A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Wreckside District: A Post Apocalypse Setting

Wreckside District: A Post Apocalypse Setting by Dave Woodrum is a role playing game supplement published by Fishwife Games. This is a generic location intended to be used with post-apocalyptic settings.

The PDF is available from RPGNow for $5 but it was purchased at the reduced price of $3.75. The PDF has 49 pages, of which one is the front cover.

It begins with a short piece of prose and a paragraph on the supplement itself.

The remainder of the supplement has a full page numbered map of the location and then descriptions of all 216 different locations.

Each location has a brief name, which can be as simple as Abandoned House or Liquor Store followed by a description. For some places, this is simply a description of an empty building. A number of locations also have a d100 loot table as well.

More detailed locations have descriptions of various NPCs that could be found there, their armament and affiliation with various groups as well as what products or services could be found, purchased or looted from the place. Some locations also have Adventuring Notes, giving ideas for adventure hooks, and others have a Historical Note, usually connected to how the pre-apocalypse business helped give the area the name Wreckside in the first place, which was due to various vehicle-related businesses.

The district has four main gangs, and some conflict between these as a result, some organised groups of survivors and various unaffiliated people, the last usually not in a very good way.

Wreckside District: A Post Apocalypse Setting in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks, although given its setup, bookmarks might not have been that useful unless every single encounter location was added. The text maintains a single column format and a number of minor errors were noticed. There are a number of black and white images, and one colour one at the end, which would appear to be stock and are, sometimes loosely, connected to the theme of the supplement and various locations. The map is extremely regular, being a rectangle. There are also a number of blank spaces labelled “GM Conversion Notes:”.

The District would appear to be part of a former urban area and can be dropped into post-apocalyptic settings. It is perhaps less suited for zombie apocalypse games than other settings; the district is probably not unified or fortified enough to withstand an attack by a zombie horde. It could still probably be used, but it might need altering.

The supplement also appears to be set only a few years after the apocalypse, and close to the present day in terms of technology, not decades or hundreds of years in the future with advanced tech, as might be seen in a Mutant Future setting. Although it could still be used in a more modern game using that system.

The supplement is system neutral but there is a fair bit of detail provided that adapting it to any setting shouldn’t be too difficult. A weapon is a weapon, and a description of it being a specific, common type should be easy to add game stats to.

There are a few flaws, but overall this is a nice, well-detailed piece of work. There are a number of adventure ideas plus potential interactions between the various gangs, interactions that could involve the players on one side or another. Wreckside District: A Post Apocalypse Setting is a decent post-apocalyptic settlement and it can be found by clicking here.