L Ron Hubbard Mission Earth

So you found the L Ron Hubbard Mission Earth rulebook and now you need to actually run it.

Mission Earth was Games Workshop's attempt at a post-apocalyptic RPG back in 1989, using a simplified version of their Basic Roleplaying engine. The premise is straightforward enough: you play wastelanders in a mutated, ruined Britain trying to survive factions, mutants, and the generalcrap of a collapsed world. The rulebook is thin—about 48 pages—and that's intentional because it was designed to be a lightweight companion to their wargaming products, not a serious competitor to Call of Cthulhu or Cyberpunk. I've run it three times over twenty years. Here's what actually happens when you open the book.

L Ron Hubbard Mission Earth Setup

Character creation takes about twenty minutes. Roll 3d6 for each of six attributes: Strength, Speed, Intelligence, Education, Personality, and Appearance. Apply the standard BRP modifiers—subtract 10 if you're below 12, add 10 if above 18. Then pick a tribe background, which gives you a starting skill and a bonus. The tribes are the Vultures, the Rats, the Serpents, the Hounds, the Wolves, and the Jackals. Each one comes with a built-in social standing modifier that affects how NPC factions react to you. The skills are where things get interesting and also where most people fumble. Skill points are determined by your Education and your tribe. You get 5 plus Education percentiles as your starting skill total. Skills are percentages, so a 45% Climb means you have a forty-five in a hundred chance. Roll under on d100, obviously. The skill list is short—about thirty skills across the book. Combat, Stealth, Fast Talk, First Aid, Swim, Drive, those kinds of things. Nothing exotic. You spend your points during character generation and that's it. No leveling up unless your GM decides otherwise. Equipment is purchased with Salvage Points, the game's currency. You start with ten. A basic knife costs two, a walkie-talkie costs eight, and a functional assault rifle runs about fifteen. The economy is deliberately brutal—most characters can't afford everything they need, which forces negotiation and theft into gameplay.

How the actual mechanics work in play

The core resolution is d100 under your skill percentage. There's a critical success if you roll under ten percent of your skill, and a critical failure if you roll the same digit twice and it's above your skill. Standard BRP. Combat uses simultaneous initiative where both sides declare actions and then roll for their turn order. Damage is subtracted from Toughness, which is basically your Constitution score. When Toughness hits zero you're unconscious and bleeding. At negative your Toughness score you're dead unless someone stabilizes you within ten minutes. Here's the thing the book doesn't make clear: the combat system is fast but unforgiving. A single well-placed bullet from a rusty pistol can drop a character who has twelve Toughness. This means ranged combat dominates and melee is risky. I learned this the hard way in my first session when a player with thirty percent Pistol blew away a seemingly trivial guard NPC in one round because the guard had rolled a fifteen on their Dodge while the player rolled a four on their attack. The guard was dead before he finished his action declaration. That session taught me to give players better armor or to make encounters involve three or more enemies so individual competence matters less.

Running the factions properly

Mission Earth has three major factions: the Technocrats, who hoard pre-war technology and serve as the primary antagonists; the Mutants, who are both feared and needed for their genetic adaptations; and the Tribes, who are your player characters' general lot. The rulebook gives you stats for faction leaders and key NPCs but doesn't stress how important reputation tracking is. Keep a simple spreadsheet. Every time a character interacts with a faction, note whether the encounter was positive, neutral, or negative. The game has a hidden reputation mechanic baked into the tribe bonuses, but it doesn't track it explicitly. If a tribe has -20% to their Fast Talk with Technocrats, that's a hard number. Respect it. The mutants are the real gameplay opportunity here. Their special abilities range from acid blood to extra limbs to radiation resistance. A player character who is a mutant gets extra skill points but suffers social penalties from non-mutant factions. This is the game's central tension. Playing a mutant feels different because every marketplace transaction and tavern conversation carries an extra layer of suspicion. Your Fast Talk skill effectively becomes whatever Fast Talk minus the relevant penalty, which in practice means you need to invest heavily in the skill or find a workaround entirely.

L Ron Hubbard Mission Earth common mistakes

The biggest error new GMs make is running the game like a combat-heavy wasteland shooter. Mission Earth works better as a social survival game. The rules for scavenging, trading, and faction politics are more detailed than the combat rules. Two pages cover scavenging procedures. Half a page covers firearm maintenance. Eight pages cover combat. You should be doing the opposite—prioritizing the first two and treating combat as a last resort. When combat does break out, resolve it quickly and move on. Don't let it consume the session. Another mistake is ignoring the radiation rules. Radiation exposure is real in this game. Characters who spend too long in high-radiation zones without protection lose one point of Toughness per hour and start rolling on the mutation table after six hours. Most groups skip this because it slows things down. Don't skip it. It's the environmental pressure that makes the world feel hostile without requiring constant combat encounters. I run with a simple radiation meter on my GM screen—a d6 rolled every hour in irradiated areas. One or two means safe, three through five means exposure begins, six means significant exposure and the character must take protective action or lose Toughness.

What actually breaks

The skill system is too shallow. Thirty skills for a game that expects you to explore diverse situations means characters become narrow. A Vulture with Weapon Skill, Stealth, and Fast Talk at high percentages will never encounter a problem they can't handle with those three skills, and they'll fail at everything else. Consider allowing secondary skill development after the first session. Give players five points per session to spend on new skills, capped at thirty percent without attribute investment. This keeps characters focused but prevents total specialization from locking them out of the game entirely. The equipment economy is broken in a specific way I didn't expect. Because weapons are expensive and ammunition is scarce, characters tend to hoard rather than spend. By session three, every player has fifty salvage points saved up and refuses to buy anything. The GM then has no leverage because the characters can afford almost anything and there's no real scarcity. My workaround is simple: introduce decay. Every month in-game, half of any character's ammunition degrades or is lost to moisture. Consumables like medkits and filters expire after two sessions. This forces regular spending and keeps the economy moving without artificial price inflation.

Where to get it

The original L Ron Hubbard Mission Earth rulebook is out of print and sells for around twenty to fifty pounds on eBay depending on condition. Used copies usually include the supplement booklet called "The New Britain" which contains faction details and adventure hooks. Avoid buying it if the spine is cracked—the pages are thin and prone to falling out. Digital versions exist on various retro RPG forums but are unofficial scans. If you're planning to run this regularly I'd recommend finding a good used copy rather than dealing with pixelated PDFs. The layout matters for quick reference during play. Games Workshop released a second edition in 1992 with minor rule changes and additional tribes. The differences are negligible unless you're comparing editions for completeness. The first edition has slightly better printed stats. The second edition has a few more mutant abilities. Pick whichever is cheaper and available.

A final note on tone

Mission Earth isn't serious post-apocalyptic fiction. It's pulpy and occasionally silly. The mutant abilities lean toward the fantastical rather than the grounded. Radiation causing extra limbs isn't realistic but it works for the tone. Don't try to make this gritty realism. Play it as an adventure game with survival elements. The best sessions I ran had players negotiating with a faction leader while their radiated dog companion distracted guards, then escaping through a sewer system that required a series of Swimming and Climb checks under time pressure. That's the game. Not shooting things. Not surviving radiation. The intersection of social maneuvering and physical obstacles under resource constraints.