First Impressions - Mutant Year Zero: Elysium

What happens when you get over your head in the Elysium enclave...

TL;DR: Mutant Year Zero: Elysium features Victorian values noble Houses trapped in an underground Enclave after the apocalypse and locked in a veiled conflict for control. The players are all Judicators, responsible for preserving order in Elysium, working in cross House patrol teams. Each Judicator needs to balance the needs of the Enclave with the machinations of their individual families. Politics, decadence and backstabbing in a world dominated by social status and slowly failing infrastructure. The setting is presented as a mid-length length campaign with an epic end game. 

Let me put this out up front; I love this book and setting. It presses all the right buttons for me and gives me the GM tingles. If you play a campaign in Mutant Year Zero: Elysium you can expect to be out of your depth, caught in intrigue and ultimately in a struggle for survival. There are shades of Cold City, Hot War, Judge Dredd, Logan's Run, Hugh Howey's Wool trilogy and more in this setting.

Clocking in at 272 pages, this is a full cover hardback book with yet another gorgeous cover by Simon Stålenhag, this time of a scene which could very easily happen to a character if they make the enemy of the wrong person. Like Mechatron, it builds upon Mutant Year Zero but is completely standalone. The layout is similar, with a decent index.

The Year Zero Engine is implemented pretty much identically to Mechatron, which I've covered separately, except that program dice return to being skills, and your attributes are now Strength/Agility/Wits/Empathy rather than Servos/Stability/Processor/Network. You get talents from your profession, and also a specialist skill. Your attributes are linked to your age; the younger that you are, the higher they will be. However, age brings contacts and enhanced reputation (which is also dependent upon your profession).

One of the most important decisions that you will make for your character is the House that you come from. Every player has a character who is from one of the four families that founded the Elysium Enclave and Titan Power. The houses all work together in harmony officially but the reality is that they are at each other's throats, jostling for control and backstabbing each other. Each House brought something to the table; Warburg - production, Fortesque - military power, Morningstar - art and culture and Kilgore - science. The game will work best with four player characters in use, one from each major house. There are notes on how to handle fewer players or more than one character from the same House. There is a meta-game that reflects the control that each house has, and the character's investigations will affect it.

The characters are all Judicators, tasked with maintaining the peace of Elysium. Judicators are Investigators, Officers, Procurators (lawyers), Scholars, Soldiers or Technicians. Psionics exist, but are frowned upon. The Patrol Leader for each Judicator group is determined by voting (by the players), weighted by the level of control each House holds in the Enclave. Patrol Leaders can reward one of the team with extra XP at the end of a session, and gain more themselves. They're the nominal spokesperson for the team. Judicators carry out Investigations into crimes. Every crime will have one of the Houses behind it, and the character whose House it is, becomes the Double Agent with an aim of sabotaging the investigation. However, this needs to be done in a subtle manner or you could be reprimanded and your personal and house reputation be damaged. If you manage to hide your plotting from the others, you gain XP, otherwise they can. There are some nice mechanics on how this is done at the table. However, it is PVP, which may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Contacts are covered in detail, with twenty different archetypes presented. You cultivate and spend influence points to gain benefits from the contacts. However, the more you draw on the contacts, the more likely your relationship is to suffer from backlash, which can be good or bad.

The combat system is pretty similar, except that there are now four ways to become broken dependent upon the attribute involved; damage, fatigue. confusion and doubt. Lack of food and water is also discussed, along with healing. You can also be contaminated by the Rot, if it gets into the enclave.

Elysium I is a mile deep, and half that wide at the top. It tapers down as it goes deeper into the ground. There are three distinct sets of levels; the Crown (where the Houses are based), the Core (the nice part of town) and the Deep (dirty, poor with most of the factories). The Houses maintain a social strata similar to the Victorians. There are plenty of key details in the descriptions to hang an evocative campaign around.

The GM section outlines the principles of the game; the House above everything, Judicators have a job to do, Judicators aren't the Good Guys, the Enclave will fall, the Surface is uninhabitable, No-one lives forever, this is still Mutant and Humans are the Masters of the World. It's a great way to give you the tone.

The second half of the book has the Guardians of the Fall campaign. This comprises eight investigations (all built to tie into NPCs established in your character's background) and three special investigations. The order of eight normal investigations is determined by the influence that each house can wield. They're all reasonable one-shot investigations which underpin the campaign. They can be dangerous if the players misjudge them. The first special investigation is triggered partway into the campaign, and the final two bring it to a climax which will likely see the fall of the Enclave. It's good stuff, and I can see it working well at the table.

The book then rounds out with guidance on how to take the survivors of Elysium forward into the future; a future shared with Robots, Uplifted Animals and Mutants.

I really enjoyed this book; it is darkly ambiguous and operates in an investigative mode. The Houses drive the players to spark off each other, and the campaign expands in scale in a good manner, with an epic feel at the end. The mechanics for contacts are simple and effective, and the Year Zero Engine clean and simple. Add to that gorgeous artwork, layout and a decent medium length campaign arc that will entertain you for perhaps twelve or more gaming sessions.

25 April 2020