Actual Play - The Hive

So earlier this week, I released the playtest document for my game The Hive for anybody who wants to give it a try.  But today I figured it would be a good idea to run through a solo playtest to give a better understanding of what the game is and how it works.

Setting Up the Game

So the first thing I'll need to do is figure out which species my hive will be.  Being a bug nerd, I know a few, but I've yet to come up with one that creates a better narrative for this game than leaf cutter ants.  

Leaf cutter ants

Leaf cutter ants do exactly what they sound like - they cut leaves.  However, what they do with these leaves is pretty fascinating.  Rather than eat them, they actually use them to feed fungus that they cultivate inside their colony inside a large chamber.  So for this play through, I'll go with leaf cutter ants as my species.

I take three d6 and set them aside to represent my Queen.  These will be rolled at the end of play as needed to see if my colony makes it through the winter, but I might need them in between.  Now I roll 3d6 in turn to set my starting citizen die pools.  I roll in order:  3, 4, 4.  Not too shabby - this makes my starting totals as follows:

Workers - 3

Soldiers - 4

Drones - 4

Not a ton of Workers, but I've got a good number of Soldiers and plenty of Drones to replenish my colony as needed.

Now I'm ready to get started.

Turn 1 - Spring

To start the first turn, I draw six cards from the top of my deck.  I draw:

2 Hearts, 2 Diamonds, 1 Spade, 1 Club

Nothing terribly dire is threatening the colony to start with, so that's good.  I've got a small Food Issue (Hearts), a small Health Issue (Diamonds), and minor Predatory (Spades) and Environmental (Clubs) Issues.  So what's going on then?  I need to figure out what these Issues are and how they're affecting my colony.  Here's what I come up with:

It's early spring, and we've been feeding on our fungi all winter while waiting out the cold.  As a result, our fungi supply has been depleted, and we'll need to get to work right away on cutting some leaves to help it grow back to full strength.  The trouble is, the forest around us hasn't fully thawed, and so leaves are in short supply at the moment.  Worse yet, a spider has stumbled upon our harvest line, and is trying to make a meal of our workers!  

So there's how my Issues are playing out: the Food Issue is that we need to cultivate more fungi, and our Environmental Issue is that the late cold has stunted growth.  I move my Club card over to my Food Issue, since that's how it's working against the colony.  My predator is a spider - nothing overpowering, but still threatening.  And it's taken out a number of the workers in the colony, so there's my Health Issue.

So now we set about addressing things.  The most pressing matter is the spider, as we can't effectively find food or replenish our numbers without getting rid of that first.  I attack the spider with my Soldiers to start, and roll my 4d6 Soldier pool:  3, 5, 2, 1.  I roll my one success needed to vanquish the spider, but that 1 means that I've suffered some casualties in the battle.  I reduce my Soldier pool down to 3.

Now that the spider has been dealt with, we can recover from the damage it caused a bit.  I roll my Drones 4d6 in order to bring our numbers back up to snuff:  5, 4, 6, 1.  Three successes - enough to solve my Health Issue, but that 6 means I've lost a Drone due to exhaustion (Drones count only 6s as casualties, not 1s).

That leaves only my Food Issue to be dealt with, which is going to be tricky.  I have 3 Worker dice to tackle a level 3 Issue - not great odds.  My workers are going to have to bust their butts to try and solve this:  3, 3, 5.  They manage to knock off a bit of the problem, but not enough to cancel it out completely.  I decide that my soldiers are going to have to get involve.  They'll move some of the larger debris out of the harvest path to help bump up the efficiency of the line:  6, 1, 4.  Their help manages to help my Workers harvest enough food to grow the fungi back to sustainable levels, but the work was grueling.  More of my Soldiers have died off, and I'm in real danger of attack in the coming seasons.  But no Issues are carrying over to Summer!

Turn 2 - Summer

Here's how I'm looking going into the warmer weather:

Workers - 3

Soldiers - 1

Drones - 3

I draw my six Issues cards: 

3 Diamonds, 1 Heart, 1 Spade, 1 Club

Things are a little more dire in the summer.  I've got a pretty severe Health Issue on my hands, but luckily nothing else is really causing real problems.  Let's figure out what's causing all this:

In their haste to harvest enough leaves to bring our fungus back up to full health, it went unnoticed that a few of the leaves my workers brought back to the colony had spores of a fungus that feeds on ours!  These spores have started attacking our fungal food supply.  We've got to remove the predatory fungus and find more healthy leaves to feed on, but there's been a lot of rainfall as of late, so there's puddles everywhere.  This has caused a rival colony to divert from their usual harvest route, and they've started encroaching on our harvest territory.  We need to drive them back!

I move my Environmental Issue over to my Health stack, and we're ready to get rolling.

I'm going to get a little strategic here and address the rival ant colony first.  I send my remaining Soldiers out to drive them off: 4.  Bugger off!  (Pun intended)

Now that my Workers don't have a rival colony to contend with, They can focus on addressing the fungus issue.  They work to start removing some of the infected parts of the fungus from the colony:  5, 6, 6.  My Workers eliminate the fungal issue, but the predatory fungus is incredibly toxic to ants, and those two 6s take a big chunk out of my workforce.  This doesn't leave me in very good shape to tackle my remaining Food Issue.

I decide to get a bit creative.  I send my Soldiers out to raid the rival colony's harvest chain in order to scamper off with some of their leaves: 2.  Not much of a help.  It's up to my Workers now: 2.  Uh oh.  Looks like our Food Issue is rolling into Autumn.

Turn 3 - Autumn

Not in the greatest shape at the end of the workable year:

Workers - 1

Soldiers - 1

Drones - 3

I draw six cards for my Issues:

3 Diamonds, 2 Clubs, 1 Spade

I've got another bad Health Issue on my hands, plus a decent Environmental Issue to go along with the Food Issue from Summer that I'm still dealing with.  And barely any Workers to deal with any of these!

An early frost has set in, and between the extreme cold and the depleted food source the colony's numbers have dropped off dramatically.  Ants that aren't being knocked off through starvation or freezing are fighting over the remaining food sources as they prepare for the long winter.  The colony will have a nearly insurmountable task in trying to secure enough food to see it through.

Based on my narration of my Issues, I move my Environmental cards over to my Health stack (now a level 5 Issue!) and get to work.

A Health Issue like this one is one of the few problems my Drones can try and tackle.  Let's try and get the population numbers back up!: 6, 4, 2.  We've whittled away a bit of the problem, but lost a Drone along the way, and I'm still looking at a level 3 there.  My workers are going to have to try and dig deeper tunnels to escape the cold:  1!  Not only did they not succeed, I've lost my only Worker die!  I'm going to need to shore up the number with my Drones to have any shot of making it through the season:  6, 1.  I'm now down to my last remaining Drone, but I've got 6 Workers!  My last shot is to try and get creative - my Soldiers are going to use their bulk to corral the ants in the colony into a central area, trying to combat the cold with body heat:  3.  No luck.  My Queen is going to have to try and get us through that one in the winter, which doesn't bode well for our chances of survival.

Needing to give up on my Health Issue, I set out tackling my Predatory one.  My Soldiers set out with my Workers to act as bodyguards and fight off any competing colonies: 1!  Not only did they not succeed, but I'm out of Soldiers!  My Workers are going to have to try and fend for themselves:  3, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6.  Four successes more than what I needed, but unfortunately with a ton of 6s.  My Workers made it through, but took heavy losses for a task they were ill-suited for.

I now have no Soldiers, and only 3 Worker dice to tackle my remaining Food Issue with.  I roll:  5, 2, 6.  They scrounge up enough food, but the cold weeds the weaker ones out.  I finish with 2 Workers.

Endgame - Winter

So my colony prepped as best they could, but I'm still left with a level 3 Health problem that only my Queen will be able to solve during the winter.  I grab my three Queen dice and get to rolling:

2, 6, 2

My Queen made a dent, but she's weakened.  I roll again:

5, 3

She's powering through.  We might have a real shot:

3, 6

We made it!  The Queen nearly killed herself, but the colony makes it through another winter.  What the future holds, though, looks uncertain.

So that's the game!  Again, feel free to download the playtest document here and give it a spin.  Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Timely & Efficient Posting

So this has been a busy week games-wise, what with Gen Con going on and the 2016 #RPGaDay.  I've also personally had a busy game week this week - ran another session of Stars Without Number Sunday night, did some Mouse Guard prep yesterday (although tonight's session unfortunately ended up being cancelled), and got to get introduced to a bunch of new roleplaying friends through Epidiah Ravacol's Google+ post, so no complaints on that end.

I started mulling over this post yesterday, and I honestly wish I had gotten it up then because it dovetails pretty nicely with day two of RPG a Day.  For those unfamiliar, the #RPGaDay hashtag posts a different discussion topic everyday during the month of August for us roleplaying nuts to come together and talk about.  Yesterday's topic was "Best game session since August 2015?"  So I'll call it close enough and post a day late.

Interestingly enough, last week's session for my Mouse Guard campaign was completely accidentally one of the best single sessions that the group has had to this point.  This same group just came off probably our best campaign stretch where they helped a group of female outcasts from Grasslake set up their own community, which I've posted a bit about before.  This ended up culminating with the patrol meeting up and forming a relationship with a civilization of moles that exists in the Wilds east of the Territories, and then fending off an army of weasels lead by a sable warlord.  Needless to say, it set some pretty high expectations for the following year in-game.

This year I've set up something slightly different.  Coming off a merchant escort run in early spring, the patrol needed to clear the northern shores of crabs that were causing shipwrecks and shutting down trade routes.  However, during this adventure the patrol found that one of the wrecked ships had been carrying a suspicious shipment of weapons.  Following sessions saw them take the investigation east to the port cities where the ships had come from, and followed the trail back west to where the weapons were headed.  Turns out that the weapons shipment was being funneled to help fuel a long-overdue rebellion in Elmoss, where things had gotten so dire that the merchant leaders had begun gleaning wages off of the citizens to keep things afloat.  Somewhat unsurprisingly given the patrol's history by this point, my players jumped in on aiding the rebellion rather than trying to shut it down.

This is where it's gotten interesting, though, and the Big Moment that I honestly did not realize was the Big Moment when I did the prep.  The leader of the Elmoss rebellion, a young but hardened leader of a lass, didn't fully trust the patrol's intentions and was hesitant to involve them further in the coup.  She therefore (following a failed Persuasion test to convince her they were on the up and up) gave them a mission to help prove themselves: coming from Copperwood was a shipment of food and supplies to act as relief to the mice of Elmoss.  The patrol needed to ensure that shipment never reached Elmoss in order to keep the citizens hungry for change, both literally and figuratively.

When I originally designed the mission, I had assumed that this would be a covered by a test or two during the Player's Turn - it was a possibly twist, and I honestly didn't even consider this as being something that needed to be addressed during the GM Turn.  I was shocked when this revelation completely halted the game (in a good way).  As their table chatter went on though, I realized that this twist managed to hit on each of their Beliefs in some way or another.  For reference, the group's Beliefs are as follows:

• Never back down, never give up.
• The needs of the many outweigh those of the few.
• Always work to better myself and others.

The logic behind the rebellion leader's giving them this task is very important to understanding why this became such an internal struggle for the patrol.  In the 1E canon, Elmoss' government was originally set up when the city was a thriving supply hub for the western Territories.  However, once many of those towns began falling during the Weasel War, Elmoss began to fall in power and influence.  The government, though, made up of the heads of each trade practiced in the city, remained the same, and became a huge burden to the citizens of the town.  In the rebellion leader's mind, this rebellion had been coming for far too long, and now that she had the citizens ready to pull it off, the relief supplies would cool their heads and the coup would miss its window.  

The first mouse (the patrol leader) understood this logic right away, and knew the danger - these mice were finally on the door of real change, and something like this might turn them away from their goal.  The second part of his Belief really shown here, not wanting to see the rebellion in any danger of falling apart, even if it meant he needed to do something questionable and that mice might suffer for it.  The second mouse and third mice were the ones that really were struggling with what was going on.  For the second mouse who strives to work for the greater good, who represents the few?  Is the need for rebellion among the Elmoss mice forcing permanent change greater than the need for them to feed their families?  Is providing food really buying time and avoiding danger for an small oppressive elite?  Similarly, the mouse looking to make herself and others better had quite the quandary on her paws.  Is the betterment of the Elmoss mice really with overthrowing their antiquated government in a bloody coup?  Can she honestly view herself as taking the steps towards her goal of bettering herself by denying starving mice food?

Ordinarily with this kind of conflict among the group, I would have moved this into an inter-patrol Argument Conflict to resolve it, but there was really one side and two questions.  Two of the three were having such an internal debate over what was the right course of action that there didn't seem to be enough to combat against the one mouse who was game for sabotaging the shipment.  They might get there on their own eventually.  In the end, I at least got them to agree that we would address the shipment in the next session so we could finish out the rest of the mission, so it'll be interesting to see what the end result is and how they handle everything.

While the session itself was interesting enough, it was really this moment that stood out as one of the best I've had in my gaming history.  I am slightly bothered that it came about so unintentionally, and that I didn't recognize ahead of time what the situation actually represented for the players, but such is a learning experience as a GM for a game like this.  I am at the least very happy that I got to be a part of the moment.