Nu World Session 2

I ran the second session of the Nu World, my After the End game, three weeks ago. I haven't written about it because I've been playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, the open-source roguelike that Fallout 4 wants to be when FO4 grows up. But that's no real excuse.

Cast of Characters

• Nate Joy is playing Rabbit, a lucky gadgeteer inventor
• Eric Schmidt is playing Ben'n, a lucky trader
• Kevin Smythe is playing Wash, a lucky hunter with a distaste for guns
• Uhuk is playing Edwin, a hulk with a lot of mutations

Getting the Preliminaries Out of the Way

At the end of the first session, the PCs were in possession of a spaceship escape pod, a female astronaut in nanostasis, and some random junk, as well as the anger of the Redeemers gang. They didn't really have a plan, but they wanted to head to Diamond City in the ruins of Boston, make some trades, and do some scavenging in the city.

I wanted to focus on the scavenging, so we handwaved the trip back to Diamond City other than a quick experiment with the new hunting rules introduce in ATE2: the New World. That was enough to satisfy me that Wash could keep the group fed in the wilderness nearly indefinitely with minimal effort and we didn't need to do the rolls every time. I do want to say that the hunting rules worked fine, but they do have a lot of rolls.

At Diamond City, the group quickly sold the escape pod for scrap value and argued about how to split the proceeds. They finally decided to buy a small house in Diamond City so they'd have a permanent base and then bought some group equipment (like extra toolkits for Rabbit) and gave everyone $1000 in trade goods to buy specific stuff.

At the same time, I baited my hook. One of Ben'n's contacts was a retired scavenger who told them a long story that worked out to "there's a house in Roxbury that looks like it hasn't been scavenged since the bombs dropped. It's right at the edge of Pirate and Greenskin territory so it's dangerous but it could be profitable." The PCs agreed to pay the scavenger 10% of the loot they recovered and he gave them directions to the house. They made plans to set out the next day.

Meet the Neighbors

So I created this map of the neighborhood in the Roxbury suburbs:

I think it's a pretty decent map. The color of the building walls indicated whether they're brick and cover against bullets or just sheetrock and only concealment. The whites and grays indicate elevation levels of the ground and the blues indicate the depth of the water. It covers several blocks and has a hundred or more potential scavenge sites.

At any rate, the PCs set out around mid-morning and arrive in the northeast corner of the map a few hours later. One thing they immediately noticed was the brick building to the east had been fortified. Further investigation revealed there was a mine by the door. Rabbit was delegated to disarm the mine and everyone else drew back to watch.

Nate was working through the math of maximizing his chances of disarming the mine when someone took a shot at him! A bunch of pirates standing on the west side were shooting at him and not hitting (cheap black powder weapons just aren't that accurate out at 200 yards). Rabbit carefully took cover away from the mine, Ben'n dodged south, Edwin charged west through the drink, and Wash started loosing arrows. As it turns out, Wash is an improbably good shot, and managed to penetrate the pirates' cheap armor at a distance. After one of the pirates got badly wounded and it was obvious that the others weren't going to hit the PCs faster than the PCs were going to hurt more pirates, the pirates broke contact and withdrew to the south. The PCs declined to pursue.

In the process, though, Ben'n discovered that he was now within 15 yards of a spore bomber: a mutant tree that senses vibrations in the air and releases floating sacs of acidic mucus. The PCs might have known this if any of them had Expert Skill (Mutants), but despite my handy cheat sheet, none of them did at non-laughable levels. Ben'n ran for cover, and aggravated the spore bomber further, sending more mucus sacs after him. Eventually someone realized that moving slowly was safer than running, and Ben'n escaped.

Rabbit finished disarming the mine and then Wash lobbed it at the spore bomber, destroying it utterly. That problem taken care of, the PCs did their first scavenge of an abandoned encampment. I don't remember what they found - some food or something non-descript - and they decided to stash their wagon and pack animals there and proceed toward their target over the rooftops, rather than wading through the water.

Over and Through the Rooftops!

ATE2: The New World has extensive rules for moving through ruins, and this was a great chance to use them. I pretty much used them as written, only increasing the penalty for Edwin's rolls slightly since he's big. The PCs spent the next several minutes making Perception rolls to avoid stepping on rotten roof timbers, and since Uhuk rolled pretty poorly, also making DX rolls to avoid being injured when Edwin's feet inevitably went through roof. Edwin wasn't hurt too bad - he never went all the way through a roof - but he did strain his ankle at some points.

I was pretty pleased with this part of the session: it played quickly but with some tension. As Uhuk noted, "I want to do something during each session - falling through roofs because I'm big is something."

The Next Problems

Soon the PCs were on a building to the east of their target, looking down at the street and alley. They immediately noticed two problems: first, there was another spore bomber in the alley immediately behind the house. Second, and more distressingly, there was an unexploded 75mm artillery shell just in front of the house. None of the PCs were surprised when I told them that Diamond City cooks up some pretty unstable high explosives, and that an old dud shell like that could possibly blow up if anyone too close or made too much noise near it.

The PCs decided to try the back entrance, at least to start, and came up with a brilliant ploy to deal with the spore bomber: kill it with fire! Rabbit whipped up some molotov cocktails and Wash through them at the spore bomber until it was burnt down. This wasn't particularly difficult for the PCs and we moved on.

We Like Loot!

The target house had locked metal shutters over all the windows and doors. Sadly for the PCs, someone had picked one of the locks before them, so the loot wasn't as good as they'd hoped. Rabbit picked the lock and they made their way inside.

They quickly found a garage with a large vehicle under a tarp. They removed the tarp and found a 1970s style Dodge Power Wagon with a crew cab, custom six wheels, and a supercharged engine protruding from the hood. It had obviously been lovingly restored before the bombs fell, and was still in good shape aside from missing its tires. The PCs definitely wanted it, but getting it out wasn't going to be trivial: they needed to get it past the artillery shell and then past the water before they could get it to dry enough land to drive unaware. And of course, it was out of gas.

The PCs decided to not worry about those problems and instead focus on looting the rest of the house. Since they considered this to be a mother lode, they focused on searching it. Upstairs, they found two tons of junk (literally - they found $400 of random junk, and random junk weighs 10 lbs per $1 of value). Much to my surprise, they decided to search the upstairs again. Another hour of searching and a lot of everyone's Luck revealed some baton rounds for a 12g shotgun (at Kevin's suggested when they found some generic ammo). A third search found a stash: "something that’s been intentionally hidden... A stash should always be something interesting, not just another bit of gear" (ATE2: The New World p. 38). I took this opportunity to get my slightly derailed plot slightly more back on track, by saying they'd found a pre-War laptop. The PCs prompted derailed the plot again by failing to hack the laptop, but I handwaved that as Rabbit being unable to crack it in his first two or three attempts and everyone else telling him to try experimenting with the passwords again.

The PCs then trooped downstairs and started searching the garage level. It turns out this was somewhat sub-optimal behavior: they'd burnt all their Luck rerolls on the residential area, which is easy to search and only produces junk, instead of the garage/transport area which is harder to search but produces valuable fuel and mechanical parts. As it turns out, they found some spoiled gasoline that Rabbit could easily filter and some more shotgun ammo.

By this point, it was getting pretty late. I had some ideas for what would happen next, and I wanted to give the PCs some time to think about how they intended to get the Dodge Wagon out so I ended the session. As it turns out, the players didn't think about that very much and I couldn't run last week because of prior commitments.

Evaluation of Play

This session was pretty much an experiment with the various new rules from After the End: the New World. We did a little trading, some hunting, a lot of scrounging, and a bit of traversal of ruined buildings. The only big thing we didn't try were the expanded gadgeteering and inventing rules.

Everything worked out pretty well. The hunting rules have too many rolls in them for regular use, but they're an acceptable simulation of hunting when people really want that detail. The scrounging and scavenging rules worked well. Much to my surprise, my players didn't need my house rules for scouting potential scavenge sites: they were pretty focused on just a couple of sites and didn't entertain the idea of searching elsewhere.

They were also so focused that I think they lost track of the fact that they were in a dangerous area and that all this scrounging took a lot of time. That turned out to bite them in the ass.

What Next?

The PCs chased off a pirate patrol, and then left a bunch of markers in smoke and fire as to where they were. They didn't seem to think much of that, but the pirates had more resources. The next session started with the pirate ambush and went down from there.

Interested in playing? We've still got space available! Email me! We play on Wednesday nights, 5:30 pm CDT until 9:30 or so.