AAR: A new friend

This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.

Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel. Or at least they were, now they’re heading away from the Citadel, with a mysterious box, on the promise of a favour from the Matriarch of the Pine clan.

This week: a 🧙 joins the party.

Story

Emmett and Joshua arrive at the Low Road, and see a straggling collection of decrepit buildings, advertising the name LUCKY’S. It is a pit of a place, not overtly malicious, but only the desperate would remain here any longer than necessary.

And yet the paperwork from the Matriarch opens doors, grants corralling and stabling, and even a room with a shower! Everyone is very polite. Joshua and Emmett relax in what passes for a bar. They strike up a conversation with the only other yellowlander there. Her name is Zelaphona, a Dream Mage. She’s very friendly, and splits the last of her black lotus with Emmett. The pair of them peacably smoke and pass out while a despairing Joshua chats with a camp local named Crystal and plays his mandolin. Crystal pets the dog.

Zelaphona joins the party, as she needs a way out of the dump, and the yellowlanders turn out to be quite tribal. Not before she can use the shower though!

On the road again and food is a serious problem, not helped by the delay of a buggalo stopping and staggering around. The “Buggalo For Dummies” book suggests a baby will be born shortly, and offers a medley of helpful and unhelpful tips to assist. Once stationary, the buggalo themselves are more useful, creating a ring of protection (and privacy) for the mother-to-be. Shortly a baby buggalo appears, about the size of a pig or sheep. It is promptly named Piggalo.

This doesn’t speed our caravan up at all, and soon a larger caravan approaches from the rear, easily passing. They have some small amount of surplus meat, but they fail to make a deal due to the cost.

Either in coin or for fresh baby buggalo!

Tools

The tools themselves are unchanged, but there’s now a third player. Our sessions have shortened to 2.5hrs as two of us are repeatedly getting a bit tired. We play Tuesdays, and that is a school night. As it were.

As mentioned, I’ve been using Tome of Adventure Design to add flavour to things, and it feels like it’s helping me. Of course, any relevant dice tables would also do this, I’m just the one I just bought. But particularly for urban, dungeon, or eurofantasy stuff, it’s a great pick. For this session I’ve been trying to use it even more, rolling for things like:

• factions
• events
• architecture

Not necessarily highlighting all this to the players but it’s helping me have a bit more of a world, for little extra effort at this point.

Lessons learned

I went for a bit of a cards-on-the-table approach to our new player. As the storyline involved a little bit of cloak-and-dagger, I specifically asked everyone (more politely):

Just trust the character of the new player. I don’t want to deal with PvP paranoia!

And they all did a great job, and we were able to concentrate on the more interesting parts of the game. Perhaps this didn’t need deliberating over and getting “meta” about, but I’ve seen parties get distracted by this before; and I think at this point it’s just one of my bugbears. Let’s just get on.

Supplies are still woefully low as soon as the caravan goes on the road, as they have been throughout. And this campaign is supposed to be a chill, non-starving one. I even bumped the supply die again!

I’m wondering about removing the UVG ruling that says that slower caravans take an extra day each week, and you account for all those extra days when they finally wrap a week. The players find it a bit jarring that there’s supply rolls at odd times in the game¹.

Also, we continue to fail them at a rate. I’d forgotten a third player meant this “two week trip” would be 9 rolls, but the d8 usage die (which is supposed to last roughly 9 uses), lasted… 4. Still some kind of solution needed.

Taking out the “odd days accounting” just removes any penalty for slow driving (or any advantage for fast driving!), so it’d have to be replaced with something else.

Hmmm 🤔