What Remains - A post-apocalyptic tabletop RPG by Contraband Games

Remember the ’90s?

Crop tops, body glitter, grunge, Dunkaroos®, and Friends? How about the Y2K Scare? What Remains is a tabletop roleplaying game set in an alternate timeline of Earth where Y2K went down exactly as we had feared. When the clock struck midnight, ringing in the new millennium, computers everywhere glitched. Nukes were launched, reactors melted down, the earth quaked, nuclear winter fell, disease was rampant, and famine became the new fad diet. It’s a post-apocalyptic story frozen in the 1990s with raiders, mutant creatures, warring factions, zombies, and all the ’90s nostalgia you could wish for. 

Of course, what’s the story without the system to roll the dice? Well, after listening to the same complaints about existing systems over and over, we decided to build our own and focus on fixing those complaints. Three years and hundreds of hours of playtesting later, we present the first game using our revolutionary (but familiar) TIPICAL engine.

The pistons that drive this engine are the TIPICAL stats. They are: 
Tenacity – Physical & Mental Toughness 
Impact – Raw Physical Strength 
Perception – Five Core Senses 
Intellect – Natural Mental Capacity 
Charisma – Force of Personality 
Luck – Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?

It looks similar to other RPGs on the surface, but peel back the paint and you see a whole new machine. All you need is a single d20, basic math skills, and an imagination. And the best part? We’ve managed to build a system that’s familiar to experienced gamers but easy to learn for those new to tabletop. And through some kind of sorcery even we don’t quite understand, we were able to maintain the realism more complicated systems supply, minus all the headache.

With a simplified roll system, combat turns move much more quickly, allowing more time for story and character development. No more 10 minute turns calculating bonuses from 8 feats or counting a bag of dice for damage, and your character’s success is determined solely by their abilities and a simple pass/fail roll rather than a GM’s arbitrary (and sometimes rigged) decisions.

Gone are the days of painstakingly creating a character of your very own, only to have someone else with a completely different concept create the exact same stats. With the TIPICAL system, character creation and leveling is easy, straightforward, and unrestrained by class formats.

In What Remains, there are six playable species: humans, revenants, saurians, simians, mutants, and freeks, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. TIPICAL is a point-buy system with no conversion rates, so there is no rolling the dice and hoping for the best at character creation; you build your character the way you want. From there, you have over 250 Edges to choose from to enhance your character’s abilities. For example, “Can’t Touch This” provides +10 to your Damage Resistance. 
You also have the option to choose Glitches. These are various flaws that give your character, well, character. For example, taking the “Liar Liar” Glitch means you’re a compulsive liar and must succeed at an Intellect roll to tell the truth. While Glitches are entirely optional, they do provide the benefit of additional Edges. 
So, choose your species, build your character, and join us in the wasteland to see if you can survive What Remains! 

Want to play a demo session with us? Check out our Upcoming Events!