Review: Cast Away by Afterthought Committee
Since the end of my last campaign, my plan has been to experiment with a variety of systems in shorter-term experiences. My past few campaigns have each spanned multiple years, and I am tired and need a break from sprawling epics. While it has taken a while to get organized, I'm happy to announce the end of my first of these new shorter campaigns and to share my thoughts!
This first short campaign was a three session mini-campaign using the system Cast Away by Joe O'Brien & Reilly Qyote from Afterthought Committee. Cast Away is available as a PDF on DriveThruRPG.
This is going to be mostly review, but I'm also going to share a few reflections on my own specific campaign that I ran, for context. As always with TTRPG reviews, your mileage may (and probably will) vary, and so I think establishing the context of how I ran it is useful in your opinions on it.
This article includes affiliate links, which allow me to get a small percentage of DriveThru's cut of any sales made if you use the link; the creators of the game are still getting as much as they would without the affiliate link. This has not influenced my review of the game.
Mechanics
Cast Away is a rules-lite, narrative-focused system about being trapped in nature. It is ideal for stories about being shipwrecked, surviving a plane crash, being stuck on a desert island, or being snowed in from a blizzard. It is a system with a powerful dice mechanic meant to model how even basic survival tasks get harder and harder.
Cast Away has only two stats: Mental and Physical, which provide a bonus to their respective checks. Each is determined by a roll of 1d4+2. If you have a 3 physical and need to lift a boulder, you'd roll a die + 3 (from your physical score). You also get two skills, which provide an additional +2 bonus to rolls about particular things like starting a campfire or staying composed when threatened. That's all the mechanical crunch present on your character sheet.
The die you roll is where the game's core mechanic shines. You begin the game rolling a d12 as your base (like the d20 core of D&D/Pathfinder/etc). But when you suffer a condition--being wounded, being starving, being dehydrated, being ill, being sleep deprived and exhausted, any of the nasty effects that can come from camping--that die size decreases. So you take an injury from a snake bite, and the next time you need to lift a boulder, you're only rolling 1d10 + your bonuses. Not every failure imposes a condition, and conditions can sometimes be imposed without a roll, depending on the narrative. For example, sleep, hunger, and thirst in my game were all tracked by me and built up over time. Yes, they were dependent on foraging rolls, for example, but one failed check did not mean that they were starving.
I do think that this models the increasing difficulty of survival well. As you get more tired, more hungry, more thirsty, your ability to provide food for yourself also declines. Is it necessarily the most fun, to intentionally build yourself a death spiral? Not for everyone. It certainly does not lend itself to a power fantasy like D&D. But I do think that it works for what its explicit goal is: modeling a sort of tragic narrative about struggling to survive against nature.
And that's pretty much it in terms of hard mechanics. Again, the game is pretty simple, favoring narrative over heavy amounts of mechanical crunch.
Impressions
Bookkeeping and Pace
At least in the way I ran the game--which is something I'd change if I ran it a second time--there was a lot of GM tracking to do. How much food does the party have? How much water? Are they getting sufficient sleep at night to avoid exhaustion? What are they doing, hour-by-hour?
This meant that there was a lot of bookkeeping. The game was slow in its pacing, as we moved hour-by-hour through the game day. The system does recommend that you track time intentionally to record each major activity undertaken. Going fishing for a few hours should matter. Time is a necessary resource, and just letting your players have an arbitrary amount of time in the day to do as they wish is going to make survival too easy.
But it also slowed the game down too much, in my experience. The game says it can be run as a one shot or a short mini-campaign, with the reasonable expectation that most of your characters will be dead or down to a low die size by the end of a four-hour session. But in my first four hour session, only two characters had even received a single condition.
What I'd Change About My GMing Style
In part, this was me not being aggressive enough. I gave them coconuts available on the beach, a source of fresh water about four hours away that they relocated their camp to (so dehydration wasn't a huge threat).
But the rulebook says for a party of 5 playing for 4 hours, a TPK in one session would require a condition to be granted every 12 minutes. We had roleplaying conversations between characters, just fleshing out interpersonal dynamics, that lasted longer than 12 minutes. This was awesome for developing interpersonal dynamics but also meant that in a four hour session, we played through only 24 hours of in-game time and suffered only two injuries. It meant that starvation and sleep deprivation were never going to be lethal over the three-session campaign I'd planned for because there simply wasn't enough time for that at the pace we were going. And frankly, I'm not sure how a condition every 12 minutes would even be possible. The only time I might have achieved that pace was during an active fight sequence with some hostile inhabitants of the island, but this isn't meant to be a combat-focused game.
Moreover, the genre is survival horror. That's a genre where you want to protect yourself and where "interaction" means danger. There needs to be more incentive for the players to engage and interact even when it means risk – that could be a sort of metacurrency bonus, but there needs to be real and mechanics-based incentive. And it also means that I as the GM needed to push them more in an inversion of the "agency" of most games – things just need to happen TO the players, rather than allowing the players to explore themselves, even if that feels more railroading than in most RPGs.
I think if I were to run this game again, I'd try to change the pace to be far faster. Instead of tracking that "oh, you only got 3 hours of sleep, so if you don't get enough sleep tonight that's a condition", it should be "you failed your roll to sleep through the noise of the jungle, condition." The specific hours should matter less. Instead of tracking specific food quantities and saying "you're ok but a little hungry", I should have run it more off of vibes. "Oh, you only hunted for two hours and rolled only OK, that's not going to be enough food. Condition." Instead of saying that there were some coconuts available, I need to more unilaterally say that some of the coconuts were rotten, causing food shortages, and hence: condition. It would reduce the amount of bookkeeping, increase the rate at which conditions accrue, and also theoretically encourage players to simply do fewer things for longer time blocks. Instead of fishing for an hour, you can chunk the game into bigger periods, which would also speed up the game. And the more time passes in the game, the more of a threat that hunger and sleep deprivation are, which is where I think the game shines best.
Combat
Where the game doesn't shine is combat. While the game encourages small, short, high-action combats--fighting a bear, for example--it offers minimal advice for running these combats in practice. Mostly, it suggests that these be handled through opposed rolls, but if I have a snake rolling 1d4, they're almost never going to successfully beat a d12 roll from a healthy survivor. That in turn means that the d12 is not going to get ticked down from a condition.
I ended up running combat entirely through PC rolls. I'd pick a high difficulty to beat, doing a sort of "roll X to deal damage, roll X minus 5 to both deal and take damage, and roll below that and it will damage you and take no damage itself." This worked better at causing the party to actually take hits, and it certainly was pretty fast-paced.
But combat doesn't particularly shine. Perhaps that is just that my group is used to D&D, where combat has a bunch of spelled out options to inspire you. In this game, some characters who were not experienced with fighting just opted to not really do anything during the fight, to try to run--something that absolutely made sense, but meant that it was limited. When a monster from the jungle was impaled on a spear from one of the players, writhing and still trying to claw at the party, we got a little bogged down in trying to stay out of reach of the thing and not removing the spear.
Combat wasn't terrible, but it was just a little clunky. It isn't the emphasis of the game, so it doesn't need a massive subsystem governing it. But when combat was my best way of actually succeeding in imposing conditions (due to the aforementioned pacing challenges in getting conditions from sleep/water/food), the clunkiness of doing combat was evident in our play.
Prep
My main issue with the rulebook is how little guidance it gives for GMs in terms of prep. I think a lot of my issues with pacing came from this lack of guidance. There's an example scenario sheet provided, but it just lists threats and locations. I tried to imitate that in my own preparations, which meant that I quickly realized that I didn't have an overall narrative or story beyond "survive." That's a fine goal, but it made it hard to think about narrative arc or development. The threat felt a little static: hunt, gather, shelter, fire. It was a checklist.
So I added plot elements. Inspired by Lost--which I had finished watching for the first time between the first and second sessions of the mini-campaign, yes I'm over a decade late to the Lost fandom--I added hostile inhabitants of the island. Because I was setting this in the same world that I run all my campaigns in, because I love using my world for things, these hostile inhabitants were monstrous kobolds that wanted to eat the PCs, instead of just kidnapping children like the Others from Lost. The players were on the island after being shipwrecked by pirates, so I added the threat of pirates tracking them down. I tried my best (sometimes struggling) to anthropomorphize nature, to make it actively try to kill the party, to make the conflict a little more dynamic than a survival checklist. And I directly asked my players to help foment interpersonal conflict and dynamics, to make the campaign largely a sort of character study.
But all of this I was doing blind to how it would affect those pacing things. By spending so much time on plot and character dynamics, the game slowed down. Survival because de-emphasized, even when that was supposed to be the point. The kobolds became a bigger threat than sleep deprivation was, and while that's not necessarily bad, it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I wish that the game had offered just a little more guidance on scenario design, and how to design scenarios that incorporated plot and character dynamics AND balance those things with survival pacing.
What I Enjoyed
It might sound like I'm just going off about complaints with the system, but there's a common theme here: execution. I wish the game was more popular, so I could have played it once before trying to run it, or at least watched an actual play, but none of my group had tried it before. Barring that, I wish there was more guidance in the rulebook about practical "how to pace this and structure a campaign using the system".
But that's a flaw in the rulebook, not in the system itself. The system's death spiral, reducing die size mechanic is something that I still really love for the genre; it works for a game about the challenging nature of survival. This isn't a system meant to be used for a generic campaign; it is a survival simulator, and I love that the mechanics reinforce the genre and the theme. I just wish that there was better support in the rules for the ways that running survival horror must be different from other, more common forms of games – including the recommendation that more things need to aggressively just happen to the party.
A lot of my gripes come down to my own execution of the system, and with a campaign behind me, I can see the things I would improve in how I run it. I'd play faster and looser with any numbers, from resources to specific timekeeping, to minimize backend bookkeeping and to increase the danger (ex: sleep deprivation). I'd keep my revisions to the combat system, to get rid of PC-vs-GM opposed rolls that just fail to really feel balanced. I'd absolutely make the environment less plentiful--less food than having there be abundant coconuts, make fresh water harder to access--to increase the difficulty of those things.
And I think, by doing those things, the game would work better. There'd be a faster pace so that the whole thing can run longer than three in-game days even if I want to only have a few sessions, which can feed the death spiral better. It would be a whole lot easier to run on the backend as the GM. Making stuff less accessible would require the party to take longer hikes, which also provides a more built-in way to assist with establishing character dynamics and relationships, by making more activities take place with only a subset of the party.
Conclusion
Cast Away by Afterthought Committee is a good system for running survival, man-vs-nature campaigns. If you want a mechanical way to build a death spiral, I think their solution is simple and elegant and really effective--and frankly, is the sort of mechanic that I think should be adapted into other survival-focused / horror-focused games about disempowerment.
As a GM, the rulebook is lacking in teaching you how to actually run the game, which can make pacing the story hard. I think some of the advice that they do give--things like "one condition every 12 minutes if you want it to be a one shot"--are completely impractical if you want to have any time for character dynamics or lower-tension scenes. Part of that could be that it is a single rulebook for both players and GMs, and if Afterthought Committee made a GMs Guide with more practical advice, I'd absolutely snatch it up and I think it could help a lot.
Is Cast Away worth $8? I really think it depends. It is certainly not going to be a game that is a catch-all, any genre sort of RPG. It is probably not going to be a staple RPG with my group. But I'm glad I have it: I think it has a really good central mechanic, and even if a bunch of the book feels less useful to me, I think it was worth the buy for me. If you want to run a survival-genre RPG, I would recommend using this system... but I'd also recommend thinking really intentionally about how to pace it, even when that means ignoring advice from the book, because I think the book leaves a lot of things vague that ended up being poorly done in my game.
But I'd run it again, with the changes to my GMing style I've mentioned here. And if you want a survival game that actually feels like a slow descent into futility, I'd recommend you give it a shot.
You can pick up Cast Away on DriveThruRPG.
Using my link helps support the blog, so I can continue doing reviews and GM advice and all the stuff you read the blog for.