(Long share)

(Long share)

I just ran my second one-shot of The Warren, this time for random strangers in my local gaming store where they advertised that they were looking for DMs for weekly D&D games. I brought my sheets and asked if anyone were interested in playing something different. I didn’t know if I would run a game that night, but I was prepared in case I could get two or three people curious.

The friendly clerk introduced me to two gentlemen sorting their Magic cards and one filling in a Pathfinder character sheet. One of them had read Watership Down before and another was of the belief that rabbits are evil, referencing Monty Python and The Holy Grail. I can work with that.

They were sent on a lettuce raid to feed the gluttonous chief rabbit Bruno, inspired by Iotho Bruno from the Discern Realties comic strip AP. Oh, so Shameless. They responded to my description with: “So, like Jabba the Hutt if he was a rabbit?”

A huge black dog found them and after some dramatic chases and distraction tactics that went south, Molly the albino, was first badly injured and then carried off to “certain death” while the rest made it back worse for wear, but with the precious lettuce for Bruno.

With some encouragement from the NPC Thistle who was fed up with these suicide missions, they tried to secretly rally bunnies for a revolt against the chief rabbit and his tyranny. But they were not careful enough and Bruno became suspicious. Hellebore, one of Brunos strongest guards would watch them wherever they went after that. Snowball exercised his -1 shrewd more than handful of times this session and this was one of his less appreciated contributions.

On the next lettuce raid Molly came back from presumed death with an incredible story and the black dog was not far behind. (It’s a character move) They set Hellebore up to be killed by the dog after Dave, the magenta tinted rabbit finally turned the tide with box cars. Then they returned to the warren where they managed to eliminate Bruno with lettuce poisoned by humans and overthrow the remaining structure in the chaos that followed.

Overall it was a very dramatic and grounded session and we had a lot of fun. They were inspired by the challenge of playing powerless rabbits and excited by the freedom that came from the system. They were keen to play The Warren or other games like it in the future, so I introduced them to one of my friends who runs regular games of Dungeon World when he’s not torturing himself running D&D 4th and 5th edition for ungrateful souls. Hopefully that will kill two birds with one stone.

My plan is to continue to run public Wednesday games with titles from my library that are mostly powered by the apocalypse. This time I got a batch of your everyday game store patrons, but I hope to also attract more mainstream people in the future.