My daughter was interested in playing an rpg with a post-apocalyptic setting, as the Fallout franchise is one of her favorites, so I began researching games in the genre. The After was different enough from the rest of the herd to catch my eye and the rest of the gaming group was willing to give it a chance. I've been running the game weekly for several months now, and everyone is quite happy with it.

I think the rest of the reviews here are spot on, so go read those for an overview. I'll try and avoid repeating what was said before and concentrate on my own personal feelings and experiences.

The vibe I get from the game, and the vibe that it seems to impart to the players, is that of D&D. Not D&D as I see it now, exactly, but as I saw it circa 1980 - new, fresh, wide-eyed explorers and adventurers striking out into the unknown for riches and adventure. The scarcity of equipment, the lack of complex machinery, and the Item Stress system emphasize a grittiness - a closeness to the environment - even if that environment is very harsh. And the absolute craziness and inventiveness of the Butcher and Ghost tech seem to revitalize the same old same old feeling of the D&D magic items we've all become accustomed to over the decades.

The players have really taken the author's suggestions to heart and become deeply involved with the people of The After. They've built up a salvage business and traded with the community of Chapter. They have jockeyed for leadership positions within the Posthuman faction. They have had romances and marriages. They have had a hockey game with a rival salvage business. One player even wrote and starred in her own one-woman show in the local playhouse.

The game developers have done a wonderful job of painting just enough of the world to get their point across and left huge areas for the players and I to exercise our creativity. As a GM, I'm fascinated with the Ghosts themselves, and how their technology works. It makes just about anything I can think up fit into the world. And since this is Savage Worlds, I can dump people, creatures, and items from Deadlands, Rifts, Lankhmar and others. Oh, and Deadlands: Lost Colony has a treasure trove of beasties to throw into the mix.

Later, I intend on dropping Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (AD&D Module S3) straight into the campaign. Why? Well, it's a favorite D&D module of mine and fits perfectly thematically. And it will be easy. I've got most of the monster stats right here in my Savage Pathfinder bestiary.

I'm also very interested in the real-life place the setting is based on - the Wind River Range up in Wyoming. I've spend quite a bit of time exploring the area in 3d on Google Earth, and watching hiking vidoes on Youtube covering the area. I have a strong desire to go there now. It's beautiful.

One note about the physical product. I grabbed the softcover of the book. One of my players bought the hardcover. While the softcover is perfectly servicable, the hardcover is just so darn pretty. I'm jealous.

So thanks to the developers for creating and publishing this game. It's a setting I never thought I'd be interested in until I saw the possibilities. Five stars and all that.

In short:

As a backer of this on Kickstarter, I'm disappointed in this. The premise had such potential, but in the end, it feels like nothing more than an OSR grab on the coattails of the Hellboy RPG Kickstarter with bad writing and desperate need of an editor.

As a fan of the genre, this brought nothing new to the table, and was an abbreviated Black Hack with minimal heroic flavoring. As someone who's growing increasingly burned out on (and burned by) OSR and the OSR/d20 approach to heroes, this didn't help. There isn't anything new here for the genre or style of play; the opportunity was there and it was dropped.

As an editor, I cringed every time I turned a page: inconsistent writing, missing or an overabundance of punctuation, and a poor background color choice make this an unpleasant to read title at best and impossible to read at worse.

If you're a die-hard OSR fan, you might find some enjoyment here. Otherwise, I cannot recommend this to anyone.

A Hopeful Post-Apocalyptic Setting The setting puts players in a post-apoc world but without the constant feeling of imminent starvation and inevitable decline. Everything has changed and the world has new dangers, but the Earth and her inhabitants will recover. This setting is for telling that type of story.

This is a gorgeous book that maintains a high standard of quality for all 242 pages. The author explains the intent behind the choices made for the setting rather than just listing stat blocks. It is very easy to "get onboard" with the world-building philosphy even though this isn't just the usual trope-laden settings we all know and love by now.

That being said, every major NPC has a stat block and (since this is Savage Worlds) I feel like I could just start running a campaign straight from this book and the SWADE core rules.

I used this adventure for my solo supers game. Enough detail was included to run the game along with game stats etc. The NPC hero included became a recurring feature of my campaign.

I particularly enjoyed the slightly camp-y retro feel to the adventure. Giant bugs straight out of a 50s movie. I wouldn't have thought to include this sort of subject in my ongoing game without this as a prompt and it made an interesting and creative side-trek. I bought all of the volume 1 Improbable Tales separately and they are what I reach for whenever I need something unconnected to the major campaign themes which feels different and fresh.

The helicarrier has been a part of Marvel comics lore since the 1960s (remember when it was held aloft by helicopter-like rotors?) but rose to new heights in the public consciousness since being gloriously re-imagined in 2012’s The Avengers. As author Mike Lafferty accurately points out, “Whirling turbines, tons of armed troops, and the constant peril of crashing to earth make a helicarrier an ideal setting for a superhero game.” It seems almost inevitable that someone set a superhero adventure aboard one. Fainting Goat Games is the first with this short scenario that can be played in an evening or two.

It would have been easy to remake the now infamous scene from The Avengers where heroes have to fend off villains assaulting the vessel. Lafferty went another, more imaginative, and in the end, more rewarding route. He elected to have the heroes involved in a heist aboard a helicarrier, essentially a role reversal from the movie. In this adventure, the heroes are tasked by a government organization Bureau of Aberrations, Mutations, and the Fantastic (BAMF; any comic fan worth his salt gets the winking reference) with infiltrate the flying HQ of a super-science criminal organization to steal a dire world-ending device and escape without getting caught.

The criminal organization? NEST (Network for the Expansion of Strategic Terrorism), clearly and cleverly modelled on COBRA from G.I. Joe with their Beetle Soldiers (grunts), Wasp Agents (elite troops with jetpacks), allied ninja-in-white (in this case, a woman named Snow Claw), and the masked NEST Leader who just coincidentally looks a lot like COBRA Commander. Its an homage, but a brilliant one.

The object of the heist is the robot known as Unity, an Ultron pastiche, but a number of alternate McGuffins are offered, ranging from the classic ray-gun that induces volcanoes to erupt to a frozen-but-still-alive golden age hero.

Want to get the action started quickly? The Helicarrier Heist has you covered by presenting a team of pre-generated characters based on public domain heroes: Green Turtle, Black Fury, Nightbird, and The Shield. All are well designed, and obviously useful beyond immediate application in this adventure. A cool addition are the sidebars detailing in brief the publishing history of each these Golden Age heroes; a nice touch.

Lafferty packs the adventure with exciting possibilities. What happens if the PCs are captured? He offers suggestions. Want to recreate elements of that thrilling scene at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier? He offers suggestions. Want to run the adventure where the PCs are villains? Again, suggestions. Every angle is covered.

It’s clear Lafferty is passionate about comic books. Its evident in the joyful way he writes and in the many Easter eggs keen-eyed readers will find throughout their adventure (the heroes’ contact, by way of example, is Colonel Steven Romita, honoring legendary father and son comic artists John Romita Sr. and Jr., and of course BAMF is the sound effect that accompanies Nightcrawler’s teleportation). Helicarrier Heist is as much fun to read as it is to play. The artwork throughout shows a similar level of passion and skill. Fantastic maps of the helicarrier’s varied levels are provided, including player friendly ones (courtesy of BAMF) that show general layout but without detail, vital tools that allow characters to plan their insertion – a trope of the heist genre - before the action begins. Because once the action begins, it’s really on – the thrills come fast and furious, culminating in a no-holds-barred showdown on the flight deck.

An action-heist superhero adventure, the Helicarrier Heist is a thrilling and unique experience, an extremely worthy love letter to The Avengers. You won’t spend a better three hours at the gaming table.

It delivers exactly what it says on the label: rules light, fun sci-fi adventure with tropes we all know and love. I am also a HUGE fan of the design of the book and how the character sheets mimic the back of a certain brand of action figure pacakging. Good good stuff. And it'll tide you over 'til Season 3 comes out.

Creature-features meet superheroics.

The Youniversal Monster Omnibus (a cool nod at Universal Studios, responsible for most of cinema’s classic movie monsters) is a collection of Fainting Goat Games’ pdf series containing portrayals of eight legendary monsters. Each one comes fully fleshed out, with stats (ranging from PL9 to PL14), with detailed personalities and adventure seeds that, in many cases, presents the creature in refreshing new light.

*Dracula, of course, needs no introduction. As one would expect, he’s presented here as a PL14 upper-tier monster, a threat worthy of even mighty superheroes.

*Mummies are a classic horror monster, shambling undead shrouded in funerary wrappings and animated by ancient magic. You could use them as mindless foes, sure, but a far better option for terrorising your costumed heroes is to make the mummy a powerful and intelligent sorcerer-priest or pharaoh hailing from a civilization long buried under the sands of Egypt. The adventure ideas provide plenty of inspiration for doing just that in a four-coloured supers world.

*As fans of Hammer Horror flicks know, Victor Frankenstein created not one but two golems from reanimated dead flesh. But Hammer got it wrong; ‘Adam’ (Frankenstein’s Monster) and ‘Eve’ (The Bride of Frankenstein) are not just immensely strong, but also highly intelligent.

*Werewolves are the living manifestation of the savagery, the bestial nature, that lies within all of us. As such, they’re great villains or tragic heroes (look no further than the classic comic series Werewolf by Night).

*The Gill Creature is the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon of B-movie cinema, an aquatic man-beast – a mutant human or a lost evolutionary link from when ancient humanity left the ocean to become land-dwelling creatures. In a cool twist, the adventure ideas posit that the Gill Creature is highly intelligent; one sees the man-beast capturing nuclear weapons from submarines with an eye towards detonating them an unleashing a Kaiiju.

*The Abominable Snowman – more appropriately known as the Yeti – is the legendary cryptid hominid of the Himalayas. In the West, the Abominable Snowman is thought of as little more than a beast. In the East, however, they are often attributed with mystic abilities and considered defenders of sacred places. That’s the tact YOUniversal Monsters endorses.

*One wouldn’t immediately associated Jack Frost and Krampus as classic movie monsters, but they are staples of folklore and fit in nicely among this cast of threats. Jack Frost is the living spirit of winter and has a reputation as both a sinister prankster (representing the cruelness of the season) and a mischievous protector of children. Krampus is another holiday-themed monster, but unlike Jack Frost there are no redeeming qualities about this fiend; he mercilessly hunts down children on the naughty list, stuff them in his sack and later devours them for Christmas dinner. Yikes! If that as a modus operandi, your heroes don’t want to punch Krampus in the face, they’re not worthy of the name.

Author Jacob Blackmon’s writing is evocative, thoughtful, and entertaining, proving that monsters – even dead ones – don’t have to be lifeless. He clearly put a lot of thought into the adventure seeds (better described as adventure outlines, as they are several paragraphs in length), which often play against expectations and elevate the monsters to new heights. Blackmon shows intimate awareness with mechanics as well, as the stats are top notch.

Entries are brought to life in breathtaking artwork, all save Dracula by Blackmon himself (the Prince of Vampires, for those keeping score, was illustrated by Dionysis Jones)

If you want to liven your superhero game with supernatural villains and desiccated corpses or launch a campaign of grim monster hunters combating ancient evils, Youniversal Monsters Omnibus is a must buy.

Everyone loves jetpacks, right? And, with that given, what could be cooler than pirates wearing jetpacks? That’s the central conceit of the Against the Sky Pirates, an ICONS adventure by Fainting Goat Games.

It’s clear the designers (Mike Lafferty, Jason Tondro, Bryanna Hitchcock) are fans of comics, not just from their obvious passion for the subject but also from the Easter eggs keen-eyed readers will find throughout their adventure (the heroes’ contact, by way of example, is Colonel Steven Romita, honoring legendary father and son comic artists John Romita Sr. and Jr.). Their text is fun and lively, written in a casual style that makes it easy and enjoyable to read the adventure.

This in an adventure in three scenes. The premise is simple: a gang of modern-day buccaneers, the jetpack wearing Sky Pirates, need to be brought to justice, and our eagle-scout-evil-fighters are tapped with the task. A tip that suggests the thieves will next be targeting a swanky outdoor fundraising event sees the characters going undercover as wait staff. The resulting fight likely leads to an exciting aerial chase (cause, what’s cooler than strapping on a jetpack and throwing punches midflight?) that culminates aboard the pirates’ plane. The adventure does an excellent job of suggesting ways of raising the drama and enriching the scene while flying and fighting through the city. In Scene Two, the heroes infiltrate the pirates’ Aerie, an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The final (optional) scene sees the heroes infiltrating or attacking (the choice is theirs) the Sky Pirates’ island headquarters.

The majority of the villainy are jetpack bearing Sky Pirates and their leadership, Captain Bloodhawk (a former spec ops soldier who chews scenery and channels the pirates of yore with a full-on beard, cutlass and hook hand, naturally) and the gunslinging Commander Kraken. That said, other villains appear to spice up the proceedings, including Doctor Radium, a criminal mastermind since the 1880s that uses Martian technology from the 1898 Martian invasion of Earth (as seen in War of the Worlds), and The Well-Read Baron, a Batman-style themed villain - and potential unlikely ally for the PCs – with a raffish green who steals literary-related treasures (the writers recommend he be played like a cross between Catwoman and Diane Chambers of Cheers).

The designers have also seen fit to include a full roster of sample PCs: the bowman Ballistic, the armour-wearing playboy-genius-industrialist Blue Knight, heroes-in-miniature Hornet and Shrinker, patriotic super-solder The Veteran, and former Russan spy Red Shadow. Clearly pastiches of the Avengers, they are nonetheless well-designed with interesting backgrounds.

The appendix includes a very useful sky pirate generator (name, nickname, signature weapon, accent, catch phrase, etc.) allowing you to quickly roll up an individual on the fly. And what if the heroes are somehow captured by Dr. Radium? Where does the villain take them? Roll up a headquarters using a random generator. It’s a neat touch that helps harried GMs, and of course is a resource that can be used over and over again.

The artwork is overwhelmingly excellent, from the evocative cover to the character portraits. Maps have been provided for every scene (the casino garden party, and the Sky Pirate’s jet and island fortress) and all are excellently rendered. Another nod to the designers’ love of comic books is found at the end of the adventure in the form of a cartoon like the old Twinkie ads found in Marvel comics of the 70s and early 80s.

Against the Sky Pirates is a near perfect superhero adventure, with exciting set-piece scenes, cool villains, and plenty of colour. I can sum of Against the Sky Pirates in one word: Excelsior!

A beautiful book with a brilliant setting. The layout of this book is nicely done, with amazing artwork and graphics.But the best is the setting, it combines wild west, post apocalytic and futuristic technology in a brilliant way, really nicely done. The quality of the book is really good and I'm really happy to have backed this project.

This book is great. The art and layout are amazing a complement the great setting and rules. The new alien races and setting rules are awesome and make the after feel very unique.

So I got my copy of The After. he book is very high quality in regards to both materials and content. The layout is pleasing, easy to read, and with an almost excitingly colored and style. The art is a style I very much like as well. Its blends solid coloring with a style that feels real and brings the fanciful world to life. The setting is one I definitely enjoy for sure.

I picked this up a little over a month ago while I was sick in bed needing something to read. This book is beautiful, the Art is top notch. The Setting is great, as a Fan of post apocalyptic games for many years this is definitely a enjoyable setting to explore. All in all I believe players and GM's will find many hours of enjoyment contained therein!

I'm not totally convinced by the Supers Red version of this adventure (I have the original Icons one). Reason number one is common to Icons version : there are a lot of random encounters table which reminds me of a fantasy dungeon and that's not something I expect from a superhero adventure. Reason number two is specific to Supers version: Supers has Mooks and Henchmen simple rules which are not used here. Each mook is fully created like a full fledged super-villain and not with the simpler mook or Henchmen rating. That's more a character to character conversion than a rule conversion so the adaptation is not entirely correctly done. The adventure is still good however and that's why I give it three stars.I'm not totally convinced by the Supers Red version of this adventure (I have the original Icons one). Reason number one is common to Icons version : there are a lot of random encounters table which reminds me of a fantasy dungeon and that's not something I expect from a superhero adventure. Reason number two is specific to Supers version: Supers has Mooks and Henchmen simple rules which are not used here. Each mook is fully created like a full fledged super-villain and not with the simpler mook or Henchmen rating. That's more a character to character conversion than a rule conversion so the adaptation is not entirely correctly done. The adventure is still good however and that's why I give it three stars

I got this product as the bookmarked version and it is a fully fleshed out setting for Savage Worlds. Gritty illustrations, maps, many plot hooks and ideas along with a full 3-act adventure. A post apocalypse world decimated by an alien war, you rebuild and make what you can of what remains. Pockets of alien energy, mutations, and recovered alien technology lead to some interesting and dangerous combinations. Equipment stress handled with a tag system to relate in what manner some is damaged or degraded. It is a completely realized world with a richly detailed starting area and fresh character concepts that let you begin play in a world decades removed from our own and yet familiar. For use with the SWADE rules.

Beautiful artwork and a compelling setting.

Could do with bookmarks for the pdf, or at least a table of contents and an index.

Also one or two of the npc stats have holdovers from the Deluxe edition of Savage Worlds