Cast Away by Joe O’Brien and Reilly Qyote is a role playing game published by The Afterthought Committee.
The supplement is available from DriveThruRPG for $8 but was purchased at a reduced price as part of a special bundle. The PDF has 20 pages with two being the front and rear covers, three the front matter and one a page of thanks.
The Introduction explains that this is a role playing game about difficult choices. It requires a standard set of dice, minus the d20, and has the Survivors, the characters, and the Navigator, the GM. The game is said to be about human endurance, survival, cooperation and possibly betrayal and characters have secrets.
Survivor’s Guide has the steps for creating characters. Each character beings with one each of d12, d10, d8, d6 and d4. The largest is their Current Die, and the Current Die is tolled when facing a challenge. Characters have Physical and Mental Fortitude and Skills. Conditions are usually the consequences of failure or poor choices. Characters can push themselves or aid others and when a Survivor dies, they haunt the others. Supplies are the things that are used to facilitate rescue, which is the aim of the game; failing to be rescued usually means failing to survive. Characters have Secrets, which are hidden flaws.
Threats include creatures that need to be fought, and some examples are given as well as how to create more. Time and weather, a hostile environment and infection and disease are other threats.
Following this is a copy of the two-page character sheet.
The Navigator’s Guide is the GM section. It covers developing challenges, assigning conditions, making death matter – when characters earn their fifth Condition, death is assured but should be made to matter – how hauntings work, how to generate supplies, how to generate rescue, and crafting Secrets with some examples.
Preparing a Game looks into setting a game up by talking with the players, how to get started, how to go in from a broader overview to a narrower one and how to manage tension. There is also an example of a setting and setup.
Wet Season is a full scenario.
Optional Mechanics has some options for haunting, mishaps, boons, keeping time, character progression and advanced combat.
There are five additional PDFs. The character sheet is a two-page character sheet. The minimalist is a single page version of this. Ground Control, Cursed Crystal and Brain Food are three scenarios for the game. Each is a two-page PDF laid out to be a trifold, the first being a space colony suffering disaster, the second a fantasy setting where the characters need to escape a demiplane and the third a zombie apocalypse.
Cast Away in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text switches between a single column and two column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a variety of stock images. Presentation is decent.
This is a full game with a variety of scenarios, although it is perhaps a bit overpriced at full price. It does have everything needed to play several different scenarios out of the box as well as details on how to design more. This is a survival game and success is not assured, and there is a good chance characters will die during it; the mechanics for haunting mean that players with dead characters are still involved. The mechanics themselves are reasonably simple making this not that complicated a game to learn, and the optional mechanics at the back do expand things. The game is a survival game, though, and not adaptable really to other types, even though survival can cover multiple genres. Cast Away can be found by clicking here.
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