A planet where apes evolved from men?

One of our players had to cancel at the last minute. Another player was out too due to a planned absence, and I didn’t want to start a campaign with two players missing so I had to pivot a little. I ran the three remaining players through the introductory one-shot adventure, something I hadn’t originally planned on doing. It turned out to have been a great idea — none of us has much familiarity with the West End Games d6 system, so it was a good trial run to get used to the game mechanics.

It was also extremely useful for me to get a sense of the way adventure material is written for this game. The game’s authors favor a “sandbox” approach, giving a fairly structured beginning scene or two and then providing a map and/or a list of potential encounters that the players can experience (or not) in whatever order they choose. It’s good for making the players feel like they get to decide where to do and what to do, but the approach can sometimes feel a little vague and unconvincing, especially if you’re the game master trying to shoehorn a plot into it all.

Both the intro adventure and the longer Into the Forbidden Zone campaign we’ll be playing through use this approach. It was great for me to be able to see it in action: the adventure started with a simple premise (the players are all ape characters who are chasing down rumors about some particularly wily and troublesome human beasts), and then led into a map with different encounters at different locations. The players were given a few rumors about the different areas to get them started, and then were free to go wherever they wanted, and the text gave me plenty of leeway to have the human antagonists appear wherever I needed them to, but sprinkled in other encounters as well.

They ended up exploring less than half of the map — at one point they failed a survival roll and got lost in the jungle, and the sandbox nature of the material let me use that to steer them in directions they might not have gone. It also let me scale the adventure to the time we had available to play. The campaign uses a similar structure, and this trial run gave me some good ideas for how to manage it. We’ll (hopefully) start the campaign proper next week, and now I’ve got an extra week to finish painting the miniatures…