It's kinda working! The essential ingredients were to add in some more rigorous overland travel mechanics, more detailed hexes, and some extra bits around weather and foraging.
Now overland travel is Interesting in itself.
Now overland travel is Interesting in itself.
As of right now I'm pretty happy with the refocus! Limiting the party to an expedition per month means that we're already into campaign Winter and the timeline's skipping along. I really wanted to push the timeline forward so we can see civilisation regrow, and that's been working out pretty well!
On the Rebuild:
I feel like the Rebuild mechanics are going well and the hub town of New Moondin has grown nicely. They're sustaining the population through winter at least!
I'll post this up on the blog at some point. Long story short it's an extremely simple worker-placement game. Choices made on the Rebuild map affect the players' purchasing power in the town for the whole season. It seems to work!
My only worry is that it's not table-inclusive enough. This might change if everyone has a pet town to manage, but at the moment there's a smaller core of people interested in doing Rebuild stuff while everyone else buys gear or whatever. I might be overthinking it, but it's a potential issue!
On Weather:
The other fun thing about pushing the timeline forward is the march of the seasons. More specifically - I've been able to try out my many weather charts!
Last session we finally had a death due to weather when someone got caught out in a Gas Front, so hopefully that's put the fear of weather in them.
I'm thinking of weather as the main travel challenge these days. Pre-apocalypse I had encounters with creatures as the main travel issue, but these days almost everything is dead!
They've had very occasional confrontations with weird post-apoc creatures and some random human scavengers, but in the main the real risk has been about the weather and the terrain and what people are going to eat.
My only issue is needing to find a way to fast-forward the weather when they spend a few weeks resting up, but that's no big deal really.
On Encumbrance:
It turns out travelling overland on a very limited hex-by-hex basis means encumbrance is a big damn deal!
The classic trade-off between speed and protection is exacerbated because armour now also weather protection. If your armour breaks, you're exposed to the elements and start taking worse damage.
Plus there's acid rain now which eats away at your gear when you travel in it.
What's an adventurer to do?
They've reacted in two ways.
The most fun one for me is the rise of the Skeleton Porter. Have a Necromancer program a skeleton butler for you and you're off to the races! You can't order them around unless you're a Necromancer, so most have to make do with a simple if/then/else order.
The other solution is quite interesting mechanically. Barrett, played by Tom, has bought an elaborate wagon pulled by skeleton horse and blown by wind. Fun fluff aside, having a wagon as a limited fast-travel option along roads is very cool! As settlements are founded and roads are built, they'll increase their ability to travel around protected from the weather.
On Cooking:
The Cooking Subsystem has been getting a hell of a workout over the past few months!
I really enjoy how cooking a nice meal has become a standard thing to do when they set up camp at night, and the fact that they've been carrying around oils and spices and all the other cooking accoutrements despite the aforementioned encumbrance limitations is a delight.
Part of the fun of it has been the randomised basic ingredients available in the hub town. Each month we roll to see what they've got available, and if they're lucky there'll be stuff available to cook a favoured meal.
If the town ingredients were guaranteed every month I'm sure we'd see the party go back to the same meals for consistent bonuses, so randomising heads this off a little bit.
The other side of the coin is that foraged food is set per hex. That is - find a certain food there one time and you'll always be able to find it again. That way if they really need Ferfect Chicken for a dish, they can take a trip out to the Ferfect Chicken area and forage for it!
This kind of means that foraging is more difficult but more consistent, while hub town ingredients are easy to get but unreliable. I think that strikes a nice balance!
On Parry:
We've got a proper Fighter for the first time in a while in Red, and we're seeing the true power of the Fighter Parry!
Basically they get +4 to AC and if missed by a melee attack, the Fighter gets a free counterattack against the target. The end result is that our resident Fighter gets a bunch of attacks per round when surrounded, which is pretty cool!
It certainly feels swashbuckly, and it's super effective against swarms of weak enemies which is exactly where the Fighter is meant to sit vs the Barbarian. Success!
On the Wild Hunt:
Something real cool that happened was I finally had an opportunity to unleash the Wild Hunt on someone.
The idea that the Wild Hunt comes for you if you eat an Elf heart has been in the game for over half a decade, and it finally happened!
There was an unexpected interaction with the "one Expedition per month" thing, since the Wild Hunt was originally to be a looming nightly threat and that doesn't play well with rolling the timeline forward rapidly.
It kinda worked out in the end with a bit of handwaving.
Essentially the Wild Hunt is an "Elves fall, everyone dies" deal, and so poor old Jasmine found herself alone and outclassed fleeing not one but two flavours of Wild Hunt.
Each species of Elf has a different way of hunting. For instance the Flitting Gads (Featherfall Elves) try to spook you into the open where they can send razor-sharp butterflies to tear you to pieces, and Brackenfrau (Charm Person Elves) charm ordinary folk against you and watch them hunt you like dangerous game.
Jasmine was being hunted by both, so it was quite the spectacle!
This just so happened to coincide with some Carousing consequences, so we had a "The Hangover" session where the main party was trying to piece together just what happened the night before, while occasionally flashing back to Jasmine's desperate struggle against the Elves.
She didn't make it, despite giving it a jolly good go.
Part of the gimmick was that you can't use the same hiding spot twice - the Elves will find you if you try the same trick again - and that's what happened to Jasmine.
It didn't help that she'd filled her extra-dimensional hidey hole with razor butterflies either...
Extensive reworking meant I pretty much just used the map... but whatever Stonehell's great. If you somehow don't have it yet, worth a purchase.
Crashed Seraphim
I won't link this because I don't trust my players enough! Cool gimmick, I'll link one day.
Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos
How did this forest of living trees come to grow in the post-apocalypse? Weird pregnancy shit, that's what!
Short dungeon accessed via a forest of sad zombies who cry at you. It would have been harder to find said short dungeon, but player bullshit (tm) solved that little issue!
Exacerbated the general sadness and loneliness by having all the treasure turn to stone when you kill the main boss, because that sucks and life sucks and everything sucks.
Banger of a module though. Led directly to a character having their cock turned to stone and indirectly to him having a coin-operated cock that needs to be paid to pee like it's a London tube station loo. Good times!
Kink
A thing I made up myself for once. Go me!
Flesh for the Witch Queen
Linked even though I don't trust my players enough (pls don't read!), I vaguely remember using this in an earlier age. Anyway, reskinned and double-reskinned in the time since.
Cool but relatively linear dungeon, fun serial killer baddies, and a lot of room to add extra bullshit.
Good times for a one page dungeon!
Last session we finally had a death due to weather when someone got caught out in a Gas Front, so hopefully that's put the fear of weather in them.
I'm thinking of weather as the main travel challenge these days. Pre-apocalypse I had encounters with creatures as the main travel issue, but these days almost everything is dead!
They've had very occasional confrontations with weird post-apoc creatures and some random human scavengers, but in the main the real risk has been about the weather and the terrain and what people are going to eat.
My only issue is needing to find a way to fast-forward the weather when they spend a few weeks resting up, but that's no big deal really.
On Encumbrance:
It turns out travelling overland on a very limited hex-by-hex basis means encumbrance is a big damn deal!
The classic trade-off between speed and protection is exacerbated because armour now also weather protection. If your armour breaks, you're exposed to the elements and start taking worse damage.
Plus there's acid rain now which eats away at your gear when you travel in it.
What's an adventurer to do?
They've reacted in two ways.
The most fun one for me is the rise of the Skeleton Porter. Have a Necromancer program a skeleton butler for you and you're off to the races! You can't order them around unless you're a Necromancer, so most have to make do with a simple if/then/else order.
The other solution is quite interesting mechanically. Barrett, played by Tom, has bought an elaborate wagon pulled by skeleton horse and blown by wind. Fun fluff aside, having a wagon as a limited fast-travel option along roads is very cool! As settlements are founded and roads are built, they'll increase their ability to travel around protected from the weather.
On Cooking:
The Cooking Subsystem has been getting a hell of a workout over the past few months!
I really enjoy how cooking a nice meal has become a standard thing to do when they set up camp at night, and the fact that they've been carrying around oils and spices and all the other cooking accoutrements despite the aforementioned encumbrance limitations is a delight.
Part of the fun of it has been the randomised basic ingredients available in the hub town. Each month we roll to see what they've got available, and if they're lucky there'll be stuff available to cook a favoured meal.
If the town ingredients were guaranteed every month I'm sure we'd see the party go back to the same meals for consistent bonuses, so randomising heads this off a little bit.
The other side of the coin is that foraged food is set per hex. That is - find a certain food there one time and you'll always be able to find it again. That way if they really need Ferfect Chicken for a dish, they can take a trip out to the Ferfect Chicken area and forage for it!
This kind of means that foraging is more difficult but more consistent, while hub town ingredients are easy to get but unreliable. I think that strikes a nice balance!
On Parry:
We've got a proper Fighter for the first time in a while in Red, and we're seeing the true power of the Fighter Parry!
Basically they get +4 to AC and if missed by a melee attack, the Fighter gets a free counterattack against the target. The end result is that our resident Fighter gets a bunch of attacks per round when surrounded, which is pretty cool!
It certainly feels swashbuckly, and it's super effective against swarms of weak enemies which is exactly where the Fighter is meant to sit vs the Barbarian. Success!
On the Wild Hunt:
Something real cool that happened was I finally had an opportunity to unleash the Wild Hunt on someone.
The idea that the Wild Hunt comes for you if you eat an Elf heart has been in the game for over half a decade, and it finally happened!
There was an unexpected interaction with the "one Expedition per month" thing, since the Wild Hunt was originally to be a looming nightly threat and that doesn't play well with rolling the timeline forward rapidly.
It kinda worked out in the end with a bit of handwaving.
Essentially the Wild Hunt is an "Elves fall, everyone dies" deal, and so poor old Jasmine found herself alone and outclassed fleeing not one but two flavours of Wild Hunt.
Each species of Elf has a different way of hunting. For instance the Flitting Gads (Featherfall Elves) try to spook you into the open where they can send razor-sharp butterflies to tear you to pieces, and Brackenfrau (Charm Person Elves) charm ordinary folk against you and watch them hunt you like dangerous game.
Jasmine was being hunted by both, so it was quite the spectacle!
This just so happened to coincide with some Carousing consequences, so we had a "The Hangover" session where the main party was trying to piece together just what happened the night before, while occasionally flashing back to Jasmine's desperate struggle against the Elves.
She didn't make it, despite giving it a jolly good go.
Part of the gimmick was that you can't use the same hiding spot twice - the Elves will find you if you try the same trick again - and that's what happened to Jasmine.
It didn't help that she'd filled her extra-dimensional hidey hole with razor butterflies either...
Mini-Reviews
I did a fair bit of reskinning for most of these, so these reviews aren't entirely reflective!
Modnar's Cellar
I reskinned this from a relatively generic wizard's tower into some sort of non-euclidean space that Elves broke into a decade or so ago and killed the main guy.
Somewhat explored, it's a fairly generic dungeon but solid.
Stonehell
Say whaaat? Yea I broke out the Stonehell again because I needed a valley with caves and the opening bit of Stonehell was just the ticket.Modnar's Cellar
I reskinned this from a relatively generic wizard's tower into some sort of non-euclidean space that Elves broke into a decade or so ago and killed the main guy.
Somewhat explored, it's a fairly generic dungeon but solid.
Stonehell
Extensive reworking meant I pretty much just used the map... but whatever Stonehell's great. If you somehow don't have it yet, worth a purchase.
Crashed Seraphim
I won't link this because I don't trust my players enough! Cool gimmick, I'll link one day.
Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos
How did this forest of living trees come to grow in the post-apocalypse? Weird pregnancy shit, that's what!
Short dungeon accessed via a forest of sad zombies who cry at you. It would have been harder to find said short dungeon, but player bullshit (tm) solved that little issue!
Exacerbated the general sadness and loneliness by having all the treasure turn to stone when you kill the main boss, because that sucks and life sucks and everything sucks.
Banger of a module though. Led directly to a character having their cock turned to stone and indirectly to him having a coin-operated cock that needs to be paid to pee like it's a London tube station loo. Good times!
Kink
A thing I made up myself for once. Go me!
Flesh for the Witch Queen
Linked even though I don't trust my players enough (pls don't read!), I vaguely remember using this in an earlier age. Anyway, reskinned and double-reskinned in the time since.
Cool but relatively linear dungeon, fun serial killer baddies, and a lot of room to add extra bullshit.
Good times for a one page dungeon!
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