Dystopia Rising: Evolution is a role playing game supplement published by Onyx Path Publishing. This is the core book for the latest edition of the Dystopia Rising game which uses the Storypath System.
The supplement is available as a 310-page PDF from DriveThruRPG for $19.99. a hardcover standard colour print on demand book for $39.99, a hardcover premium colour print on demand book for $66.99, PDF and standard colour for $44.99 and PDF and premium colour for $71.99. It is also available in printed form from sites such as Amazon. The PDF is the version reviewed although it was purchased at a reduced price thanks to a special offer. Two pages are the front and rear covers, two the front matter, three the Table of Contents, 22 the Index and one the character sheet. The character sheet is also on a second, single page PDF.
Welcome to the Evolution explains that it’s four generations after the Fall and the move to impermanent digital media caused a lot of knowledge to be lost. The descendants of the survivors are new Strains of humanity, changed by what happened.
Book One: Flesh starts with a piece of fiction before moving on the Chapter One: A New Age, which is The Doomsday Book, a section giving some in-character background on the world, how humanity got there and various asides added to give more detail in places.
Chapter Two: Your Brothers and Sisters explains that those who survived the Fall were mutated by the Infection into Strains. There are eight Strains, each of which is divided into three Lineages, and each is then covered. In each case an overview is given of the Strain, why that Strain considers itself the best, what others don’t like, how the Strain survives and game stats, followed by stereotypes and descriptions of each Lineage. These have nicknames, descriptions, Edges and Strain Condition.
Devoted are those who chose something to believe in after the Fall; Accensorites are essentially religious types, Red Stars believe in humanity and Unborn believe in the Grave Mind.
Elitariat (or Elitists; it’s possible that one name was used by mistake) are the, sometimes self-proclaimed, leaders. Digitarians work to rebuild technology, Pure Bloods are the wealthy and powerful and Solestros are the new money version of Pure Bloods.
Evolved are those who have been changed more than others. Irons are larger and stronger, Reclaimers are also strong but are used to cold and Unstable believe they are the pinnacle of evolution.
Gorgers are basically descended from the reanimated dead, but are alive. Full Dead are pretty close to true zombies, Lascarians hate the light and eat the dead and Semper Mort consume blood to survive.
Landsmen are those that spread out forming small towns and farms to survive. Mericans are the town and farm workers, Natural Ones live in the woods, plains and mountains and Quiet Folk primarily live with each other on farms and in small towns.
Mutants are those who were mutated by the Infection. Remnants are usually born from two different strains in an irradiated area, Retrogrades are continually losing and regrowing their skin and Tainted have the disease that creates raiders but metabolise it.
Nomads are the travellers of the wastes. Diesel Jocks are road warriors, Rovers travel in caravans and Saltwise travel the seas, not land.
Townies live in the cities and towns. Baywalkers live on the outskirts of cities, Yorkers are the gangs in the inner cities and Vegasians are gamblers and cutthroats.
Chapter Three: Knitting the Flesh starts with five pre-generated characters, before moving on to an overview of character creation. This starts with a character concept before moving on to Paths. Each character has three Paths; Strain is the character’s Strain, Role is their occupation or expertise and Society which is connection with an organisation. Skills, Skill Tricks and Specialties are covered, then Attributes, of which there are nine, then the final parts which are Edges, gear, Strain Condition, health & stress, defence and connections.
With the overview done, the book then moves on to covering specific parts of character creation, starting with Paths. Paths affect a character’s Skills, Edges, resources and advancement, and though the supplement has them, players can create their own. Paths consist of concept, connections, Skills and Edges, with an overview given of each, followed by how to advance in the Path and what happens when one is left. Strain Paths are covered in Chapter Two. Role Paths are covered here, and are essentially jobs. Though characters can belong to any number of societies, the Society Path is for the organisation they have the strongest ties to. Various different organisations and their benefits are then covered.
Skill Tricks are what abilities characters have in Skills over and above the normal ability. Each Skill has three Skill Tricks, but more can be created. Edges are what a character is best at. Strain Edges are gained at character creation, depending on what Strain the character is; each Edge is associated with a Strain. Open Edges can be gained by any character and can be purchased at any time, as long as the character meets the prerequisites. Open Edges are divided into Mental, Physical, Social and Style. Finally, how Experience is used to advance the character is covered; Experience is earned in low numbers and advancement is fairly slow.
Book Two: Blood Harvest starts with another piece of fiction before moving on to Chapter Four: Rolling the Bones, which covers game mechanics. The core mechanic is the challenge, and characters have a dice pool of d10s to meet a challenge. A handful of dice are rolled, the relevant Skill and Attribute are chosen to determine the number of d10s, those that roll higher than the target number are a success and 10s are successes and are rolled again. The successes are spent to buy off the difficulty. Dice pools are rarely altered; the difficulty is altered instead.
Skills are the core of dice pools, and if a character lacks any dots – ranks – in a Skill, they can roll a straight Attribute. Skills have narrowly focused expertise within them, called Specialities. The Skills are then listed, with example rolls using them, and what the levels, dots, mean, at 1, 3 and 5 dots. Attributes are covered next. There are three Attribute types, Mental, Physical and Social, and three Attributes in each. Each has a description, from 1 to 5 dots, as to what that level means. How dice rolls work is covered next, with all the different ways these can be affected, and the results of failure.
Time looks at how time is handled in a game. Once time levels suitable for combat and action are passed, it is measured in scenes, acts, episodes, arcs, seasons and series, rather like a television show. Most events fall into three different types of action, adventure-action, procedurals and intrigue, and how these are done is covered.
Chapter Five: Acts of Violence is essentially on combat. It starts out by looking at armour and weapons, both of which have tags, which help determine what they do, and can differentiate between two items that otherwise might be the same type. There are more weapon tags than those for armour, and each is a single word with a description and up to three points in tags; some can have 0 or -1 points. This is followed by a brief section on improvised weapons.
How initiative is determined is followed by the different types of attacks, from close combat to grappling to thrown to ranged. Characters can also defend to reduce the chance of an attack hitting. How characters are damaged is next, with different Injury Conditions when injured; Bruised, Injured and Maimed are followed by Taken Out. The book advises that these Conditions be applied using appropriate narration. Taken Out isn’t immediate death; instead, the character will deteriorate unless something is done. Characters can also take Stress Conditions on a similar scale.
There are also threats, which come in different types and some examples are given. First aid for physical injuries and coping mechanisms for mental ones are covered and then the Grave Mind is covered, because in this game death is not necessarily permanent, and characters can return from the dead multiple times, brought back to life, somehow, by the Infection. Finally, there’s a look at handling violence in an abstract manner and how permanent physical problems do not mean a character cannot continue.
Chapter Six: Wild, Wild Wastes looks at the, plentiful, hazards of the wasteland. Fatigue, starvation and dehydration are all potential threats, and alcohol adds its own problems. How to find food, outside of settlements, and how to try and ensure it doesn’t kill you are covered, then the hazards of radiation. The Strains are more resistant to radiation than their vanilla human predecessors, so radiation is handled differently. The weather is still a hazard in and of itself, then there diseases, some real, some not, that can cause harm. Fear and trauma can cause their own problems and there are a lot of example trauma Conditions. Gear is next, with ways of scavenging it, using scrap and example Flaws that every item has. Finally, the wasteland economy is covered, along with gear price lists.
Chapter Seven: Birds of a Feather covers groups and starts by looking at factions, which are groups that have come together for mutual aid. A number of these are described, but there could be more. Secret societies are like factions, but more specialised and, naturally, secret.
Chapter Eight: What You Believe is on religion in the wasteland. A number of different faiths are described, with their history, philosophy, theology, customs & organisation and tenets, along with an example prayer. Faiths can cover everything from belief in holy radiation to television to rock and roll. Faiths have a game effect too, with new Faith Edges and how they are restricted to different faiths.
Chapter Nine: Brain Bleed is on the mental power of psionicists. There are different psi powers, with minor skills anyone with psi powers can use, then more specialised powers that can only be used by specific psionicists.
Book Three: Bone is essentially the Storyguide – GameMaster – section and starts with some fiction before moving on to Chapter Ten: Campfire Stories. It starts with Before Game, which covers making people welcome, deciding which kind of apocalypse is wanted, with several different sliders, and series, acts and scenes. The series is the campaign, the acts are individual adventures and scenes are the components of those adventures. It then moves on to During Play, which covers how to run the game and interpret the rules as well as dealing with players. The Grave Mind is what a character goes through between dying and returning to life, with guidelines as to how the Storyguide can create the experience for a character.
Chapter Eleven: Threats of the Wastes starts with some guidelines for making encounters and then has mechanics for running hordes, enemies in overwhelming numbers, and brutes, single enemies who are more powerful. This is followed by some guidelines on making new threats. Rogue’s Gallery: Threats is the bestiary. This is divided into different sections; first being denizens. These include animals, of the mutated and much more dangerous varieties, and various different types of people. Raiders are cannibals and this menace raids what passes for civilisation in the setting. The raiders come in seven different types, all with different abilities, and each type has different subtypes within it. Zombies come in fourteen different types, again with subtypes, and again all with different abilities. The chapter finishes with a brief table showing the numbers used to make the different levels of threats.
Chapter Twelve: The Wasteland starts with How We Got to Now, which is a history of the Fall of Mankind and the rise of the Infection, and the start of rebuilding civilisation. The Rise of Civilisation then covers how civilisation has grown, with revolts and wars against raiders and technology today, with some hints as to the future. One note is that the Infection means that when the Fall happened is not known, because the Infection replicates. It recreates things, including Scrap that seems to date back before the Fall, but is truthfully only a copy, and a copy of an unknown generation at that, which means things may be wearing out due to overcopying. Or they might be getting better thanks to evolution.
Following this is a gazetteer of the Wasteland, starting with Philly del Phia. This city is covered in the most detail, with history, locations and major and minor NPCs, and Creeds in the city. The rest of the Nor’East is covered in less detail, then the rest of Nor’Merica in even less and finally a brief overview of the rest of the world.
Chapter Thirteen: Let the Dead Lie is an adventure, consisting of eight scenes, set in Philly del Phia and intended for newly made characters.
Appendix: Conditions and Flaws List contains all the Conditions and Flaws from the supplement in alphabetical order, divided into a section for each.
Dystopia Rising: Evolution in Review
The PDF is well bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. The Table of Contents is to a similar level of depth and is hyperlinked. The Index is incredibly thorough, though not linked. Navigation is very good. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are many full colour illustrations, up to full page in size at the beginning of chapters. Presentation is very good.
This is a zombie apocalypse game with a difference. The apocalypse happened a long time ago, but due to the Infection that caused it, many things are preserved; it isn’t just people who are recreated. It’s also not a pure zombie apocalypse; there are many other destructive factors, like nuclear weapons, that went into the Fall and the descendants of the survivors have changed. Perhaps it has one major component in common with zombie apocalypse games; the zombies might be a threat but the real threat is other survivors. The ability to, repeatedly, come back from the dead is a fairly significant difference too.
The world is not covered in great detail; as mentioned, Philly del Phia has the greatest coverage with the amount of detail decreasing as distance increases. The recent history of the world gives a lot of potential problems to encounter, though again these primarily revolve around other survivors. Classing the Strains as broadly human, there are non-human problems and dangers, but it does seem that these, as they so often do, take a backseat to the issues that humans manage to create for themselves, and about themselves. It seems it’s difficult to create anything involving a zombie apocalypse where the other survivors don’t quickly become the main hazard.
This game is, from the looks of it, a new version of the original Dystopia Rising. It would seem that perhaps the major change is that the game system has been changed from the original one to Storypath. This has the advantage that anyone familiar with other Storypath games – and, to a degree, Storyteller games – will have an advantage when it comes to learning how to use this one. It’s possible that some of the original material could be converted to be used with this version, though how easy that might be to do mechanically isn’t known. If it can, that would increase the available content, which is otherwise fairly sparse. Dystopia Rising: Evolution is a zombie apocalypse and post-apocalypse game that is a bit different and it can be found by clicking here.
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