Planet Motherfucker Review

I'm usually not very fond of settings books. Most of them include too many ideas that I find boring or down right stupid, and the good ones usually require too much player commitment. I'd rather run a game than recite imaginary history and cultural facts that the player characters should know.

That is why I'm such a big fan of Jack Shear's various bare-bone settings. By only including the essential details and referencing inspirational material rather than listing pages upon pages of minutia, Jack's settings never fail to get the creative juices going. His newest setting, Planet Motherfucker is no different.

Planet Motherfucker takes place in post-apocalyptic America in which polite society came to a end in 1965. Rising from the ashes is not a depressed wasteland of eschatological existentialism. Instead, we find ourselves in a drug and booze-fueled world in which everything awesome about trash culture has become the norm. Hot rods, killer robots, mutant animals, weird science, voodoo daddys and everyone is sexy as hell. You know all the fun, gonzo stuff found in the Fallout series? It's a game that is just that and nothing else.

Planet Motherfucker is a slim volume, filled with mostly random tables and character templates. It's perfect for use at the table and a complete adventure can easily be improvised on the spot using the random tables. If I have one major criticism, it is that I would love to see more of Jack's vision of this world. He does an excellent job of giving the GM enough information to have his imagination go wild, but Jack is so on point with the craziness that I just want more. A full-blown source book would be a dream come true.

Although PM is advertised as system neutral, it is best paired with Savage Worlds Deluxe, which Jack uses to run his own PM games. The character templates are ready to go SW novice characters and the monster ideas reference creatures that are stated in the Savage Worlds rule book. This makes sense because Savage Worlds is a excellent system for running pulpy, action oriented games. However, I could easily see this setting run in systems like Mutant Future and Apocalypse World with excellent results.

If you're in a rut with the settings you've been using, or you just want a fun setting that anyone can jump into and have a blast with, order a copy of Planet Motherfucker.

PS: Some people have been putting together recommended listening lists for a Planet Motherfuck soundtrack. I have been compiling them and adding my own suggestions to this Spotify playlist.