Another season, another MEPACon. I attended all three days of this autumn’s MEPACon, playing in two events and running three. Not bad for a weekend of gaming while still getting in some sleep (though sleep logistics did prove a little challenging).
My first game was Flails Akimbo, a zero-level scenario for MÖRK BORG. I bought Mork Borg years ago; it’s a funky book with wild art and eye-twisting layouts, but whose fantasy rules are actually pretty slim and easy to run. I bought a bunch of small supplements and zines for the game, but didn’t get a chance to actually play the game until this MEPACon. As you’d expect, given the Mork Borg death-metal-on-speed aesthetic, Flails Akimbo was fast, violent, and super gory. Also, fun.
Next up was The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 for Mothership, a nice little creature feature scenario set on an asteroid mining station. It’s one of the original trifold scenarios for the game, and one I’ve considered running myself.
And then there were my own scenarios.
Fallout 2d20: Crawl out through the Fallout
I started with Crawl out through the Fallout, a new introductory adventure I wrote for Fallout 2d20. It’s what happens when you get a song stuck in your head for a few weeks and the only way to get rid of it is to write a scenario.
Here’s the pitch:
It was a simple job. Find a bunch of pure-gen seeds at the old GrowMore(TM) research lab. Get them to your contacts. Make caps.
And then your contacts showed up with way more people – and way more guns – than you. You ended up dead.
Well, dying.
Now, as you crawl through the irradiated mud of the crater they dumped your bodies in, you’ve got one thought on your collective minds.
The bastards must pay.
Though I’ve played a bunch of Fallout with the Lair of Secrets crew, this was my first time running the game (and my first time playing it in the real world). It’s a pretty desperate setup, with the PCs near death and needing to scramble for resources and allies. I was a little nervous about how that would work, but the players leaned into it. The game went well, in part to having a person at the table who had played before, and nudged me in the right direction when I got a rule wrong.
I’m running the scenario again for the Lair of Secrets crew: Session 1 is up on YouTube:
ShadowDark: Mörka Norden
I re-ran Mörka Norden, a Shadowdark scenario taken from the opening sessions of my lunchtime campaign. Here’s the event blurb:
An introductory ShadowDark adventure, in which the heroes attempt to hunt down a bandit lord amidst Mörka Norden, a vast realm of ancient forests, forbidding mountains, and lost knowledge.
This is the third time I’ve run this adventure, so the beats are getting familiar. There’s a particular area where the players think they’ve found the main adventure location, but are actually on a short side quest. I’m thinking of expanding that side quest so they can completely ignore the job they were assigned, and instead delve deeper into the subterranean darkness. You don’t often get to simply avoid the main quest in a con scenario, and I like the idea of giving folks that option.
Mothership: DECANTED
Last, I ran DECANTED, my zero-level scenario for Mothership. Originally envisioned as a Mothership funnel, it features the PCs waking up from cryosleep to find themselves in the middle of a ship-wide disaster:
You aren’t supposed to be awake. You know that, as sure as you know you shouldn’t be smelling the stench of burned flesh and melted plastic in the air. Or gagging on spheres of something that isn’t water as they hit your face.
You shouldn’t be trying to see through the gloom of the emergency lights, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be floating in microgravity.
This should be someone else’s problem. The Flight Crew’s problem. Because you’re engineers, scientists, teamsters, and grunts. Your job is saving the shake-and-bake world of Jupiter’s Tears, not in space aboard The Wandering Profit.
No, you aren’t supposed to be awake. And you wish you could go back to sleep. Make this someone else’s problem.
But you can’t. The Flight Crew isn’t coming. The ship is dying. And you need to figure out how what the hell is going on, or you’re going to die along with it.
The problem with this scenario as a a funnel is that funnels assume a goodly number of a characters will die … and that just doesn’t happen in this scenario.
Oh it could happen. It’s called “decanted” because if a PC dies, a new one is simply ejected from cryosleep and thrust into the adventure. The trend, after two playthroughs, is for the PCs to play it smart and safe. Only one PC died in each game, which is a far cry from the body count in a normal funnel, but I think that’s ok.
Everyone’s had fun, and people felt like they earned their escape. When I run it again, I’m just going to call it a zero level adventure and drop the “funnel” bit (of course, doing that will likely lead to a Total Party Kill…)