Zak S's totally fucking sweet recaps of his TMNT/Mutant Future game are the kind of games that I wish I was running. Not only because his players are totally rad, but because we seem to like our post-apocalypse the same way. Two of the most formative games of my high school years were Jared Sorensen's Inspectres and octaNe. Inspectres has been bar none the best money for enjoyment that I've ever gotten out of a roleplaying game and octaNe... octaNe was a kick in the junk.
The years of 14 to 18 were full of a lot of weird fucking movies. My parents had given me the ability to rent R-rated movies on their account at Heads Together Video, a cult video store in Pittsburgh that's sadly no longer in business. They had a phenomenal selection of Hong Kong action, independent strangeness and B-movies galore and I spent most of my money renting movies like Six String Samurai, Big Trouble in Little China, Repo Man, Versus and Shaolin Soccer. They were bizarre, entertaining and utterly over the top, which was totally cool to the adolescent mind. Combined with a burgeoning interest in ska, punk and hardcore and my existing nerdy qualities, it meant that on the whole, people had no idea what I was talking about most of the time. octaNe somehow synthesized all of my interests at the time into a neat little package, which also included one very cool rule:
The Rule of Rock n’ Roll
Before we even get started, I need to make one thing perfectly clear: the Rule of Rock n’ Roll states that when playing octaNe, you MUST be playing rock n’ roll music* of some kind. Consider it The Law, and disregard it at your own peril.
You heard. A game soundtrack is fucking mandatory. This is probably the reason that I ever thought about game soundtracks and as a result, I've had wonderful ideas for game settings come from songs as diverse as Fugazi's 'Full Disclosure' (kind of Burn Notice meets the Invisibles, filtered through the corporate superheroics of WildCATS 3.0) and Slim Cessna's Auto Club's 'This Land Is Our Land Redux' (Desperado as an actual Western, complete with man portable Gatling guns)
This is what my post-apocalypse sounds like:
You had me at Tom Waits.
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