Mutant Epoch

Mutant Epoch is another fantastic d100 game, and this one is a post apocalyptic game with so many d100 charts each one is a rabbit-hole waiting for you to roll a result on it and be pulled father down into the options. The best part about d100 system is the design freedom that allows designers to create wonderfully massive random tables, and control odds and probability to a tighter extent than a d20. You can put an overpowered 1% option on a table to be rolled every blue moon, and it won't destroy the game. Dungeon Crawl Classics uses a d100 very effectively in this regard for many of its tables.

This game has characters of nearly infinite variations, and each major type has a "complexity level" the designer rates it at, so beginning players can gravitate to the easier and more straightforward character types, and advanced players can dig into the meat of the harder classes and character types. There is something for everyone, and that "design complexity" that makes for a long-lived game is baked into the rules.

Game play-wise, this is classic Gamma World on radioactive crack. You do not know what character you will play, their background, or current situation. You could start out with a war-cyborg with a fusion gun, or an indentured farm worker wearing shackles with no shoes and a wooden spear. You really don't know, and you make the best of your starting situation and become a hero no matter where you begin.

The game world builds through its character creation process, much like Traveller, but to a far greater extent since it defines your starting position, equipment, situation, and role. If Traveller went this far, you would be rolling, on an exploration mission, crash landed, on a planet of hostile aliens, working in a local bar, never allowed to leave, with no equipment.

Go.

This is the ultimate "anti pet character" game. You are not endlessly redesigning your idealized "you" or your favorite "online identity" in this game. I swear, self-insert and these over-protected pet characters damage our mental health, we create such a fake persona for us to live in that our real self is seen with disdain and scorn, and we begin to hate ourselves in comparison. My life could never live up to "idealized me." I swear if there is one thing that makes me leave the fantasy genre entirely it is this culture of self inserts and identity gaming.

Identity branding damages mental health. Putting yourself in the game, seeing yourself as an extension of your game identity, or living this "fake life for real" makes who you are inferior. All you will have left in the end is who you are, not a game's version of you. Love who you are. Not a paper character sheet version.

Who you are and what you get are random in this game. There is zero chance you self-insert. You need to deal with what you get. The story organically happens from there. Every new campaign start is a challenge, and you could be playing a series of characters who constantly get killed, but creating a new one is so fun that you do not care.

Mutant Epoch is the best post apocalyptic game on the market,. easily beating out classic Gamma World and Mutant Crawl Classics, and I still love the latter one since it is DCC-infected madness.

Highly recommended.