After the Fall TTRPG & Digital Suite

In the opening days of 2021, a fascist narcissist dictator who was unable to accept losing did the unthinkable: he bombed the cities that voted against him. And because mutually assured destruction is exactly as advertised, the launch of any missiles caused the launch of all missiles. Cities erased. Oceans boiled. The sky went dark and stayed that way for generations. Civilization didn't collapse slowly. It ended all at once, the way Doom said it would: "One, two, three, and to the four."

And then, against all reason, life returned.

Two thousand years later, the world of After the Fall is not a restoration of what once was. It's something stranger. Radiation warped flesh and bone. Old sciences became superstition. Magic re-emerged as reality: a tool, a weapon, and a curse, and with it came the rebirth of gods forgotten, some more ancient than others. Cracked highways lead to fortified villages. Rusted machines are worshipped or dismantled for parts. Guns have re-emerged as the height of technology, though they are no where near what we had when the world burned. The relics from Before the Fall (BtF) are holy objects in a world that barely remembers what they were. This is not a heroic age. It is an age of survival.

After the Fall is a story-first TTRPG built from scratch after years of running other systems and hitting the same walls: too much math, too many rules that slow the table down right when things get interesting, too much choice paralysis before you've even rolled a die. So I built something that fixes all of that.

The rules use a single d10 for everything (besides rolling for damage). One die, one formula. The GM's job is to tell a story, not run a spreadsheet. A bad roll creates a complication, not a dead end. Avoiding a fight through clever play earns XP as well, that chance to advance is not lost by choosing to not engage in combat. And with 9 classes, 6 races, and up to 3 classes per character, there are over 600 combinations of who your character can be, without any of them feeling like you're reading a tax document to build them.

The digital suite is where After the Fall goes further than most TTRPGs. There's a full character creator wizard that walks you through every decision step by step, a character vault to store your crew, and a fully functional character sheet that rolls your dice, tracks your conditions, manages your inventory, casts your spells, and handles just about everything else so you never have to stop mid-scene to do arithmetic. On the GM side, the encounter dashboard tracks your threats, their HP and conditions, handles their rolls, and calculates the XP your players earned, all in real time, round by round.

It works alongside any map tool you already use, like Roll20, or skip maps entirely if your group prefers theater of the mind. The suite supports however your group plays.

The full rules are written. The web suite is built and in beta. The game is in active playtesting and getting sharper every week. What this campaign funds is getting it from working to polished: finishing the commissioned artwork, cleaning up the code I cobbled together at some cost to my sanity, and locking in hosting so the suite stays up and running for everyone who backs it.

After the Fall is also meant to be a community. I'm starting the world, but if you and your players create great locations, compelling threats, or equipment that ought to exist in The Deadlands, I want to hear about it. Backers get access to the community portal where suggestions can be made and voted on, and the best ones have a real shot at making it into canon. This is a living world and it should grow like one. Additionally, if you want your name literally in the game, you can claim a relic that will say "property of YOU" on it when a player finds it.

I'm not asking anyone to write a check with a lot of zeroes on it. Small contributions add up, and every one of them goes directly toward making After the Fall the game it deserves to be. If you've read this far, you already know whether this is something you want to be part of, and I hope it sounds as fun to you as it has been for me.

Thanks for your time.

Ryan