Players: Shimon, Liz, Andrew, Tim

We decided to make our setting be a defunct amusement/theme park in Southern California, after the apocalypse.

Beginning Abundance: Shelter (If there's one thing we have, it's buildings...and other various, less useful structures).

Beginning Scarcities: Water (A single working drinking fountain), Power/fuel (Our gasoline-powered backup generator is running low), and Population (Very few people...in the 20's or 30's tops).

Beginning Pieces of Topography: A coastline, A giant man-made Tree, a pond complete with its own island and fish (mutant fish due to the tainted water), and a deep sinkhole where one of the park's attractions used to be.

A couple interesting details about our society arose early on. Firstly, our family structure was comprised of interlocking polyamorous familial units. We had a small group of self-declared non-breeders who were living in a tent city on the island in protest of our generally very breed-happy institution.

As this game progressed, it became clear that we had a very dysfunctional society. The town's elder, Jeremiah (who lived in an upper tower of the Magic Castle), decided that the best way to solve our population problem was to pair up the most fertile couples...regardless of anyone's "feelings," and took it upon himself to start a genealogical survey towards this end. Not everyone was thrilled about his plans, and he died unfortunately and "coincidentally" as Jonathan, leader of the free-love movement, rose in his place. There was a bus of school children who finally arrived at their happy destination, only to eat almost all of our food (creating a new shortage). So, like any logical society, we decided that the best thing to do was to try to trade some of those children with a neighboring community for more food. Sadly, it turned out that there were tainted corndogs involved in their little binge, and they all died of dysentery. And then there was me, who for some reason had an obsession with clowns...creating a legend that the night the merry-go-round collapsed into the sinkhole, a psychotic clown had kidnapped people and was holding them there. I think it is safe to say our society had problems.

Ultimately, our non-breeding "lost boys" left us for greener pastures, fed up with how generally "mean" we were. Around this time, a few of our number went to investigate some lights in the sky...and we drew the King of Spades. The Frost Shepherds came. Game over.


Post-game, we discussed what the Frost Shepherds could be and decided that they were probably some kind of military contingent (and the source of the lights). We thought it likely that they did not in fact destroy our society, but just shipped us all off elsewhere...but not before blowing up the tree for good measure...since, you know, what's the point of being in the military if you can't blow things up.

Technically, I facilitated this...although I had never actually played the game (or read the book) before. Shimon and Andrew had both played before, however, so we managed to pull it off. Technically, there should be almost no in-game free-form discussion...and we didn't quite pull that off, but other than that we got into the flow fairly easily. The rules are pretty simple, which helped a lot. Thanks to Liz, Andrew, and Shimon for playing with me. If any of you want to add some details that stood out for you, please do.