Morning Pages is the practice of writing something first thing in the morning on a daily basis. A lot of folks do it longhand, but as friend and all around excellent human Margaret Dunlap pointed out there’s no wrong way to do it. So this week, we’re going to try an experiment and do a weej’s worth of Morning Pages, using this.
Dusk by Spencer Campbell is a minimal rule, minimal prep, RPG about a world where the Sun has gone out and the things in the dark have come for the people who are left. It’s a lovely, clean system that does a lot in a small space of time and can be bulked out with additional modules if you want. It also scratches the Destiny 2/Dustland Runner/Mad Max aesthetic I love. That sense of something new being in a world that’s no longer quite yours. I like it and, as the TTRPG part of my brain wakes up a little, I came up with something for it. Welcome to Beacon City 3.
Themes
- I love stories about communication and community and I think the most interesting thing you can do with post-apocalyptic stories is explore the ‘post’. Look at Reign of Fire as an early example of this, or Day of the Triffids as an earlier one. More recently, look at the things The Walking Dead franchise has done to expand and evolve it’s world.
- I’m a big fan of rescue fiction too and the way Dusk is laid out you can do a lot with some fundamentally altruistic characters doing their best to help. The nature of the world really speaks to that too, with the encoraching dark bringing the best out of some people and the worst out of others.
- I like radio stations. I just think they’re neat. And I like the idea of making the world a better place through means other than solving the big problem. Besides, how do you solve the Sun going out? (I have a note about orbital mirrors and light sources but that’s not for this campaign).
- I love irrationally large vehicles. I’ve written about roadtrains before, and Snowpiercer in all its forms shows how much fun you can have with a society locked into an unwelcoming shape that’s vital to their survival.
- I’m doing a lot of reading about rewilding at the moment, the process of releasing limits on nature to repair damage. One of the first things I read was about ‘vegetation pulsing’, where you let large areas go fallow. And then I read about how plants grow more at night…
Concept
- A mobile construction platform designed to lay down and repair communication networks across the continent. When the Sun collapsed, it was repurposed into a Suntech construction platform, building colossal lighthouses that provide artificial sunlight for miles.
- Each of these lighthouses needs to be crewed and each one needs a little of the Suntech powering the platform. So every time they build one, they get a little weaker.
- There should be four platforms, all working towards a central point. Each lighthouse doubles as a radio station, doctoring a communications network onto the continent. But none of the other platforms are responding…
Plot
- The players are a Shard team working out of this platform. They cut a path through the feral vegetation for it to move, guard it while it’s stationary, rescue and assist nearby communities and explore the strange new wildlife growing out in the dark. They also have to discover ways to keep the platform moving, and uncover the truth about whether the other platforms are still active.
Welcome to Beacon City 3. Tomorrow we’re going to look around a little bit.