A new Dungeons & Dragons supplement contains all the information you’ll need for building a campaign centered around a society destroying apocalypse.
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Most people associate Dungeons & Dragons with classical fantasy tropes, but the popular tabletop roleplaying game works well with tons of different stories and settings. For instance, back in 1991, Dungeons & Dragons released their “Dark Sun” campaign setting, which placed players in a dangerous world ruined by arcane magic. This post-apocalyptic setting remains popular among D&D fans to this day, and many players have hoped that Wizards of the Coast would bring back this strange world for a new generation of survivors.
While Dark Sun doesn’t appear to be coming back any time soon, a new supplement provides a full toolbox for crafting your own post-apocalyptic campaign. Earlier this week, Anne Gregersen released Sir Alkian’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse, a 139 page supplement about crafting a campaign set either during or after an apocalyptic event. The manuscript contains ten sample causes for the collapse of society, along with optional rules about food scarcity, equipment quality, or even adding rules about the use of magic to make things like healing or creating food and water a bit more expensive and thus adding to the atmosphere of a campaign. The guide even adds conditions like stress and trauma that should keep players from feeling invincible as they trek through barren wastelands and fight off infected monsters.
The supplement also contains several new races and subclasses flavored for the apocalypse. The demonic fey’ri, the sentient zombie Husk race, and the genetically altered Voidalka all add some interesting choices for players, and there’s also new subclasses for the Barbarian, Cleric, Druid, Rogue, and Sorcerer. There’s also a number of revised and new backgrounds, designed to give players appropriate histories when crafting their character.
My favorite part of Sir Alkian’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse are the monsters. Not only does the book contain statblocks for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it also provides guides to how to convert monsters into post-apocalyptic forms. After all, many monsters would magically adapt to the danger of their new surroundings, and these templates let DMs quickly flavor monsters without much work. Plus, the templates are useful even outside of the apocalypse for DMs looking for a specific flavor of monster.
Sir Alkian’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse is a detailed and thorugh supplement that provides a solid foundation for any DM that wants to challenge their players to survive a world with little to no refuge. Although there are plenty of TTRPGs set in a post-apocalyptic setting, this supplement adds on to Fifth Edition rules without much revisions, allowing players familiar with Dungeons & Dragons to put their survival skills to the ultimate test.
Sir Alkian’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse is available on the DMs Guild for $9.95.
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