I don't think the agency thing is necessarily an issue, but my suggestion would be to present these foreign armies as something akin to a force of nature - you can't seduce or go aggro on a hurricane or a mountainside or radiation, you just have to hunker down and hope you survive. These armies should be the same thing.

Later on, maybe you can change that as you increase the scope of the game.

Let's see…where were we?  Right, Trey got himself a broken nose trying to calm Fox down from his hallucination. (Fox saw himself as Partidge, the guy he killed; Trey as the younger Fox; Sammy as a friend of Fox's; and III as Fauna, Fox's girl.)

You know…if he saw Sammy as someone who was there, I clearly need to ask Fox who was with him when he killed Partridge.

III was an NPC I actually came up with on the drive to the game store.  She's one of the girls at the Convent, and she never speaks.  In fact, I've never said her name—I just hold up three fingers.  (If you check out my other thread, maybe you'll figure out why she's mute.)  She's inspired a curious mix of protectiveness and speculation - the players are trying to figure out if she's a helpless waif or a secret River Tam ninja asskicker.

And I left out a scene - earlier, when Trey went to go see Fox (right after Fox jumped out the window, in fact) he caught Twice, Abondo and Fuse leaving Fox's room.  He failed to Go Aggro (a gunlugger! the shame!) but managed to Read a Person on Fuse (big, slow, likes to burn things) and Manipulate him into letting him go, using the leverage that they would go cook off some rounds from Trey's grenade launcher.  Fuse entertained himself blowing things up and is something of a natural at it.

Right, so, after all of this things seemed to quiet down and I thought I'd announce some future badness, as Sammy sees a group of muscle surrounding a small well-dressed man moving across the floor of the Convent, led by Jeanette.  He catches her eye and reads a person with an 8 - she doesn't want him to piss these guys off.  He tries to stealthily get into a place where he can observe them, but is spotted.  The small guy hands him a card with his name (Peppering) and, sotto voce, implies that should he ever tire of working here, Mr. Peppering's employer could find a place for a talented young man like him.

Everybody knows Peppering works for Parson.  So why is he here, and what does he want with Mother Superior?

They go in to talk to MS, Sammy gathers Trey and Fox and tells them what's up.  Fox has a key to Mother's room, and he's been sleeping with her, so he figures if he gets caught listening in he has a built in excuse.  He overhears Twice report "they're clean" - but Sammy was sure the thugs were packing heat.  Is Twice going to betray Mother Superior?  He grabs the bull by the balls and knocks, telling III (who answers the door) that he needs to see Mother Superior right the hell now.

In her private room, he tells MS everything: that Twice and her thugs tried to kill him, that Peppering's men are armed, that Parson has a spy working in the Convent.  He wants her to believe him…and he blows the roll, snake-eyes.  She dresses him down, telling him that Twice has been with her for years, and tells him to go back to his room like a good little boy toy.  NOW he reads a person and finds out she'd need some damn good proof to believe him, so he calls in Abondo and fast-talks him into spilling, with a promise to protect him from Twice if she retaliates.

Mother Superior sends Twice & co out of the room.  Peppering gets nervous and leaves, which doesn't seem to upset the Mother very much.  In fact, she's got a job for Fox and his boys.  See, Fox has infiltration as a gig, and she very much wants someone on the inside of Parson's camp…

Hmm.

On the one hand, you did retire a character, so logically you should get a replacement.

But, you have a character already, so it's not like you'd be kicked out of the game.

But, you did take two characters as an advancement option, it seems kind of mean to take that away from you.

On the other hand, you pretty much lose all your other advancement options when you retire or lose a character, so why should you keep that one?

You could be losing your second character, though, the one you got from the advance. 

But do I really want to keep up two sets of rulings depending on which character you retire? No, that's kind of ridiculous.

Final decision: "So, Player, do you want to keep playing two characters, or do you want to go back to just one?"   

OK, I moved Parson out of Ambition so I really ought to fill that slot, but that's OK because I had been thinking about these guys and wondering what to do with them. 

I mean, just because we've got poison gas and shit floating around doesn't mean that we want to leave all that great stuff unused - but most people don't have the balls or the equipment to go searching around long-term in the ruins that aren't habitable.

Enter the Salvagemen, a bunch of creepy bastards who do just that.  Armed with gas masks (some makeshift) and protective gear to keep the poison off their skin, they head down into places like Denver's eastern outskirts, Pueblo, Salt Lake City, take what they can find, and bring it back.

Actually you know what?  Fuck it, that's not interesting enough, and I just spotted Warlord/Prophet.  The Salvagemen are wearing all that protective shit every time you see them.  They're an insular little community with their own superstitions and tales.  They don't talk much to outsiders, except to Barter with them, because nobody else understands what it's like down there in the Fog.  They are ripe for someone to rise up and tell them why they are the chosen and everyone else is wrong.

To join the Salvagemen, you have to give yourself to the Fog.  Walk deep into it, until you can't see the group you left, then strip naked, breathe deep, and roll +weird.
On a 10+: You are accepted! The Salvagemen accept you as one of their own.  If you leave the Fog for more than a couple of hours without your Salvager gear, though, make the "if you enter the Fog unprotected" move.  Those masks aren't to keep the gas out.
On a 7-9: You have been touched by the the Fog, and it takes something from you.  What was it?  Although you do not join the Salvagemen, take +1 ongoing when dealing with them as they recognize this.
On a miss: The Fog rejects you.  Treat as if you failed the roll for entering the Fog unprotected.  Hope you can make it back out.


I figure the Salvagemen are one of the sources of food, machinery etc. Having their support would make winter a lot easier to handle.

Sorry, I'm not recognizing the reference.

Full Throttle, one of the classic LucasArts adventure games.  The Cavefish were a band of rival bikers who used night-vision goggles.

It's going to take a hell of a lot of games of AW to get me to give up decay as a front, because fighting against decay?  That's what my favorite works of the genre are about.

So what do we have? As we're playing in the first session I ask them, "So where are you?" and they tell me, "Denver" and I say "Why?" and they say "Maybe because its high up, it's safe" and I'm like "so what, anything lower than Denver is fucked, like poison gas or something?" and they're like "Yeah."

So picture it, you're looking east from Denver, CO, and instead of seeing the whole goddamn country laid out before you, you see the lad getting lower and lower, and it descends into this stuff, this yellow-green nasty fucking mist, clinging onto the ground.  Sometimes there's more of it, sometimes less.  Maybe when the weather's right you can get certain places that are usually blocked.

You know what? Have a couple maps.  Here's the western US, and the CO/UT area:


I actually did these with a "sea level rise" map overlay but it works pretty well.  Red means you're fucked; orange is the mist coverage on a typical day, yellow is as bad as it gets.

You'll notice that yellow comes right up and touches Denver - it's all around the Convent.  When the mist is at its worst, people climb up to the second floor and pray it doesn't get too high.

So yeah, the mist.  Landscape/Furnace.  I know I said breeding pit, but right now it just seems like it's dead out there beyond.  Maybe I'll change my mind later.

I figure I need a custom move for going into the stuff.  This stuff is fucked up, it's swallowed most of the goddamn planet, there is no way it's not connected somehow with the psychic maelstrom.

So, if you enter the mist unprotected: roll +hard.
On a 10+, you hold your breath and keep it together long enough to do your thing and get out.
7-9, choose one:
- burning lungs, take 0-harm AP and -1 ongoing until you're out of the mist
- You cough up a hunk of bloody mucus. At least, you hope it's just mucus. Take 1-harm AP.
- your mind gets ripped open and exposed to the psychic maelstrom. Treat it as a miss on that roll.
On a miss, all three.

The mist doesn't have a countdown, it's just there.

The PCs started the game working for Mother Superior, whacking a rival leader, so I'm going to start with her too: she's dead center on the Ambition front, which probably needs a name.  She wants to unite the various Rockies settlements and she wants to be, if not in charge, then the one pulling the strings.  I'm putting her down as a Warlord/Hive Queen: consume the other leaders and their holdings then swarm on to the next.

Threat 2 is going to be her chief enforcer, one of the first leaders she chewed up and spit out.  Shading to the envy side of Ambition, because the PCs seem to be Mother's new toys.  She's called Twice, and her gang is Brute/Enforcer.  I pick a few names for her gang: Rum, Abondo and Fuse.

Threat 3 is the mysterious Parson.  We know he's a Grotesque/Mindfucker, so he craves mastery.  I have a feeling that he's got his fingers in a lot of pies, and Mother Superior is upsetting that balance.  There's only space for one behind the curtains and he wants to be it.  I get the impression that nobody deals with Parson directly.  Like, nobody even knows what he looks like.  It's all intermediaries.

I'm leaving the fourth threat open for now in case something good shows up in play.

The fact that two threats on this front are both working "offscreen" for their ambitions makes me call this Front "Shadow War", and that lets me write the Dark Future: unless the PCs tip the balance, Mother Superior and Parson will keep up the brinksmanship until the war comes out into the open and there's blood in the streets.

Need to think about the countdowns for this one. 

Twice's countdown might look like this: every time the PCs do something for Mother Superior that she could have done, advance 1 tick.

3pm - dirty looks and the cold shoulder but nothing more
6pm - refuses to offer or accept assistance
9pm - scuffles between the thugs & PC supporters, no blood yet
10pm - betrayal on the battlefield, or anywhere else convenient
11pm - "Mother Superior, it's them or me."
midnight - pushed too far, Twice gathers her entire gang and comes after the PCs (or Mother Superior, whichever seems appropriate).

For Mother Superior - a countdown to an assassination attempt might work.

For Parson - maybe one to discovering his identity, or his reaction to attempts?  The PCs certainly seem to be heading down that path.

I know that not all threats need a countdown, but they seem pretty darn useful.