Once again, my little campaign in the making has met and Sifting Through The Ashes has taken one more step towards it’s first stage of broader tabletop play. As my friend and player–who was a bit more familiar with MeghanlynnFTW’s Sanctuary & Sentinel–predicted, Sanctuary didn’t last all that long. We spent most of our timing building out the “sanctuary” and all its features than we spent playing the game after that. I’m not sure we even got through two whole rounds of turns before the game ended, thanks to a bad roll on my part and then a few more similarly bad rolls. It looked like we wouldn’t even make it past the first round, but we did. The rule at play here is that whenever you take a turn, you draw a card from a prepared deck of cards, look up the situation related to that card, and then roll to determine if the guardians of your sanctuary are successful in handling the threat or if they fail to take appropriate action and their enemy, The Threat, gets what it wants. When the game starts, you have to roll above a two on a six-sided die to succeed. And on my very first turn, I rolled a failure and that started us on a downward plunge because, as is often reflected in reality, it was increasingly easy for things to go bad or fail the more that whent wrong for the sactuary’s guardians. Still, we got some interesting worldbuiling building out of the game and I’ve got even more ammo for setting this all up according to my initial vision of the campaign, so it wasn’t a wasted night. It actually lasted almost exactly as long as I wanted it to, so it all worked out in the end even if we spent most of the post-setup play feeling like the game was crashing down around our ears.