Before I get started, I have to tell you that Dan Woodward, a lovely guy who is a member of the Vintage RPG Patreon and a player in my West Marches game, gifted me this copy of the game, which he contributed to. I apologize in advance, Dan!

This is The End (1995), possibly the most ’90s game I have ever encountered. The core idea is that the Biblical apocalypse has unfolded more or less as predicted. God has raptured away the worthy while the sinners have been swept into Hell (worth noting that the idea of the Rapture is not Biblical, but was developed by kooky American evangelicals in the early 1800s). The folks who are left are the Meek, the normal folks who were neither Good nor Evil (I can’t help but think of the cookbook episode of The Twilight Zone, “It was a warning!”). Just folks, trying to muddle along after the collapse of civilization as they knew it.

Mechanically, the unusual bit (because it has to have at least one, it was the ’90s!) is the basic rolling mechanic. It’s a dice pool, tied to an attribute. Roll the corresponding number of dice and get at least one lower than the relevant skill rating to succeed. Then re-roll the pool of successful dice to determine the total success points. Those work similar to the quality of success chart in James Bond, but less elegantly. There is also a sanity mechanic called Ennui that encourages characters to be social.

I kind of balk at the basic assumption in the game that, in the wake of an apocalypse where the very good folks and the very bad folks are all taken away, the folks who remain would belatedly try to become sufficiently good or bad, in case God does a second sweep. The various pockets of remaining civilization are all variants of established post-apocalyptic tropes that are further extrapolated on to capitalize on the themes of the setting. But they boil down to Really Good places, Really Bad places and some hapless, doomed places (doubling down on meekness, I guess). The art mirrors this in pretty typical ’90s fashion. The Richard Kane Ferguson cover sure looks like a Richard Kane Ferguson cover. I don’t recognize any of the names of the interior artists, but they deliver a pretty grim tableau that would be at home in any given White Wolf splatbook; there’s even an artist doing a pretty solid Tim Bradstreet impersonation. It seems to me like the game very much wants to coax players to extremes.

The problem is that I feel like the folks who would be left behind would be mostly sad and self-interested. They’d sort of drift into endless existential crises and scrabble around for what’s left of the drugs and booze. Remember how impossibly depressing everyone was in The Leftovers? And that wasn’t even the result of a clearly supernatural happening (at least as far as I am aware, I couldn’t get past the first season). There are no uncertainties about what happened in the world of The End, and I reckon that clear knowledge of abandonment would break everyone’s will. People would all sit around quietly, waiting for the end to come. But I guess that wouldn’t make a good RPG.