Tabletop Tales: ‘Hell on Earth D20’
There’s a saying that I read some time ago on a forum that I liked so much I stole for myself: “Whatever you wrote the most about is what your game is about. If you wrote a 120 page tank combat game with 75 pages of plane combat rules, you have written a plane combat game.” There’s a lot of truth to this statement, especially when it comes to older roleplaying books that adopted a common ruleset so they could focus entirely on story mechanics. The Deadlands trilogy piggybacks on the DnD 3.5 rules because at the time the rules were open source; the new Deadlands books (that I don’t have yet) use Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds system instead.
Deadlands is a saga of roleplaying books detailing the battle of heroes against the theoretically fallible horsemen of the apocalypse (known in universe as “The Reckoners”) over a long, convoluted story-line that spans over two time periods and two planets. Normally I would start this saga with the original Deadlands and not with Hell on Earth, but I won’t for two reasons: 1. I don’t have the first book and 2. According to Hell On Earth anything the heroes did in the original Deadlands was undone by the Reckoners sending their #1 badass Stone into the past to kill Sarah Connor any heroes he could find until the bad guys won; negating the entire first part of the series. Their whole plan revolved around being defeated so that they could lure all of the heroes out from hiding so they could send their Terminator after them.
In regards to the opening quote, Deadlands‘ Hell on Earth D20 is a setting book almost completely dedicated to giving general setting information in the form of an introduction chapter and retelling that information for games-master use at the end of the book. Information a player would want is sandwiched in the middle and consists entirely of custom feats and classes. These classes are all fit to a specialized roll. Third party 3.5 content tends to focus on making every concept a class in its own right, such as insisting on the existence of a rogue class, a ninja class, a special ops class, etc when they are all pretty much rogues. Here, we have a class that focuses on making weapons, a few fighting classes, a radiation spell-caster, and a charisma class that ends up being the most important in the party after the adventure.
The introduction is written from the viewpoint of a Brotherhood of Steel Templar named Joan, who describes herself as bleeding out and dying talking into a voice recorder. She then spends 49 pages explaining absolutely everything a common character would know about the setting including landmarks, why the war happened, major enemies and allies, and effectively every reason not to get out of bed in the morning. Common sense would dictate Joan isn’t really dying and you would be right, the re-introduction’s first segment is about how “Jo is alright, we have plans for her”, she has a lair around Denver and is likely mentioned in the relevant sourcebook. The long story short is that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse need human emotions to gain power, and have engineered a series of events that prompted a magical nuclear holocaust that destroyed civilization, covered the world in monsters, and now use the remaining humans as an energy source by striking fear into their hearts.
This sum’s up a major problem I have with the Deadlands trilogy. Every major character is either written to be interacted with or given no statistics followed with the mantra “If we stat it, you will kill it and we don’t want that to happen”. Thus the major villains such as the Horsemen, Stone, and the other big names enjoy plot immunity UNTIL you buy the adventure where you can kill them. The GM Secrets section is littered with prompts for the reader to buy source books that detail the areas mentioned with more detail. Areas of major plot significance are all vaguely mentioned, some areas are mentioned, complete with a prompt to buy a book for more information. The few areas that are listed are more or less references to other media with places like S-Mart and Movietown. Dr. Pepper not only survived the bombs dropping but it has the magical ability to cure you of all radiation.
For instance a major plot point concerns Air Force One and its crash somewhere near Denver. The GM Secrets states that the spirits of the plane refuse to let it be found and if you want to find it you have to buy the Denver Sourcebook. The result is, if you actually wanted to run Hell on Earth as a gamesmaster while remaining faithful to the metaplot you would need not just the 3.5 Handbook and this book but you would also need the specialized monsters manual “Horrors o’ the Wasted West”, and depending on what part of the gameworld the party goes to you will need a different book for each major area! Meaning you need the Denver sourcebook in Colorado, City ‘o Sin for Vegas, Shattered Coast for California, and Iron Oasis for Utah; Joan paints those four states as extremely important yet the book teases you time after time with half information meant to prompt you into book-buying. So despite devoting almost the entire book telling you about them, as a GM you are basically lost without the full library.
Since the game uses 3.5 rules, the majority of the GM secrets section is scattered with different skill checks with a target of 15-25; meaning a player that knows what skills he needs to move the story forwards can be stacked effortlessly by level 7 and above. Skill-Stacking has always been a 3.5 issue, and it’s only made worse in Hell on Earth: D20 by how important skill checks are to the games plot. For example the core mechanic for lowering fear and potentially winning the game has a target of 20-32. If you are playing the class meant to do this task you can be easily stepping over that number by tenth level due to how 3.5’s skills work. By level 15 a “Tale-Teller” can reliably lower the fear level after every adventure, and by 20 the only way he could feasibly lose is by rolling a one. Translating these games concepts to 5E ends up in a cleaner system all around, and it’s probably much cleaner in the new Savage Worlds ruleset too.
When it comes to setting specific weaponry in 3.5, you really are at the designers mercy. Melee weapons like clubs and swords just do a single dies worth of damage while guns do two dice worth. When your typical human has around 12-30 hit-points getting shot means you can afford to get hit once or twice. While this does mean that the players have a fighting chance against most enemies, the way power ramps up in 3.5E makes it so that by later levels there’s very little stopping the party from rushing in guns blazing for every single situation; the amount of ammo spent is nothing compared to the continual treasure gain the average party experiences. You can imagine most combats consist of “I get into cover and shoot” with the occasional “Nade out!”
I mention the power balance because I have “Horrors ‘O the Wasted West” and I can tell you for certain most of the enemies are either humanoids armed to the teeth or monsters with teeth for arms. Most of which have mechanics that kill or maim players instantly with very high skill saves. As an example Mainliners are freaks with syringes for fingers and a tiny handful of hitpoints, if they hit you then you must immediately constitution save against death. Many monsters have such mechanics, I sincerely doubt how much these monsters were tested. From a glance it looks like throwing any of these monsters against a party will kill most or all of them; which is not only the opposite of good design but it also does not make much sense for the setting. The Reckoners need living, scared people in order to exist. Most of the Hell on Earth monsters are capable of wiping out the remaining towns with their near endless numbers, or are mindless horrors that wipe out whole towns for fun. That devolves into an argument of how much control the Reckoners actually have, since they are supposed to be immortal yet Famines horse was famously slain. At any moment a hoard of Tremors worms can stray from the Mojave and destroy everything, I don’t get how gigantic underground creatures can have a marked territory and don’t just roam.
The Deadlands line is really focused on a specific series of events happening, and that shows throughout the entire Hell on Earth line; it’s clear that they worked hard to edit out anything of story significance out of the core book, leaving you with only part of a setting. That said you could run a game of Deadlands with just the core book and Horrors O’ the Wasted West making things up as you go and players wouldin’t know the difference. But deep down you would know you are playing the game “wrong”, and that’s something that always bothered me about Deadlands. There are alot of extra books for Hell on Earth that add further flair and story that could of been compiled into a few really big books. The core book by itself is useless, and that’s not good design in my opinion.
You might wonder “How does it end, if they are so worried about the plot?” Here it is and I kid you not: At the end of the Hell on Earth game line,a spaceship called the Unity warps to Earth captained by Dr. Hellstromme, who apologizes for helping destroy the world by capturing the Reckoners in a magical thingamajig. He then sends the party off on his spaceship to the far off planet Banshee (Located in the Faraway system) where you will begin the next game in the line: Lost Colony. Exchanging one hellish planet for another hellish planet. Having not read the adventure “The Unity” myself I can’t say for sure what the plan is but from what I’ve read it has the same explanation everything else in Deadlands…
About that. Every part of the rules that seems to favor the players really does not. If you die, you might get back up (eventually) as a “Harrowed”. You are the walking thinking dead. The manitou powering you is constantly trying to take control of you to further the cause of evil. Junkers have to bargain with a manitou to get ideas to develop their tech. Those evil spirits serve the Reckoners and are always causing havoc somewhere. Because of the evil coating the world all characters get the “Counting Coup” ability, allowing them to earn special perks from notably powerful enemies by harvesting their soul energy. By the end of a trek across the wasted west you’ll end up with all sorts of whackey things like magical guns, a haunted Harley motorcycle, immunity to toxins and poisons, and other supernatural goodies.
In conclusion we have a game line so worried about the plot that they forgot to spend much time at all discussing what the world is like in any more detail than a third party description of what the world is like. The most concrete thing we get is the description of what a Deadland looks like, since most of the game world is one. Between the players and monsters there is little to no balance to be found, with wonky weapons and megamonsters I can’t imagine most fights ending with anything less than half the party dying; which I argue is not that fun. Deadlands emphasizes why third party content was suspicious at best for the 3.5 ruleset, often presenting it’s own balance and gameplay issues. Hell on Earth may not be a bad game, but it’s certainly not the best post apocalyptic game I have seen. At best it requires you to have your own version of the post apocalypse in mind well before you try to apply Deadlands to it, and that is a problem.
As a 3.5 Setting Book, Hell on Earth gets two out of five pop culture references from me.
