What is NUKED?

NUkED is a fast-playing tabletop roleplaying game about a world that wasn't just laid low by the apocalypse, it was warped. Twisted. The laws that once governed the natural order became flexible. Negotiable even. A century and half in, the wastelands are full of all manner of strangeness. Bizarre mutants and new species that seem to have crawled out of a fantasy story. Even magic. For real, no shit magic. To say it is a strange new world barely scrapes the surface. Find a crew to watch your back and arm yourself. There will be blood. 

 

The Origins of 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 

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! 

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.