Another weekend, another mission with the kiddo. I’m totally off my original script for the campaign, but for good reason: the game’s systems tend to work, so I don’t have to do quite as much work to string a campaign together as I originally thought.

This mission is a follow on from our last one, where we raided some houses to find a scientist’s notes. After a discussion with my son, we concluded they lead to an underground bunker in the city. We had to search and resolve which house was correct, then get everyone inside. The only mechanics I added here were rolling to see if we had found the right building and I limited the enemy types to a few stronger options. If we drew a POI calling for an enemy, we rolled on our list of options and spawned 1D6 of those instead.

And it worked. We ended up ambushed by ghouls–twice. One of these was particularly bad, with Krassny locked fighting a ghoul through a doorway for multiple turns and nearly dying for it. My son, per usual, had excellent luck and saw no issues dispatching his batch of ghouls.

We managed to collect two out of three anomalies on the board (with my newly painted anomalies) and found the correct house early. Knowing that we needed food and water to meet our daily minimum requirements (DMR), we decided to search as many POIs as we thought we safely could. We hit some rough luck trying to actually find useful things, but one of the POIs was an equipment cache. My son is almost bizarrely lucky in this campaign. I found a single unit of food and a single unit of water. He got a cache full of DMR and got us through the day, which was good, because…

We got surrounded by bandits. Krassny, continuing his streak of awful luck, was nearly dead within a turn. After an intense firefight, I managed to get him into a garage and got Artyom in with his flamethrower to clean up. To make matters worse, we rolled an emission storm on the Zone Events table, so we knew we had more problems coming. With two enemies left to go, I couldn’t quite reach them with the flamethrower–but it hit me: I didn’t need to handle them.

The storm did. I threw a flashbang at them, pinning them down. When a storm whips through, you have to be in cover or you take a serious hit. We consider “Cover” from a storm to be significant structures, so by pinning the enemies, we deprived them of enough action points to actually get inside. The storm whipped through, and, well… we didn’t have to worry about them anymore.

After that brush with near death, we decided to scuttle along and get out of dodge, wrapping up the mission. I was once again impressed by how the simple concept of MDR makes you organically make things worse for yourself. Narratively it works well: we have to scavenge for supplies constantly, so it makes sense we’re turning everything over. It further makes sense that this sets off traps and attracts attention from the denizens of the zone. I like the tension of feeling like you’re trying to gingerly kick a bee hive at every turn.

Our next mission sees us going underground in a bunker. I lack the specific terrain for this, so I’ll have to wing it. Class is back in session and I’m not pulling off much of a painting miracle this upcoming week. After that mission, we’ll have an “escape the city” or maybe “monster waves” style mission. Or we might answer the question of what our other two characters are doing. I’d like to eek out maybe 3-4 more games in this campaign, which will actually make it one of the longer campaigns I’ve ever completed.

And I owe all to raising a kid. That’s all it takes: full responsibility for another human being, a lot of money, and about 10 years of waiting. Worth it.