Drowned Books: GM Diary 1

I'm going to put together a GM diary for Drowned Books that should serve as a bit of an AAR, in case a player misses a session, but also I'll try and share my thoughts on the system and what I'm doing an learning as a GM. I'll leave the more philosophical stuff to Ishmael: I am not a game designer or reviewer. This is more intended like a diary than a critique.

So why Apocalypse Frame? It's fun, it's fast and in a server where we are more often playing introspective and sprawling slow paced epics that explore the lurking fascism of 20th century American suburbia I feel like it's my job to bring out the one shots and the sci-fi horror, the escapist stuff (please ignore that Thin Ice was based on the works of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and J. Sakai for the purpose of this paragraph). Mechs running around, gunning down enemies and blowing stuff up is right down my lane and exactly the sort of thing I wanted to run.

I commented elsewhere that I was worried that on suggesting Apocalypse Frame people would just ask me to run Lancer instead. One of the things that I like about Apocalypse Frame is its simplicity and speed while also still feeling deep enough that choices to things like your loadout or your approach to a turn do still matter.

Once I had decided I wanted to run this system there was a bit of time put into considering setting. I've been running games in the Boxes setting for almost 10 years now. Part of the fun of that is that the impact that players had on the setting in previous games is felt going on forwards. That is a lot of the fun of having a long term setting and was what eventually brought me around to using that for this game. It's a chance to advance the plot again seeing who comes out on top between Tempest Company and the Navy. I'll upload the little setting booklet I did for this game if you want to check that out but it does assume previous knowledge so don't think of it as a definitive introduction to this world.

While the villains of the setting were an easy call with the Ducal Navy I took a bit more time to think who we would be fighting for. It might bring us more in line with the RAW setting to be aces working for the Bluescarves or Marin itself as opposed to Tempest Company which, though strongly on the side of the anti-dictatorship movement, is a lot more ambiguous when it comes to being good. I figured though that the players would enjoy engaging with that ambiguity a bit.

We're using roll20, which I don't think any of us have used in years since both me and Ishmael have moved to running games using Foundry VTT. As far as I know nobody has done anything for Apocalypse Frame in Foundry and though I started working on a Foundry system for us I decided it wouldn't be done in time for things to start so we just hopped over to roll20 and dusted off our accounts after a long absence.

All that said roll20 has been fine. We haven't had any issues and I can make tokens and move them around and give them health bars and everything seems to work as intended. I'm happy with it and though I might return to writing the system for Foundry at some point I don't feel a pressing need to right now.

We met once prior to this week to test out the VTT and get character sheets done. I ran a few test combats to get a feel for things but that wasn't much of a session, mostly being administrative stuff. Over the course of the week the players talked over discord to come up with their characters and the dynamics of the group but I feel a lot of that also developed over the course of the initial session as we saw how these characters interacted with each other and the world. In the next sections I'm going to go over that session, and introduce the characters. I don't imagine many people will read this outside of our group but hopefully in the future this will be a useful resource to me as a GM and to any players who miss a session.

Azure Rose

Napoli Division is the oldest fighting unit in Tempest Company under the leadership of the slightly crazy Major Jourdain (famous for her near imbecilic risk taking) they have seen combat in the Charlemagne Wars and dozens of actions in Marinian space. The division has been operating with frames for some time now and were the first to deploy them within Tempest Company. The most notorious strike team within Napoli Division is the Azure Rose, made famous by Grace Hope, the most feared ace on our side. Let's meet the aces of Azure Rose:

Grace "Ladykiller" Hope has become the literal poster child of the anti-dictatorship movement thanks to her skill in combat however she isn't exactly an ideal candidate for this role. With a reckless streak that would make Major Jourdain blush and an all encompassing death wish she is as much a risk to moral as a boon and the not always unspoken primary objective of Azure Rose has warped into ensuring that Hope doesn't die.

Fearing the fallout of such an event the mysterious Chicken Eating Man, head of intelligence and internal affairs, has dispatched Lip Pip "Seashells" Pippipinden to watch over the strike team and keep them in order and it isn't just Ladykiller she has to worry about. We've also got the gun-nut Alyssa "Sextant" Hazard who seems to revel in destruction just as much as Ladykiller but perhaps from a further distance, and Kefra “Jackanape” Bazelgeuse who is responsible for the callsigns of all the team members but Seashells (who chose her own in defiance of all the people calling her Lippy).

It's a lot of cats to herd but Seashells isn't on her own. Over the comms we have Joker (who is not exactly a player character, he's for when Jackel wants to join in VC and engage in comms banter) and Crab King, who one player described as the kind of person who tells you how to select your units and pan the camera. Crab King also has a goat. Why does she have a goat? It's not clear but if you do well on a mission you are allowed to feed the goat a carrot as a treat.

The First Mission

We opened in media res on the Azure Rose's first mission after deployment on Zephius IV, tasked with destroying a Navy base containing three hangers. In the first phase of the mission they traversed the strange landscape of the ACMD ravaged planet and before they could reach their objective they were set upon by the half metal, half flesh creatures that have taken over since the infection.

This was the first real combat encounter after the test ones that I had run the week before and fairly quickly it showed to have a lot more tension than those initial test. After the previous weeks players had expressed anxiety that things would be too easy so I tried to have things get going as quickly and as dangerously as possible. Though no one took frame damage in this fight there were multiple moments where the players had to opt for caution to ensure that. while last week they had felt assured that there would always be enough drops to restore tension and vigour each round, it was shown this week that this really isn't the case and the resources had to be shared out with thought.

Some memorable moments: Sextant managing a snap shot killing a terror-sheep just before it could maul Ladykiller's frame, Jackanape and Seashells bringing fire and explosives to try and deal with the metallic death kittens hiding in the trees who kept leaping down from the branches and earing through the frames' armour. It was also just a joy having Joker there making fun of people.

After taking stock and doing some photography the strike team moved on to their primary objective which was a large base with trees along one side and a river along the other (mechanically the river required an interact roll to cross, similar to a rooftop). I gave them the option of which direction to strike from and they went for river.

The initial moment of the attack were somewhat confused as Sextant bounded across the river into close range, got scared and bounded back across. This resulted in much teasing of the poor Sextant over comms for the rest of the mission. Jackanape and Seashells, once again working as a team, burst over the river an established a beachhead allowing them to push in the direction of the objective hangers. Sextant provided long range support from the other side of the river.

Meanwhile Ladykiller was sleepy, none of the enemy combatants had been enough to impress her so far, so she made a cup of coffee with her onboard coffee machine. When she eventually decided to strike out at the enemies it was not exactly in support of push to the objectives but more because she spotted a big mech on the other side of the river. Being an ace and hero of the anti-dictatorship movement she dispatched it with little trouble.

Jackanape and Seashells fought their way to the hangers and with explosions and fire they destroyed the three objectives bringing an end to the first mission.

At this point it was getting late, we'd been a bit late in starting as we had to catch a player up to speed who hadn't been able to make it the week before and I had work in the morning so we had a quick conversation about how things had gone but decided to hold off on the IC debriefing and distribution of materials until we could meet next.

I really like how this turned out. I'm still getting the hang of making these encounters fun and interesting but I really liked the variety that the terrain provided. There's quite a bit of variety in the different types of responsive activations and I found that useful for adding interesting situations aside from just as retaliatory attacks. I think I've got a bunch more learning to do on making these as interesting as possible but that will come as we do more of these.

We won't be meeting again for a few weeks as I'm going to be busy until July but I'm really looking forward to the next session.