Last night was the first session of Savage Worlds I've ran where I didn't use someone's map, scenario, or monsters. For a long time now I've been hoping to get Day After Ragnarok and Savage Worlds in general into the gaming rotation. We played a couple of one-shots taken directly off Pinnacle's
website. These went fine, but Savage Worlds is a fairly complex to pick up and run, so even through yesterday we were working out the kinks in combat. Keep reading to find out how the guys did facing off against evil Soviet-allied dark dwarves!
I wrote up some notes yesterday for prep. The notes outlined mainly the big bads (there are several working against the guys throughout the whole game), the actual missions, both long-term and short-term, and the main NPC's which could turn out to be allies or enemies, depending on how the guys interact with them. I prepared two set pieces and apporpriate encounters and off I went.
Basically the guys need to travel across America, starting in California and travelling through the Rockies and the Poisoned Lands East of them to get to Fredrickburg, VA where they will set off to cross the Atlantic (the coast has been flooded as a result of the serpent fall as you can see from this map of the world to the right here).
I planned last night to be the journey through the Rockies (I'm hoping the campaign will be a good dozen sessions when all is said and done), so I planned for two actual encounters. We only got through the first encounter, but I feel we got a lot accomplished. The guys' job right now is to escort a caravan of covered wagon-riding civilians as the Americans want to repopulate/civilize the Poisoned Lands. They were supposed to come up on a check-in session to resupply, but the station was seemingly abandoned or attacked with no tracks leading in or out - like it was attacked from the inside-out. Basically a clan of Dero (or more commonly known as Durgar - dark dwarves) armed with AK-47's from the Soviets had dug through the mountains and destroyed the base. The guys did a great job fighting off the swarms of Dero and it was very fun to see the equivalent of a goblin swarm gunned down by WWII-ear soldiers with very nice weaponry.
The thing that I liked best though, was the interaction between the guys (military officers) and the civilians. I've never so successfully integrated politics and factions within a game before, and I feel the NPC design was the greatest strength of the game yesterday. The entire caravan consists of: the four guys (British soldiers and one Canadian Mountie), 4 American soliders including Colonel Booker, the guys' commanding officers, their 2 1/2 ton truck, 100 civilians, and 13 covered wagons being pulled by Oxen. Amongst the civilians are Mayor Cowen (not really a mayor, but was "elected" that by the civvies to represent them), Father Beyer - the Catholic priest, Doc Cattle (instead of Doc Cottle) - the vet and general medical professional who smokes like a chimney, and about a dozen cattlehands - cowboy types who are armed. From the looks of last night, Mayor Cowen wants to take over the caravan and get rid of the military types or at least make them work for Cowen instead of the other way around.
All of this is going with rumors in the background that people in the caravan are "speaking" with Colonel Brenner, a Nazi magician the players captured a while ago and who very well might hold a grudge against them. It's uncertain yet at this point to the players whether this is just rumor or something worse.
The game was a blast, and we may end up playing against next week right away - something we don't usually do in the group. We tend to rotate games, but I'd like to keep the momentum going, and it looks like the guys seem to agree, so go team!
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