Thursday, January 22, 2015

Abandoned Parking Lot: Lot A From Fishwife Games For Your Old School Post Apocalyptic Campaigns

There are times in the wastelands where a DM  wants to slow your party's roll whist adventuring through the wastelands. And that's exactly what I did the other night. During my Thundarr game I wanted the party to have a mix up with some vat grown goblins. This little gem provided me with exactly the right mix of elements I needed. A full map of the cars and trucks, a mix of different types of vehicles and the potential for greed and monster encounters. I was able to supply the monsters and the rest went done smoothly. Partially because of the diversity of this product. There seven pages of potential post apocalyptic flash point artifact rusty gold and relic conditions. Greed is always a nice motivator & Fishwife games knows how to bring a bit of mystery to the table.


Grab it Right
HERE

According to the product's introduction this is a part of the design of it. 
The parking lots of the post apocalypse is littered with an assortment
of abandoned vehicles. All of these hunks of metal are waiting for the
characters to exploit, loot, and possibly even drive off in. Though the
Game Master and the players might have a few ideas of what sort of
vehicles they would love to find, the parking lots of the urban wastes
are random with their offerings. Some cars and trucks are worthy finds,
others are semi-useless hunks of crap. Some of the interior contents of
these vehicles offer the characters much needed supplies and treasure
while some contents lack in anything desirable. Just like the parking
lots of our current times, you are never likely to know what you'll find
until you snoop about a bit. 

This allows a DM to insert this into an adventure location in their wasteland campaign as a fully realized loot zone with lots of potential for mutant monster mayhem. This can be done easily,quickly, and with maximum damage potential to a party in that adventure location. The secret here in the nature of the product is how its designed. 

Each edition of Abandoned Parking Lot will feature a number of random vehicles and their contents. Though the exact make/model of these vehicles is kept generic, such as “Midsize Sedan”, the author has provided a personal suggested variety of vehicle in the description, such as (Chrysler 200).
While it is likely that the parking lot would be connected to the presence of a building or buildings, these structures are left out of the provided maps (one numbered, one unnumbered). This is to allow the GM to easily drop the parking lot into most any urban wasteland area that they intend to use for an adventuring apocalyptic crawl.
 The current edition of Abandoned Parking Lot offers over twenty some vehicles and the parking lot is intended to be located in a rougher neighborhood. There's quite a few drugs to be found in some of these vehicles, indicating that the nearby crime rate was a bit high before the fall of civilization.
The potential to screw with a party of adventurers is quite high in a number of places and simply sit back and watch the situations arise. The design ethos here is concise and clever a hall mark of Dave Woodrum's writing and savoy when it comes to using his product for max. adventuring and story potential in the wastes. Each car is like a mini story waiting to unfold and with mutations such as artifact empathy and telepastic relic reading and the like, the potential here to drop in exposition about the background and history of your Apocalypse is limited merely by your imagination.
This product is completely system neutral and can be applied across the board for games from modern horror to complete post apocalyptic mayhem ala Mutant Future or Mutant Epoch. But there's another side of this product, with a bit of imagination this one little parking lot could be used for a game like Chill, Call of Cthlhu or may other modern games where an abandon parking lot full of cars can mean the difference between life and death.
Lord knows it saved my life the other night and gave the players a nice excuse to have their adventurers face down giant freaking mutant insects called Chatterers. No relation to the Hellraiser character. All in all I think this one is worth your time and patience, with a bit of imagination this product can be used over and over again for years and years to come! 

2 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for this fine review!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Keep torturing my players and I'll keep spreading the word.
    Cheers Dave!

    ReplyDelete

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