Almost there! It’ll become apparent that what I thought was going to be another long stretch of this campaign ended up with our game wrapping up pretty quick after this.

If you’ve just run into this one somehow, this is an edited version of my actual play reports of a|state I wrote for our Slack while I was working on my deep dive of the game. Terrific campaign, learned a lot about not only a|state itself but FitD games and long-form play as well. The series started here.

Downtime

It’s personal business time in a|state tonight! Mostly they’re dealing with the catastrophic consequences of the bombing I wrote about last time. One faction is destroyed, many many NPCs are dead, a PC is dead, shit is just real bad all around.

One of the leads they expressed an interest in pursuing is recovering the dingingsmith that General Machinery swooped in and grabbed shortly after the bomb went off. She’s somewhere in the bowels of the Iron Bastion. But there’s no specific writeup about it. It can be anywhere at all.

Most likely candidate, the most straightforward, is this perpetual warzone called The Contested Grounds. There are a bunch of impregnable towers in the middle of it, otherwise it’s endless blocks of bombed-out urban warfare. Kind of weird! But, sure, let’s do it. It also happens to be more or less across the entire City. Which means I can finally poke at the travel rules in the game.

Prep

Headed into the next big chunk of our a|state game tomorrow so I’ve cleaned up and refactored the relationship map. Before and after!

I borrowed an idea I got working on Space Wurm vs Moonicorn to organize things more geographically + conceptually. I think it’s gonna be good.

And after:

I think I’ll still be adding lines but maybe only as they come up as relevant?

The original had lines for friend, foe and backing faction. That stuff is all on the character sheets already, and I kind of need the players to manage that on their own. Although I’ll also say that even after, dunno, more than 20 sessions they still haven’t quite wrapped their heads around their backing factions. Might be a few too many details.

I’m also implying stuff in a different way on this one. Like everything in gray is stuff that’s been destroyed and characters who have died.

<–Part 7 | Part 9–>