On the face of it, this should have been a good game. Highly imaginative setting, game being run by someone picked by the game company in that game company’s space. But it was easily the worst game of the convention for me; Not completely bad, but not up to the same level as everything else.
The setting is Earth, a billion years in the future, where people are slowly dragging themselves out of the remains of a collapsed civilization, surrounded by things they don’t understand. Almost everything has some degree of technology infused in it, even the dirt, and some people are better than others at interacting with that technology. Effectively, you have magic items and people who can do magical things; It’s a fantasy setting.
Someone once described it to me in terms of people being able to use some function of a piece of technology, but often not knowing what the actual purpose of the thing was. Like having the coil from an old car and a battery; They know that they can use this thing to give someone a shock, or to start a small fire with a spark, and they know how to recharge it from the battery so that it does it again, but they have no idea what either of those things was used for and no idea how to recharge the battery when it eventually drains.
Sadly, almost every aspect of this one wasn’t good.
Very noisy room, because it was a double room with a bunch of tables in it (I’ve had other games in those rooms with that company which weren’t so bad, but it was really loud this time. Or my ears are getting worse). GM kind of spoke to the table, in a fairly low voice, so it was a strain to hear him. It was Saturday night, so people were tired, which definitely didn’t help.
For an imaginative setting, the scenario just … Wasn’t? Weirdly characterised villagers who seemingly want to sell you everything have their village destroyed when the big machine they built it under wanders off, they need someone to figure out where the machine went by following it, then they need a safe escort to the new location to rebuild because of … Reasons? Got attacked by a few things along the way, avoided another, found the machine, found out that it was gathering stuff and sorting it, presumably for processing, and for some reason switched it off so that it wouldn’t move for a while.
Maybe there was more to it than what I understood, maybe it was cleverer than I picked up on, but it didn’t feel like a well thought out game to me. The mysterious flash of light which attracted our attention? No idea, unrelated, just a McGuffin to get us there. Why the village is built under a big machine that periodically moves? They’ve always done that.
I’d been assuming it was some kind of mining machine, and the flash of light was a meteorite impact, so it headed off to mine Space Minerals. But, … Nope.
I imagine it’s tricky to come up with a plot which uses this “ruins of a technological civilization you don’t understand” setting without requiring the characters to learn to understand it, but this game didn’t feel like it even tried; Could have been a D&D scenario with a magic moving stone roof for all the impact it had on the story.
I’m tempted to go back through blogposts to see whether the Saturday night doldrums are a thing, based in this game. I didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t as good as any of the others I played, and I’m wondering whether GM & Player fatigue had a part to play in this.
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