The Inspiration

Right now in Minnesota we’re going through a massive deep freeze, in the southern part of the state, we might not get above 0 Fahrenheit for several days, and the lows have been very low, -14 with -30 wind chill (-25 and -34 centigrade). So how can you create a game around something like that, and that is where The Frosts of Rhime come in.

The Setting

A deep magic, something long forgotten, has awakened throwing the lands of Rhime into an ice age. Frost Giants harrow the lands removing the smaller folks, humans, elves, halflings, and even breaking down into the dwellings of the dwarves deep below. A white dragon of an ancient stature sits on the remains of the largest city in the lands.

Deep deep below the rending claws of the dragon and delving of the Frost Giants, pockets of people huddle, always trying to dig deeper below, get closer to the center of the lands and further away from the ever increasing cold that is seeping down.

The Campaign

The player characters come from one of these pockets of people left down below. Just from that setting and telling them to come from one of the groups of people together is enough for the creation for a lot of good backstories.

Their goal, of course, is to return the lands to the ways that they were or at least stop them all from freezing to death. This means beating back Frost Giants, the ancient White Dragon, and more creatures of the cold before they freeze to death. Freezing is actually going to be one of the timers of the game. Unless they can make it back to one of the under ground settlements in time, which are moving, exhaustion becomes a real thing. This is a deep cold that even a magical resistance can only slow down a little.

There are two ways you can drop the players into this game. Firstly, start at level 1, give them small battles leading up to leveling up where they can start to deal with the bigger threats in the world. Or you drop them in at a higher level and let them start to deal with the bigger things. This is one where I might start at the higher level. I don’t know that survivability of low level characters is going to be that likely, even the most heroic.

When I talk about exhaustion, I’m talking about using those D&D rules where eventually you can die. Players at higher levels are going to have creative ways to deal with it more than characters at lower levels and they might be able to stay out for more prolonged times. It might be too deadly for lower level characters. I do want to tweak, a little how exhaustion hurts the players, instead of making their check for it at the end of the day, this is something from the middle of each day. And you need to spend a full day out of the elements deep below the ground to shake it. So no magical housing is going to get it out of your bones unless, maybe, the players spend a full 24 hours in there.

The players are going to battle their way up until they are eventually facing off against an ancient white dragon. At level 20, them versus the ancient white dragon should be in their advantage, but bring in some of the allies that the white dragon seems to have, like the frost giants.

Before that, they will need to get something, the mcguffin, something that the white dragon has used, somewhere in the lands to bring down this frost. Most likely at the top of a mountain that is treacherous to get up and could cause them to die just from exposure. So at the mid levels/early part of the campaign, make it about figuring out where that item is, what that item is, and how to undo what has already been done. Then as time goes on and they get better and stronger, let them go up there, deal with Frost Giants who are guarding the items for the white dragon.

How does this game sound to you? Do these post apocalyptic style of games where survival is key seem interesting to you or do you prefer more focused on high fantasy?

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

This is building off of my articles on where to start in comics and the article on zombies in pop culture. The format is going to continue to be a little bit different every time, mainly because it can be, but I want to talk about some things that have worked well and some that don’t work as well.

I think that we can all think of a lot of apocalyptic or post apocalyptic stories out there. About 5 years ago we had a lot of them being taken on in the Young Adult style with books series like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Maze Runner. Some of these worked better and some were disappointments, at least for myself. Since then, the genre hasn’t really died off, we have Netflix putting out shows like Daybreak and The Rain where things are going horribly wrong or have gone horribly wrong in the world. The genre as a whole has kind of been all over the map though with a lot of goofy stories as well as many very serious takes on the genre as well.

Now, I’m not sure that any particular take is going to be always the right one. Some that take themselves too seriously become overwrought and melodramatic, while others can try and do a humorous take on it that just ends up being hit or miss. And there’s also an element where some authors are trying too hard to be profound on a topic that is going to lend itself to a lot of speculation.

Just to talk about speculation, I feel like there are two that I can kind of compare as to how one does it decently and the other does it poorly. In The Hunger Games, we have this idea of spectacle, and that humans, even when things are going poorly are going to want spectacle and probably even want more and greater spectacle, especially if they are at the top of the food chain. This is something that we can see already in our society where people love things like Survivor, or even before our time with the shows in the Roman Colosseum, so The Hunger Games has a feeling of something that is grounded and truthful to it. Compare that to Divergent. The issue with Divergent, besides that the story just takes a left turn that everyone saw coming is that they split up humanity and society in a way that doesn’t make any sense. At no point in time before has society split itself along those lines in such a way or tested people so that they would be split that way. It feels like an illogical jump for a society to make and one that doesn’t really aid the society in the long run. So even though, I would say, there is some overlap, the speculation and the ability for a post apocalyptic story to have a ring of truth to it makes a big difference.

Now, I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how it’s moved into other mediums. It’s easy to think of books, films and TV shows, but in many ways it’s just as easy to think of video games. The Last of Us is a prime example of a post-apocalyptic game, and the Resident Evil games take place during or after the apocalypse. But probably less known to some, though obviously something I like, is how it’s made it’s way into board games. Pandemic Legacy Season 1 and Season 2 are basically board games about the apocalypse and the fallout from that. And it gives you an interestingly written story. Even a game like Dead of Winter, which I’ve mentioned in the zombie article, is definitely about survival after the apocalypse. While I don’t have a ton of post-apocalyptic games on my shelf, I have a lot that are about thwarting that great disaster from happening, basically all of the Lovecraft Mythos investigative games from Fantasy Flight fall into that category. In those games, Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition, Eldritch Horror, Elder Signs, you’re always trying to stop a great old one from coming through, or something along those lines. Even fantasy games like Gloomhaven, Sword & Sorcery, and Aeon’s End: War Eternal, while maybe not as heavily apocalyptic as some, have bits and pieces of that thrown in, especially if you fail the campaign.

Finally, there are RPG’s, and I think when it comes to a medium that is built for the apocalypse, RPG’s are that medium. Even if it hasn’t happened, the fact that you’re going on an adventure to do something, it’s going to be to stop something bad, and generally that’s some form the of the apocalypse for at least part of the world. And if you make it up to level 20, it’s probably for the whole world. In fact, one of the campaign books for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is Princes of the Apocalypse. There’s just something about the story of an malevolent god trying to destroy humanity and the player characters becoming humanities champions that just works well for a story. It’s one of those things where you can joke that it’s a story as old as time, but it works for so many reasons as it gives you that heroes journey and that final thing for them to overcome.

Well, that was kind of rambling, I had a lot that I wanted to talk about what I like from apocalyptic stories and why some of them don’t work as well if they ring a little hollow. Plus, I couldn’t go an article without talking about how it has flowed into the RPG and Board Game mediums. What are some of your favorite apocalyptic stories from whatever medium it might be?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

Pro

• The setting looks amazing
• Mythic is known company
• Aesthetic is amazing
• Hidden action selection

Cons

• Game play didn’t look that exciting

Campaign Thoughts

It’s a little bit lighter on this section than it is sometimes. I do think that there’s more than I could pull out of it, but honestly, I look at a lot of Kickstarters and there aren’t a ton of massive things that stand out to me. I want to like this game more than I do by just looking at it, but when it comes down to it, I have other games with a post-apocalyptic setting. I have other survival sorts of games, and while it has minis that look cool, I feel like the game play doesn’t match that.

Now, I will say, I’ve only seen a game play, not more, so maybe I am missing something from that one that Man vs Meeple did on a live stream, but generally I’ve been able to get the game and I’ve enjoyed how the present games, even if the games aren’t for me. And I felt like I understood the game, but it was just lacking in excitement that the game looks like it should have. I don’t feel like they had any “aha” moments or stand-up moments, and with the theme, it feels like there should be those in the game.

Back or Brick?

For me, this is a brick. I realize that I’m probably missing something and that there is likely a good and interesting game there, I just don’t think it’s for me. The game play doesn’t match what I see on the table, and the aesthetic and theme aren’t enough to push it over to where I’d want to try it for myself for sure, especially at that price point, which is a fair price point, but not one that you take a risk on.

How about for you, is this a back or a brick? Is there something that you think I’m missing in game play?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

In Fallout, you take on one of several roles from the video games, you might be a Ghoul or a Super Mutant or someone from a Vault or someone who explores the wasteland for a living. You, and the fellow players are racing to be the best wanderer of the wasteland, completing objectives, fighting monsters, and exploring new locations and ruins. By completing various objectives and fights, you can gain experience points to become better at surviving the wasteland. On your turn, you can move, explore, interact with quests or fight, but when you interact with a quest or search a location, those are where the game really takes off, because you get story read to you. Fallout as a branching story deck that allows you put in or take out cards from the story and advance quests an the main plotline, and depending on what you do, that determines where the story and scenario go. And that’s also how you can get victory points, and the first person to nine points wins.

Let’s start out by talking about theme, the people who I played with talked about how it pulled in quests and side quests from the video game, and that thematically it felt right for that. As someone who wasn’t familiar with the game, I thought that the theme worked well, and I enjoy a good dystopian/post-apocalyptic theme. I’m sure if I was more familiar with the IP (intellectual property) I’d pick up on more of the specific Fallout theme, the theme didn’t differentiate itself a ton from other dystopian/post-apocalyptic settings. That said, it wasn’t completely generic either and even without playing the games, just from being familiar with them in concept, things like Nuka-Cola are nods to the video games that I recognized.

The theme isn’t where the game suffers a bit for me. The game is pretty stingy in handing out points. So getting to nine victory points, which are on quest or objective cards, is slow. And you basically always get them through completing parts of the story quest. You can fight monsters, but unless they are harassing you, it’s not that great a strategy, and while leveling up can be helpful, the randomness of how leveling up works can work out extremely well for some people and very poorly for others. I like the concept of leveling up and how it works, but it felt a bit too random. And leveling up doesn’t give you anymore scoring and isn’t always that helpful for allowing you to get more of the main quest done.

But, to counter some of what I said here, the story parts are the best part of the game. The combat, challenges, exploring, movement, all of those things are pretty standard fair. The story, on the other hand, how it’s created is well done. You can branch out in different directions as to who you help or how you help them. That will then lead you into a new section of the story, depending on which one you did, and it continues to branch and add things to locations that you can explore as well as to the main story. And since that’s the best way to get victory points, it really encourages you to find ways to solve the main quest items as they come up. And that means that there is more story that is read. And sometimes the main story is contingent on the locations that you are searching, so separately you all search at similar locations until you find what you need.

There is one notable other downside for me, this is not a short game. Getting to nine victory points, because it mainly comes through quests that you can then get more points because of completing objectives, the game can last a long time. Our three player game lasted probably near 2.5 to 3 hours, and while the story is good, that means that you’re taking a lot of turns where you are either getting generic story or no story at all. And, if you don’t get lucky on some dice rolls at times, you can find what you need to get more story, but then the story is taken away from you. If this was a fast game with turns taking a few seconds (which they generally don’t take long) and you get points for killing tough monsters or other ways, the game would work better. Instead, the game overstayed it’s welcome. I think I’d find it more interesting if you could try and move forward the story faster every turn, or that the choices were a bit more choose your own adventure style or, in Dungeons and Dragons terms, failing forward, where even when you don’t succeed on the main story, that causes it to move forward somehow, as that would make the game move faster. For what we were doing in the game I think that 1.5 hours would have been a good upper time limit, not nearly twice that long, and the game can be played with four people, which is going to make the game last even longer.

But overall it’s not a bad game. I think that fans of the Fallout video games who like board games are going to enjoy this game way more than I did. And, I think, with the expectation of how long the game takes set from the very beginning that might help better set expectations for the game. I knew, generally, how long it was, but the game still seemed a bit long to me. I do think that the theming is pretty strong and especially that case for fans of the video games.

Overall Grade: C-
Gamer Grade: C
Casual Grade: D
Fan of Fallout Grade & Board Games: B-