A Word From The Atomic Wastelands

Bounty Hunter of the Atomic Wastelands (BHAW) has been out for 3 months now,  to the day. In this time it’s been downloaded just over 250 times, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just friends and family who are checking it out. I have no idea whether any of these 250 downloaders have actually read let alone played the game . I’d like to think so but then I myself have got a few games I bought in November I haven’t  got round to yet, it’s just in the nature of things.

I do have further plans for BHAW but I’ll admit that there is a certain lack of urgency behind them. I put myself under a lot of pressure to finish the game and meet my self-imposed deadline. Now that this has been done I’m been feeling a lot relaxed about things.

The one thing I really want to do is to arrange for a limited print run of the book for just me and my friends, so I guess mentioning it here is a bit of a tease.  Sadly this isn’t quite a simple as sending the existing pdf to the printers as the document has to match the exact technical specifications for colour reproduction and there is a bit of a learning curve. This is a project I am committed to. It will happen.

Of more general interest perhaps, I have a couple adventures of BHAW I’ve written I’d plan to release. I just need to tidy up the text and possibly draw a few new pictures. BHAW makes for a great pick up game, a few canned adventures would only increase its usefulness in that role. I am reasonably confident I will get round to this eventually, it’s the sort of thing I can do with just a few afternoons here and there.

I am less confident about the next two BHAW related projects as they both represent a much larger commitment. This first is a source book for Big Fallout City which introduces a mini-game for the exploration of post-apocalyptic ruins. I’d originally planned to include this core rulebook but I ran out of time. The rules are already there, we used them in out campaign they just aren’t in a fit state to share and I figure making them presentable is a lot of work.

The other ‘maybe some day’ project is an expansion for the vehicle combat rules. BHAW already contains a perfectly good vehicle combat rules. The thing is when I run it for my group it also comes with a whole bunch of visual props in the form of vehicle tokens and a road template that really  jazz up this aspect of the game. Unfortunately these images for these props aren’t mine to share so I’d have to redo all the art myself and that’s a biggie. For starters I’d have to learn how to even draw cars!

I’d also like to introduce more variety in the type of vehicles and make generating road encounters even faster. That’s would be all brand new content, it’d need to think up and then test.  I can’t see that happening any time soon.

Also I may give Mutant Bikers of the Atomic Wastelands a little face lift. I posted about MBAW on this blog just because its historical link to BHAW. That, some 15+ years later, it still gets a handful of downloads each months makes me smile. I don’t plan to revise the text but pdf it comes in is pretty terrible. It deserves better.