OSR Post Apocalyptic Commentary & Review Of Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny For Your Old School Campaigns

 "Hell Tanner isn't the sort of guy you'd mistake for a hero: he's a fast-driving car thief, a smuggler, and a stone-cold killer. He's also expendable “ at least in the eyes of the Secretary of Traffic for the Nation of California. Tanner doesn't care much for those eyes. You'd also never mistake Hell Tanner for a humanitarian. Facing life in prison for his various crimes, he's given a choice; rot away his remaining years in a tiny jail cell, or drive cross-country and deliver a case of antiserum to the plague-ridden people of Boston, Massachusetts... if anyone is still alive there to receive it, that is."

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny was published in 1969 & is an unapologetically post apocalyptic Science Fiction yarn. Damnation Alley isn't a great novel instead it's a throw back to Pulp magazine tradition. This novel goes hard because Hell Tanner is an exact copy or contemporary of Snake Plisken from John Carpenter's Escape From New York. 

According to the Damnation Alley wiki entry;"Hell Tanner, an imprisoned Hells Angels  member, is offered a full pardon for his crimes in exchange for taking on a suicide mission: a precarious drive through Damnation Alley, a narrow passage relatively free of lethal radiation, across a ruined America from Orange County, California to Boston, as part of a convoy of three Landmaster vehicles (fitted with various rocket launchers, flame-throwers, machine guns, and slicing implements) attempting to deliver an urgently needed plague vaccine  to the survivors of Boston"  

The world of Damnation Alley is a post apocalypse Hellscape & here's a break down according to the Wiki entry; "a post-apocalyptic Southern California, in a hellish world shattered by nuclear war thirty years before. Several police states have emerged in remaining areas of the former United States that can still support human life. As a result of the war, hurricane-force winds above 500  ft (150 m) prevent any sort of air travel from one state to the next. Sudden, violent, and unpredictable "garbage storms," and giant, mutated animals and insects make day-to-day life treacherous."

 This novel has very little to do with the movie & according to a review; "Barry N. Malzberg found the book "an interesting novella converted to an unfortunate novel," faulting it as "a mechanical, simply transposed action-adventure story written, in my view, at the bottom of the man's talent."^[1] Zelazny himself agreed with Malzberg, stating that he preferred the novella and only expanded it at his agent's request to make it more viable for a movie deal."  Umm don't let this take away from a great little post apocalyptic that tells it's story in a one hundred and fifty pages. If you wanna read the original "Damnation Alley" (novella) at the Internet Archive.

Damnation Alley could easily be used as OSR post apocalpytic inspiration with the PC's being called into service to take medicine from the nation of California to Boston. The DM can populate their own landscape with a wide variety of mutated encounters. Hell Tanner could easily be viewed as a proto type for a Wretched rpg Apocalypse game group of PC's. The PC's have to trek from West to East coast and they happen to be the worst of the worst criminals because only they can survive the Hellscape. 

Forget radiation for a moment and let's talk weapons that are capable of mutating animals and humans into the monsters we see in Damnation Alley. For me it's easily got to be some sorta of Michael Moorcock inspired Chaos based weaponry. These weapons may crack the reality of Damnation Alley's Earth and allowed Chaos to pour into the landscape wrecking ecology, reality, and more. This Hellscape is what the PC's must journey across. 

For the Wretchedverse these horrid weapons allowed the breaking the walls of reality allowing the Beyond to pour into this world and mutated every monster and animal it touched including the human race. This is a world on the edge of extinction to adventure within.