Ashes: Redux

 Well, I finally got the chance to run that Ashes Without Number adventure I had written.

Someone on my local gaming Meetup group's Discord mentioned that they were interested in trying out Ashes Without Number and I remembered that I had an adventure already written. I offered to run if there were enough interested people, which there turned out to be.

The slamon run was an environmental hazardh rather than an encounter, so I worked up an abstraction of the bridge crossing to work as a minigame. To simplify the scene, I broke down the bridge into only what was relevant. Based on the length of the bridge (this is a real bridge, so I have that information), I divided it into squares equal to the distance a character can move as a Move action. So a character taking a double Move would move 2 squares. Moving only 1 square meant that the character could take another action, such as Defend, offering a defensive bonus against slamon attacks. The slamon themselves would be taking slam attacks, potentially pushing characters off the side of the bridge. Based on AWN's shoving rules, Fernbridge is about 3 shoves wide. 

The players had a good amount of fun with this minigame, though they did also take the effort to secure a slamon for themselves.

When it came time to rescue the doctor, they decided to pursue a negotiated solution instead of the tactical scenario that I had planned for. While my intention had been to curtail that option, I hadn't built it up as effectively as I should have. When they approached the Town Watch guarding the Death House, the guard responded "I'm not the person to talk to" which led them to try to track down the person who they should be talking to and then talking them into releasing the prisoner.

As always happens, if the players go someplace that I don't plan for, they unlock my "easy mode." It took some rolls, but they made all of them and were able to talk the mayor into letting the doctor go.

There was a time after that where I considered adjusting the adventure  (As a one shot, there's no need to assume that I can't run it again, or that this outcome is canon to any eventual campaign) so that the "talking solution" was more viable. But I got some feedback from the player who requested the session that they were disappointed that they didn't get to test out the combat system.

So I'll be coming up with a few lines for the guards to more effectively block the Interaction approach and push it into Combat/Exploration as intended.

Another very important lesson: Get feedback from your players!

Ashes Part 5

 Just a couple more things to make sure that everything is ready to go.. 

In the strict order laid out by the book, I'm jumping around a little bit. The reason for that is that I wanted to have an adventure ready to go for my local gaming Meetup, so I moved that step a bit further up the list. Nobody wanted to play my adventure, so it's still waiting and might get a little polish as things proceed.

Since I do seem to be going with the Crisis campaign structure, one of those skipped steps is determine the first and second crises the party's home base will be dealing with.

 Crisis

Communications

A relay or node collapse has turned local comms into one or more islands

Law Enforcement

Law enforcement has retreated to defend only itself and its immediate supporters 

Now, the book says that I should use the first crisis as a hook for my first adventure, using the Starting Adventure Generator tables, then foreshadow the second crisis for the next adventure. But I've already written an adventure. What should I do?

I think for now, I'll keep that adventure in my back pocket. Try to run it as a more standalone adventure for an introductory one-shot. Sort of like the TV movie that would serve as a "backdoor pilot" for a series.

So what would the first adventure in the ongoing campaign look like?

Let's consult our Crisis Adventure generator tables and see what we get.

A Friend has suddenly lost a critical Thing and needs to get more from a Place. 

Friend: Canny old artisan or tech

Thing: Fuel for vehicles or generators

Place: Semi-active battlefield

Now let's see where these results lead us.

Our home Enclave is Eureka, primarily the Old Town region. The setting is a ways past the apocalypse, so more like a Fallout than a Walking Dead, so this might be a failure in the old, wired telephone system that has been brought back to life, or it might be a new system using slightly futuristic (or retro-futuristic) methods. But there's a link somewhere that means that some part of town can't reach out to some other portion. That link can be restored by refueling something, but the necessary fuel is near a semi-active battlefield.

Let's assume that there's some sort of transmitter that's gone down. A repeater tower like modern cell phones use to stay in the network. It can be repaired, but it needs to be refueled. This fuel takes the form of an atomic (or some other bafflegab) power cell. Every power cell in town is working hard keeping other repeaters and other technology powered, so the party will have to find one that's not being used. The most likely place is salvaging a semi-active battlefield, full of the wreckage of various war machines.

The battlefield itself is within the Ruins of Eureka, where the local Beastmen (whom I've decided are Ratfolk) fight to keep their territory. I like Fort Humboldt for this, since it's a good defensible location, within the Ruined portion of Eureka, and it's close to the highway, which means that it might be useful for controlling traffic into and out of the civilized portion of Eureka.

What we have here, then, is an escort quest: The party must protect a canny old tech as they scout out vehicles, either along the highway or along the only road into the Fort, for ones carrying functioning power cells, while the ratfolk attack with ranged weapons at their leisure from the bluff.

The only thing left is to foreshadow the second crisis that we rolled up. On the one hand, without adequate communications, it seems very likely that law enforcement would become very cautious and defensive. But once the communication crisis is resolved, that should resolve itself, right? Unless something happened during the communications blackout that got them good and scared. And the cause of the failure isn't something that's been discussed, so it might have been a deliberate act of sabotage rather than a random failure. 

But that's for next session...