The end of the world doesn’t need to all be creeping darkness and earth-shaking doom. Instead, it can be the rip-roaring high adventure of the open road. We talk to Marc Langworthy about vehicular violence in the post-apocalypse in the new Devil’s Run RPG

Words by Christopher John Eggett

Ah, the open road. A Sunday drive. Going out for a little spin. Doing a sweet jump in your Valkyrian apocalypse buggy so you can one-handedly fire an automatic weapon at your enemy as you fly gracefully above them like an improbable and deadly automotive eclipse. These are all very good ways to spend our time with man’s other best friend, the car.

Bringing the Mad Max thrills of post-apocalypse to our tabletops mostly brings to mind the endless roads of car-murder of Devil’s Run, or Car Wars, from which it evolved. These games work on a ‘death arena’ style of combat that evokes the idea of sports as much as it does war.

We last spoke to Marc Langworthy about adapting the colossal Kings of War universe into an RPG. Today we’re talking about how exactly you make an RPG about what amounts, at first glance, to a destruction derby.

Langworthy introduces us to the world that he has helped create more fully, “It’s a zany, Mad Max, post-apocalypse in North America. There’s a lot of tongue in cheek involved. And a lot of throwbacks to the 80s and 90s in terms of the characters and where the personalities of the post-apocalypse are drawn from. It’s just this big crazy mess of car wars along the highways of North America.”

Buckle in then, as we take a tour of the sight of this bizarre and cartoonish world of screaming metal, screaming tires and, occasionally, screaming player characters.

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The game grew out of a relationship between Langworthy and Wordforge Games. Having been previously invited to do some background work on a handful of Devil’s Run factions, Marc was approached to develop the RPG from there. The game runs on Modiphius’ 2D20 system – used in Mutant Chronicles Third Edition, Conan, and John Carter Warlord of Mars. There is a Savage Worlds conversion in the book too, for those not quite ready for a low roll to be a good thing.

Langworthy was involved most heavily in the creator of two of the factions, BritAttack and Justice. These factions, like everything in Devil’s Run RPG are focused mostly around the west coast of what was the USA.