What is NUKED?

A while back I was approached by 819 Entertainment about being the GM for a live play roleplaying game to be streamed over Twitch. Friends have been trying to convince me to do this for quite some time so having a real production company behind me was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. 

The folks at 819 had some ideas for what kind of game I would run. My main genre is fantasy but we agreed that there are a lot of great options for live play fantasy already out there and we wanted to offer something else. 

I love running games and performing but my true passion is game design so I pitched creating a game specifically for the campaign. The Producers were familiar with my work and were all for it so we settled on what would become NUKED. 

NUKED is a post apocalyptic game. It felt like a natural fit for the world we find ourselves in. There are several games out there that play with that genre. What I hope will set this one apart is tone. Many visits to a dark and terrible future are very grim and have paramilitary overtones. 

I love Mad Max and Red Dawn and those elements are there but this is more Rock and Rule and Wizards.  

I felt that the lighter take on an inherently dark genre would provide a lively playground for the players. 

Knowing that the primary use of the game, at least initially, would be the stream I kept things simple. In my opinion, game mechanics have to give the GM and the players the common language needed to define the reality of the world where the adventures take place. I made sure that there was just enough structurally to give a NUKED session a distinctive feel without risking slowing down 

The heart of the game is the task resolution system. Every skill has a rating. To test, roll that many six sided dice. Any six you roll is a success. As long as you roll at least one, you succeed. If you don't but you rolled at least one five, the result is a partial success. No sixes or fives and you failed. 

That's essentially it. There's more of course, like for difficult tasks you roll less dice and extra successes are used by Feats to do special stuff, but that is how you "make a roll". 

Geeks Collaborative Gaming is our publishing partner for NUKED. I'd hoped to have it out before the stream launched but I caught COVID. It laid me up more than a month and I'm still exhausted. Because of this, we decided to release a "COVID preview" version of NUKED that is out now!

A "Player's Companion" follow-up will be released in 4 to 6 weeks (sometime in March). 

The setting is a lot of fun and the system is doing everything I wanted it to do but that's only part of why you watch a stream. You may come for the game, but you stay for the people. Fortunately, we have an incredible group of players. 






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