Retrospective 24 - Angels and Fascists

What convenient timing for a Retrospective, just after the party's weeks-long quest to clear out a crashed angel dropship was resolved and a new frontier awaits!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Really this long arc kicked off with the rise of fascism in the hub town of New Moondin, causing major interpersonal issues down the line...

On a Fascist Uprising

Oh, how innocent I was. Thinking that the post-disaster cohesion of the last of humanity would enable a utopian paradise where the Goblins farmed food for all, the Undead would work the fields, the various factions would live in harmony, and we could get all fully automated gay space communism up in here.

It turns out that in the absence of a government, someone can impose a government.
That person was Damnation Snels, a Cleric and leader of the Snelsman faith, whose highly motivated religious minions were able to neatly take control of the town in a bloodless coup under the pretext of security.

Since this was a neat parallel to present politics in the real world, I thought this was a grand old time.
As it turns out, not everyone was comfortable with fascism...


On Being a Bad DM

I was so caught up in the spicy melange of political intrigue that I ignored and downplayed the growing rift that had opened up at the table.
In the red corner, Damnation Snels. Played by a player who enjoys having a significant impact on the game world and playing morally suspect characters.
In the blue corner, Grumpy. Played by a player who refuses to support a villain campaign where the party ruins the world "for funsies" and rarely accepts compromise.

The net effect of this was a simmering undercurrent of tension. They agreed to disagree and played in the same party for the sake of group cohesion, but that tension was never resolved.

At its heart my failure was in trying to resolve a player-level issue in the fiction. This was a clash between playstyles, not a mere in-character rivalry, and treating it as such led to some extremely poor DMing and nearly lost me a very good player.

My in-fiction solution was to essentially make it a political clash. My assumption being that if one of the two rival characters won the support of the town, that would be the matter resolved.
In the end Damnation Snels won by a landslide. Problem solved, I thought!
I was wrong.

As of time of writing, this all came to a head in a massive breach of the social contract in Session 241. That's outside the scope of this Retrospective though, and while I think the situation is on its way to being resolved I don't want to write about it in case it's not!


On Travel

Travel is hard. Hard in a way that I don't think the players have fully grasped yet.

There's always talk of "lets quickly pop back to town with the loot", and said quick trip takes up a whole session. This is especially true when they're all fully armoured and thus extremely slow.
Recent additions of special Steed and Wagon rules will hopefully help with this, allowing players to hoon down the ruined roads of this dead planet, but on foot it's slow as hell.

This is on purpose, partially because slow travel limits how many hexes I need to key at a time (laziness is key!) and partially because travel is intended to be a Big Deal now.

So it works, but travel difficulty is always underestimated! Such as the time when their quick jaunt back to sell some angel corpses resulted in fighting a dragon!


On Dragons

Oh fuck yea, they fought an actual dragon!
I have these things on the overland encounter table because my game has a ton of dungeons and no dragons.
This particular beastie was an Explosion Dragon. Breath like a mortar, explosive teleportation, all sorts! In the end they managed to kill it through the power of bullshit and a powerful gambit. Good times!
Only one casualty, but that was down to luck rather than skill, and one of the survivors had their skin burnt off in the creature's death throes which was particularly horrifying!


On Crabs

A surprisingly common foe during their travels has been Stoneshell Crabs. Massive hermit crabs who use big rocks as a shell and hunker down under it during Gas Fronts when the hyper-poisonous fog blows in.
Each time they've met them the crabs have been a little more prepared, leading to a running joke where they gain a little more sentience every time they show up.
I dig this, so it's probably going to happen now!

On Hexes

I eventually caved on my idea of pretending my hex map was not, in fact, a hex map and have started describing things in terms of hexes rather than being intentionally loose and obfuscatey.
Hence the very pretty map that Carter has been filling in as they explore!

On Angels

The last few sessions were focused on clearing out a crashed Seraphim - a huge dropship that once hung in the sky and deployed spherical angels for mysterious apocalypse reasons.
While angels are powerful foes, the fact that there were a finite number of angels within meant that the party started a tactic of going in, killing a few, then dragging their bodies out.

This did, unfortunately, reveal the weakness of such a strategy. It's a little boring! Combat is fun and all, but if all you do is combat then not much else occurs in a session!

Thankfully they eventually heeded a rumour they'd once heard and waited until Sunday when the robotic beings started glitching out. With the angels on the fritz they strolled in, used their map of the place to find their way to the centre of the dropship, and... downloaded a God into the mainframe.
Now in control of the Seraphim, said deity then proceeded to start marching off to the north so she could complete goals of her own. Handy!
At least they got the exp!

Mini-Reviews:

Crashed Seraphim
A reskinned version of a rotating one-page dungeon (which I would appreciate my players not looking at too hard), the rotating ring structure made this Fun for me, but hard to map for the players!
Good times, I really enjoyed the gimmick. Plus I can reuse it for many other crashed Seraphim in the future!