Actual Play – World of Abingdon Meadow (7/31/2015)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Phil Vecchione, Tali Halevy, Arvel Ben Dor, John Alexander, and Pamela Alexander
System: The Warren
World: abingdon meadow

This has got to be easiest game in the world to run. I’m serious.

I admit I get anxious every time I run a new game for the first time. Will I get it right? Will I know what to do? Will I entertain my players? These aren’t questions I should ask myself or fret about, but I do.

The Warren (or is the warren?) is Powered by the Apocalypse but so simple and elegant that I didn’t even realize we were really playing until the rabbits were in too deep. I’ll go into that more in a bit, but first, here are our bunnies!

We had Pumpkin the not so fast, Lily the tagged, Nibble the frantic, Spot the brave, and Bounder. From the get go I loved the game because everyone started drawing their rabbits. Tali had some pretty amazing skill and ended up draw both her rabbit Nibble, and her husband Arvel’s rabbit Spot. (Also the two of them were on their honeymoon, which was just wonderful).

Asking some questions

We started with the Warren questions. Things like What part of the meadow marks the warren’s location? What do your sense tell you about the warren? And why aren’t you in charge?

After then answered those, with a positively delightful story about Spot running back from a farmer’s house with hounds of hell chasing him down (told by Nibble) we had a pretty good feel for where the rabbits lived. Then I picked a few of the stakes questions that I was interested in finding out answers to. What things do they prize in the warren? What other animals live nearby? What problems do the humans cause?

All pretty standard fare, right? Right. Yes, but then the situation questions… wow, they just started us off:

Is it night or day or somewhere in between?  It’s day.

Why are you so far away from the warren? We found a really good looking beat and we’re all working on trying to dig it up.

How did the hunters get between you and the warren? Their dogs sniffed us out.

What other animal shares your hiding spot? A chipmunk named Stoat.

And boom, we were off to the races. Nervous Stoat asked the rabbits if they would politely leave his log so the dogs didn’t find them all hiding inside it. Brave Spot bolted to draw their attention. And much terror ensued! What I loved was that all we had to do was ask ourselves “what would happen next?” in order to move the story forward and to keep presenting challenges (terrifying ones at that to the rabbits.

Highlights

Lily was so scarred by the dogs almost catching her, she’ll never be able to sneak again because she so jumpy now (harm)

Spot innovated a new move “Bite the nose that sniffs you”. When an animal is sniffing it’s nose in your warren (or burrow you’re hiding in) and you bite it, roll strong. On a 10+ it recoils, on a 7-9 it does so but you have to choose one:

• It will be back soon
• It remembers you, and will take this personally!
• It fights before retreating, take a scar.

Spot chose that it would remember him and the dog, Carl Crandon III, shouted in the name of his ancestors that he would drive these awful rabbits from his home it it was the last thing he ever did.

Nibble using her sense of space to find out where a good hiding spot is! Bounder running around in circles around the hunter to try and draw their fire and give the others a chance to bolt!

There was much panic and much bravery. And digging and hiding among the cabbage!