Retrospective 25 - Enter the Dino-Dome!

2020! A whole new decade!

Crazily enough this marks nine years in the campaign world (considering the first characters to make landfall were in Australia back in December 2011) and almost six years since I started running in the UK (Feb 2014). Where's all that time gone?!
I suppose next year I'll have to do a decade in review. Don't hold me to it!

Anyway, these retrospectives are in 10-session chunks, so let's look back at what's been going on more recently as we come into this fresh new wartorn fire-stricken decade.

This segment of the campaign dealt with one main new area - the Dino-Dome!
A reskinned and retrofitted World of the Lost, this massive dome of diamond keeps the terrible apocalyptic weather off and enables the high-oxygen world inside it to exist!
The whole place is controlled by the quasi-deity Styx, a Goblin and former PC who got uploaded to Fortress-City Fate close to the climax of the End War.

Lore aside, this dome is basically a high-level high-danger area full of dinosaurs and vampires and a suspiciously reasonable God-King who likes to give his subjects complete freedom... up to a point.

One of the most powerful sessions we've had hinged not on danger or dinosaurs, but on the philosophical question of "what is real"...



On a Simulated Reality Inside a Simulated Reality Inside Our Heads

Long story short - after overcoming many dangers, they got to the centre of the Dino-Dome where they got uploaded to the Real World.

There they met Styx who told them in no uncertain terms that their world, the game world we've been playing in since the post-apoc reboot, is a lie.
They've been living in a simulation, the Real World is a paradise! After the world ended everyone in Fate was uploaded to the Matrix and liquefied. A bajillion years later, when the world recovered, Styx re-downloaded everyone into identical clone bodies and set them free into this new paradise. Simple!
Some people enjoy downloading themselves into simulations, like the Poison World sim they'd been living in, and now that they're out won't they please stay?

This sounded far too good to be true, kicking off a whole session that was mostly intense philosophical discussion about the value of living forever in a world without struggle, and whether this alleged "Real World" was itself the simulation, and whether it truly mattered either way.
Which is even more interesting because both "worlds" are equally fake and equally real since they both occur in our collective heads as we make up bullshit around a table with dice.

Great times!

In the end they chose their original world of suffering over the new world of perfection, which is pretty much what happened to the first iteration of the Matrix if I remember right. People just can't bear paradise.
Plus you only get exp through hardship, and what's the point of playing this game if you're not getting exp?

On Untrustworthy NPCs

I only just realised this, but there's been a bit of a theme of powerful NPCs with an agenda fucking things up whenever they're called upon to fix things.
The Lady took control of the Seraphim and marched it on Fate, rather than properly help the party.
Styx is a far-sighted and petty God with unreliable goals, making him an unpredictable nightmare.
Bertha is beset by a living embodiment of her grief which makes her hard to deal with.
And Gifflewim is an arbitrarily powerful Elf, and lo and behold he fucked things up right good instead of solving things properly.

Maybe the lesson is to never trust authority??



On Fighters Being OP

Gambits have gone too far, man!
Our resident Fighter, Red, has thoroughly been rinsing the Gambit rules. With a Fighter's beastly attack stat and the +8 Aim Bonus from aiming a rifle and the armour penetration of said rifle, she's been easily wiping the floor with any enemies by declaring stuff like "I want to shoot them all in the head in one shot".

The trouble is I'm torn. A Fighter is good at fighting! That's the whole point! Plus it's really fun!
But it's getting boring when one person can just one-shot any enemy with a high likelihood of success, especially with the massive array of different options you can get from a Gambit.

The key mechanical trouble is that gambits are based on AC, not HD, which means that a creature with 20 HD and 12 AC is more easily defeated in one blow than a 0-level dude in plate armour.
Not that armour matters when you've got a gun, compounding the issue.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do about it yet, other than maybe just disallow "kill" as a viable gambit attempt and rely on players not taking the piss! Gambits are otherwise pretty much a perfect blend of fun and simple, so I don't want to mess things up with a heavy-handed mechanical change.

On PvP

After the frankly exhausting saga of Grumpy and Snels which started fun, got tense, got shit, and basically stayed shit forever since, I've thoroughly been disabused of my previous position that "PvP can be fun and interesting!"

On balance it's been a good thing for me to learn from.
Warning signs. Recognising when it's no longer fun. How supporting ongoing intra-party conflict is a bad fucking look. Why putting a foot down is actually important.
Most importantly, realising when my high-minded "open world means you can do anything!" ideals have slipped into "open world means you can ruin other people's fun!"

Hopefully there won't be a next time, but if there is I hope I'll be better at dealing with it.

On Burnout

I feel like burnout is something you can only recognise in retrospect, like the thing with the frog in the boiling water.
I don't want to recount the whole saga and old wounds again. Suffice to say that this tiresome feud technically started in May, came to a head in early October, and never stopped. Eight fucking months. What was I thinking?
Weird how this lines up with that big content gap at the end of last year on the main blog. Almost like I should have noticed sooner.

On top of this, World of the Lost is cool but needs some love to make it usable. It also needed to be reskinned to fit my world and travel rules. Already getting burnt out on the internecine strife (not to mention Brexit, the UK election, and all that shit) I sort of coasted to a finish at the end of last year.

Coming back fresh in January felt fucking wonderful. So fresh! So vibrant! So prepped! An encouraging optimism for the year ahead!
Pity about the real world, but at least I've got an imaginary one to escape to with my mates.



On Vampires

They've been dealing with vampires a bit lately, considering they're one of the major factions in the Dino-Dome.
And dealing with vampires means dealing with that most menacing of vampire threats - level drain!
Yes, level drain is here in its pure form. At least they get a save.

They know the risks to fighting vampires, and since most vampires seem to be fairly friendly (despite their outrageous and ubiquitous Transylvanian accents) there hasn't been so much need for conflict with these guys.

Spoiler for later blog posts - a made a couple of vampire PC classes!

One intended for those level-drained to death: Vampire Class.
One for the extremely niche case of a Cleric suddenly becoming a Vampire due to a magic mirror: Vampire Cleric Class.

I was considering having a template Vampire that just slots over existing classes, but surely having gimmicky niche vampire types is better... right?

Oh and I also LOVED the ongoing joke that some vampires just have on big central tooth!

On the Thing

Boy has one of my players taken the concept of the Inheritor and absolutely run with it!
Originally intended as a kind of body-horror-themed monster ability stealer, he's taken that lore and become something between the Thing and a Dr Frankenstein.
Currently he has plots to experiment with brain-swapping and rat mutations, and he's already helped create abominable dino-human baby hybrids.

It's one of those classic situations where I'm pulled between "nuh-uh, the mechanics say..." and "fucking hell this is amazing" so I'm sure I'll break soon. Allowing all this mad experimentation means having so many opportunities for things to go so bad in such a fun way!

A Mad Science system with partial successes might be the way forward...

Mini-Reviews

World of the Lost

You know what's cool about a sandbox map where like half the hexes aren't keyed? Me neither. It's like getting halfway through cooking a meal and realising you forgot an ingredient.
Still, thematically it's cool. It's hard to fuck up dinosaurs and robots and slime monsters, and those hexes that are keyed are often interrelated.
I basically just slapped this down on my current campaign map and wiggled it around until it fit.
Also reduced the hexes to 1 mile instead of 6 miles because 6 mile hexes are for losers.

Basically it's got good things in it but treat it as building blocks instead of a finished house.


Gimmick Sessions:

The end of the year always inevitably has a couple of gimmick sessions around Halloween and Christmas.

This time I ran Mothership for Halloween, with the players living through an extremely lightly reskinned Pitch Black. That was a good time! A good mix of exploration and action and mystery solving. Loved the char gen flowchart, absolutely did not utilise the Fear rules as much as I should have. Real good!

On Christmas I ran a real silly gimmick session of a real silly gimmick RPG: Motherfuckin' Crab Truckers. I never wrote it up, but it was a real fun time! Allegedly set a bajillion years in the future where our campaign world is overrun by intelligent crabs, they faced off against cops, traffic jams, and a crab-dragon in their quest to deliver a truckful of toys to needy crab children.

I made kustom kharacter kheets for Crab Truckers and I love them all so please behold them: