Ashes Part 4

It's just a skeleton of a setting, but that's fine. The flesh of it can come as we play and create scenarios.

Now we need to decide which of the campaign structures that the game provides are we going to use.

 

The two options are Exploration and Crisis.

 

Exploration is very much in the mode of the Fallout games. The characters wander the wasteland and see what new hope or horror lay over the next hill.

 

Crisis is closer to something like the Walking Dead. Things are actively happening and coming for the players, who are likely attached to a community of some sort.

 

To help make up my mind, I used the Starting Adventure Generator tables for each structure and went with the adventure prompt that seemed the most promising.

 

Exploration
A Friend is being threatened by a Complication, with the source somewhere out there at a Place
Friend: Wandering Peddler
Complication: The zone of interest has been contaminated by a recent disaster
Place: Toxic waste disposal site

Crisis
A cunning Enemy is responsible for provoking a Complication in order to harm a Friend
Enemy: Aggressive refugee leader
Complication: Flooding has trapped a Friend or the PCs for the immediate present
Friend: Harried medical worker

 

I wound up going with Crisis because the idea of flooding hooked me. Knowing a bit of local history, I knew about the flooding of the Eel River and other waterways back in 1964. Since this is a location that's between two of my Enclave locations, Eureka and Ferndale, it felt like an opportunity.

 

It also gave me a chance to incorporate something else. As I've been musing about this post-apocalyptic version of my hometown, one thing I thought of was mutated versions of local creatures. One thing that the region is notable for is salmon. Make a salmon bigger and more dangerous, and you've got a slamon, capable of overturning boats. A flooded river with immense slamon swimming upstream could make for a fun encounter.

 

The idea of a harried medical worker also played into this being about Ferndale, since we know there's some sort of illness plaguing the town. And this is actually the point where I decided that the plague was radiation.

 

So a refugee has come to Eureka seeking medical help for the plague afflicting them, but things didn't go to plan, so they are now planning to get revenge on the medical professional who treated them, flooding the Eel River to prevent rescue.

A little more thought and the backstory started to come to me: The refugee had actually come from Ferndale with a family member to get radiation treatment in Eureka. The family member was too far gone and didn't survive the treatment. In grief, the survivor kidnapped the doctor and took him to Ferndale to be afflicted by the radiation and die of radiation sickness.

 

In order to make sure that the doctor gets the strongest dose possible, I decided that there was probably a location that was particularly radioactive. If I had gone with mutant cowpox or something, this location might have been a hospital. Since it's radiation, I thought there might be a place with a significant concentration of radioactive materials.

 

So I came up with the Death House. Built with the materials traded from scavengers who looted the old nuclear power plant, the people of Ferndale built a house as a wedding gift for a newlywed couple. But all of the radiation from the building materials meant that the couple didn't live long after their wedding. Once they realized what was going on, the house became a method of imprisonment/execution for the community's criminals. 

The interesting thing is that the thrust of the adventure is a rescue operation, so a confrontation with the main villain is not guaranteed. They may not stick around, since they have been treated for radiation and would only pick up more the longer they stayed. The Death House is operated by the Ferndale town watch, who were told that their prisoner was a raider who had murdered the family member, so the villain doesn't have to stay to ensure the execution.

The possibility of a continuing or recurring villain could definitely be interesting.

Going too much farther along the plot line is getting ahead of myself, since this is supposed to be run in a sandbox style, with the players making choices and taking action on their own.