Summer means road trips for many people. It might be a family vacation, a chance for friends to reconnect after a long school year or even a trip for young lovers to see the country as their attraction grows. What makes these trips memorable are the unexpected moments like flat tires, roadside attactions and crashed alien vessels.
Wait, what was that last thing?
In The Last Caravan, players create a small band of people who are heading out across North America after a devastating alien invasion. It’s unclear if anybody won but the world has definitely changed. The players might be seeking safety, humanity or even a way to show that humans and aliens can live together.
“I grew up in Western Pennsylvania,” said lead designer Ted Bushman, “and have road tripped across North America more times than I can count, sometimes in the dead of winter. There’s something deeply intimate and melancholy about those kind of trips — the frigid dark outside and the warm, bright inside. Deep conversations as the snow falls. The amazing folks I roleplay with are the kind to dig into improv scenes with characters — I loved the idea of building a game that could embrace character relationships in that way.”
Bushman inspiration from several sources, such as XCOM 2’s vision of a world brought low by aliens. There also are echoes of The Last Of Us featuring a journey in a world with recognizable echoes that’s been changed forever. Instead of a fungal mutation, the event in the game is called the Two Months War.
“I come from a fiction background primarily,” said Bushman “and so I have a pretty strong vision of the world and recent history. Unlike a fantasy realm with faction histories spanning a thousand years, most of the important events of The Last Caravan happened in the last 12 months. I tried to build events that feel logical and complete and set the table for interesting play. I’ve brought characters and factions and conflicts to for Atlases [ the GM role] to play with or change as they will.”
As a Forged In The Dark game there will also be a bit of narrative control offered to the players. They choose how to manage resources like fuel and the path they take across the country. These elements shape the story to make each playthrough of The Last Caravan unique.
“You will find desperate people trying to head west,” said Bushman. “Will you let them into your caravan, even if they might slow you down or betray you? You will find factions disagreeing over transformed regions. Who will you side with? For your next region you have a choice between an ice-driving trek across the frozen great lakes or a dive into alien-controlled territory where your allies are prisoners — what risk is more worth it to you?”
The players will also be able to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the alien invaders. The characters could fine danger in mammoth shipwrecks or infiltrators trying to pass as human. Maybe even a little bit of both.
“In an early playtest,“ said Bushman. “A player asked if they could be an alien in disguise. Like any good GM, I said yes, and that meant that, from now on in this world, aliens can disguise themselves as humans and we can have all the Battlestar Galactica imposter drama that that implies. John Harper does this with ghosts in Blades [In The Dark] — intentional vagueness about the limits of your magic system allow you to adapt it to player impulses and needs.”
The aliens offer another element the players might shape. They could be the monolithic bad guys of films like Independence Day or something more enigmatic like the ones encountered in Contact. The players actions might take the story into one where the two factions make peace and rebuild the planet together.
“In my vision of this world,” said Bushman, “there are sympathetic invaders. The future is up in the air, and a single car’s worth of travelers might be able to transport an important Maguffin in a way that could shift the tide of the coming war. The hardest choice might end up being: what do you want the world to look like? And how will you make that happen?”
The unlocked stretch goals include an unusual player type. These stories often feature a dog companion like Fallout 4’s Dogmeat. One of the options coming out with the full game include playing the travelers’ trusty dog.
“Having the Good Boi as a player archetype lets you not just have a dog companion,” said Bushman, “it lets you be the dog companion. You’ll get benefits based on your sense of smell and ability to communicate with other dogs. I’ve been toying with the idea of an alien artifact that allows you to communicate in two-word phrases to your humans, and whether it’s too silly.”
The Last Caravan is on Kickstarter until Tuesday, June 27th. The digital PDF is currently slated to release in October 2023 with a phyisical release in November.
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