Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Josh Fox about Last Fleet, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out Josh’s responses below to learn more about the game!
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Tell me a little about Last Fleet. What excites you about it?
The elevator pitch for Last Fleet is that you’re brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists aboard a rag-tag fleet, fleeing from the implacable inhuman adversary that destroyed your civilisation. The game focuses on action, intrigue and drama in a high-pressure situation.
The game delivers the experience I got when I first watched Battlestar Galactica (the noughties reboot). I remember the incredible sense of pressure, an exhausted fleet and characters both on the edge of collapse, the high stakes, and the explosive action. I remember the simmering political tensions between different factions. I remember how everyone was under constant suspicion of maybe being a secret traitor, and sometimes people even suspected themselves. And I remember how all of this was demonstrated through personal conversations between friends, family members, lovers, and rivals. That’s what the game is designed to do.
Also, I just flipping love the bad guys in this game. The Corax are a hive mind, an immense extradimensional fungus network that live in the tenebrium, the realm outside normal space that FTL ships travel through. When the Corax fleet attacks, it’s by extruding these huge fungus tendrils out of a dimensional rift and then launching swarms of spore ships.They’re able to absorb their victims’ genetic material and also the information content of their brain, enabling them to create an exact copy of the victim, memories and all, but who is actually a flesh puppet for the Corax. And so, if you lose a fight to the Corax, rather than just getting killing you’re typically paralysed and dragged off to be deconstructed in a biological cauldron. The next time we see you, you won’t be you anymore. Which is pretty horrible.
How does the game mechanically approach the Battlestar-style relationship environment?
A key part BSG is obviously the political environment: a military hierarchy, the presence of elected officials whose interests are only partly aligned with the military, and other factions such as Zarek’s people, Baltar’s cult, the union and others. I’ve baked that into the game setup, so that whether you create a setting yourself or use one out of the box, you’ll generate groups whose agendas will push against fleet unity. That’s then reinforced by the Call for Aid move, which enables players to get certain benefits that they can’t get anywhere else – like access to rare equipment, or the ability to perform an action at a larger scale – often in exchange for tying themselves more closely to that faction.
Of course, like most PBTA games, Last Fleet also comes with a set of charged relationships between the player characters, to get things going. These are handled fairly loosely initially, just little seeds of friendship or rivalry or a grudge or suspicion. But then the game’s core mechanic reinforces that. The nub of it is that you can voluntarily ramp up pressure on your character in exchange for bonuses to your die rolls – an effect that allows you to succeed at almost any roll, if you wish. But to get that pressure down, you have to take actions that generate interesting relationship drama.
There’s three ways to do it:
- You can Let Loose, indulging a vice and losing control. Let Loose is an easy, almost-guaranteed way to reduce pressure, but it also automatically puts you in tricky situations: even on a hit you’ll do something you otherwise wouldn’t like revealing a secret, making a promise, or falling into another character’s arms.
- You can Reach Out, sharing a hope or a dream or a fear or suchlike. Reach Out reduces pressure by strengthening relationships – but then everyone who you build a relationship with has a bit of that pressure invested in them, so if something should happen to them, the pressure comes rushing back all at once.
- You can hit Breaking Point, allowing the pressure to come to a head and then doing something foolish or dangerous. Breaking Point is a bit like getting Marked in Night Witches, in that initially it’s evocative and fun, but do it too many times and you’ll come to a sticky end.
So between all of the above stuff, you get a pretty rich stewpot of political, social and emotional drama.
That potential result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense – what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?
That potential result with the enemy changing you instead of death sounds really intense – what is the effect of this on the game, and on the players?
It’s not something I’d typically expect to happen to player characters. The game’s principles encourage you to build up interesting NPCs and make the players care about them, partly so you can “kill their darlings” later on. Or better yet turn them into baddies.
If it does happen to a player character, you have two options: bring them back as an NPC, or give them the Sleeper Agent move. Sleeper Agent is a start-of-session move, which generates bad stuff that your character has secretly been doing off-screen. Even you, the player, don’t know what it is. How well you roll tells us how bad it is, how much evidence there is to implicate you, and how much chance you have to stop it.
Incidentally you can start as a Sleeper Agent by taking the Scorpio playbook.
What do players typically do in Last Fleet to occupy their time – are there adventures with strange worlds, or are they more likely to be negotiating in a dramatic scene?
It really depends a lot on what roles and playbooks are chosen. The roles include soldier types to engineers to more political characters. The playbooks are slightly more personality-based, but each one will colour the type of play you’re likely to see, with playbooks like Gemini bringing in skulduggery, or Scorpio bringing in intrigue, or Pisces bringing in the supernatural.
There’s always a lot of stuff going on in Last Fleet, which could include things like:
– Dealing with a tense stand-off between civilians and the military, or between other political factions
– Handling the results of mass panic: protests, riots, or other civil disobedience
– Addressing practical problems like mechanical breakdown or resource shortages
– Investigating suspicious stuff, which could turn out to be political, or could turn out to be enemy infiltration
– Handling the fallout from the above – bomb threats, sabotage, poisoned food supplies, etc
– Battling the enemy, whether in tense space dogfights or holding off boarding actions
Whichever roles and playbooks are chosen, the above will be going on at some level, but the emphasis and the approach to problem-solving will vary massively. So you could get more politicking, crisis management, investigation, scouting/away missions, or battle scenes. All interleaved with the interpersonal drama generated by the pressure system.
How do you control the level of violence in the game for players to ensure they’re not veering into monstrosity?
Last Fleet is the first game I’ve written where violence is explicitly coded into the rules, because the war-time setting makes it inevitable. Nevertheless in my experience, violence in play is typically instigated by the enemy who, by definition, are implacable – intent on humanity’s destruction or (as the canonical bad guys, the Corax have it) borg-style absorption. Indeed the nature of the setting makes this almost inevitable. Desperately trying to fend off waves of enemy fighters, protect civilian ships, hold off boarders, and so on. So there’s violence, but it’s mostly defensive in nature or (Night Witches-style) action aimed at destroying military targets.
But violence is a thing that can get more extreme if an enemy, particularly an enemy infiltrator, is captured. We see that in the source material as the characters are so desperate to win the war that they’re prepared to torture or kill in cold blood to get their way. All I can say here is that the game provides absolutely no benefit to doing this. The only interrogation moves are in no way enhanced by putting the target under duress, except perhaps emotional duress (by using the move “call them on their shit”).
Even so, something about the setting is likely to make some players go there, let’s face it. My games always contain a section discussing safety (not yet written for Last Fleet) and war-time issues like violence and torture would be front-and-centre for an initial discussion around lines and veils. Every game I’ve run to date has banned torture from the game before the first scene is played, for instance. That is what I’d recommend unless a group is keen to explore this very dark territory.
There is one particular playbook, Capricorn, who is a risk in this regard. They are explicitly set up as a character who is willing to do anything to defeat the enemy, with moves that hard code in collateral damage, for instance. In this case play is focused on the social and personal consequences of this behaviour: if you’re lucky you steady the fleet, if you’re unlucky you can cause more damage than the enemy, and spark panic. In a way the story of the Capricorn playbook is “can you avoid becoming a monster”, and obviously there’s a chance that the answer is “no”.
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Thanks so much to Josh for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Last Fleet on Kickstarter today!