Last Fleet (12/8/2021)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Karen Twelves, Adrienne Mueller, Eric Fattig
System: Last Fleet

Pitch for the game:

The last of humanity are fleeing across space, pursued by the implacable inhuman adversary that destroyed their civilisation. They’re outnumbered and outgunned. Supplies are running low. The actions of a brave few could be all that stands between humanity and extinction.

Welcome to the Last Fleet.

Last Fleet is a PBTA tabletop roleplaying game where you play brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists struggling to hold the human race – and themselves – together under unbelievable pressure. The game focuses on action, intrigue and drama in this high-stakes situation. You’ll fight space battles, search for enemy infiltrators, tackle supply shortages and navigate faction politics. You’ll strive against your own self-doubt and sometimes crack under the stress.

We used the included setting where the threat was the Corax, a fungal species capable of perfectly emulating humanity. Yes, this game is very much Battlestar Galactica with the serial numbers filed off, and I was hear for it. See my love of BSG here.

Some things I loved

The game very much invited the creation of ships, which were in turn a place to house potential problems and opportunities, cast members, and locations. Each ship felt like a place I could ask questions about, fill with purpose and trouble, and let the players explore at as they had the interest and opportunity. I also sketched all the ships using outlines of basic shapes from objects in my house (cans, boxes, etc). It meant for simple but satisfying geometry. I left myself lots of space on the page to fill in the details as we needed them, As you can tell the Hecate and Agamemnon were some of the places we spent the most time.

It also meant I got to do some fun shenanigans employing aspects of the Greek gods, which I love doing whenever possible. The fact that not one ship was called the Argonaut was a true testament to my attempts to not make this the same as by Apocalypse Galactica game! It was hard.

Other great things:

• All of my players being hard core and awesome.
• The many relationships that bound them.
• The Explorer move, learning from going places no one has gone before!
• Mercedes bursting forth from the Tenebrium, her Hornet covered in spores.
• Looking back and finding notes like “Durean will shiv Thorston (Adreinne’s character) in his sleep and President only guarded by Ursela.
• Mechanically I loved that role and playbooks were independent, so you anyone could choose to be a pilot or engineer, etc.

Some things that were great, but didn’t last

The tension of “who is a Corax?” was great at the start. I gave some hints of people making poor decisions, maybe out of desperation, maybe out of prejudice, maybe out of secret loyalties…or maybe because they were a fungus monster who wanted to destroy and consume humanity. We had people with legitimate complaints about the disparities in how they were treated and used that discontent to mask sedition. At the time I was thinking about how the Black Bloc was using Occupy Oakland as cover for vandalization and theft, and wondering where there allegiance was. Were they hardcore activists showing that you can only affect change by causing real disruption? Were they opportunists using Occupy as a shield for personal thrills? Or, even worse, were they a counter movement trying to harm the credibility of Occupy? I didn’t know and that not-knowing made dissidents feel all that much more real and unknow.

The issue though, was that once I revealed a single character as a Corax, the players walled themselves off against every NPC with the assumption that any of them could be secret fungal monster, and opportunities for intimacy or trust was gone. So it was thrilling and tense, until it was’t.

Some things that didn’t work for us

The pacing of a breaking points happened faster than we wanted, and the options, while intense, weren’t something we always wanted to play out. Having suicide explicitly offered as a way characters exit the game kept rubbing us the wrong way. It wasn’t something we needed spelled out. Because they came at us so fast, I think there was a lot of effort spent to mitigate the pressure, and therefor breaking points, which didn’t feel in the spirit of the game.

I also had a real hard time giving the characters opportunities to interact. There was a lot of time when one of them was in a shuttle or a fighter and cut off from the others except through comms. After seven sessions, we still very infrequently had all three characters together in a scene. Not something needed all the time, but I struggled to make it happen at all. That meant a lot of GM to player conversations and not as many player to player interactions.