Waste World Designer's Notes

Waste World was designed by Bill King.  Here he details how he went about it.

Starting Out

I started work on Waste World in September 1994. It was a big challenge. I had written fiction, wargame rules, scenarios, supplements for wargames and RPGs. I had helped create the backgrounds for many different games including Warhammer, Warhammer 40000 and Mutant Chronicles. This was different. I was going to build a world and a game system from the ground up. I had to help brief the artists, supervise the graphic design. If I blew it big time, I had nobody to blame but myself.

I wasn't quite flying blind. I had been playing roleplaying games for nearly 20 years as a player and a GM. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted a game system that was quick and violent with a minimum of book-keeping and a maximum of excitement. I wanted to create a science fiction world that captured the same sense of wonder that I had felt when I first read 2000 AD, when I first encountered Japanese anime, when I first played Warhammer 40000.

Right from the start, I knew I wanted a world of extremes. I wanted endless deserts and giant cities. I wanted the setting to be one world - that's right, one single, solitary world. I like Space Opera but most SF RPG's I have played seem to me to be too vague. They need endless systems for generating countless worlds. That means that by their very nature they tend to be sketchy and lacking in detail.

I decided that Waste World was going to be as detailed as most fantasy worlds, with all the wonders concentrated within easy reach. This first decision simplified the game design immensely. No need for random tables to generate solar systems and planets. No need for starship rules and rules for different levels of technology. I could prune things down to the bare essentials and get to grips with the stuff that excited me: the cultures, the aliens, the mutants, the giant killer robots.

Outlining The Basics

Now that we're a little way into things, I'll admit I cheated a little on the world-building stuff. A large chunk of Waste World already existed in my mind. For years, I had been running a Japanese anime style campaign. The Shogunate was a harsh post-apocalyptic world where super-powered samurai and cybernetic ninja battled killer robots and powerful mutants in the service of their brutal feudal overlords.

The Shogunate already existed in that sketchy way campaigns do in the minds of GM's. It existed in scattered notes, hastily sketched maps and half-remembered gaming sessions. The trick now was to pin down the details. Little did I know what was to come. The original Shogunate was going to mutate and become something barely recognizable to the original playtesters.

I wrote a quick essay giving an overview of the world and what it was like. I soon discovered that there were a lot of places beyond the Shogunate. There was the flying city of Ikarus, and the Shogunate's ancient enemy, the cyborg nation of Prometheus. There was the enormous trading complex known as Janus with its alien population and a tower that stretched up into space. There was the city of Hydra, where the population had used genetic engineering to reshape themselves into hundreds of different castes, each with its' own specialist function.

My original Shogunate campaign had been set in a war-torn world of multi-colored deserts and fortified cities. I had never really explained how the world got that way save for the odd reference to the Armageddon Wars which had ravaged the world thousands of years in the past. I knew that the sort of vague waffling that my players tolerated in the heat of the action would not be good enough for a full-blown game. I needed to explain how Waste World got to be the way it is in a clear and comprehensible manner.

Entropic Bombs And The Apokalypse Virus

I knew immediately that since this was an anime-inspired world I was not going to go for a hard SF explanation. Waste World is a post-apocalyptic game in the old fashioned style. It has super-powered mutants and high tech weapons and all sorts of weird climactic effects like (literally) acid rain and poisonous mists.

In the old days writers blamed this stuff on nuclear fallout. I knew I could not get away with that. These days everybody knows that radiation does not give you super-powers, it gives you cancer. And we all know that atomic war doesn't give you a mutated world either, it gives you nuclear winter.

This led to my first great discovery about Waste World. Nukes had been superceded by even more destructive Entropic Bombs. By a strange coincidence, these also do all the things we used to think nukes did, like give you super-powered mutants, and awesomely potent psychers.

So far so good. I needed more. I wanted a world both barbaric and high tech. I wanted an explanation for how this savage society could still have blasters and chainswords alongside axes and spears. I investigated all sorts of things. I thought about caches of ancient weapons and ammo. That was fine as far as it went but it wasn't quite good enough. Eventually my research led me to the second of the unholy weapons that had devastated the Waste World: the Apokalypse Virus.

The Apokalypse Virus is the ultimate computer virus. It was unleashed during the Armageddon Wars. It is artificially intelligent and has one purpose; to cause the extermination of all organic life on the Waste World's surface. It can infiltrate any computer system, and reprogram it to cause the maximum damage. Robots rebel. Food factories insert poison into their products. Reactors melt down.

Of course, the Virus was not completely successful. Some systems were isolated. Some resisted it. Certain automated factories still worked, churning out hi-tech products, particularly weapons. I reasoned that the Virus would leave its victims with the means to kill each other. However most systems that made life tolerable and bearable were down or hastily patched by a society living on the very edge of extinction.

Drakonium

All that was needed now was something for all these warrior civilizations to fight over. At first I thought of Apokalyse-Virus-infected artificial intelligences behind the scenes stirring up all sorts of trouble, but this wasn't enough. Next I added conflicting ideologies. The Prometheans see themselves as the last true humans. They hate mutants and genetically engineered people. The bigotry of the Prometheans gave the Hydrans a good reason to hate them in return. I added similar ancient feuds to the history till the world was a seething cauldron of hatred and tension.

So far ,so good , but all these people needed something to fight over. There had to be a compelling reason for them to come out of their relatively safe cities and confront each other.

At last, a long way into the design process, I came up with Drakonium, an organic crystal that uses solar power to grow. It is a product of ancient nano-technology that blooms in the desert and needs to be harvested by enormous fleets of factory crawlers. Raw Drakonium is poisonous but when processed it is an incredibly potent energy source. In fact, in a world where fossil fuels were long ago exhausted and nuclear reactors proved too dangerous, it is the only energy source.

Everybody needs Drakonium. Without it their city will be blacked out. The great recycling machines that keep the air pure will stop. The factories that produce food and weapons will grind to a halt and the city will die. So the landfleets of the megacities scour the world looking for Drakonium, and they fight wherever they encounter each other.

After sketching out the basics of the world, I decided that the best way to explore it was in person. There were two ways of doing this. The first and obvious one was to playtest the game. This would let me look at the sort of stuff that players would be interested in and force me to describe the things that they would see.

Building A World

Before I started on designing the world proper, I wrote a whole bunch of stories set in the Waste World. These let me look at the world from the inside. In the end I must have written a whole novel's worth of short stories and fragments. I tried inventing the sort of characters that players would like to play. I described their lives and their adventures from the inside. The stories made the world real in my head. They fixed things in place. They made the setting concrete to me.

When I later sat down to put the rules on paper, I tried always to keep to the spirit of the fiction. A fair number of these stories made it into the book. You'll find them there.

Having words on paper is one thing but we now needed art. We needed to let the players visualize the world their characters would adventure in. We needed to show people the setting and all its strangeness.

This long, troublesome process was an adventure in itself. Manticore Productions is based in the Czech Republic. We eventually ended up travelling all over Central Europe, interviewing and briefing people through translators, trying to get people to understand our vision in a language that was not ours. We were lucky. We got what we wanted. In the end we commissioned three artists to do the concept work for the look of Waste World.

Jakub Pozar drew the megacities and gave them their overall look. Ondrej Zahradnicek made sure the people looked as we visualized them. Marcel Turic looked after the weapons and equipment. I think the results speak for themselves. All our other artists worked from these original concept drawings and all of them brought something fresh to the project.

This was an enormous team effort and all the people involved, from my business partner Paul du Temple, to our translators Daniela Erhartova and Sallie Lynch are to be commended.

A Little Bit About The Rules

Since these are the Designer's Notes I suppose I really had better say something about the actual game system itself since that is what I am paid for.

Right from the start I knew Waste World was going to be extremely violent. The setting demanded it and so did the look of the people. There were lots of cyborgs and people with bionic eyes and limbs. I wanted to create a combat system that would explain this.

Waste World has four critical hit tables that allow you to blow big chunks of your opponent and consequently to have big chunks blown out of you. When your life force (our equivalent of Hit Points) reaches zero, you don't automatically die.

Instead you roll for hit location and then you roll on the appropriate critical hit table. You might still die, you might suffer a flesh wound or you might fall unconscious. On the other hand you may well lose some fingers or an eye, or have your leg shot off. If you live through this experience, you're probably going to want some bionic parts. Fortunately the rules tell you everything you need to know about how to get these.

A word now about character generation. At first I wanted to give players a number of character templates to choose from and some simple rules to customize them. I actually wrote and designed over 100 templates and we got most of them illustrated.

However, over the design period, certain points became apparent. While templates were quick and easy to use, they limited player's choices about what they could play, and they meant that most future supplements would simply be an endless list of templates for people to choose from.

The greedy part of me thought; "Great - that's easy work and it forces the public to buy the supplements, if they want to ever play new character types." The part of me that loves designing and playing games thought that the idea sucked. While I'd like our customers to rush out and buy the supplements I don't want them to feel they have to. I wanted the game to stand alone.

In the end I made all the rules I had used to create the character templates available to you. There are still 11 beautifully illustrated full-color character templates in Waste World so you can make a quick start. You can also design your own character however you like, and you can choose from hundreds of skills, powers and special abilities to do so.

Anyway, after eighteen months of sheer hard work, a quarter of a million words of writing and the commissioning of over 600 illustrations, Waste World is finally done. We're all very proud of it. Its turned out to be everything I hoped it would be. I can only hope that you'll like it too.

Now, its time to go and write the supplements.