I’ve owned Apocalypse World and Mutant: Year Zero for ages and, like a true GM, never actually run either. I like the idea of post-apocalyptic survival, but when I sit down to prep, my brain quietly puts on a trench coat and leaves the scene. So I picked up After the War, hoping its “rebuilding community after galactic trauma” pitch might be the one that finally gets me to the table.
Short version: this is less “Mad Max on a gas run” and more “Firefly/Expanse refugees trying to make a home on a haunted frontier world”. It’s very much about community, relationships, and trauma, with some memetic horror in the wings. If you want a crunchy resource crawl, this isn’t it. If you want to tell stories about building something fragile and precious and then kicking it to see what breaks, it’s promising.
The game is set on Polvo, nicknamed “Dirt”, a junk world where the remnants of humanity and several alien species have washed up after a catastrophic war against The Song: a sentient memetic virus that hijacked whole civilizations. We only “won” because a corporate counter-virus called Tormenta burned everything down on the way out.
Now, years later, millions of refugees have come to Polvo to start over. New settlements dot an alien world still littered with crashed dreadnoughts and war relics. The Song still echoes in the wilderness, Tormenta still mutates people into horrors, and a bunch of factions (peacekeepers, corporations, revolutionaries) all want a piece of this “new beginning”.
So this isn’t classic post-nuclear “everything is ash and we fight over petrol”. It’s post-war, post-occupation, about rebuilding, governance, and second chances while the old horrors haven’t really gone away. The core promise is: defend the place you now call home and try to build something better out of a very broken universe.
The engine: traits, beliefs, strain, and the drama machine
Mechanically, After the War sits in that indie storygame space, a step away from Apocalypse World rather than anything OSR-ish or trad. Characters are built from layered Traits: where they’re from (Terran, Martian, Belter, various alien peoples), their War Story (what part of the conflict marked them), their Profession, and how they live now.
Conflicts are straightforward: both sides roll a pool of d6s based on relevant Traits and Convictions, add them up, and highest total wins. Your Strain (ongoing trauma/stress) literally deletes low dice from your roll; you can take more Strain to reroll for a push-your-luck feel. Winning a conflict usually gives you Strain as the cost of getting your way.
The real engine, though, is Beliefs and Insight. Every character has Beliefs about themselves, others, and the world. Scenes are explicitly framed to bring those into contact with hard choices. When the table agrees that a Belief was really challenged, you gain Insight and can trigger Moments of Discovery (little restorative interludes) or Growth (where Beliefs turn into lasting Convictions and the character changes). Over time, you accumulate Convictions and eventually retire the character or let them become part of the settlement’s cast.
Compared to Apocalypse World’s playbook moves, this is less about tactical move selection and more about deliberately throwing your own Beliefs into the fire. Compared to Mutant Year Zero’s nice clean skill system, it’s a bit fuzzier and more emotional, but still light at the table once everyone gets the pattern.
Scene structure: everyone helps point the camera
One of the more distinctive bits is the collaborative scene framing. For each scene, three players share the job: one sets the Platform (where/when we are), another adds the Tilt (what’s gone wrong or about to), and a third poses the Question the scene is about. Then everyone decides whether they’re in Actor mode (their PC is in the scene) or Audience mode (they play side characters, adjudicate Trait use, and hand out Insight when Beliefs get hit).
The game explicitly says: only roll when it matters, and end the scene when the Question is answered. That keeps things focused and makes it very clear what this game is for: dramatic, belief-driven scenes, not tactical exploration or granular survival.
If you’ve mostly run Call of Cthulhu or similar, this is a tonal shift. You’re not prepping fixed investigative scenes; you’re curating where the camera points and leaning on the players to help frame the trouble.
Building community: settlements, faces, and the plot web
This is where After the War really distinguishes itself from the other post-apoc books on my shelf.
Campaigns start with Settlement Creation. As a group you choose one of the core settlements on Polvo (farming Barleymow, salvager-town Warframe Yard, military Fort Bligh, trade hub Vermilion Exchange, science-heavy Daedalus Station, or spaceport Port Thoth) or an offworld colony.
You then pick three Industries that define how your settlement survives (farming, salvage, textiles, logging, etc.), answer a set of loaded questions (“Your settlement produces a unique good. What is it and why is it prized?”), and create three Face NPCs, each tied to one industry and given a Belief. The group maps the settlement, marks down neighbours and who they’re loyal to, and establishes at least one relationship between each PC and a Face.
Behind the screen, the GM keeps a Plot Map: Faces in the centre, neighbouring settlements around them, and a mesh of History threads (what happened between this Face and that settlement) and Relationship threads (how PCs are entangled with those Faces). Each session, you add new threads or deepen existing ones.
It’s like a more formalised version of Apocalypse World’s map-of-names and threat webs, but very much centred on one home community and how it sits in a wider political and memetic mess. Apocalypse World’s Hardholder or Hocus games can produce similar “our holding matters” vibes, but the system doesn’t walk you through building that community in the same step-by-step way.
Mutant Year Zero also puts community front and centre via the Ark, you track Development Levels in Food, Culture, Technology, and Warfare, vote on projects, and roll to see whether the Ark’s defences, farms, or cannibalism initiatives progress. It’s a nice crunchy mini-game, with the Ark sheet changing over time.
After the War doesn’t do that kind of numerical development. Instead, community building is handled through fictional positioning and relationships: which industries your settlement relies on, which factions have influence, which Faces are under pressure, and where the Song or Tormenta have sunk their hooks. It’s about who changes, not what level the food track is at.
Exploration and resources: less hex crawl, more pressure cooker
If Mutant Year Zero is “we draw a map of the Zone and go out to see what tries to eat us”, After the War is more “we go out because something threatens our community, and we care about what it does to the people back home”.
Polvo itself gets a decent gazetteer: climate, ecology, political history, governance, and a surprisingly detailed look at different currencies and economies (Terran cash, Union credits, corporate nanotube banknotes laced with surveillance, favour economies, and so on). It gives you tools to colour trade disputes, debt, and power imbalances without ever asking you to track exact grain tonnage.
There isn’t a hex-crawl subsystem like Mutant Year Zero’s Zone travel rules, where every sector is a card or keyed location you roll up threats for. Exploration in After the War is scene-based: you frame a Platform in the wilderness or a crashed warship, throw in a Tilt involving the Song, Tormenta, or factions, and let Traits/Strain drive the drama. The example adventure, “Cry Uncle”, is emblematic: a farming community under Tormenta’s creeping influence, with missing children, class tensions, and a very specific, local horror at its core.
Resource management is mostly soft. You care about industries, trade goods, and favours, but there’s no rule that says “mark off three food or starve”. The crunchy resource itch that Mutant Year Zero scratches (counting grub, water, bullets, and Work Points on Ark projects) is not really here. This game is more interested in who gets to decide which mouths are fed, and what that does to relationships.
If you specifically want “we’re on our last can of beans and the Zone is full of rot”, Mutant Year Zero is still the better fit. After the War is more about political economy and emotional scarcity than material scarcity.
Player relationships: found families, trauma, and slow change
Where Apocalypse World uses moves to foreground tangled relationships, After the War does its work through Beliefs, Convictions, and Faces. PCs start with Beliefs like “Alliances are better than subjugation” or “Self-governance is a human right” pulled straight from character examples, and these get hammered against community problems and personal history.
Every character has at least one relationship to a Face from character creation, and the GM agenda explicitly tells you to remember home, name NPCs, show families and children, and bring the consequences of the war and of the PCs’ actions back to the community. Long-term play involves characters evolving as their Beliefs turn into Convictions through Moments of Growth, until they eventually retire or become part of the settlement’s permanent cast.
It’s very much about found families and troubled homes rather than lone, haunted wanderers. If your mental picture of post-apoc is “lone biker with a shotgun”, you can still play that, but the rules keep pulling you back to “What does this mean for the people of Barleymow?” There’s little encouragement for PvP backstabbing; the tension is between different ideas of what the community should become, and between trauma and hope.
How crunchy is this, and what’s the prep like?
On the rules side, this is light to medium. Character creation has a few moving parts (origin, war story, profession, traits, beliefs), but nothing like a lifepath system. Conflict rules are simple: build a pool, roll, add, compare. Strain and Moments add just enough texture without turning into a sub-game. Once everyone understands scene framing, it’s easy to run at the table.
Prep is front-loaded around the settlement and plot map rather than encounter design. Your first session is essentially collaborative worldbuilding: settle on your community, build Faces, answer those loaded questions, map some neighbouring settlements and which factions they’re aligned with. After that, ongoing prep is mostly adding new history threads and faces, and thinking about how the Song, Tormenta, and factions push on the community.
As someone who hasn’t run a post-apoc survival game before, I find this reassuring. Mutant Year Zero’s Ark projects and Zone map are also clear procedures, but they come with slightly more bookkeeping and random tables. Apocalypse World’s MCing is powerful but relies heavily on your comfort with freeform play and improvising moves/fronts on the fly. After the War sits in between: strong procedures, but focused almost entirely on one settlement and its people.
The catch is that it expects buy-in on collaborative framing and emotional play. If your group is happiest with clear GM-framed scenes and tactical problems, they might bounce off Platform/Tilt/Question and the Audience role. If they like story-games and character-driven drama, they’ll be at home.
What itch does this actually scratch?
For me, After the War scratches the “hopeful community on the edge of horror” itch. It feels like a mashup of The Expanse’s Belt politics, Firefly’s “the war is over, the good guys lost” energy, and Mass Effect-style memetic/cosmic horror. All filtered through a lens of trauma, diaspora, and rebuilding.
It is not the best choice if your heart is set on desperate hex-crawling, inventory juggling, or highly tactical combat. That’s Mutant Year Zero’s lane. It’s also not as gleefully feral or punk-weird as Apocalypse World; the tone is more sober, concerned with ethics of governance, corporate exploitation, and the psychological aftermath of war.
The itch it scratches is: what does it mean to build a just community on a graveyard, with literal weaponised ideology still echoing in the hills? And can our characters actually heal, or do they just pass their damage on?
Will this be the one I actually run?
Honestly… maybe, baby.
From a purely practical perspective, After the War gives me a clear first session, strong settlement and relationship tools, and a GM agenda that is about keeping home in focus and following consequences, which lines up with how I already like to run horror and mystery games. It doesn’t demand that I invent a whole wasteland from scratch or juggle a resource mini-game; it wants me to care about three or four NPCs and what happens when the Song or Tormenta reaches into their lives.
If I decide I really want “starving in the dust, counting bullets”, I’ll probably still reach for Mutant Year Zero. If I want raw, messy, punk apocalypse with cars and guns and moves, that’s Apocalypse World. But if I want my first post-apoc campaign to be about community, trauma, and hope, with some space bears and memetic horror to taste, After the War has made a strong case for itself.
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