Aftermath!
For those who have never before encountered the game, Aftermath! is a role-playing game set in a post-holocaust genre. Published by FGU in 1981, the game is long out of print but a few die-hard fans are still around.
The collapse of civilization is referred to as the Ruin, but the cause of the Ruin as well as the length of time that has passed since then are up to the GM. The rules make the generic assumption that the Ruin was caused by a world-wide bio-chemical war with limited strategic nuclear strikes and that it occurred about a generation ago. However, the modules themselves vary as to the Ruin.
Aftermath! has the distinction of being the first non-fantasy RPG in which I took part in a campaign. (I had played a few other games -- Stormbringer, Villains & Vigilantes, Traveller, and Gamma World -- but none of them had been for more than an adventure or two.) I discovered it in a local store about a year into my military career, while attending technical school near Chicago. In one fell swoop I purchased the boxed set and four of the five modules published for it.
Before I even had a chance to take the modules out of their shrink-wrap, however, I was approached by one of the "permanent-party" NCOs in our barracks who happened to be about to start up an Aftermath campaign; he offered me a spot in the game if I promised not to open my modules until after the campaign was finished. I agreed, and joined the five other players that he had managed to recruit.
For characters, we were supposed to create versions of ourselves. The
background (so the GM told us) was that our characters were volunteers for a
secret, cryogenically-suspended colonization mission to Alpha Centauri. This
sounded like fun, and we spent a lot of time researching the upcoming mission
while the GM discussed each character individually with his player. Actually,
our "research" consisted mostly of watching every science-fiction movie we could rent...particularly ones involving space travel. Once everyone was ready, our characters were transported to Cape Canaveral and placed in our freeze-tubes.
Imagine our surprise when we woke up. We were not on a spaceship orbiting an
alien world, but instead in Sydney, Australia. The GM was running us through the two Australian modules: "Operation Morpheus" and "Sydney:
The Wilderness Campaign". (Both of these modules were ones that I had purchased.)
The game was kind of complicated at first, but we eventually got the hang of it. We usually played 2-3 sessions on weekends (we were too busy studying during the week), starting Friday night and ending on Sunday. We managed to finish the first module without excessive difficulty (although at some point my character became a "vampire"), and we used the University as a base of operations while we scouted the Sydney area. Eventually, we established ourselves and were beginning to forge alliances with some of the saner communities.
It was at this point that I finished school and got transferred. Since the
second module is more of an open-ended campaign setting anyway, I didn't mind.
My character was last seen riding off towards the Outback on the back of a giant kangaroo, with the avowed intention of somehow finding a way home to America.
I lost most of that initial set in the Northridge earthquake; the only part of it to survive was the Sydney module. Since then I have managed to replace it, though, and my collection currently consists of the boxed set, two copies of Sydney, one copy each of Into the Ruins and City State, and printed-out copies of Operation Morpheus and The Empire of Karo that I eventually acquired as PDFs.
These days, my interest in Aftermath is more for nostalgia and the sake of completeness; I have not run or played an actual Aftermath campaign for well over a decade, and there is very little chance of me doing so in the forseeable future. This is not to say that I have not used the material; rather, I have taken the trouble of scanning the modules that I do have and then converting them for use with one of the game systems that I do play. The City State module is a natural setting for a variant Twilight 2000 game, while I have plans of using Sydney and Operation Morpheus as the setting for a GURPS campaign.