Build Your Own RPG Apocalypse with Ashes Without Number

By Cameron Kunzelman | August 14, 2025 | 10:18am

Artwork from Sine Nomine Publishing

Tabletop Features ashes without number

Build Your Own RPG Apocalypse with Ashes Without Number

One of my favorite things about tabletop roleplaying games is making a little world. I’m the kind of player who is inherently resistant to the packaged fiction. I can meet my fellow players halfway—if I’m playing in an official setting like Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, I’ll make my own town or city (shoutout to Bogbrook). I have to admit that this desire on my own end makes me generally interested in games that generate worlds and contexts as a part of their mechanics, and Sine Nomine’s Without Number games really scratch that itch. We’ve made worlds, stars, and cities of our own devising with these game systems, and now we’re creating and playing within postapocalypses with 2025’s Ashes Without Number, which has a very robust free edition alongside a more extensive paid one. To put it briefly, the game is good.

Kevin Crawford’s Ashes Without Number sells itself as “a game about worlds that have ended and those who refused to end with them.” In practice, it is a one-stop shop for creating a fictional apocalyptic world, populating it with factions, stationing them in enclaves, and then creating strong adventures and quests for players. Just short of 300 pages, it walks game masters and players through all of these steps piece by piece, and Crawford writes in a clear and direct way. Importantly, you don’t need to use all of those parts of the game. The book is very clear that all of these game mechanics and setups are in service of the story that players want to tell with each other, and readers should feel free to add or abandon however they want. After starting with some clear statements about how to use the book (“GMs need to react”; “players need to have goals”; etc), it sets a reader free to learn about how to make an apocalyptic world.

Most Popular

This, inherently, is a complicated enterprise. “Apocalyptic” settings and games mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. (Shameless plug: I’ve recently podcasted about this very thing). Ashes Without Number addresses this by hitting as many different tones as it can. If you want a “raiders doing violence in vehicles” world, the book has you covered. Mutants? There are rules to use. Zombies? Of course. The modular nature of the book, and its clarity about picking up or putting down parts of the game to best hone your own, means that there are lots of cool ways to shape your play experience without drastically altering the basic framework.

That basic framework is also deeply efficient and easy to learn. The game is pretty straightforward: you make characters with some rolled-up stats, they get some skills, you pick some backgrounds, and you derive a bunch of combat numbers and saving throws from those combinations. The game is based around a 2d6 system, and it seems like all of the things you need to know about how to run the game moment-to-moment are contained in a single page—it’s 37 for the curious. I feel relatively confident that with a couple hours of prep that I could run this for any random group of people who might be interested in it.

What sticks out the most to me as interesting in Ashes Without Number is not the core mechanics, but rather some of the additional ideas that are “apocalyptic” and are just generally fascinating in their own right. The game has a stress system that I could see being a really great engine for drama in a game about inventory and supply management. It is chart-driven and creates a clear set of costs for specific player actions—killing other people makes you stressed, for example. While reading, I immediately compared it to Mothership’s iconic stress system, and it’s hard for me to determine which one I think would provide more interesting outputs. I definitely want to put them up for side-by-side testing.

Another thing that I find delightful about Ashes is the Enclave generation system. In the postapocalypse, you need groups of people or creatures around. What will those be? Maybe you should roll on a random chart! The book has 80 different “tags” of types of Enclave and a simple system for rolling up two of those tags and creatively thinking about how they might combine together—I just rolled up “Chokepoint” and “Contaminated Land,” and reading through the descriptions provided in the book gives me a strong starting concept for an irradiated district of the wasteland with a single, barely navigable path through it. The book also offers suggestions of who might be there, who might send you there, and several other characteristics for the zone—without too much work, I can sit here and create a quest about a merchant who needs the party to transport some rare materials through the chokepoint in defiance of the raiders who hold it, and maybe that will happen right about the same time as a roiling storm comes off the poisoned wastes…

Now that’s gaming. Ashes Without Number is a great single book if you want to play in a variety of tones from homespun apocalypse to a thinly-veiled The Walking Dead, Fallout, or Gamma World-esque romp. The game understands that you might want to turn certain parts of it on and off depending on the vibes you are looking for, and that’s refreshing, especially in a world where official games from IP that match those apocalyptic tones generally seem tied to specific mechanical expressions. It’s a great book, and I’ve already found a lot of cool things to lift from it to put into other games alongside a desire to play this one.

As a final note, if you need convincing about getting the paid version of the game, let me hit you with this: there are optional rules for evil techno-wizards in there.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.