Andy Munich. This man is a genius. He created a beautifully simple Dread hack for Mad Max: Fury Road.
Dread is probably one of the simplest horror and suspense-based RPG systems out there. Everyone makes a character using a pre-built questionnaire for a specific scenario. And the GM takes the answers, and uses them as part of a scenario. The only mechanics used is Jenga (the block tower). Want to do something difficult? That'll be one, two, or three block pulls, thank you very much. The tower falls? Your character is dead (or at the very least, on the chopping block for a slightly better time in the story). Jenga and the story reinforce the inherent tension in each other.
Andy took the system, then hacked it slightly to create a Mad Max version. And in Andy fashion, everything is just improvised. It goes something like this (actual events may vary):
- Get a speaker, and blast the Mad Max: Fury Road soundtrack in a loop, from game start until the game ends.
- Ask the players what story they want to run.
- Have each player create a number of characters (~3 each) to make a tribe.
- Make shit up to go with the music.
I didn't get to play in Andy's game, but got to hear about it from others. And I got to ask him a few questions on how he ran it, because I wanted to run it for friends. I've run it twice so far, and the players say they had a blast, so that' good. And as a GM, I totally loved it.
As far as creating the characters, for the games I ran, I told the players to describe each character with 3 physical descriptions and 3 personality or mental characteristics. They also needed to write down any stuff the character had, although this doesn't come for free... gotta pay for that with some pulls (after all, stuff ain't cheap in the post-apocalypse).
Now, you really don't need anything more than just index cards, but wouldn't it be cool to have little Mad Max character sheets? At least that's what I thought, because I love that shit. So that was my little project.
I looked for a Mad Max: Fury Road logo using Google image searches. Many didn't work, but I finally found this one (which is off of a rogerebert URL):
That looked pretty good, as you can grab the Mad Max: Fury Road words and font without extraneous characters or graphics. There's even the iconic graphics below, which in theory you could include, but I decided to skip that part.
Had to find the Mad Max font, which it turns out is named AgencyFB. It might require a license to use it for profit, but I'm not selling nothing.
You want a pretty simple thing, which isn't more that a name and a few physical and mental descriptions. But of course you gotta have Mad Max sounding stats, right? After a little assistance from the wife, I ended up with Mug (physical appearance), Bent (personality; but just sounds twisted too), and Gear (which works for both stuff in general, but perfectly for that whole car thing). I put the infamous quote from the movie instead of just "name"; maybe that's cheesy. But it's Mad Max. There was cheese.
And here we go, with little name tent and everything. Four to a page, about the size of an index card anyways:
Got a PDF version as well, but can't seem to figure out how to upload it here. PM me and you can have it.