I enjoy the setting quite a bit. I've been looking for a good PA setting that didn't have the typical mix of monsters and magic (mutants and psionics) and this one scratches that itch. The alternate history presented is more well-thought than many, though I feel they could have left out the central part of it - The Exodus - and the setting would be no different for it. Mostly because it requires a tremendous leap of faith about future technology that doesn't add to the setting itself.

I'm not big into wargaming, so the miniatures aspect of the game is lost on me though I do admit some fondness for the idea of creating such scenes - this might be a holdover from my model railroading days when I was younger. As an RPG, the rules are a bit heavy. I do love the setting though, and I can see playing in this setting with a different rule set for home games. I hope to see more expansion on this title from the publishers.

When I first saw the news that Shangri La was going to be a thing I thought to myself "Oh cool, Wreck-Age is doing a waterworld thing" but I was so, so wrong. This setting supplement turned out to be so much more and is in my opinion one of the best windows into the post-collapse earth of Wreck-Age. There is so much potential for play packed into this thing that it would take several campaigns to actually touch on all the different aspects covered within. I cannot recommend it enough. It is easily one of the most interesting and creative setting supplments I have ever read and I highly suggest purchasing it even if you don't play this game. The content within could easily be used in any post-apocalyptic or dystopian style game.

A nice up of the game in a very short space. Only problem was this was one of two covers for an identical product.

A nice up of the game in a very short space. Only problem was this was one of two covers for an identical product.

This beginning adventure for Wreck Age is a wonderful mix of various encounters which can be handled in many different ways. Since Wreck Age can be either a table top mini game or an RPG or a combination any adventure can have difficulty finding the balance of the two. The Omen manages to pull it off. It is very sandbox with only a couple of fixed encounters and then many possible encounters which can be taken or left. It also presents several ways to make this one shot adventure into a campaign including the PCs leaving their current faction and jioning one of two others or striking out on their own.

Use this module as your introduction to Wreck Age.

While I am a fan of the Wreck Age game I am not a fan of this product. Let's start with the characters provided. Adventure is recommended for 4-6 Green characters. 6 pregenerated characters are provided but one, Domm, is clearly stated to be the Trained Narrator Character and not for the players. So if you have 6 players somebody is rolling up their own. The character's backgrounds are given in the begining except for Janek. Why was Janek left out? Maybe he's the black sheep of the village. All characters are listed as Outriders at 12 RU. By the rules there are no Green Outriders. There is a Trained Outrider at 45 RU so Domm could fit. By the adventure they are going on and rules they should be Jammers (Scouts) which have Green at 12 RU. (Domm should be 25 RU then). There are frequent references to "the map". None is provided. Guessing the Narrator is supposed to carefully read the adventure and make up their own map and then create the player version for them to fill in. Okay for an experienced Gamemaster but a new Narrator might have problems and is not something that should be forced on people getting an introductory adventure. Biggest problem is that this is the introductory adventure to a combined RPG/Skirmish game. There is not one combat encounter in the entire adventure, there is not even a chance to shoot a bunny for dinner unless the Narrator adds it. Spoiler Alert this adventure is a Boy Scout trip into the woods looking for things to get their merit badges.

Originally posted at http://krazyivansrpgs.com/

Content Wreck Age is a hybrid RPG and table top war game set on a post apocalyptic version of Earth. Facing an ecological cataclysm the rich and powerful gathered themselves up into a fleet of ship and left Earth to colonize new worlds. Those who were not part of the privileged class were left behind to die.

After the Exodus, a term used to describe the abandonment of Earth; those that remained were witness to catastrophe after catastrophe. Numerous natural and man-made environmental disasters scoured the planet. Society collapsed. People found ways to survive however, and generations later the planet started to heal itself. Now humanity enters a new age. They refer to it as the Resurgence, but it’s also known as the Wreck Age.

The first section of the book details the setting for Wreck Age. It covers a great deal of history starting with events that took place from just before the Exodus to the beginning of the Resurgence. Bunches of notable settlements and other locations in the land of Merika (what used to be known and America and Mexico) are covered in brief. From there the idea of Communities (big C for a reason) is covered, and the settings factions are detailed.

In Wreck Age Communities are more than where a character comes from. The Community is a reflection of a character’s beliefs. It’s a character’s support structure. Mechanically speaking the Community actually dictates how character advances. This is done through the concept of ‘Resource Units’. Characters acquire Resource Units through play and return them to their Community. This ‘currency’ takes many forms: food, fuel, weapons, scrap, medical supplies, or even intangibles like trade relations with another community. A character advances by spending Resource Units and can advance their Community through the same kind of expenditure. This is important because the manner in which a community grows can affect what kind of advancement a character can take, and effect what kind of gear is available.

A total of ten factions are introduced in the book, but only four of them are given full detail:

Stakers: Insular communities that work to cultivate THEIR land. The land and the community comes is the most important thing in their lives, and they will fight and die to protect it.

Drifters: Barbarian hordes that take what they need to survive. Drifters value martial skill over all else and shun the technology of ages past.

Stichers: Remnants from the passengers of a medical ship that crashed back to Earth during the Exodus. Stichers are the bogeymen of other communities, and with good reason. You see, Stichers prolong their own lives through harvesting, and implanting, the organs of whomever they can catch.

Reclaimers: Technophiles who revere the technology of the past. The Reclaimers are based in several data caches throughout Merika where they have begun to rebuild the info-structure of the past.

The ARHK: Based in old Hong Kong, the ARHK is one of the few industrialized locations left on Earth. That industrialization requires fuel, so ARHK Troopers scour the planet looking for raw materials (and the slave labor needed to extract those materials).

The Church of Fun: The world sucks, let’s get high. The Church of Fun revels in emotional excess, however they can get it.

Unicephalon: Originally an organization left behind during the Exodus to monitor the planet and notify the colonies when it was safe to return. The organization has shifted its focus, and technological superiority, towards humanitarian welfare and defending those left behind.

The Vale: A death cult that believes that the time of humanity is over. They seek to kill as many others as possible before they themselves are killed.

Caravaneers: The big rig truckers of the Wreck Age. Caravaneers brave the wilds to travel from Community to Community in order to sell or trade their wares.

The Fringe: Everyone else who doesn’t otherwise belong to another type of Community.

The next section of the book covers game rules. Everything, and I mean everything, is covered through the lens of combat, and that includes social interactions. Combat will likely not be fast in this system, particularly for those who are unfamiliar with table top war games, but it will be brutal. A single hit can potentially kill a character. While this may turn some off, consider that Wreck Age is also a table top war game. There isn’t anything here that is a game breaker from an RPG perspective for me. I expect that combats will take a similar amount of time to RAW D&D 4e. Furthermore the rules present a great, character focused, war game

Character creation comes next. The system reminds me of older editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as characters take ‘Archetypes’ that are basically professions and advance into new professions. The character stat line is even reminiscent of WHFRP. This system isn’t the most detailed, but in light of glut of minimalist RPGs on the market today it fits right in.

The remainder of the book is mostly consumed by copious equipment lists. All kinds of gear, armor, weapons, faction specific equipment, and Community enhancements are available for purchase…if a character’s Community is large enough to offer them. This is where we get back to character and Community advancement. To advance characters and gain access to new gear the Community has to be built up. All three consume the same resources however. So, beyond standard RPG and war gaming challenges Wreck Age provides a mini game in the form of resource and Community management. I see this as a strong point for RPG play because it requires that the party work together to decide how their Community will grow. While Wreck Age is no ‘rules light’ system, the Community building aspect of the game reminds me of Apocalypse world. I suspect that this will appeal to folks to play AP World Engine games, especially if they also happen to be war gamers.

The final sections of the book cover scenarios and charts to aide in play.

Production Overall the production value for Wreck Age is excellent. The book’s artwork is evocative of the setting and well done besides. Nearly all of it is in black and white, with the exception being the cover and a couple of pages that feature Wreck Age miniatures produced by Hyacinth Games. The PDF is easy read due to the crisp, clear typeface. My only quibble is that some of the section headers are not clearly differentiated from the rest of the text.

Organization Organization is not one of the strong suits of Wreck Age. First, the PDF of the book has no bookmarks. There is an extensive Table of Contents, but none of it is hyperlinked. There is no index at all. All of that makes looking for specific rules within the PDF a chore, which leads me to another issue…rules terminology starts showing up fairly early in the book, in the setting sections without explaining what they are. While there are plenty of contextual clues that provide the reader with some idea of what these terms mean, actual definitions are hard to find immediately because of the lack of bookmarks and hyperlinks. The Verdict

Wreck Age is a robust, war-band style, skirmish war game and a lightweight RPG rolled into one. The war game is reminiscent of old favorites like Necromunda and Mordheim. Your war band can grow, improve, and gain character over time. It’s a good war game. That said, while rules are include for narrative play, Wreck Age in RPG-mode still feels like a war game. The rules for narrative play are essentially the same as table top play, with the only real change being a slightly more free-form skill challenge system. The game is supported by excellent production values, but hampered by a lack of standard organizational features like hyperlinks and bookmarks.

There is potential for Wreck Age to be an excellent hybrid for the group that is willing to take the time to combine narrative game play with the table top game. That said, I am providing three recommendations for Wreck Age:

*For non-war gamers Wreck Age as a standalone RPG is average, and I only recommend it to the gamers who love post-apocalyptic settings.

*For war gamers Wreck Age is still an average RPG, but the mechanics will be a cinch to grok and will scratch the war gaming itch even when played as an RPG.

*As a standalone table top war game Wreck Age is well above average, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys skirmish war games (particularly those who are fans of Necromunda or Mordheim).

Wreck Age is a respectable, though not necessarily innovative, Post-Cataclysm roleplaying and tactical tabletop game. While it has a decent level of quality, looks good, and has enough content to stand out, ti suffers a little bit from not committing to one style or the other. Still, it's well above average, and is in many ways a good example of what such a game should be.

Mechanically, Wreck Age uses a system that is pretty reminiscent of the older Shadowrun games, with a flexible target number and multiple dice. I personally like its system, while it's perhaps a little simple for some of the more fleshed out characters. The characters' depth seems to essentially be limited in order to put them into a tabletop wargame setting without a whole lot of changes.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about its communities system. I find it to mesh incredibly well with the setting on one hand, but it seems a little impractical in play. It's definitely a hold-over from the wargaming experience that somewhat detracts from the generic image of a loosely affiliated roving band of intrepid survivors passing through the wastes. It also winds up forcing a large amount of groups into pretty well-defined categories, and while I don't think it was ever intended as a method to stifle the potential for players to belong to groups with a personality of their own it runs a very real risk of usurping the players' perceptions of their groups. Still, it's an interesting touch. I like the resemblance to Outbreak: Undead's systems, which I felt were pretty good at modeling a post-apocalyptic or post-cataclysmic survival group, so I'll give it a thumbs-up.

That's essentially the tone of the game as a whole; there's some moments of brilliance and some moments of average; Wreck Age isn't like one of the big-name games that delivers solid performance throughout; it provides a system that is either very interesting and useful, or barely passes muster. That said, it's certainly competent, and while the setting and system are integrated perhaps more than I'd like, most of the decisions made are pretty solid; indeed, some decisions (for instance, making player characters in narrative play immune to certain morale-related effects) are both gutsy and prudent, and I think that Hyacinth Games did a good job approaching the needs of both the tabletop roleplaying and tabletop wargaming genres.

As far as the final quality goes, Wreck Age has a decent amount of art, and it's not shabby. The page borders are actually the most annoying thing for me in the whole book, being this odd grungy background that would have been entirely passable for the first twenty or so pages but then becomes a little repetitive. The font choice for the page numbers also seems a little too dissonant, being a clean sci-fi font while the text is written in a font that is literally a digitization of old printing press letters. While it feels right, it's also not, perhaps, the most legible, though my gripes about fonts delve perhaps into the utmost depths of pedantry. However, while we're in the depths of pedantry, I may as well bring up my gripe with 6”x9” formatting. On a digital canvas, it doesn't help with any image resolution concerns (though Wreck Age doesn't have any glaringly low-resolution images), because the reader will probably just zoom in, and the text column widths feel really short. The editing work in the book is... haphazard. In some places it is very well polished and feels good, but there are many places where even minor edits could make the text flow better, and some grammatical mistakes slipped under the radar.

Still, at the end of the day, Wreck Age is interesting, and I think that's really what matters most. I would give it an unreserved reservation for what it is. However, it is a niche, and I'm not entirely sure that a lot of people really need to worry about both a wargame and a tabletop game, and as such I don't feel quite comfortable giving it five stars as its capacity in either area picks up a few of the detrimental elements from the other.<br /><br />UPDATE: Wreck Age has been updated, which fixes a lot of my gripes with grammar and typos, as well as adding a glossary at the beginning of the game and hyperlinks to the index to capitalize on the potential of a digital PDF. While my rating remains unchanged, as I've gotten pretty picky about giving out five stars recently, its quality has been greatly increased.

Quick look into the drama of the Stakers life. Harsh conditions make some hard, others give in to their weakness. Stakers take care of each other as that is their strength in this brutal world. Quick read, put it on my phone and read it on the go. Good inspiration should you choose to play the game.

It is a brutal resurgence that all must survive trough. This is a way to test the waters and get the mechanics and ideas down quick and to the point. It gives the reader the ideas and background and puts them in control of the success or failure of their community. Note to the Narrator: Read through this first and get the information and the feel of how the game goes. It will make your game time way more fun and shorten the hang time of needing to check this or that. I enjoyed playing this and plan to replay this with several others interested in the game. It is a great way to get your group up and running with the mechanics, and start a Staker community. So, you don't want to play with the Stakers faction? Easy Tiger, this can bee used to build a settlement for your Stitchers, Drifters, or Reclaimers to raid!!! Still a win!

Wreck Age is a new franchise from Hyacinth Games, and delivers an interesting vision of a post-apocalypse world.

—

Setting

In the 23rd future, Earth was a pretty screwed up place. A combination of economic and ecological factors forced mankind to flee the planet in a bold effort to colonize other planets to save the race. The plan was to send wave after wave of colonists to settle in the stars, a promise of a great exodus that woudl insure mankind’s survival.

The Exodus, it turns out, was a lie.

After the cream of humanity took to the stars, it became apparent that there was no intention to take anyone else. The rest of humanity had been forced to fend for itself in a planet that was barely holding together. Society crumbled, and humanity bore the worst of natural disasters.

Generations later, whatever was left of mankind clings desperately to life. A new world has emerged and mankind once again forces itself to pick up from the rubble and rebuild.

It’s a stunning (and all too possible) scenario that plays up the idea of mankind’s apathy towards the less fortunate in a way that strikes very close to home. I like that the scenario isn’t a spectactular end like a meteor, but an apocalypse that had happened even before anyone else realized that it was too late.

—

Factions

Wreck Age has several factions of differing philosophies and levels of technology.

The Stakers are community and family-centric settlers who focus on sustainability and survival who are slow to trust strangers.

Drifters are nomadic barbarian clans who wander and attack stable communities in a throwback to ancient warrior raiding cultures.

Stitchers are gruesome medically trained survivors of an Exodus Ship that crash landed near TooSon. While initially benefactors to their community, the dependence of the ignorant to those with knowledge led to a strange warped sense of entitlement and control their communities with fear and knowledge.

The Order of Reclamation are those who struggle to rebuild from scavenged technology and data. Operating from Data Havens, they are a cult of techophiles that travel the wastes to find lost technology for their own ends.

The ARHK, or the Autonomous Region of Hong Kong are a highly industrialized and technologically capable faction who have forces in Merika in an attempt to scavenge lost technology to support their own society. Following directives from the Board of Directors in the hermetically sealed city of Hong Kong, the ARHK troopers are a strange and terrifying sight in the wastes.

In the midst of an utterly depressing world, The Church of Fun espouses excess and hedonism. The very ethos of “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” the Church of Fun are a drug-crazed group that is a force of chaos in the wastes.

Unicephalon are a conspiracy of hidden operatives who seek to shape humanity towards the concept of Re-Birth, a plan to recreate society to what it should be. Part illuminati and part knights templar the group is perhaps one of the closest to the “Good guys” despite their reliance on espionage and secrecy as their methods.

The Vale are a death cult that hold the belief that mankind has existed past its due date and they exist merely to clean up by destroying what’s left of humanity.

Caravaneers serve the basic need of trade between settlements. They travel the dangerous roads between civilized settlements, braving raiders and dangers to make sure that they make a sale.

The Fringes are not so much a faction as a catch-all term for small crews that have been forced to work together. They are not members of any of the Factions and simply work towards survival. Many Adventurers fall under this category as they are often mercenaries working for one Faction or another as needs dictate.

—

Mechanics

Wreck Age is designed to be playable as both an RPG and a Tabletop Game. As I am predominantly an RPG player, I’ll focus mainly on the RPG side, but I’ll see if I can throw in a comment or two with regards to the Tabletop side of the equation as well.

Wreck Age mechanics involve rolling a pool of d6′s against a given Target Number. Unlike other Target Number based systems, the TN applies to each die, much like a Difficulty number from the Classic World of Darkness. Therefore rolling against a TN of 4+ means that dice rolling a 4 or greater count as a success. Some tests also require multiple successes.

Rolling a natural 1 is an automatic failure regardless of any bonuses. While rolling more than a single 6 adds a value of 1 to one of the 6′s’ rolled. This took me a bit to understand, but is fairly simple when you get the hang of it. Rolling three 6′s for example, will add +2 to one of the dice, giving an end result of 8, 6, 6

—

Character Creation

Creating characters start with the group getting together to put together a community. This dictates which Faction (if any) the player characters will be coming from and the Archetypes that they can choose from.

There’s a large list of archetypes, ranging from “generic” ones with no faction affiliation to those belonging to specific factions. These are then customized later by spending points. Interestingly only the Reclaimers, Stakers, Stitchers and Drifters get full archetypes.

—

Scenarios and Campaigns

Wreck Age finishes up with the standard Tabletop game rules for scenarios and stringing such scenarios together into a campaign as well as a few pages of advanced rules.

—

Conclusion

Wreck Age is a Post-Apocalypse game that makes a good effort at being both an RPG and a tabletop game. Part of me feels that the RPG part is a little thin, and the way that the mechanics are presented at the same time make it difficult to learn one without having to try and slog through the other. I also found myself going through the rules several times just to get a few mechanics.

The setting and artwork are very evocative, and I’m definitely interested to run and play games in the setting as presented, but learning to run it is going to require a night or two of focused study.

Wreck Age will be easier to learn if you’re a tabletop player, of course, and the various units and factions are compelling and have a strong visual identity for hobbyists that enjoy the painting aspect of it. From the images of the miniatures in the book, the figures are pretty neat.

Overall, I would definitely recommend giving Wreck Age a shot if you’re a fan of post-apocalypse settings. Tabletop players will find it easier to get into, but rpg players with a taste for tactical combat will find that Wreck Age is right up their alley.

This is well written, with an unusually good layout. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but hope to soon.

With apologies to the editor, The Omen could have used more editing and proofreading, but it's a solid adventure. While staying short enough for a single evening's enjoyable play, there's enough there to give players a good taste of the Wreck Age world, and bones to build on if the narrator chooses to extend the scenario.

This is a nice story idea, offering different ways to solve the problem and depending on the characters actions the ending is different. While the adventure will be long enough for an evening, it can be used as a starting point for much more.

Nicely done! :)

Since I did not look at the game system, I cannot judge on that. It seems simple and fast, but then again I only skimmed it.

5 points for content 5 points for the price 5 points for artwork and presentation

no rating for the rules sytem

I like it!