Diner Punks
Scope
The motivation behind building Diner Punks
Diner Punks is an RPG setting.
The goal of the project
Diner Punks is a Rockabilly version of Mad Max meets Jericho as a trashy 1980s post-apocalypse movie. While exciting action scenes and insane car stunts are central to the setting, there's also a strong aspect of exploration and discovery as the PCs add detail to the camp they're associated with and explore the strange post-nuclear world beyond their community. If your game session would make a good Mojo Nixon song, you're doing it right.
Diner Punks's Unique Selling point
The hook for the game is the "Diner Punk" aesthetic. What is that? I wasn't really sure when the words floated through my head, but I had a feeling it was what I needed to pull together the "post apocalyptic rockabilly muscle car" game that I'd run at conventions in several different variations. The phrase popped into my head at a convention, so I asked some of my fellow Hex Games writers and artists what they thought of the name. While nobody could quite come up with a definition, everybody had ideas for stuff that they thought could be called "Diner Punk."
Here's a list of things that we thought might be "Diner Punk":
- A Suicide Girl in a poodle skirt
- A Mad Max Movie starring Elvis
- Bartertown meets Mel's Diner
- Vanishing Point meets Damnation Alley
- Post-apocalyptic roadsters built from classic muscle cars
- Smokey & The Bandit with a machine-gun packing Sally Field
- Happy Days starring Mojo Nixon as Arthur Fonzarelli and Linea Quigley as Joanie Cunningham
- A Red Elvises cover of "The Day the Music Died."
- Speaking of the Red Elvises, Six-String Samurai is very close to and an inspiration for Diner Punk, but isn't quite Diner Punk.
- I hadn't seen Streets of Fire yet when we were having this discussion, and the others either hadn't seen it or forgot about it. Upon seeing it, I realized that it was very close to what I had in mind. The big difference is that it's set in a dystopian urban sprawl rather than a post-nuclear wasteland.
Theme
Genre
Post-Apocalyptic. The bombs dropped in 1972. It's now the mid-1980s and the outposts of humanity are starting to interact again thanks to trade routes made possible through diner-based trading posts who publicize their locations with help of a pirate radio station with a border blaster that can reach nearly everywhere in the Boomlands.
Reader Experience
Convoy missions should provide a nice mix of exploration and discovery, excitement, mystery, and over-the-top action (at least some of it vehicular). These are grounded by more personal stories that come out of the Diner Punks' relationships with and resposibilities to the people of their camp and other allies or contacts. A Diner Punks adventure should feel like a crazy road trip through a world full of danger and weirdness.
Reader Tone
Diner Punks games can span the spectrum from slapstic to horror, but everything is tempered by the kind of optimism that can only come from being an American with a cool car and a big gun.
Recurring Themes
Community
The thing that separates Diner Punks from mere Drifters is that Diner Punks are out on the roads in the service of their camp. Players should help create the camp their characters come from and scenes that happen in the camp should always help establish the characters, settings, and events that make the camp feel like a living place. A more detailed, vibrant camp raises the stakes for adventures by providing living examples of the people who benefit from the PCs' heroics.
American Swagger
The PCs in Diner Punks are 1980s American action heroes with big guns and fast cars, which means they have boundless (over)confidence in their own abilities. This most often manifests in the form of ridiculous stunts, high bodycounts, and massive property damage. Players should have a "never tell me the odds" attitude when it comes to crazy action, and the GM should encourage that behaviour.
Weird Coping Mechanisms
The human mind has many ways of adapting to tragedy, and some of them are really damned weird. A good Diner Punks game should be filled with interesting characters and communities who have dealt with the apocalypse in strange and unorthodox ways: cannibalism, weird new religions, violent bloodsports, bandit gangs with matching clown costumes, and anything else you can think of. The threshold for "too weird" in a Diner Punks game should be very high.
Character Agency
Diner Punks takes place far enough after the apocalypse that survivors have started to establish relations with people and groups outside of their compounds or camps. In their role as emissaries for the community, Diner Punks are in a position to bring major change to the camp they represent and the people who live there. Since the whole premise of Diner Punks involves the world rebuilding itself after a nuclear holocaust, the party can also affect the world at large in big ways with relatively simple actions and ideas. After all, this is a world where rudiementary communication between the surviving outposts of humanity was re-established by some unkown music fan tinkering with a radio transmitter.
Focus
Drama
Highwaymen: As routes get cleared and come into regular usage, criminals inevitably arrive in hopes of looting the cargo that passes their way. Bandits are one of the most common threats to Diner Punks.
Politics: As the world becomes more connected, camps, diners, and groups like the RRV are forming alliances and consolidating power in ways that make some of their neighbors and non-member trading partners nervous.
Survival: In adition to dealing with the other people in the world, PCs in a Diner Punks game have to contend with giant radioactive insects, nuclear fire storms, and other atomic horrors in addition to the mundane struggle to find food, water, and other basic resources.
Exploration: Some of the cities that were only lightly nuked are starting to cool off enough that they can be explored without the explorers' flesh falling off their bones from the radiation. This could lead to both "dungeon crawl" explorations of the ruins as well as fights over the slightly-less-radioactive-than-before resources to be found in these previous hotspots.
Diplomacy: The Diner Punks are the ambassadors of their communities, so most games will probably include some deal-making and diplomacy as the heroes negotiate deals with diners, traders, and camps they encounter along the way.
Other pevalent elements:
- Rock & Roll
- Crazy Car-Fu
- Badassery & Bullets
©2023, Steve Johnson