Right, where to start with Eco Mofos (2023)? Let’s do: it looks fucking great. The layout is warm and bright. Daniel Locke’s intricate art just refuses to stop grabbing my eyes. It’s all great, but my favorite bits are the end papers — little wilderness and dungeon tiles in the front, a spread of improvised weapons in the back. They could have done the whole book illustrated just with spot illustrations of weird junk and jury-rigged items and I’d have pored over them forever. It’s a lovely looking book as it is, though, and lines up nicely with the theming.
Which, right on the cover: Weird Hope. Two hundred years ago, everything went to shit. The world is still a scary, dangerous place, but it’s getting better. The vast majority of game worlds are in decline and I cannot express how refreshing it is to have one coming around this time. The influence of post-apocalyptic fiction is here, but it isn’t overwhelming. You and your fellow mofos are a force for positive change, traveling through the wilderness to find a new haven to call home.
System-wise, we’re looking at a game built out of Into the Odd and Cairn, but with many tweaks and customizations. The gist of the rules fits front and back on the included bookmarks. It’s D&D-ish enough for anyone to pick up. There’s a Luck attribute that’s also a meta currency for getting out of trouble. Combat is deadly and thus to be avoided. It’s a game about meeting people, seeing strange sites and scavenging. Randomness is a key feature, right down to character generation. There are no classes, but characters can get appropriately post-apocalyptic Adaptations, like the Fungalist, who can turn into a silent, ambulatory mass of fungus.
The goal is to get this thing to the table and play it on the fly. When you need something, there is inevitably a random table for it. A single page table provides procedural maps to hang whole sessions on (the front end pages illustrate this in detail with the map tiles). There are a lot of cool, thoughtful bits in here, but the procedural maps are maybe the big Thing. I want this in every game, forever. I might just take this and use it in every game forever.
And it is hopeful. Without being saccharine. The game envisions a hard world whose inhabitants want to work to make it a better place. That might sound like real fantasy, but maybe seeing that kind of work in a game will make it easier to envision in reality.