We played an actual game!

Last night, for the first time in well over a year, we sat down to an in-person, Monday game night. Despite the sweltering heat we’re experiencing (a record for Bellingham yesterday), it felt like coming home. To ease back into the process, we kept it to a small group (myself as GM and three legacy players).

As a sort of prequel for the proper Coils of Chaos campaign to come, we rolled up ordinary people surviving the “Discordance,” the apocalyptic event that reshaped the world untold millennia prior into the weird wasteland motif. Rather than go for a standard modern setting, we played in “New Laconia,” a sort of perpetually 80s Reaganomics hellscape begging for an apocalyptic event involving a world-devouring Chaos Dragon.

For the first round of characters, we rolled up a chemist, talent agent, janitor, and a kid who got separated from their parents in the crowds. The idea is that we’ll play through randomized characters until we settle on one that everyone likes as the “everyperson,” who will be transported through convoluted ways to the campaign proper. Then the rest of the players will make characters native to the far-future wasteland.

None of the characters we rolled are exactly “everyperson” material, but there will be plenty more as we run this survival horror funnel game, the path of which is being determined by random event tables and player directive. We used pieces from the Night of the Living Dead: Zombicide game as proxies until we bother to design actual miniatures for memorable characters.

Couple of highlights from the session:

- the janitor touched (or was touched by) four “discordant artifacts,” everyday objects made unstable by the influx of Chaos Magic. This resulted in four mutations: obscene musculature, hitch-back legs, a right arm split into two forearms, and a baby arm growing out of their chest.

- the chemist’s sedan (a “Rhonda Afford”) ran down a discordant artifact (a singing trashcan) while trying to escape a parking garage, resulting in the vehicle growing double the size and getting stuck in the tunnel.

We’re currently waiting on our final proof copies to get here in the mail. After we’ve confirmed they print well, we’ll be releasing the final version of the pdf to Kickstarter backers and patrons here at the Noble Knight level and higher. We’ll also be making the print-on-demand version available for purchase.

We did a little online gaming during the pandemic, which was great, and really helped us get the system to where we have it now, but we’ve sure missed this, and it’s nice to have our regular game night back.

- Dutchmogul