The Unofficial UFO:Aftermath RPG Manual

The Unofficial UFO:Aftermath RPG Manual

Chapter one: Welcome to the Aftermath

In the beginning, there was the world. And the world was round, and mostly bluish, and most people agreed that, while overall it wasn't really a paradise of any sort {the odd occasional lovestruck artist nonwithstanding}, for a world, it could've been worse. Not that it was what you could call a mover and a shaker among the worlds, considering that it did nothing but laze about for a few million years. But inevitably, the world eventually heard of home improvement and decided it might as well do something about all that muck it was covered in, and it wasn't long after someone got to the point of inventing the light switch.

Things sort of steamrolled after that, and the people started inventing all sorts of things, useful or not, like the steam engine, the wingnut, nuclear bomb and slinkies. To an outside observer, it wouldn't have been difficult to compare the way the world has been going to one giant party.

Eventually, however, the beer began to run out, and the mob started thinking about inviting other people to the party. Some argued that someone was bound to show up soon enough anyway, what with the amount of radio noise they made, or in the worse case, call the cops. Some started scoping out the neighboring houses to see if anyone old enough to buy alcohol was in, but without any luck.

Needless to say, when a giant mothership suddenly showed up in their orbit, the partygoers greeted them with a melange of reactions.

In the first couple of days, there was the usual shock, resignation, disbelief, apathy and the embarrassed shuffling of feet from the scientific community. A hastily-prepared space shuttle mission was arranged to intercept and rendezvous with the rudely unresponsive starship. A large number of astronomers agreed something in the ship needed tuning up, since it was leaking some kind of powder.

By Thursday, there was jubilation, heated debates and a sudden resurgence of Babylon Zoo on radio stations. The space shuttle Endeavor manages to pull up next to the starship, but since the driver doesn't answer even after an extensive amount of hullbanging it is forced to return to earth after leaving a parking violation ticket under one of the windshield wipers and taking a few snapshots for the DMV. In the meantime, the spores continued replicating like nobody's business, covering most of the atmosphere. Makeshift "ancient" cults begin springing up like mushrooms after a rain, ranging from "alien creators return" to "mana from heaven that will solve world hunger". The latter are mostly criticized for not having enough beer in their scriptures.

At Sunday, sometime noonish, the spores mutiplied to the point where they completely blocked out the sun. Deciding that they've had enough of this dumb floating around business, they plummeted down onto the earth not really like so much snow as a global dumpster truck full of sand. The high point of vast majority of people sharing the same sentiment for once in history was unfortunately offset by the fact that the sentiment happened to be "Man, being dead SUCKS!"

The handful of those who happened to be in the bathroom at the time walked back out, their flies still down, and looked at the carnage of the alien aftermath.

To all means and purposes, it looked as though the party was over.

And obviously, someone would have to clean the place up.

Chapter two: Roleplaying

"All the world is a stage." - Shakespeare

"Everybody's a critic." - Unattributed

Roleplaying is a form of entertainment where the participants, or players, act out imaginary characters, while at the same time, keeping their characters within the constraints of what is "real" within the game setting. To put it simpler terms, roleplaying can be likened to playing pretend, but with rules. Go back, for example, a decade or so in the past, to one of the times you were playing cowboys and indians. Doubtless many of them ended with heated debates over who shot and didn't shoot whom. If you look at that situation through your present eyes, it will probably seem childish. On one hand, it was probably fun to pretend to be John Wayne, Buck Rogers or whatnot, but when two actions clashed, so did the participants. Roleplaying enforces rules to avoid that sort of game-stalling conflicts. Thus, any uncertain situations can be resolved quickly by the referee, or oft-called "gamemaster" who is in charge, among many other things, of informing how things went.

If you want to know more about roleplaying in general, I would suggest you read Uncle Figgy's Roleplaying guide for non-RPers, as this guide will mostly deal with information specific to the UFO: Aftermath setting.

Chapter three: Character creation

Well, this is it. The big one. The brown stuff has hit the fan. Apocalypse. Ragnarok. End of the world as we know it. And on a Monday, no less.

You are a soldier in the service of the Council of Earth, the organization determined to rally the survivors of the world and retake the planet from the evil clutches of the alien invaders. Would you like a booklet? Excellent. As a soldier, it will be the duty of your squad and yourself to use your skill, wits and firepower to accomplish the duties the CoE commanders put forth before you.

Before you can begin, you will need to create a character, an alter ego that you will play during the course of the campaign. You'll need to decide on your soldier's name, how he or she looks like, his personality and, probably the most important part to the beginning player, how to allocate his physical attributes.

There are six physical attributes, strength, agility, dexterity, willpower, intelligence and perception, which in turn determine the character's proficiency in fourteen separate skills. Strength represents the overall muscle mass and mostly has effect on the soldier's overall carrying capacity and handling heavy launchers. Agility determines how quickly the soldier can move, and deals with running and throwing. Dexterity is how nimble the character is, and will greatly help with handguns and sneaking. Then there is Willpower, which shows the character's patience and ability to focus, thus helping with rifles and snipers, intelligence that will increase the soldier's psionic power and help the soldier do more damage, and finally perception, the cornerstone of every good scout.

The conversion of points system into the English language is as follows.

0 / Awful
1 / Poor
2 / Average
3 / Good
4 / Very good
5 / Excellent
6 / Heroic
7 / Superheroic

IMPORTANT: Note that you cannot raise any of the physical attributes to the point of "superheroic"; that level only applies to skills.

Each soldier begins with twelve points they can distribute among their physical attributes. You may wish to distribute them all evenly if you want a jack-of-all-trades, or increase some aspects of your character at the cost of other. Remember, though, that as your soldier gains experience, he or she will improve, thus allowing him to develop further as he wishes. Also, you may decide to give your character some "personal" traits, but there's a catch; first, they must be balanced, and second, they must be approved by the GM.

A rough example of a character description might go like this:

Name: Unknown
Callsign: Quinch
Age: 28 {estimate}
Experience level: 3 / Strength: 1 {Poor}
Agility: 4 {very good}
Dexterity: 2 {average}
Willpower: 1 {poor}
Intelligence: 3 {good}
Perception: 3 {good}
Bonus to stealth
Bonus to close-range dodging
Penalty to weapon initiative
Penalty to psi defense / Found by a CoE patrol near Grozny base, the subject has not been able to provide any information relating to any time period predating the Fall as well as showing high degree of disorientation immediately afterwards, leading the medical staff to presume he is suffering from shock-induced amnesia. Regardless, he seems to retain an above-average knowledge of combat and field tactics which brought him into his current CoE unit. Extremely taciturn and unsociable, he exhibits most symptoms of chronic paranoia, and appears to reflexively attempt keeping himself unnoticeable even in social circumstances. While his alertness and agility rate rather highly, they are offset by his undeveloped muscular mass and short attention span. Also, while he seems to be used to fighting, he exhibits a moderate level of discomfort when handling firearms, often hesitating before opening fire.

You can write the personality description any way you want to; the bottom line is to just provide the other players with some information about what the person is like.

Chapter four: ph33r my 1337 skillz

To make a long story short, your skills determine how good you are at doing things. They are split into fourteen categories.

Marksmanship / This skill deals with two types of weapons; first, and most commonly used, are sniper rifles. The second are some of the heavy, gyro-stabilised weapons, such as the gatling gun or the warp resonator. Among the weapon skills, this one is hardest to master.
Rifles / Deals with the more commonplace types of rifles; assault guns, shotguns and laser rifles all fall under this category. As this type of weapon is fairly widespread, many soldiers try to specialise in this skill.
Handguns / The handling and use of small arms; revolvers, submachine guns, automatic and semiautomatic sidearms. Dangerous in close quarters, they are often overlooked because of their low damage.
Launchers / The weapons that fall under this category can be summed up in five words - rocket launchers and deployable turrets. If you have your eye on that RPG-7, this is the way to go and to sweeten the deal, a four-barrelled turret on an elevated position can wipe out a small army. The small print some fail to notice, however, is that those weapons, or the ammunition for them, are often hard to come by.
Throwing / The general misconception about this skill is that it only applies to grenades. Instead, it deals with any and all weapons whose payload travels in an arc rather than a straight line. Covering grenades, plasma launchers, Super Strikers and the shoulder-launched M79, it's the second most used weapon skill in Aftermath.
Psi Power / aka Spoonbending, doesn't seem to be much to look at at first. While all experimental psionic weapons tend to be either too ineffectual or unreliable for combat, and those with the pedigree of being developed by the aliens slightly less so, the Psionic Projector, one trump card they do have, makes it all worthwhile.
Hit Points / Determines how many hit points the soldier has. With each successful attack against your soldier, his hit points will drop. When they reach zero, he's dead.
Speed / Succinctly put, how fast the soldier can run without getting winded. High speed can be very useful for soldiers who favor the hit-and-run type of attacking, but is essential for any soldier who wants to quickly get out of - or into - trouble..
Dodging / The use of cover, minimizing you profile and just plain luck, this skill will make it harder for enemies to hit you. Just remember, no matter how high it is, you ain't gonna be no Flash.
Observation / Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and gut feels. By paying attention to the little things, this skill will help you spot aliens sooner, hopefully sooner than they'll spot you. An essential skill for scouts and reconnaisance operatives.
Stealth / Sneaking, shadows, cover, lingering in the enemy's blind spots - the polar opposite to the Observation skill, Stealth will help you stay undetected, and thus unshot-at unless you're actively looking to pick a fight.
Aliens / Gray's "Anatomy" turned into "Grey Anatomy", when it's hard to make a headshot on a creature with no head to speak of, the Aliens skill helps you pinpoint the aliens and transgenants' critical organs {or facsimiles thereof} for inflicting more harm than would otherwise be the case.
Medical / The practical use of medikits and makeshift equipment, this skill will help you get the most of what medical supplies you have in the field. Just remember - chest wounds may suck, but only when properly inflicted.
Capacity / How much raw weight your soldier can carry before it starts to bother him. Just remember that some things, like the deployable turrets, are going to be hard to lug around no matter how strong you are.

Chapter five: The formulae and other boring stuff

NOTE: Chances are that you don't need to know all this, especially if you're not GMing; it's simply written as either an aid or a set of guidelines for GMs who wish a more "solid" set of rules to decide whether any given action succeeds or not. Some of these might interest the casual player as well; for example, the exact numbers that make up any given skill, while some, on the other hand, might seem important only to the most pedantic GM.

a)Skills {the following is a direct copy-paste from Sigget's Skill Tool documentation}

"There are 14 skills, actually there's 15 if you include melee, but melee is never used in the game. The skills describe how well a soldier is at a certain task. The skills are represented in the same way as attributes, so the above table is used here aswell. A soldiers skill is calculated from his attributes and his trainings, we'll get to the training later on. The formulas are very easy as you can see in this table:"

Strength / Agility / Dexterity / Willpower / Intelligence / Perception
Marksmanship / 0.25 / 0.5 / 0.25
Rifles / 0.5 / 0.5
Handguns / 0.25 / 0.75
Launchers / 0.75 / 0.25
Throwing / 0.5 / 0.5
Psi Power / 0.5 / 0.5
Hit Points / 0.5 / 0.25 / 0.25
Speed / 0.25 / 0.5 / 0.25
Dodging / 0.25 / 0.25 / 0.5
Observation / 0.25 / 0.75
Stealth / 0.5 / 0.5
Aliens / 0.75 / 0.25
Medical / 0.25 / 0.75
Capcaity / 0.5 / 0.5

"So for example, a soldier of very good(4) agility and heroic(6) willpower will have a rifles skill of: 4*0.5 + 6*0.5 = 5.0 = Excellent. If the soldier instead had excellent agility he would have had 5*0.5 + 6*0.5 = 5.5, now this number needs to be rounded to an integer value, the rounding method used in the game rounds 5.5 to 5, NOT 6. So the soldier would still have an Excellent rifles skill."

b} Gun-tottin', grenade-tossin', wholesome, family-friendly fun!!

The base probabilities of hitting with any ranged weapons can be summed up in these formulas.

Awful / 100*(1-(X/100)^(1/9)
Poor / 100*(1-(X/100)^(1/3)
Average / 100*(1-(X/100)^2)
Good / 100*(1-(X/100)^2)
Very Good / 100*(1-(X/100)^3)
Excellent / 100*(1-(X/100)^7)
Heroic / 100*(1-(X/120)^7)
Superheroic / 100*(1-(X/150)^7)

The X in all these formulas is the distance between the target and the shooter relative to the weapon's range expressed in percentiles. For example, if you're shooting at a trannie that's thirty metres away with a gun that has the maximum range of fourty-five metres, the "X" would be 30/45= 66, which would lead at, say, good skill with that weapon, to a roughly 56% chance of hitting with each shot fired. Soldiers with heroic or superheroic skill may even land hits that exceed the weapon's nominal range.

Of course, not all hits do the same damage; some may just graze the enemy, while another may be outright lethal; all that depends on the soldier's Aliens skill.

Minor hit
(-50% damage) / Normal hit
{no modifiers} / Serious hit
{+50% damage} / Critical hit
{+100% damage}
Awful / 50% / 50% / 0% / 0%
Poor / 35% / 65% / 10% / 0%
Average / 20% / 80% / 20% / 0%
Good / 20% / 70% / 20% / 10%
Very Good / 10% / 50% / 35% / 15%
Excellent / 5% / 35% / 40% / 20%
Heroic / 0% / 20% / 40% / 40%
Super-Heroic / 0% / 0% / 40% / 60%