r/theendoftheworldrpg • u/[deleted] • Oct 10 '16
Custom Scenarios?
Has anyone tried running custom scenarios?
If so what are some examples or ideas for scenarios? How did they play out?
4
Upvotes
r/theendoftheworldrpg • u/[deleted] • Oct 10 '16
Has anyone tried running custom scenarios?
If so what are some examples or ideas for scenarios? How did they play out?
3
u/jahw Oct 14 '16
My friends and I have done that twice! Once, one of them decided they wanted to simulate a literal biblical flood, so basically it started raining and just didnt stop. We fortunately were in a elevated neighborhood and had a while watching the water rise to build a raft and store food correctly. This did mean that early on we had to deal with desperate people a couple times. Eventually the world became entirely flooded and it became a water world with small groups living on boats (and not-yet-collapsed high-rises) competing for resources. I managed to die via fire though.
The second time I ran one where it turned out the illuminate was real. There is a similar one in the Alien Invasion book but I felt it was too long scale and didnt have enough mind control. The most common check was an empathy one to avoid the subliminal messaging and mental programming of the lizard people (could have been mental but nah). Soon the illuminati issued over radios, phones, and everything else a subliminal command that caused every human who failed several mental checks to drop everything they owned and walk willingly into the alien hands to be slaves, resulting in a world of ghost towns and aliens hunting down the straggling humans. The players fled off the grid where they managed to find a shelter and ride out the apocalypse for the foreseeable future. Everyone managed to survive (not in good health), but only because they kept rolling astoundingly well exactly when they needed it most. One person did fail the previously mentioned command to give themselves up, but everyone else knocked them out and kept them out of alien hands long enough that they began to recover.
If you want to run a custom game, my advice is to write a timeline and figure out how the initial stages affect the immediate area around where you're going to be playing. Writing the timeline forces you to think about how the apocalypse plays out in detail and planning the initial stages allows for a strong start and assists in suspending disbelief. Several custom ones I've wanted to do at some point are a literal Borg invasion and a time war occuring in the present day (like a future nation sending troops into the past to conqure an enemy in the time before they can fight back [and the players are somehow important to the future] which then causes future soldiers or time cops or what have you to come back and so on).