Cast Away

Check out this breakdown on creating a character in Cast Away, written by Tatiana Gefter for an upcoming actual play miniseries 🏕

https://totscharactercompendium.wordpress.com/2024/12/16/cast-away-afterthought-committee/

https://www.veritastabletop.com/cast-away-review/

Cast Away is a short (20-pages) but content packed survival TTRPG. There are detailed rules for surviving in the wilderness after a horrible accident, and you get to use your polyhedral dice!

Absolutely gorgeous game with so much potential for drama. For a full review, head here: https://podofblunders.com/2021/10/01/cast-away/

Cast Away is a crunchy, compact survival RPG.

It's 14 pages, with a very cohesive visual design and clean, readable layout, and it uses some nice repurposed technical drawings to illustrate key elements and add immersion.

Despite the cover's first impression, Cast Away isn't anchored to a specific place or setting. It's versatile, as long as the thing you want to do with it is a wilderness survival situation. The included sample scenario is a plane crash in the 70s amazon rainforest, but without a doubt you could set your game anywhere from an oil platform in the ocean to a derelict lunar colony to a crypt city overrun with undead.

Mechanically, Cast Away does a very good job of covering the things it absolutely needs to cover, but it also does a good job of stepping back and letting the GM choose how situations progress. For example, every Survivor has a pool of dice for their HP and Skills. Every time they take damage (called Conditions) they remove the highest die from their pool. When they heal, they recover the lowest die out of the dice they're missing. This means that in any roll, the stakes are usually crystal clear. Either you're working to improve your situation, or you're working to stave off a Condition.

Additionally, decision-making is as important as dice-rolling. Let's say a Survivor drinks non-potable water. There isn't an express difficulty rating for that. The GM could choose to make up a target number and call for a roll, or they could simply say "you contract a parasitic infection," and then it's on the players to figure out how to manage their evolving situation.

This mix of "hands off" and "hands on" works really well for how the book engages with the material. In some ways, Cast Away's GM functions almost as a prompt, simply reminding the players of what their immediate problems are. The players do the rest, propelling the game forward under their own initiative.

Surprisingly, I think Cast Away might be an excellent first rpg or convention game. It's very easy to learn, the sheets are very well-composed, there's a cheat sheet for players to help make picking up the rules even faster, and the premise of Cast Away is extremely easy to engage with and automatically compelling.

You don't have to worry about figuring out adventure hooks in a survival scenario. The hook is to survive.

Of course, Cast Away does advertise itself as relatively lethal, but on reading through it seemed much less murdery than a standard osr low-fantasy game. Death in Cast Away usually comes through attrition, after a long struggle, and even then dead characters linger as a pool of dice that their player can spend to influence a few more rolls. It's mechanically neat, and it keeps people from checking out after they mulch a character.

As of 1/4/21, there *is* some relatively dark material that the book alludes to as potential character backgrounds, so you may want to have safety tools on deck, but that material is also not required for play. You can also use scenario crafting to tailor your scenarios to the tone that your group is looking for, whether it's brutal and exhausting or frantic and adventurous.

So overall, if you like tight, well-designed games, if you like survival scenarios or games that run perfectly at conventions, or if you've ever played dnd on a camping trip, I'd strongly suggest picking this up.

A simple, yet elegant ruleset that manages to have innovative mechanics. Encourages inventive and narrative play over "crunch". Ideal for alternative play formats like Play by Post and Play by Email. Would make for an amazing alternative to "ghost stories" around a camping trip campfire!