It's only been five sessions since the last Retrospective and it already feels like a lot has happened!
Buckle up, I've got a lot of thoughts.
Cold Winter:
We bridged the thirteen-year gap between the End War and the start of the post-apocalypse with a minigame - the lengthily named Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Of This Cold Winter.
Reskinned from a harrowing winter season to a harrowing decade or so of apocalypse survival, it worked really well!
I'll say a little more in the mini-review at the end, but it was very good. Lots of nail-biting decision making, visible despair, and whoops of triumph when something went right for once.
The surviving groups made up the demographics of the final town, which was good groundwork for me to build off.
Quick off the Mark:
My visions of a few sessions of scrabbling for cash in the post-apocalypse were quickly overruled by a hell of a good first session back!
A rumour of treasure and a little exploration led them to a buried prepper cache, full of riches and ripe for the taking!
Loaded up with guns and valuables, they were soon able to equip themselves in a manner befitting explorers of a dangerous new land. Probably for the best, really.
One of my favourite things to happen was the rise of the loader-porter skeleton. It was quickly discovered that Encumbrance is super important in the exploration stakes, so Andromeda purchased herself a skeleton that would follow her around, carry her stuff, and reload her muskets for her.
Others soon followed suit. Great fun!
The First Death:
Alas, Sophia.
Carter had such plans for her, and they were all dashed in a single string of foolish mistakes.
They investigated rumours of mysterious flying creatures, which the party quickly insisted were "seagulls". On discovering that they were flying Elves, Sophia decided to climb down into their protected gorge and start yelling insults at them so that they'd attack her.
It was a complete success... and Sophia's corpse tumbled into the ravine riddled with Magic Missile fire.
Sophia was, of course, a holdover from the pre-apocalypse. An unaging Elf-child who kept making veiled hints that she was the child of POWERLAD and one of his lovers. We never did find out the truth of that.
Her designs on abusing the Summon spell to call forth meaty demons live on in Carter's next character, who at time of writing has devoured a couple of Elf hearts and has the Wild Hunt coming for her, whatever that means. That can't be good.
Clerics:
Dear Lord my new Cleric rules have been getting a workout! I'm really happy with them.
Clerics feel very powerful and it's been fun to see people grapple with and play into their gods' strictures.
Notable mighty feats include the time when two POWERLAD Clerics created overlapping lightning barriers to nuke a bunch of skeletons, and when the UFO Cleric used his Abduct ability to completely neuter an otherwise incredibly dangerous burrowing beast.
Theme Change:
After the crazy-epic apocalyptic showdown of the finale, it would feel a bit weird to me to just start over at first level and do the same old thing in a very different world.
The world is vastly changed, it's practically a new campaign, and so my goal was to change the theme enough to make it feel different.
Maybe eventually society will recover enough for us to go back to classic town-and-dungeon gameplay, but for now it's a hardscrabble fight for survival in a hostile world cloaked in poison.
As of right now, I'm happy with how it's going!
Buckle up, I've got a lot of thoughts.
Cold Winter:
We bridged the thirteen-year gap between the End War and the start of the post-apocalypse with a minigame - the lengthily named Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Of This Cold Winter.
Reskinned from a harrowing winter season to a harrowing decade or so of apocalypse survival, it worked really well!
I'll say a little more in the mini-review at the end, but it was very good. Lots of nail-biting decision making, visible despair, and whoops of triumph when something went right for once.
The surviving groups made up the demographics of the final town, which was good groundwork for me to build off.
Quick off the Mark:
My visions of a few sessions of scrabbling for cash in the post-apocalypse were quickly overruled by a hell of a good first session back!
A rumour of treasure and a little exploration led them to a buried prepper cache, full of riches and ripe for the taking!
Loaded up with guns and valuables, they were soon able to equip themselves in a manner befitting explorers of a dangerous new land. Probably for the best, really.
One of my favourite things to happen was the rise of the loader-porter skeleton. It was quickly discovered that Encumbrance is super important in the exploration stakes, so Andromeda purchased herself a skeleton that would follow her around, carry her stuff, and reload her muskets for her.
Others soon followed suit. Great fun!
The First Death:
Alas, Sophia.
Carter had such plans for her, and they were all dashed in a single string of foolish mistakes.
They investigated rumours of mysterious flying creatures, which the party quickly insisted were "seagulls". On discovering that they were flying Elves, Sophia decided to climb down into their protected gorge and start yelling insults at them so that they'd attack her.
It was a complete success... and Sophia's corpse tumbled into the ravine riddled with Magic Missile fire.
Sophia was, of course, a holdover from the pre-apocalypse. An unaging Elf-child who kept making veiled hints that she was the child of POWERLAD and one of his lovers. We never did find out the truth of that.
Her designs on abusing the Summon spell to call forth meaty demons live on in Carter's next character, who at time of writing has devoured a couple of Elf hearts and has the Wild Hunt coming for her, whatever that means. That can't be good.
Clerics:
Dear Lord my new Cleric rules have been getting a workout! I'm really happy with them.
Clerics feel very powerful and it's been fun to see people grapple with and play into their gods' strictures.
Notable mighty feats include the time when two POWERLAD Clerics created overlapping lightning barriers to nuke a bunch of skeletons, and when the UFO Cleric used his Abduct ability to completely neuter an otherwise incredibly dangerous burrowing beast.
Theme Change:
After the crazy-epic apocalyptic showdown of the finale, it would feel a bit weird to me to just start over at first level and do the same old thing in a very different world.
The world is vastly changed, it's practically a new campaign, and so my goal was to change the theme enough to make it feel different.
Maybe eventually society will recover enough for us to go back to classic town-and-dungeon gameplay, but for now it's a hardscrabble fight for survival in a hostile world cloaked in poison.
As of right now, I'm happy with how it's going!
Scale:
One of the biggest differences is scale. I've divided every six-mile hex into one-mile sub-hexes, and so they've spent the last 5 sessions tooling around in a single six-mile hex.
Previously they were flying across a bunch of six-mile hexes in a single day, now they're struggling through a hostile landscape where the best they can manage is about twelve miles a day.
The world feels much bigger as a result - getting back to Dwimmermount will take them weeks, rather than days, if they ever make it there at all.
Weather:
My justification for this relative slowness is the toxic atmosphere.
Even on a clear day inside the protective Storm Shell you're breathing in noxious fumes, and in the usual hazy weather you quickly become exhausted.
To this end, I'm leaning heavily on a Weather system based on this one.
Basically weather changes at least twice a day - morning and evening - and potentially more often with Encounter rolls.
For the most part, weather is shit. It's exhausting, or equipment-eating, or painful, or straight up deadly.
I've got different weather charts for different Seasons which should be fun! Changeable bastard weather in Spring, long clear days and cloying heat in Summer, endless rains in Autumn, and swirling blizzards in Winter while the poison freezes into the soil.
There are different effects per Weather type, with more severe effects if you're not wearing protective gear.
The players are currently protected from the worst of the elements by the Storm-Shell, a vast shield of energy created by POWERLAD when he saved the town, so it's relatively safe to walk around without protective gear on.
If and when they eventually leave the Shell it'll be a different story.
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| Like legit check it out |
Hexcrawl Procedure:
Having a much more detailed/procedural hexcrawl mechanic is the other key way that the post-apoc campaign feels different to what we had before.
Every day is divided into Watches, basically the hexcrawl equivalent of dungeon Turns.
Each Watch is 4 hours long, with specific things that you can do in each Watch like Travel, Explore, or Forage.
This makes each day more granular, and allows for various mechanical effects like gaining encumbering Exhaustion as you travel through Hazy weather.
Every day is divided into Watches, basically the hexcrawl equivalent of dungeon Turns.
Each Watch is 4 hours long, with specific things that you can do in each Watch like Travel, Explore, or Forage.
This makes each day more granular, and allows for various mechanical effects like gaining encumbering Exhaustion as you travel through Hazy weather.
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| New laminated sheets are of course needed as a result |
Timescale and Expeditions:
I want the players be able to experience and steer humanity's recovery across the face of the poisoned Earth, which necessitates a real acceleration of the game's timeline.
Consider: It was about half a year in-game between the beginning of the apocalypse and the end of the world.
That took over two years of weekly session in real-time.
At that rate it'll be real life decades before the players see humanity start to recover!
So I'm flipping it on its head.
My goal is to have a month go past every session on average. This means the seasons can change, and we can have a "Rebuild Phase" every three months where players get to orchestrate the rebuild of the world.
To this end, every month players choose whether they're organising an Expedition or taking Downtime.
Expeditions take up a whole month, no matter how long you actually spend out in the wastes. The remaining time is presumed to be spent on organising the Expedition beforehand and recovering from the poisonous miasma afterwards.
Downtime is the other option, and includes all the classics like Carousing and Spell Research.
The idea is that Expeditions might stretch over a few sessions (like if it's an Expedition to a dungeon), but we'll make the time back with comparatively speedy Downtime months.
Hopefully I'll have more on the Rebuild Phase when we've had more time to try out the mechanics.
Mapping:
Expeditions take up a whole month, no matter how long you actually spend out in the wastes. The remaining time is presumed to be spent on organising the Expedition beforehand and recovering from the poisonous miasma afterwards.
Downtime is the other option, and includes all the classics like Carousing and Spell Research.
The idea is that Expeditions might stretch over a few sessions (like if it's an Expedition to a dungeon), but we'll make the time back with comparatively speedy Downtime months.
Hopefully I'll have more on the Rebuild Phase when we've had more time to try out the mechanics.
Mapping:
A last note on Mapping.
Since the world is trackless and uncharted and fundamentally changed from its pre-apocalyptic state, mapping the world is suddenly important again!
A fun part (as I said before) is that it's the same world the players have been inhabiting for years.
They can use the old maps to find where towns used to be, but they can't be sure of what's out there.
I've been a bit flip-floppy on how obvious I want the hexes to be.
Currently my ideal is that it's fairly naturalistic, less "let's explore this hex" and more "let's explore around this area".
The struggle is, of course, that the map is fundamentally hex-based. I might have highfalutin ideas about the players drawing freehand maps that are completely functional but fundamentally inaccurate, but hexes are the bones of the world.
To be fair we're already getting functional and pretty accurate maps so maybe I can't complain just yet!
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| Best so far as of time of writing! |
Mini-Reviews
An absolute fucking banger.
It's a minigame originally intended to save a small village from a long cold winter, as the name implies.
I changed no mechanics and just scaled everything up, changing Fuel to Filter-Plants and rewriting the Occurrences to be on a year-by-year scale.
I didn't realise before we started, but there's an intrinsic self-balancing effect to losing people in this game. The more people die, the easier it is to feed and heal them. By the end they'd lost a ton of people, but the remainder had more than enough supplies to see them out to the end of the game.
Honestly amazing. 5/5 gnawed corpses.
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