Some Notes on Mutant Year Zero

In this second “Notes on…” article, we’ll look at another game my Friday group played for a few months on a weekly basis: Free League’s Mutant Year Zero (from now on referred to as MYZ).

The Zone

MYZ is a classic “cinematic post-apocalypse” setting, in which Earth has been ravaged by some past cataclysm and weird mutations have emerged among the surviving population.

The rulebook comes with two example “Zones” to adventure in, based on New York and London, but it encourages you to make up your own… so I did just that! Most of my group is in Vancouver (BC, Canada) so with the help of Google Maps and an online flood simulator, I made a map of a future Vancouver in which the sea level went up by a few meters. I then overlaid a grid to make up sectors of roughly the size recommended by the rulebook, and, with the help of my 11-years-old kid, added a handful of landmarks inspired by real Vancouverite landmarks. We were ready to play!

Since MYZ claims to be a fairly “low prep” kind of game, I can safely say that making this map was probably most of my original homework besides, you know, reading the rules.

The Mutants, and the Year Zero

Player characters are “mutants”, following the usual tropes of genetic mutations being rampant in the post-apocalyptic future. Character creation is straightforward, with little bells and whistles except for the (now pretty standard) step where the players establish not only how they know the other characters, but also what their relationship is.

The game mechanics are great, I like them very much. Having known the Year Zero Engine from other Free League games, it was interesting for us to see where it came from. I’m a big fan of any “stat + skill” system, and I enjoy dice pools, or any game system that gives me a unified mechanic and simple numbers that I can manipulate and transfer on the fly, like “Aaron got 2 successes with his Manipulate roll, so you get +2 dice with your Sneak roll”. The crunch level is right around my comfort zone, with high-level resources for food, water, and ammo/money.

The list of skills is a bit short for my tastes (a dozen skills only), but it actually works pretty well in this case because out there in “The Zone”, you frankly don’t have many different ways to solve your problems… you just need to survive! Similarly, I generally prefer free-form character creation (with optional “templates”), but in this case, class-based characters (or “Roles” as they call them) works OK because we only planned a short campaign.

Mutations

Mutations are effectively special abilities and super-powers, and there is a nice sort of “downward spiral” mechanic that gives the setting a little touch of hopelessness. Every time you use your Mutant abilities, you run the chance of straining your body and having the ability “misfire”, including triggering a new latent Mutant ability… this decreases one attribute score. So if you use your powers too much, you will end up as a weak, barely functional multi-legged glowing amphibian insectoid, or whatever. It doesn’t happen fast enough that we cross into body-horror territory or anything like that, but it does give some players pause after it happens a couple times.

Around the middle of the campaign, however, we started running into a few small issues with the Mutations. As written, they are effectively automatic: you spend your Mutation Points and they just happen, unless they misfire. This made some powers like Puppeteer, Mind Terror, or to some degree Telekinesis, rather overpowered because unlike a physical or combat-based Mutation, they effectively can’t be opposed. I don’t mind it when the player characters take control of my NPCs, but it felt weird for me to take over the PCs without the players being able to do anything about it. By the end, we half-assed a rule that these sort of powers could be resisted, as an action, with an opposed Wits or Empathy roll (depending on the situation), boosted by Mutation Points. In my opinion that helped keep these power exciting and suspenseful.

The Ark

MYZ is one of those games in which the player characters have some sort of headquarters with stats and a character sheet of its own. This is very common nowadays but back in 2014, when MYZ was released (ten years ago now!) this was probably quite notable. Of course, MYZ wasn’t the first game to do that, we can probably trace it all the way back to Ghostbusters in 1986 (once again, if you think of a cool mechanic idea, Greg Stafford probably invented it). But MYZ set up the trend of Free League games in which you have upgradable headquarters with a buffet of features and abilities.

In MYZ, these headquarters are called the “Ark”. My players picked an abandoned train yard, placed it on the map, and we continued to follow the rulebook’s instructions for NPCs, factions, and specific locations inside that. That part is really well done, because it sets up your campaign with a good chunk of narrative material and adventure fodder in a minimal amount of steps. In fact, there are a lot of Session Zero elements that, more or less deceptively, help set up your game’s initial narrative direction, from the relationships between PCs, to the creation of the Ark and its denizens, to the Roles’ motivations and backgrounds, and more. You quickly realize that the game really helps you set up the game for success, and that’s a very nice and underrated element of MYZ.

We didn’t end up fully using all the “Bosses” and their factions by the time we wrapped up the campaign, however, but they at least all had a cameo. A couple of them did have a full-blown character arc or dedicated sub-plots, so that was nice.

Play Structure

A lot of recent games, especially the PbtA types, have very strict play structures that I often don’t care too much about. Again, MYZ gave me just the right amount of it, not too much and not too vague: you alternate between scenes inside the Ark, and expeditions out into the Zone.

Ark Scenes

The idea is that bad things happen to the Ark. At best, people die of sickness or accident, or leave to try their luck elsewhere. At worse, the Ark occasionally gets attacked by other Arks, raiders, or monsters. Either way, the Ark’s population decreases and you have to do something about it. This includes bringing back resources from the Zone, and developing the Ark with community “projects” that increase one or more of its four stats: Food, Culture, Technology, and Warfare.

Projects include things like building a windmill or setting up a militia, founding a library or even setting up a political system. Not all projects are “good”… for instance, we loved that you can get your Ark to embrace cannibalism when Food gets low! It temporarily boosts the Food level, even though it kills off a few members!

Zone Exploration

Projects only progress when you go out in the Zone to advance time, and you often can pay for a project only by bringing back resources (called “Artifacts”) from the Zone anyway. The play cycle is really well done, not even counting the fact that you obviously want to go into the Zone in the first place.

Exploring the Zone similarly has a light touch of high-level rules. You can easily traverse already explored squares on the map, and you have to play through the dangers of the unexplored ones. There are several random generation tables to give you the general vibe of a sector and the main threat therein, and then you can easily improvise the rest. When in doubt, there’s a whole bunch of small (one or two paragraphs) ideas for enemies to deal with and fun ruins to explore. It’s a lot of fun to see the “known map” expand, along with your own gamemaster’s notes on all these new sectors you effectively discover with the players.

The brilliance of the game design, here, is that there’s always a default goal for the players: they’re looking for an “Artifact” to bring back to the Ark in order to make it better. Explore the Zone, get some Artifacts, finance some Projects, grow your Ark, get better stuff to explore the Zone further. And if a story develops that calls for the players to do something else (steal something, free prisoners, saved captured friends, etc.) then that’s great, but at least there’s always something to fall back onto… without the gamemaster having to do anything.

Gamemastering the Zone

The rulebook provides so many elements to help the gamemaster that, frankly, this was one of the easiest games I’ve run, especially when you compare the (very low) amount of preparation required to the (satisfying) amount of world and story complexity. It’s just a very well done game in my opinion.

Of course, it’s not perfect. The rulebook has this problem with splitting thematically similar material across different chapters when it relates more to the players, or more to the gamemaster. So I ended up having to flip back and forth constantly between, for instance, the “Zone Travel”, “Ruins in the Zone”, and “Threats in the Zone” chapters, always forgetting which piece of information is in which.

Another problem that occurred very early was the way the game tells you to handle threats against the Ark. The goal here is to provide a backdrop for the next adventure, maybe even a motivation for it, or at least a complication. There are about 25 random threats, to roll from a table or draw from a Threat Deck, ranging from internal power struggles inside the Ark, to weird things being spotted in a nearby sector, or to monsters or strange cults attacking the Ark. You’re supposed to integrate this threat into the session, making it “the challenge of the week”, so to speak. The problem for me was that we never leave something like that to one session. If monsters attack the Ark, my players will want to investigate where these monsters came from and whether they have a weakness to exploit the next time they attack. If some drama happens inside the Ark, it will reverberate for multiple sessions as factions line are drawn. So after three or four sessions, we had, well, three or four ongoing plot lines, each barely started. I stopped drawing new threats after that, and only did it again once some of those previous threats’ narrative arcs reached their end. I highly recommend doing the same, unless somehow your group is able to resolve stories in just one session.

Special Sectors and Metaplot

While MYZ doesn’t really have “scenarios” by default (although there are published scenarios and campaigns out there), the rulebook does come with “Special Zone Sectors”. Those are sectors with a fully-detailed adventure location, including NPCs and possible events. These are great to sprinkle in your campaign. I used two of them, one for a mid-campaign two-part Zone adventure, and one for the campaign’s two-part climax adventure.

The other thing MYZ has is, effectively, a metaplot. It’s not really a metaplot in the way I use the term, but hey, the rulebook calls it that. Basically, the last chapter of the rulebook explains what really happened to Earth, what your Ark Elder is hiding from you, how the end of the world is still yet to come, and how the PCs can possibly escape or stop it. It’s a nice little campaign framework, but most importantly, and unlike most games out there, it outlines how the game ends. I didn’t use anything from this metaplot per se, but I did drop a couple of hints during our games, and ended the campaign with a cliffhanger that features the first recommended “lore drop”, to moderately positive effect.

Overall, I really liked Mutant Year Zero, and my players did too. We played for about 15 sessions over four months, and I had a lot of fun. I doubt we will revisit the Zone, given how many other games we have on our wishlist, but I wouldn’t mind reintroducing it as a possible “interlude game”, i.e. the sort of game we play for a session or two between campaigns.

You can get Mutant Year Zero from Free League over here in hardback or PDF. As usual with Free League, the Foundry VTT module is very well done and is absolutely recommended if you’re playing online.