Closing the Chapter on Uncanny Earth
If you would like to see a full play report of this campaign, check out Uncanny Earth
Self Congratulations
We did it.
Truly, this has been a fruitful experience that allowed me to flex my creative muscles, but more importantly, build a bond of friendship with my players.
No campaign should be held to some platonic ideal. This certainly was not perfect, but we kept showing up, because truly, at its best it’s been some good, mostly wholesome fun.
One-shots have their satisfaction. But there is nothing like getting invested in a campaign and feeling that build up and escalation week on week.
And now it has come to an end.
Not THE end. But AN end. The closing of a chapter. Other things in life demand my attention. I will return to GMing, but I need a break, both to focus on my work and to just be a player for a bit. GMing for two straight campaigns has been awesome, but it was hard work in its own way. It thrives off the energy of me and the players, but I am putting in the lion’s share. And that’s ok. I do it with pride and for my own satisfaction. But I also need that rest after reaching this satisfying checkpoint.
We can resume it after this breather. I have faith we can make it work.
We also may feel content with leaving it for a while, or even forever. I will absolutely get the itch to run something (frankly that has not left). Truthfully some other systems are catching my eye. Possibilities of new adventures. A new start. Refreshing.
But Uncanny Earth is not stale. It is an ambitious work to be proud of. It is also not solely my work. My players are just as much a part of it for me. They are the other half of this body. They are the reason I even got to show up each week.
Thinking back to the beginning, I was nervous. Foolhardy too. My heart was telling me I wanted to do this kind of campaign but could I pull it off?
This is the time and place to just go for it. You do not need permission to play this game. It is but a game after all. Dive in. The car is there to drive. Get in. Hit the gas. Keep driving. Tinker with it in between trips.
There will be occasional bumps on the road. The game might provide them, but those bumps pale in comparison to the bumps life will throw at you. If you’re still driving, and you are having fun, you are doing GREAT!
As for the tinkering part. There are countless resources, articles, blogs, videos, books, essays even, that provide sage advice and tools for turning this into a more pleasant ride. But only you and your fellow passengers will truly know what this ride needs. Listen to your passengers, and listen to the car.
I am still tinkering. I am a fellow traveler searching for “PEAK RPG”. I will never truly find it, but I don’t care, because the journey will take me and my friends to awesome places.
Let me tell you about our times doing donuts through a place I call Uncanny Earth!
The World
The basic pitch was this: What if we played DND, but as X-Men… In a post-apocalypse run by the big A himself. An “Age of Apocalypse”… if you will.
A millenia has passed since the great Gene Wars, when mutants and humans nearly wiped each other out. The dream of co-existance between mutant and man went up in nuclear fire. What remained mutated. People. Animals. Plants. The Land itself. The world became feral again.
Among the carnage there was one who claimed victory.
The Greatest of All.
En Sabah Nur.
Apocalypse.
From the ashes he dominated what few mutants remained and built his Empire, ruling over the ruined Earth. Crushing what remained under his boot. Testing it. Is it strong enough to survive him?
He is the Great Oppressor of this land. Outside his influence, pockets of civilization try to live a different way. They form their own traditions. Some try resurrecting the cultures of the past, making the same old mistakes. Others find new mistakes to make. But among this desolation, there is hope.
A new era is approaching. The Phoenix’s cycle of rebirth is about to begin again. Whoever takes its mantle has the power to reshape the world in their own image.
So who will it be?
The System
At the time of dreaming up this campaign, I had fallen hard for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Something about the tone it evoked, the flavor, and the spirit of its mechanics really appealed to my tastes, especially as it pertained to fantasy.
However, I was also ready to step out of that genre into something more science-fiction. X-Men is fantasy, in its own way, but it leans heavier on sci-fi tropes and aesthetics. It’s also very gonzo. Especially the Claremont era of comics. It got weird. And weird is what I wanted.
So I looked into Mutant Crawl Classics. For the most part, it gave me almost all the tools I needed to build a working car for this campaign. It had the Mutant class, which was like a weirder DCC wizard. It also provided alternate Mutant options like Manimal and Plantient. Those still felt thematically appropriate.
The post apocalyptic elements implied a certain setting that I think mostly worked, but I knew that I would have to homebrew A LOT.
Thank Crom for the wider DCC community/ecosystem.
The biggest thing I needed to add was a way to allow the players to be able to heal, and frankly just survive, without a dedicated Healer class. Because the MCC Healer is, frankly, boring as fuck.
As an aside: I am quite disappointed with the Healer class in this book. It lacks a unique identity and has a weak class kit to boot. Hardly any flavor (a problem with the human classes in general). Really should have been chopped up and spread across other classes or replaced with something weirder.
Thankfully, I found the healing rules I needed from DCC Lankhmar. Even better was the concept of Fleeting Luck. Both of these in tandem make for a more heroic game, but the system still ostensibly feels Old School. This was the perfect choice for what I wanted in my campaign.
Fleeting Luck was henceforth known as X-Factor.
We were good to go.
But now, I had to think of how to structure the world. My answer: A hex-crawl.
Looking back, I may have been too hasty to commit to that. It’s a fine method of systematizing travel, and with an overland travel hazard die it makes it fairly straightforward, but revealing the world hex cluster by hex cluster just slowed down play. I am starting to understand why people opt for point-crawls instead. Functionally, it would have given me the same outcome during play, just less headache to prep.
Still, I had a lot of fun putting together that world map. Coming up with weird ideas for regions is a true joy for me as a GM. Rust Hills. City Swamp. Great Western Desert. Frozen North.
Tropey? Yes. Fun? Yes.
What I had to learn through trial and error (and a lot of sweat) was that I could not prep all that much session to session. The world needed filling, though, and the trap I fell into was thinking everything in 6 directions needed to be prepped, because I want the players to be able to go ANYWHERE on this map any given session. Sandbox style, right?
Well, here’s what I learned about prepping Sandboxes: What your players are doing right now is what you should be focusing on. They can do something else, sure, and that’s where it's nice to have brief outlines to build on later, but sessions are short, and they will stick with what is currently compelling them 9/10 times. So prep that. After they are done, ask them where they want to go and color in the lines..
But man, that took me a while to figure out.
It’s also something this particular system does not provide tools for. So I grabbed some light travel and exploration procedures from Knave 2e. They were simple and made resource and threat tracking easy. Hexes are 6 miles, roll a hazard die for each watch (4hrs) spent in the wild. It takes 1 watch to cross a full hex. After 4 hexes exhaustion sets in. Not a perfect system, but good enough. Players knew it intuitively by then from our prior campaign, so it flowed nicely into the new system.
Aside: One thing that kind of bothered me about DCC was the lack of an inventory tracking system. I tried to create an easy limit to how many items players could carry (items up to their Stamina score) but mostly gave up on tracking it. That was my players’ job anyway. In hindsight I don’t think I needed it that much, but for a game where a character’s “build” is their inventory it felt weird to just let them carry as much shit as they want.
What it resulted in were some very unexpected outcomes (which are always welcome). Rolling for encounters, obstacles, weather and signs is great. But there are some arbitrary results I kind of hated working with but I’ll touch on that in a sec…
The other big thing that was missing from this game were dungeon procedures. Baffling that Dungeon Crawl Classics didn’t include any either beyond just saying a dungeon turn is 10 minutes. It hints at a broader design philosophy I don’t quite gel with, which is that it's seemingly designed for you to run modules with it to provide a more complete experience. Some modules have hex-procedures, others have timers, encounter tables, chase rules etc.
I knew I wanted to have general tools to universally apply to homebrewed content. So I stole the dungeon procedures from Knave 2. This is where I really had to make some fixes. I hate the arbitrary fatigue result and the depletion result on the hazard die. It punishes players regardless of their preparations. Also, players had access to a solar powered lamp, and one player had the darkvision mutation… So yeah, torch tracking just wasn’t a thing.
However, the biggest gift it gave me was actually the dungeon shift result, though I didn’t know it at first. I realized I could apply it to clocks in the dungeon. With a dungeon shift, I can reinforce why there is always a time pressure beyond torches going out. Even if the timer is huge, there is a possibility of it progressing and players are encouraged not to faff about. This place is gonna blow in about 7 dungeon shifts!
For the most part, I think I was able to find a nice groove in the exploration and adventuring loop. The world felt huge as a result, despite the hex map being not all that large. This whole time they really only explored two and a half biomes, with the last few sessions being in the frigid northern wastes (the most original location anyone has ever come up with).
The Funnel
I knew I wanted to start my campaign with a funnel. It’s a staple of the DCC lineage, and seemed like a fun challenge for the table. There was no better time than to kick off the campaign with a session 0 in the Mother’s Maze. Now titled: Cerebro’s Maze. Because this is X-Men.
This was a deceptively hard session to prep for. The adventure module is way too bloated for what I needed in a funnel. I knew I didn’t want to keep my players at level 0 for more than 1 full session. We ended up spending 2 even after I hacked the adventure down to a third of its full size.
I really wanted to keep the funnel focused on the deathtrap maze, as it's not that big, full of danger and serves the purpose of acting as a trial by fire that traumatizes the PCs enough to mutate right afterwards (not really an X-Men thing, but we weren’t going to RP puberty - it's really more of a metaphor anyways). The module’s themes and tone felt close enough to the world I wanted to introduce the players to. It just took some light re-flavoring and this felt like an X-Men game.
The players were all mutant clones created on the living island of Krakoa, 1000 years after the Great Gene War ended in nuclear fire. Their randomized features are part of a Darwinian test to see who may survive the world of Uncanny Earth. Cerebro has no compassion for the mutant clones. It is using the same philosophy as Apocalypse and applying it to a rapidly repeatable experiment. The players start off as labrats. Those that survive will manifest their true mutations, because holy shit did they just endure trauma.
Looking back, I still think this is a really cool origin story for them. They are outsiders to Uncanny Earth, they didn’t grow up here, and so everything is new to them. There is no gap between player knowledge and character knowledge. And they spent their first waking hours surviving the “danger room” except it was actually rigged to kill them. The PCs that survived had to walk over the countless corpses of the clones who woke up before them.
There was, however, a major issue in this module that only came up later during play. The equipment they started with felt too convenient and gave them a huge advantage beyond Session 0. Their lanterns made torches useless. They already started with lazer pistols (albeit weak ones) and a multi-tool that could turn into any basic tool they needed on a whim, including a 1d6 club. Oh and they each had a frag grenade that dealt 6d6 damage. When your best tool is a frag grenade, everything blows up.
Moreover, Mother’s Maze was designed for DCC, not MCC, and did not include tech levels or complexity modifiers for the tools. In hindsight I could have added those, but giving players starting equipment they can’t use is pretty shitty. Plus, they would eventually learn how to use the things.
As an experience though, the funnel was a tonne of fun, for me especially. It was my excuse to take the gloves off and become a mass-murderer. I don’t think it was quite as fun for my players, but that’s because it lasted two full sessions. The funnel’s design also had all new characters start from the top of the map, so it got very repetitive. Eventually, the gotcha moments got stale.
They did make it to the end and rolling the mutant powers was very exciting. It’s a class that is utterly bonkers. You can have some insane variations in what you end up with, so each mutant came out pretty different. I also made an offer for one of them to take on Cerebro as a Patron and become a Shaman, eschewing their mutant powers in favor wetware programs (more on this class in a sec)
It was at this point in Cerebro’s control room, where a vision of Professor X made them the new X-Men and gave them a job: Find the old X-Men. Except our new heroes are not so, well, heroic. This is still MCC after-all. Our band of Mutants don’t have the years of training and privileged education as old Earth’s strangest heroes. So yeah, they kinda suck at this. Which is all part of the fun!
So our band of newly minted heroes chose their new names and rode the Blackbird out of Krakoa, only for it to crash-land in Uncanny Earth…
The Shaman
As sessions went on, I felt a sense that Scream, the party Shaman and group leader, was lagging behind in understanding his class. It took everyone a bit of learning to understand the differences with this core ruleset from what they were familiar with. Casting tables are fun when you get the hang of them, but they do prevent you from being able to count on your ability to do a specific thing. For example, you can’t just cast a fireball knowing how much damage and destruction it will do.
Everything depends on the check. This is actually really fun, but can be a slower pace of gameplay, especially at the start, so the players were a bit shy to use their powers. Scream especially suffered with this. I think he felt that his patron abilities at the start were weak and not particularly applicable. His first wetware program was Query, which essentially is a Google Search, as he would often put it. He just isn’t the kind of player to really lean into using something like that.
He also didn’t quite know what to make of the Invoke Patron table. Cerebro used the rules for Tetraplex, a patron in the MCC rulebook. The Patron Invocation actually amounted to a temporary stat buff, but there just wasn’t that much opportunity for him to use it, plus a hard limit on how many times he could use it due to his Patron Bond result, which was not particularly high.
This was my fault. I didn’t understand that the value a Shaman brings to the game is their ability to understand and use artifacts. Artifact Checks are unique to MCC, but I had mostly ignored them at the start, fearing they might be too complicated. There was also the fictional problem of the PCs waking up in a technologically advanced facility and having access to a bunch of high-tech equipment from the get go (Mother’s Maze was a Chekov’s gun of future bullshit I had to deal with). The results on the Artifact table are granular, plus the list of artifacts in the core book are fine, but not terribly exciting. Where’s the Shrink Ray? Or the Gloo Cannon? Lazer rifles and power armor are cool, but we can have some better ideas. I had to homebrew a lot of my own artifacts, and learned to improvise complexity modifiers for generic items the system didn’t cover.
My own inexperience with the system was creating a campaign that devalued one of my players, from a mechanical standpoint. Moreover, the other players started with a Children of the Glow alignment, now renamed Children of the Atom, which gave them a +5 boost to mutation checks. The Shaman, who was also of this alignment, got no such check. This should have been allowed, but at the time it felt like a betrayal of the class. It’s just not something they are supposed to have,as per the rules.
This leads me to the conclusion that the class just isn’t what it appears to be. The Shaman, thematically, comes across as a wizard variant. The Patron relationship and wetware spells convey as much. But… They also can use any weapon or armor in the game (armor has no penalty in MCC) and they are adepts at making Artifact checks. The problem here was that Scream’s Intelligence just wasn’t that high. His flat bonus was only a +1. Still, he became the party’s go-to guy for Artifacts.
Something else that happened with Scream was that he got his hands on a suit of Plate Armor while playing through Frozen in Time, another DCC module I placed in this game. The plate armor, as written in DCC where it is listed as a piece of equipment, inflicts a -8 penalty to all movement related checks. This I enforced, despite nothing being written in MCC.
My conclusion was that MCC did not include the armor penalty rule because plate armour is not something players would get their hands on. Armor in MCC’s implied setting is different. There are actually very few armor “sets” in MCC in the first place. Power Armor is the highest you can get, and that is mechanized so it wouldn’t inflict a penalty to movement. Plate Armor on the other hand is from a bygone era. You just aren’t going to be doing parkour in it.
Nevertheless, Scream, in every universe and every incarnation, always goes for maximizing his AC. So he ended up being a plate armor wearing Shaman with a lazer rifle.
The bigger mistake I made was giving him access to a Q cell so early (looted from the corpse of an android), so that his lazer rifle would have infinite ammo, always. That thing did so much damage it could completely shred through enemies if he got a single hit in. Luckily that was rare.
The Mutants
I think the mutant class is really not a class at all, but a slot machine. You may end up with an absolutely overpowered character, or you could end up with someone functionally dead on arrival. It’s luck of the draw. That can be fun, but by God are some of their abilities problematic.
For example: your mutant could have wings at level 1 that allow them to fly at their normal travel speed. Traversal now becomes meaningless. Why would you ever walk again?
Or another example: Your natural AC is 18… At level 1.
Or another example: You can delete any NPC out of existence with just one really high roll… At level 1.
Or another example: You can resurrect any creature, or restore any item, with a high roll… At level 1.
Are these crazy high rolls very rare? Not as much as you think. Not with that +5 bonus to mutation checks from the Children of the Glow alignment (which per the MCC rules, any mutant can begin with), which at level 1 is a +6 bonus, since you add caster level, and only increases each time they level up, until eventually you get a +15 to each mutation check, so you don’t fail a mutation roll unless you roll a nat 1. And all this is without burning Luck or Radburning to boost the roll.
Active mutations don’t have levels the same way wetware programs do. You have access to the same suite of abilities from level 1 all the way up to 10 unless you lose your mutations or they change.
So yeah, easy recipe for absurdly powerful characters.
And my campaign started with 4 of these guys.
Alignment
I’ll be brief on this but I think MCC should have scrapped alignment altogether. The Archaic Alignment system present is a bit more nuanced than the traditional Law vs Chaos that you would find in DCC and every other Old School DND game. It is much more of a faction system, which heavily implies a setting that the book does not really go into that much detail on.
I can see how it encourages faction play, and I included it for that reason in my campaign, reflavoring a few things while keeping others the same. For example, Children of the Glow became Children of the Atom, naturally.
The trouble is really to do with the benefits of these factions, which are much more hard-coded than just being a follower of more abstract concepts like Law and Chaos. Being a follower of the Children of the Glow gives you a +5 bonus to any mutation check, and mutants are allowed to start the game with this alignment per the core rules.
I hope you can see the issue present in that. That +5 check doesn’t stay static since you already add your level to the mutation roll. As written, at level 1, a mutant of this alignment gets a +6 bonus to their mutation checks. So at level 1, the mutant just needs to roll a 6 or higher on their mutation check to be able to use it. By level 5 they will never fail an active mutation roll unless they roll a natural 1. That is not even accounting for Radburn or Luck-burn adding to their rolls.
By the last session my players only reached level 3. They now had +8 to their mutation checks, and they liberally burned X-Factor to get higher results. They were now superheroes, which is fine, given the theme of the campaign. Granted, I am the one who added Fleeting Luck from Lankhmar into the sauce, and now I am complaining it tastes too sweet. Still, even without the added bonus of burning Luck, the Mutants hardly ever failed their checks. They would also frequently hit absurdly high results on their rolls. This leads to a very powerful party, which is great for a heroic campaign, but it also led to some weird moments like this:
Lezardo the level 2 Mutant had the active mutation of Molecular Integration, which allowed him to heal and repair creatures/artifacts. At the higher results he can actually resurrect creatures and revert them to how they were up to an hour ago. Just below that result, on a 20 or higher, he could remove any poison status from a creature. He got infected with a mind-controlling poison that was going to take over him within 20 minutes. Knowing he had this power, he was going to use it to save himself. Totally cool.
However, Lezardo also had the Children of the Glow alignment (Children of the Atom in this campaign’s flavor). At level 2 this means he gets a +7 bonus to his mutation checks. So he rolled once and got a 12 result, just barely high enough to not lose the mutation and regain 1d3 hp. Immediately he rolled again. The result was still lower than he wanted but high enough to cast something, again healing himself by 4 hp, bringing him up to his max. He proceeded to roll 3 more times, never failing, but never actually doing anything in the fiction either, until finally he reached a result high enough to lose his poisoning. This power is cast at-will and the duration of the cast is instant. His chance of failing this roll is so low that he can literally spam it until he gets what he wants, without any penalty for wasting everyone’s time. At level 2. See the issue?
You could argue the player is power-gaming, but the way I see it is that the system is giving him permission to do this. MCC is not a complicated game. This one buff, from the player’s alignment no less (which they did not earn, because the game says they can start with this) is granting far too much power to this one class than it deserves. Mutants can already come out busted. This makes them nearly unstoppable if they have the right mutations at their disposal.
The other problem with how alignments are written in MCC is that they seem really tied to playable species in what is a race-as-class system. The Shaman in my group, as written, would not get a bonus to his wetware checks simply because he was a follower of the cause. So while it presents itself as a faction system, it actually disincentivizes mixing and matching classes with unconventional factions.
Were I to run another MCC campaign, I would cut the alignment system out entirely.
Difficulty and Balance
The Yeti-Spider was a particularly cursed creation.
I am not a GM who particularly cares for balanced encounters, but I do like to present the players with challenge.
In this campaign, I felt like the odds were often stacked against me. These guys have so many cool abilities. They also have X-Factor which they can burn to add to their rolls, and they can burn Luck/X-Factor to heal during and outside combat enough times equal to their level.
So yes, this game felt superheroic. That’s kind of what you want when playing an X-Men themed game.
It often felt like they could easily defeat any enemy mob I threw at them. But then, I decided to fight back harder. I brought the pain and they felt it.
In play, I am not adversarial. In prep, I might be.
The system is also calibrated to be very deadly. This is something that proved to be the case even with the revised healing rules. So far in just under 15 sessions, there has only been one character death (RIP Frost), but it came quick and sudden.
What is always on my mind though is that the mutants can cast what I will tamely call “FUCK-OFF” powers like molecular disintegration, a power that literally lets you delete any human sized creature with a high enough roll. Remember that +5 bonus to mutation checks? (I do.)
So yeah, I feel at liberty to throw some insane challenges at the players, because ultimately, combat is a choice. I am not forcing them into it. They can always flee or strategize around it. Yes, time is a factor, but that’s where the real risk is. Do they let a problem fester while they rest and recuperate or do they take it on now and risk death? A hero’s dilemma indeed.
Adventures
As mentioned, the vast majority of the stuff we played was homebrewed. Honestly it was a mammoth undertaking that had to be portioned out bit by bit. Finding the right balance took trial and error. The whole time I was envious of anyone running a fantasy elf-game, due to how easy it is to plug pre-written modules into those settings. In my last campaign I had like 5 or 6 scattered throughout the game world (though barely used any).
Here I relied a bit on some pre-written official MCC material and a whole lot of coming up with my own stuff. I’ve gotta say the process was rewarding, but also very tiring. MCC/DCC official adventures were easy enough to cut and paste into my setting. The main issue I found was in prepping them into easy to reference texts for at the table use. The adventures themselves are cohesive and well written for the most part, but they do imply a playstyle that skews a bit closer to the traditional model than I would like. Player agency sometimes feels like less of a priority.
This isn’t true of all of them, mind, but it is something to keep aware of when delving into that product line. Lots of truly great adventures to be found there, though, just keep in mind that many of them follow a plot structure. For sandbox campaigns, better to source more location based adventures in the vein of Frozen in Time. That said, homebrewing for this system is easy as hell. It’s also not all that hard to take a low-fantasy themed module and repaint it into a post-apocalyptic sci-fi module. The two genres aren’t that far apart when it comes to motifs and themes, just different coats of paint.
Still, I felt like if I really wanted to deliver on my vision for this world, I would have to build a lot of it myself. This is where I really had to learn to find my groove. I am not an experienced adventure designer, nor am I good at drawing maps or statting up enemies.
In the beginning, I would grab one of Dyson’s maps and just key it as I saw fit. This is a fantastic method to start with, but it is deceptively tricky sometimes. You may end up with more rooms to fill than you anticipated, and it can be a hassle to make it work for your intended adventure site theme. For the most part though, this is easily the best way to get started homebrewing content for those not inclined to draw everything from scratch.
Still, it would take me forever to get these maps ready in time. So eventually I tasted the forbidden fruit of AI. Why not let it aid me in this task?
I quickly learned why. LLMs are dumb as a bag of brick. They excel at being mediocre and generic. Yes it can generate whole adventures in a pinch, but all it takes is the slightest bit of scrutiny to see that it all falls apart at the table. You cannot afford to be in that situation during play. So if you are going to use it as a tool, be thorough in your examination of the output.
It’s fine at drawing a quick battlemap, or providing stats for an enemy on the fly. It can even create spell tables that are mostly functional. In fact, this is where I used it the most since MCC is very light on providing wetware programs for the Shaman. Also according to the lore these programs were made by AI, so it was a bit of an in-joke at my table that some of them were literally generated by Chat GPT.
I also used it a fair bit to generate images of characters, locations and events to use as handouts.
But then I realized it was pushing my hobby out of the tangible realm and further into the digital. Everything felt detached. Did this really feel like my world anymore? I don’t mean that in a domineering sense, the world belongs to the table after-all, but at what point are we letting the computer dream the game up for us?
So yeah, I ditched it after a few sessions and went back to just drawing in my sketchbook. All the adventure design happened on paper from then on. I still used Obsidian for the note-taking and ease of reference, but every map, image, and icon on the VTT was now just a photo taken from my sketchbook.
Did it look amateurish? Yes. Did it feel awesome? Yes.
The players felt it too. No one told me they preferred the AI generated content. They all liked my shitty drawings.
The biggest difference, aside from aesthetics, is that everything felt intentional. It took me longer to prep from session to session, sure, but it also meant I went into each session knowing exactly what was in each room, because I put it there. The maps were drawn for me more than they were for my players. All the necessary details were there.
My players could see them too, prompting questions, but that’s not a bad thing in my opinion. Being generous with information only helps your players make more interesting decisions. I’m not here to screw them over by hiding the important details. If the map helps them ask questions, that’s great.
Final Thoughts
We have concluded the first arc of this campaign and now it is time for me to take a break from Uncanny Earth. Who knows when we will return? I still have an appetite, but other systems and settings call for my attention. Then again, our last session ended with the players being teleported out of a crumbling Ice Spire to the far edge of the Galaxy to intercept The Phoenix before it can reach the Earth. There is endless possibility for where this can go next.
Who am I kidding it’s gonna be a Sword and Planet adventure.
In the meantime, I look back at the adventures we had and think: we did the X-Men campaign we set out to do. It was goofy as hell. That’s what made it so fun. Players got their asses handed to them constantly, but would come back with a vengeance and some sick new ordinance. They played the sandbox. They leveraged their connections and used their brains as much as their powers.
We had some epic moments indeed. Rescuing the mutant mind-mother from the pure strain human caves was a great culmination of months of OSR style play coming to fruition. A simple dog-whistle sourced from 5 sessions earlier ended up turning the tides of battle in their favor.
The fight with the Growlers, a rival manimal party (basically Thundercats), quickly humbled them and was a reminder that a fair fight is not worth the trouble.
Running through the Frozen in Time adventure had them befriending a Yeti, who saved their lives when the facility’s reactor started melting down, but couldn’t get out in time to save himself, just barely failing his Agility check to climb out of the ice tunnels before they caved in. Instead they were left with Crom, a Fighter lost in time, who I tied to a major faction in the North, and who kept dying in battle or getting captured.
Who could forget how after many sessions of rescuing Crom from whatever horror I inflicted upon this poor NPC, that the party decided to sacrifice him to The Symbiote (yes that Symbiote) in exchange for its patronage?
And finally, the epic assault on the Iceman’s Spire, where the party launched themselves to the 3rd floor via a catapult then crawled their way to the top, battling undead Yetis and the vile creations of the mutant, Lich.
Their reward was to be transmatted via a supercomputer into deep space to intercept the Phoenix at the edge of the galaxy. However, some in the party picked up some defects on the way. A hazard they were well aware of before taking the plunge.
So all in all this was an absolute joy to run, despite some friction with the rules as written. Again, it illustrated that to me, system is really there to serve your setting and intended playstyle, but the rest will come from the friends at the table, and that is what will power the engine of your campaign.
It’s not the rules that keep everyone coming back.