'End of The World' settings- Apocalypse how?

By Watercolour Dragon, in Genesys

Does anyone have any of the EOTW line and the Genesys CRB and know if the two would work together? And any thoughts on this/ making them combine effectively?

If anyone's used those books it would be great to have some feedback on if they'd be good for Genesys.

If they would we have a zombie, alien, divine powers and rogue tech dystopia canvas of creativity to play with!

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/the-end-of-the-world/

I have EotW:ZA. Man that dice mechanic sucks.

The game/concept ports over beautifully into Cortex Plus (soon Prime), which is a great dice mechanic. Into this system however, there would be some obstacles. Primarily the creation of your own (I forget what they're called in EotW) "Distinctions", which is kind of a signature of that system.

As a mechanic they would generally map fine as Talents I think - although they are supposed to potentially be negatives too. However, you'd be creating a whole new dynamic in Genesys to allow ppl to create their own Talents. It'd require some sort of standardization and deconstruction.

Also Genesys has a lot more granularity with regards to Skill selection, which there is basically none of in EotW. Maybe that would be part of the dissolution of the self-made Distinctions though?

Anyway, the fluff from those books are great and would port over fine into any system equipped to handle a "Modern" setting - which Genesys is/can be. But porting even the spirit of that system over (create yourself, group consensus/vote), much less then "offensive/defensive stat" dichotomy, would be more of a challenge to translate than it's worth.

Use the EotW ideas/fluff.

Use the Gensys system, as-is.

You'll be good.

Edited by emsquared

Maybe the answer then emsquared is whichever works best for individual playing groups:

- fix the EotW dice mechanic somehow if you dislike it and use the system otherwise as-is (I note some players prefer to make a character than play as themselves, which is understandable!)

- use EotW with Cortex

- live with EotW's dice mechanic if you don't mind it

- or just port what you need from EotW to Genesys, mostly the ideas and fluff stuff.

Well, I was being a little harsh about EotW's mechanic. It's fine for what the system was really designed for: oneshots or very short (3-4 sessions at most) "campaigns".

It actually has some interesting parallels to the Narrative Dice System, positive/negative pools in one, the dice can "stress"/harm you. That - in principle - I like. The all d6s though just aren't flexible enough.

My table played with it for like 8 sessions and so long as you pay attention to, and use, the "Require more successes for harder tasks." rather than just adding more negative dice as the system seems to prescribe, it's passable. You can make it work. Though there are still places where it breaks down ... Like players become afraid to try anything risky or interesting as it can literally kill them just for trying.

Anyway, original point remains.

You can use Genesys as-is to approximate yourself. You can use Genesys as-is to play a modern era zombie apocalypse game. It would do quite well with it even - Minion Groups, Structred Social encounters, the ability to treat zombies as "environmental" challenges and still damage/tax PCs. And the fluff (and art, ye gods what a gorgeous book) from EotW is usable in just about in any system.

I've been slowly working on a very generic, robust "modern" hack, and a large part of that was to run a zombie apocalypse game.

Reading through the Genesys rulebook, there are a lot of match ups between the two. Personally, I always thought of the EOTW system as a good primer for RPGs because of the simple dice system. I can see that with a little tweaking, the scenarios in EOTW should work with the Genesys system

I think the most work would come from converting the positive.negative feature mechanic over to the boost and penalty dice equivalent. I played about a dozen sessions of the zombie setting, and I would call that one of the high points of the system. The second highpoint would be having other characters "voting" on your character creation details. Those two items seem to be the only "new" mechanics to me. Everything else seems to transition simply by replacing the mechanics.