NOTE: I blurred out the art in our tokens because I didn’t want to steal from artists but it is easy to grab art for your games; make sure you buy their work to support them (which we did). Picking out the art for our mechs took the most time and was really gratifying. I quickly made up and uploaded the tokens with Affinity Designer while folks got acclimated to their character sheets.
Bankuei from Deeper in the Game mentioned Apocalypse Frame (Illuminated by Lumen) and I was immediately intrigued. Emailed some local friends, printed out the pdf and we were engaging in the most traditional of winter holiday traditions, pretending to be piloting giant robots, throwing sci-fi weapons against fascist hover tanks.
For our first mission, support vehicles were getting across a bridge and Republic hover-tanks were attacking. A turret crew landed who were finishing up constructing it after being air-dropped into place. It reminded us of D&D 4e a bit, which for us is a high compliment. The economy is fiddly and interesting and the different mech’s powers were fun.
Our strike team trio:
an H3 Angler, call-sign: SHELOB
an M1 Soldier, call-sign: ACHILLES
and an L2 Brawler, call-sign: TAZ (Tasmanian Devil).
The team decimated the hover-tanks being air-dropped onto the battlefield which was fine. The goal of tonight’s game was to get a grip on the mechanics, not face a monstrous challenge.
I find myself wanting to build on the already kinda-sorta narrative-ish mechanics and bolt on something to reflect the relationships between the pilots but maybe not…maybe just name the mechs and flesh out the pilot in those last seconds should they fall in the midst of a mission.
Clearly, we need to name our squad so I can make a logo for future blog posts.
I’ve got ideas for future missions and I’m curious to see how the team does on a larger map with a Prime Enemy, cascading situations and more forces on the move. We’re all intrigued and will be smashing things with Apocalypse Frame again during our winter break. In the game’s description it says that it is a playable work-in-progress, excited to see this progress moving forward. There is a strong foundation to build on.
Githyanki Diaspora 