The heart desires: Neuroshima and Monastyr

Dear Santa,

I have been a good GM all year, I have entertained my players with thrilling adventures. I have written interesting plots and tried to give everyone a personal and character building experience. So if you could swing it Santa, I have but one RPG related wish for Christmas.

Translations into English of the Polish games Monastyr and Neuroshima.

As you know I have been looking at them for years in adoration and with passionate desire to try them. The polish gaming scene sounds extremely interesting and these two specific games from the descriptions and the game reports I have read sound like just my thing. Well designed interesting story driven settings which presents a blend of realism and fantasy well suited for compelling stories.

Neuroshima sounds like it wll fill the place in my heart for a well designed RPG based in post-apocalyptic setting, much like the dystopian future displayed in the Terminator movies, the excellent Jericho TV show (which was cancelled long before it’s time) and the best computer games ever made Fallout and Fallout II.

I am a huge fan of post-apocalyptic settings, the feeling of loneliness, dispair and savage behavior. The endless plains, nature slowly reclaiming it’s ground and erasing humans from it’s surface year by year. There is a certain prioneer sense to survival in such a world, stories become interesting without resorting to cheap tricks like magic and dragons. A simple thing like staying warm during the freezing winter in a world without conventional heating or collecting food becomes a dangerous journey outside the perimeter of safety. Slowly running out of ressources and forced to take a stand as more and more citizens succome to the elements, marauders, hunger and decease. Do you venture out? Do you dare dream of a better tomorrow? Do we know how to avoid ending up in the same place? What lurks in the wilderness that once was your city?

I am a big fan of the recent documentary and TV series Life After People and looking at simulations of a world where humans suddenly disappear, the dangers that lurk in your every day world once we are no longer in the equation is endlessly inspiring for interesting storytelling. The Discovery show The Colony also in the same vein shows how human ingeniuty and know how combines to solve grave problems from what can be gathered in post human urban environments. The same show also gives us insight into how humans function socially in situations where resources are restrained and the personal security of not just oneself but ones peers is under threat. Which skills are useful, which personality traits are desirable and what conflicts lie in store that regardless of planning we must face and deal with to survive.

I have been searching for a game that gives me this, and while Neuroshima is based on an apocalypse of our own aggressive folly and I tend to consider epidemic spread of decease a more interesting approach I hope it does capture what made Fallout such a great game. The endless wastelands deformed and lifeless, everything fighting to survive, all set to a moody Mark Morgan soundtrack accentuated by classc The Ink Spots and Armstrong performances. The world was believable and to me that is the single biggest argument in selling me a great experience.

So dear Santa, as you know I have written the publishers several times even offering them money upfront as a preorder for an English version. I have bought the Neuroshima Hex boardgame (which I look forward to testing later today and will do a review of here soon) but in the years of pleading, begging and bribing I have yet to hold in my grubby little GM hands a hardcover or bound book version of these two games in a language I can read.

It is all I ask for this year.

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