Mint Reviews: After, by Cyclopean Publishing.
About a month ago, Cyclopean Publishing reached out to me and asked if I would write up a review of After, a game about telling a story about the past and the present at the same time. I agreed, and received a copy of the game in exchange for a review.
In After, your characters exist in a world called Extempore, a land of transient, mismatched landmasses that shift and move, carrying inhabitants from various worlds and pushing them to figure out how to live next to each-other.
Who are you? You're someone who matters, someone who has abilities that are big enough to cause significant changes in the world around you, as much as it shifts. You know this because you've already done it - and you're going to do it again.
After uses d6 dice pools with each dice serving up a 50% chance of success. You need a # of successes to meet or beat the difficulty rating to get what you want. The game also uses staggered successes, meaning that if you only meet the difficulty rating, you succeed at a cost. Your stats run from 2-4 dice in your primary pool, but you might also get dice from special powers.
After's unique twist revolves around the interplay between the past and the present: your characters have a Past Act that isn't quite defined at the beginning of play, but has already defined your characters through character pieces called Origins and Past Legends. These pieces are the simpler halves of your character, but they get fleshed out when you invoke Memories, a limited resource that gives you the ability to narrate a part of your past in order to ensure that something is true - and to ensure that right now, in present, you are successful. The GM also has the power to announce a flashback to the past to flesh out a detail that the PCs are encountering in the present: an NPC who appears clearly angry with the party might trigger a flashback to the moment where they first fought that NPC. If the group plays through the Past Act, only their Past powers are available to them; they cannot draw from their Present Legend.
The Present Legend is the other half of your character, and it's the most complex piece of the pie. Your Present Legend both introduces a core mechanic that heavily influences the setting and themes of your game, it also presents a list of powers that you'll slowly gain over the course of play. In each session, your character will unlock a once/scene power that allows you to really show off, and also give you experience. Your fifth and final power will unlock in your final session, drastically changing the end of your character's story.
Another key piece to the character sheet is Focus. Focus is described as a narrative tracker, meant to measure your character's power as it grows. This is a double-edged sword; you can spend Focus to fuel your powers, but accrue too much and you become burdened with Consequences, which often make certain actions difficult, or inhibit you until you fulfill a narrative requirement. Your Focus also determines how hopeful or tragic your Epilogue is at the end of the game - a result determined through a dice roll.
After describes itself as a maximalist game, and I'm inclined to agree. The setting itself is everything and the kitchen sinks: minotaurs, frog-people, cyberpunk skyscrapers, elven druids, steampunk automatons, and object-headed folks are all welcome in this hodgepodge milieu. The art for this game definitely contributes to this feeling! You can get a lot of cool ideas just by flipping through the art.
What this means for your players is that the world is their oyster, and if you want a high fantasy fan, a robot-lover, and a player who loves putting their fursona into every game possible to all play at the same table, you can do that with After.
Then there's the Present Legends, which have a very specific arc. If you play through your legend with the goal of hitting every power, your character will find themselves irrevocably changed. All of your employees unionize, your parasite takes over your body, or perhaps you surrender to an opposing faction that you've been fighting throughout the entire game. You can choose to avert your final power in order to have more control over your epilogue, although this means that you're also giving up the chance to be supremely effective in your last session.
After creates an interesting contrast: while the world is open and allows a bunch of set-pieces to exist alongside each-other, character arcs are hyper-specific. This specificity is needed, because you need a reason to do the things you're doing, and outside of what your arc gives you, I didn't find a lot of moments where it was clear to me what kinds of stories you are meant to be telling with after.
Your characters are very diverse, not just in their origin, but in the powers that will change who they are. They likely all hail from different domains in the world of Extempore, and it's likely that as a play group, you'll likely travel from Domain to Domain over the course of your adventure.
As a group, I'd expect you would have to find a thread that brings all of your character together, and hold onto it pretty firmly in order to tell a story that is both colorful and cohesive. The GM advice section of this book gives a lot of good advice on how to build a challenge in order to make it navigable and dramatic. That being said, there's also a lot that seems to rely on GM fiat, such as when a Flashback occurs, and when Domains shift.
If I was to run this game, I'd likely need to pull from my experience with other ttrpgs to string Challenges together to fit the genre or tone that I'm going for. If you want a Noir game, you'll need to already know how to run mysteries. If you want a political game, you should already be familiar with the tropes of political stories. If you want a combat-heavy game, I hope you know how to make the combats matter!
I think that the campaigns written for After, (Clear as a Bell & Dreams of Sylvia) might mitigate some of the openness that I struggled with just with reading the rulebook, as I have a feeling they might fill in some of the gaps I felt when I was reading it.
I would recommend After to a players who like the idea of playing with time, and moving between moments that exist in the past as well as the present. If your group is usually pretty good at coming to a consensus on the types of themes or narrative threads you want to follow, you'll also probably be able to pick up After and have fun with the colorful set-dressings you can use to tell those stories.
After is also good for groups who want a tight, limited campaign, likely about five sessions in length. If you like the idea of characters that are perhaps somewhat doomed to certain fates, there's specific elements of After that might appeal to you.
However, if your group often struggles to create reasons for your characters to work together, or if you're a GM who prefers a little more structure when it comes to running a game session, I think you might want to put After back on the shelf.
You can find After at IPR, on Itch.io, and on DriveThruRPG.
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