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.

The biggest hurdle we encountered was actually in building out and defining our sanctuary. Because we’re using this game to follow up on other games and set something up for yet other games, we had a larger amount of detail already in-hand than Santuary is written for. We kind of shifted around it a little bit in our initial, early steps of defining the sanctuary, but “is a safe place to live and grow food in a world darkened by constant falling ash created by the debris of countless space battles slowly falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmosphere” is actually not a great power for a santuary to have in this game. The implications of a lot of the events, the follow-ups to the events, and how the guardians work suggests that they are influenced by the power of the sanctuary, and the whole “safety and hope for a future” thing isn’t really a great power in that regard. You have to get really abstract to work with that in the mechanical terms a lot of this game tries to deal in. We managed it a couple times, but we quickly shuffled things around again to focus on the power of the santcuary being the giant shield bubble surrounding it on all sides save for a few discrete places (to allow entry into and out of the bubble). That way the guardians, individuals representing factions from within the sanctuary who are piloting giant mechs, could draw on that power a bit more directly and literally. And when we needed more reasons for The Threat to want it, we decided it was the largest such barrier in a world where similar barriers covered individual buildings or city blocks rather than a small cluter of islands. All of which has made for excellent worldbuilding.

From there we built out the lingering traces of governments and the corpo-governmental bodies that still had the power to act, what bits of the past still linger despite the ash, and what strange or mystical phenonoma might exist in a world cursed to centuries of ash and cold due to the headless and ultimately pointless wars of avarice and pique perpetrated by those with more power than sense. Turns out coportations and their boards wanted what might be the last slice of possible good living left on the planet and while only one had the power to act, it really paints a picture of the future our players will eventually step into when the time comes to leave the bubble. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how all the billionaire bunkers are going to fall apart in modernity and unless there was some kind of massive change in the way billionaires and the paranoid operate between our current day and the fictional future we covered in our games, I doubt it would work out well for them either. The best example of this I know of it probably Chuck Wendig’s “Wayward” which shows a billionaire’s bunker quickly breaking down because the rich assholes who moved in quickly realized that their wealth and power does nothing for them when the world has ended and the people they brought in to serve them are only one step away from taking over (they just need to win over whatever security the billionaire installed). This world, already decades into their collapse, would have undergone a lot of upheval and while some billinaires and their cronies survived long enought to establish corporate fiefdoms in their little bubbles and shelters, more of them probably fell to their own hubris or underlings.

When all of this shakes out and we get through our game of Sentinel (the story of the final Guardian standing watch until the sanctuary finally falls or they are replaced by someone from without the sanctuary), there will be a lot of world to be ordered according to what groups are out there and how many of them manage to survive. I think I’m going to build out some factions and play a little roll-off game by myself to see how they all play out. It will be time-consuming, sure, but it’ll be worth it to give them all the sense of history I want this world to have when we finally step into it. There’ll be a lot to play out, given the mix of governments and corporations looking to solidify their power, and it’ll be really fun to figure out if they all turn into corporations, governments, or something else entirely. I’ve got some ideas about the kind of government that might emerge from a corporation on a long-enough time span given the way the world will look for most of that time. It’ll be interesting to see how many wind up with that system in place. And interesting to see which ones of them are overthrown completely and take on some other form of goverment over, or perhaps even by, the people on the ground level (so to speak). It’ll all be fun. Now I just have to put in the time to make it happen…