Earlier this year I thought I might start a new classic fantasy campaign, filled with as many classic RPG tropes you could think of. Sadly it never got off the ground. I would have liked to think the problem was my busy schedule with university and the work of maintaining a flourishing social life. That would however be a lie. If I really wanted to I would have found a way for us to schedule some gaming sessions. The real problem was simply that I wasn't feeling it, I had burned out on medievalist fantasy, at least for RPGs. However, when the summer rolled around I felt I really wanted to do some roleplaying again. Since I still felt no draw to fantasy I landed on science fiction (or science fantasy) in either a classic "traveller style" or something post-apocalyptic. Having run a few one-shots of mothership I realized that the post-apocalypse was for me the more fresh option.
Below I have included a quick run-down of the adventures of our (mostly) post-human heroes. I've divided them into three different sections based on the adventure module I used for each. The first is Reliquary of the Ancient Ones (at level 0), the second is Welcome to Eastwood (at level 1), and the third is Warlords of ATOZ (at levels 2 & 3). Important names (such as those of player characters) are introduced in bold whenever they first become individually relevant to the main action of the play report. Beware that this write-up ended up being quire long!
Content Warning: The play report of "Warlords of ATOZ" has some references to several vile right-wing political movements from our real world. If you prefer for RPGs to be escapism then fair enough, perhaps this blog post isn't for you. If however, nazi and KKK cultists getting blasted away by a gang of outcast mutant heroes sounds appealing, then read on!
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| cover art by Doug Kovacs |
Reliquary of the Ancient Ones
We start our adventures in the village of Kleta, a small but humble settlement on the border of both a hot-house jungle and prairies which give way to rocky deserts. Under part of the mound on which their village is built, the people of Kleta have discovered a passageway leading deeper into the earth and ending in what seems like a blank (and dry) pool. As a test to become adults, the village elders decides to send sixteen unproven mutants into the pool to discover what lies beyond.
Using ropes ro rappel down, the party pass through the pool and into a large and otherwise empty cavern beyond, with a carving in the shape of a doorway on one of its walls. The first casualty is suffered as the boar-manimal Harry Bottom decides to jump down instead of using a rope. The group find a console next to the carving on the wall. By pressing random buttons the room lights up and the rope by which they came down seems to disappear. A voice welcomes the group to "the archives" and begrudges that some of "the programs" might be experiencing power outages.
The party mash a few more keys on the console and the carving of a doorway lights up with an image of a fine marble interior. The characters discover that they can enter the image, after which the doorway closes behind them once they have all entered. Inside the marble halls are many alcoves with strange artefacts protected by static fields of force. The party manage to get past some of them through violence but also attract several dangerous enemies: one extra-dimensional smoke squid and one doppelganger that surprisingly turns out to be the more deadly foe. The doppelganger kills several PCs, including the mighty human Ken Power and the mutants Satan and Fidgetspinner. After defeating the smoke squid and taking some of the artefacts, the portal which the characters came though opens again.
The Group are able to return to the central chamber, where after some more button-mashing they are able to enter another room. This time they seem to be in some strange laboratory with two cages. One contains semi-intelligent manimals, and the other has feral humans inside. The party quickly send Dog the beaver-manimal through one of the vents to try and end the lock-down that the facility seems to be under. In the meantime the others search through the room they are in. Arnold the human finds a powerful mazer rifle. Ned Fart (also human) finds a strange device which activates a nearby mechanical man that throws one of the manimals into the opposite cage where they are torn apart by the humans. As Dog turns off the lock-down the cages open and the party are forced to flee through another portal at the other end of the facility.
The party once again arrive back in the room they first entered, only this time it is no longer lit and at it's centre sits a strange glowing orb on a podium next to a console. The whole room is pulsing with strange lines of light on the floor and as the PCs start monkeying with the console it's as if several opponents are conjured from the air to fight them. First some neanderthal cave-men and then a medieval knight sat on a horse. As the party shuts down the console the enemies vanish and the strange orb falls off the podium.
Retrieving the orb and finding the rope through which they came down, the party ascend back up to the surface and are excitedly greeted by the other villagers. The orb is taken into the custody of the village elders and the party are declared to have passed their trial of adulthood. Each non-human PC goes through metagenesis and gain a set of new powerful mutations.
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| cover art by Peter Mullen |
Welcome to Eastwood
Some weeks pass with more and more strangers spotted in Kleta. Some are seemingly on the run from some northern calamity and others are asking very probing questions about the orb and the archive. As it happens, one of the younger villagers—Jésus—has recently disappeared. Hoping to both get the heat off of the village and find the youngster, the elders of the village send the party westward into the desert carrying the orb.
After several days of travel the party come across an area of desert which seems to be covered by a giant vision-obscuring forcefield. After entering the field without issue, the party discover that they can in fact not pass out again. In front them is a small village with several wooden buildings. Before they have time to really consider this, a strange man wearing strange clothes including a wide-brimmed hat, boots, and a leather vest approaches them. "Welcome to Eastwood!" he exclaims, and after dodging some of their questions directs them to the nearby a nearby building known simply as "Earl's".
As they enter the village the party's search for Jésus quickly gets sidetracked. A lot of time is spent throwing dice and playing cards inside Earl's, though only after the PCs manage to acquire a strange "card" which seems to be able to pay for goods and services. The party also use the card to buy gear at a local shop, finding a large selection of different wide-brimmed hats; one pink, one with a leopard-print, and one black with metal studs. The group also purchase what seems to them to be small bullet-fed pistols and other types of assorted gear.
As they explore more of the town they are challenged to a duel by a strange metallic man carrying a similar pistol to the ones they just purchased. The metal man immediately shoots—and seemingly kills—the gigantic Fanged Mutant and the green gibbon-manimal Julia. After smashing the metal man the party are however joyed to find that both are still alive, having simply been stunned by the gunshot and taking no permanent damage.
Sadly the tussle attracts undue attention from some more metal men dubbed "security". The party are forced to hide inside first a doctor's office and then a temple of some kind. At both locations they are attacked, by a crazed doctor and some inter-dimensional hounds respectively. The party conclude that Jésus most likely has been taken by security into the town prison and hatch a plan to get themselves captured and then get him out. Julia and Arnold are thrown in jail after a quick bank robbery, and are happy to discover Jésus locked inside, along with his plantient cellmate Vitae and a snake-manimal the party had previously sold out to avoid getting thrown in jail themselves. Somehow (though great luck rolls) the party is able to find a hole leading out through Jésus and Vitae's cell. Arnold sends his telepathic rat companion Rått-Eva to fetch the keys to the cells, ensuring an escape from the jail!
The party spend some more time dicking around the town but become all the more focused on leaving Eastwood for good, the best bet seemingly being the newly arrived metal snake (a train). Before boarding the group say their goodbyes to the town, exploring the outhouses and ranch, and going for a dance at the local "house of ill repute". As they are boarding the train they are called out to by a mother who pleads for the group to help her spasming daughter. As the group try to hold her down she begins thrashing to such a degree that she flings her limbs and head off, spouting a strange milk-like liquid everywhere. The party—suitably creeped out—leave Eastwood.
After some time spent playing cards and fighting off a train-robbery, the group stops outside of an old mine. They are ushered off of the train by the conductor and then approached by a seemingly crazed old man. As they help him push a cart of explosives down the mine he goes crazy (much like the girl from before) and his head starts spinning. The party are able to flee the explosion back up the mine, which after the dust settles reveals a glowing hole in the ceiling.
The party ambush and smash a couple more metal-men and enter the hole where they find themselves in a place most like "the archives" of their previous adventure, though with more hallways. After some exploration and another fight with a group of metal-men, the group can feel the heat of radiation coming from down one of the corridors. Investigating further, the party find a set of large double doors. After being thrown open they reveal a pulsing reactor core guarded by a giant 20 foot tall fox-manimal wearing clothes akin to those of the people of Eastwood. The party recognize the fox from several items at the store, which had borne the likeness of the fox.
As battle ensues the Fanged Mutant is knocked out (though not slain) in a single round and the fight looks as though it will be a deadly affair. Luckily Julia decides to not attack the fox directly, but instead hammers the reactor which causes a shutdown of the facility including the fox-manimal which had turned out to also be made of metal. As the party leave the facility they discover that the shimmering field keeping them in has disappeared, transposing the town of Eastwood onto the actual non-pocket-dimension landscape. The party say their goodbyes and begin making their trek back to the village of Kleta.
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| cover art by C. Aaron Kreader |
Warlords of ATOZ
As the party near Kleta they begin to spot masses of black smoke rising from where they know their home village to be. As they finish their trek back they are shocked to discover that a charred ruin is all that remains of their once flourishing home. Further investigation leads to the centre of the village where a strange hooked cross has been smeared in blood. Vitae, a member of the benign "Clan of Cog" recognizes the symbol as belonging to the "Gene Police" (though this is not their true name), a pure-strain human supremacist faction. The party also realize that even though they find several dead bodies, there are not nearly enough dead to cover the entire population of Kleta. Two trails of footprints are found, one big leading north towards the great grasslands and another smaller leading east into the nearby jungle.
The group investigate the smaller track first and are overjoyed to discover a small band of survivors (the other survivors of the 0th level funnel adventure) held out in the jungle. They explain that the village was attacked the same day the group left to investigate Eastwood by a group looking for the strange glowing orb. The party decide to send their fellows into the jungle in search of a strange shamanic Oracle that is reported to live in its depths. Both to keep the orb safe from the gene police, and to perhaps explain what its capabilities are. The party themselves take some much needed time to recuperate before they set out, following the larger trail of footprints northwards.
After some time traveling, the group reach the crimson fields of the blood-grass savannah. Through some mutant powers they tame some giant grasshoppers (called hoppers) to serve as steeds. Speeding along the plains they soon come upon a place where the trail seems to congregate with several other ones, all leading even further north. In the distance the party spot a group consisting of warriors mounted on giant lizards and walking captives moving north. The characters manage to sneak up on the group and initiate a battle with the warriors, dispatching them easily. The many-limbed plantient George Buske manages to catch one of the warriors as Dog acquires a mecha-arm from their leader.
Through information gained from interrogation of the warrior and captives, the party learns that their fellow non-human tribesfolk are about to be sacrificed in a debased ritual to the warrior's god ATOZ. Before making the final trek to the temple of said god, the party are again joined by the other characters sent away to deliver the orb to the oracle. In fact, the oracle himself now joins the party. He is a human who seems to always be freezing, having ice-white hair, an odd-gait, and missing an eye. Having unlocked some of the secrets of the now known to be data orb of mankind, the party is feels strengthened (each PC leveling up) before finally arriving at the temple of ATOZ.
In a ritual before them, a figure wearing a pointy red robe (surrounded by others wearing similar white robes) sacrifices an old mutant before a crowd of cheering warriors wearing red cloaks and armbands. After some deliberation the PC's decide to seek out and defeat the source of these evils directly, taking the fight to ATOZ himself. The party sneak around the camp using a magic spell of invisibility cast by the oracle, bypass the guards and climb in through the mouth of the head-shaped temple of ATOZ.
Inside they manage to defeat a couple of security bots without making enough noise to alert the hundreds of chanting warriors outside. The party proceeds further up into the temple and come upon a large floor with facilities for installing mechanical body parts. Through the oracle's manning of the facility controls Arnold receives a robotic eye, whilst Vitae also gains a mechanical arm as well as a mechanical heart.
In the uppermost level of the temple the group finally come face to face with ATOZ and four of his pointy white-clad bodyguards. Before the enemy can act, Dog uses his mind-controlling ability to turn the four bodyguards. Arnold supercharges his mazer rifle and disintegrates what turns out to be a holograph of ATOZ. As his avatar is destroyed, ATOZ appears on the screens cursing the PCs and commanding the head to lift off the ground and plummet to its destruction. Through the oracle's feather fall spell the party is able to escape. Dog commands one of the guards to steer the head right into the congregating warriors down below.
After landing safely the group incite a slave-revolt which combined with the shock from the crashing temple cause the "gene police" to be essentially annihilated after the party engage in a desperate firefight with the survivors. The party are overjoyed to reconnect with their friends and family, and eventually return home to rebuild Kleta. With the aid of the data orb of mankind they ensure this now settlement—Kleta 2—will flourish into an even more prosperous settlement.
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| cover art by Peter Mullen |
GM Thoughts
This campaign was great! A real breath of fresh air and the folks who played in it seemed to think so as well. I have very few thoughts on the system. It essentially plays just like most other B/X adjacent OSR games (in which I also include the likes of Mörk Borg), albeit with a few non-grating 3E-isms. One of my players remarked on how she found the system to in fact be much simpler than she first thought, which should taken as a compliment I think. Another player remarked on the quite large amount of combat during the campaign. He was probably right, wether it was me or the modules I used there was a lot of fighting to be had this time around. I probably want to reverse this trend for any other upcoming games.
Reliquary of the Ancient Ones was the weakest of the three adventures in my opinion. I think this ultimately comes down to it being a tournament module of essentially a series of not very interconnected encounters. Going by the module i think (as long as I didn't misunderstand the text) you just roll randomly for which room the PCs encounter until they eventually reach the end. That is quite unsatisfying, so I ran it a bit more like a depth crawl so that the PCs were always making progress toward the final room The data orb was an addition of my own. The concept of an archive of important moments from history is great though, and the scenes themselves are good and most have a lot of fun interactable elements. In the end I would rate this adventure as flawed but easily salvageable.
Welcome to Eastwood was the only third-party adventure I ran. It's also the adventure most similar to the kind of location-based adventures I'm used to. One of my players is a bit of a cowboy-junkie and so I felt I had to run this adventure. It was more information dense and terse than the other adventures and this meant it also had a lot more actual adventure content. In fact we spent three out of the campaigns five sessions on it! The strength of this one is the limited but very thematic sandbox that the town offers, the whole place being a pastiche of Westworld is certainly a fun reveal. The part where it flounders is the quite lengthy and linear end section. Overall though I would recommend this adventure as it's strengths are much more prominent than it's weaknesses.
Warlords of ATOZ is an odd adventure. The way it is written is very linear, but if you take the content out of the context of the adventure and treat it more like a location-based adventure-toolkit it's actually pretty good. This was the adventure I changed the most—the adventure is a reference to Zardoz, not real-world dickheads—but the quite simple outline made changing it quite easy. Since my players have never seen Zardoz I thought it would be more cathartic to splatter the brains of some neo-nazis than reference a—albeit very fun—movie from the 70s. Changing the warlords to have captured the people of the PCs home village was great since it served as a much better call to adventure. It also providing the party with the option of raising a slave revolt as an alternative to just sneaking into the temple. Although this was the adventure i changed the most, I can't deny it was easy to run and a good length for one or two sessions.
In regards to the overarching mcguffin narrative, I essentially just used it as a way of connecting what would otherwise be a series of disconnected adventures. The campaign was basically as a series of one-shots with a recurring cast of characters. My main motivation behind this was that I was unsure about how many sessions we where going to play, and so I felt a more episodic approach would make any sudden end less jarring. In return, I very sadly had to sacrifice some player agency in regards to what the players goals were. At no though point did I railroad what the PCs had to do to achieve those goals. For a short campaign, using a new system, I found this to be an acceptable trade-off (though you make of it what you will).
Something great about a post-apocalyptic/neolithic setting—such as in MCC—is the character's lives are already an adventurous struggle. Contrast this against various medievalist fantasy settings where getting the characters from their otherwise settled lives into becoming adventurers can be a bit of a hassle if online complaints are to be believed (ultimately I think this is an issue of play-culture and player expectations, not so much setting). The question of "why would my character go into this dangerous dungeon?" is less pressing when the rest of the character's life is already a daily fight for survival and they have no safety to return to.
Something else I've come to love about science fantasy (which a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction falls into) is the ease at which you can throw anything into a game and not have it be jarring. The tone of lord of the rings would be heavily impacted if Anduril was actually an alien laser gun (it would be cool though), whereas replacing he-man's sword with such an item wouldn't be out of order at all. The whole genre is to me at it's best when it includes as many whacky and high-concept ideas as possible, becoming a sort of stew of equal parts grounded and zany adventuring. I can go on gushing, but ultimately I think I just love when a genre allows for me to base a campaign on the (second?) best Tenacious D album.