then I’ve been bitten hard by the bug and have spent more time sourcing vehicles, bits, conversion parts and miniatures. This blog series will cover this project in detail as I prepare, strap on my survivalist gear, rev up the V8, scavenge the gasoline and face the white line nightmare of the wastelands.

I’m also covering this project on my own blog at www.twistedpinnaclegames.co.uk