{"id":1707,"date":"2020-01-08T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-08T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/?p=1707"},"modified":"2021-11-16T00:38:38","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T05:38:38","slug":"five-or-so-questions-on-last-fleet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2020\/01\/five-or-so-questions-on-last-fleet\/","title":{"rendered":"Five or So Questions on Last Fleet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi all! Today I’ve got an interview with Josh Fox about Last Fleet, which is currently on Kickstarter<\/a>! Check out Josh’s responses below to learn more about the game! <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Tell me a little about Last Fleet.\nWhat excites you about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The elevator pitch for Last Fleet\nis that you’re brave pilots, officers, engineers, politicians and journalists\naboard a rag-tag fleet, fleeing from the implacable inhuman adversary that\ndestroyed your civilisation. The game focuses on action, intrigue and drama in\na high-pressure situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game delivers the experience I\ngot when I first watched Battlestar Galactica (the noughties reboot). I\nremember the incredible sense of pressure, an exhausted fleet and characters\nboth on the edge of collapse, the high stakes, and the explosive action. I remember\nthe simmering political tensions between different factions. I remember how\neveryone was under constant suspicion of maybe being a secret traitor, and\nsometimes people even suspected themselves. And I remember how all of this was\ndemonstrated through personal conversations between friends, family members,\nlovers, and rivals. That’s what the game is designed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How does the game mechanically approach\nthe Battlestar-style relationship environment?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A key part BSG is obviously the\npolitical environment: a military hierarchy, the presence of elected officials\nwhose interests are only partly aligned with the military, and other factions\nsuch as Zarek’s people, Baltar’s cult, the union and others. I’ve baked that\ninto the game setup, so that whether you create a setting yourself or use one\nout of the box, you’ll generate groups whose agendas will push against fleet\nunity. That’s then reinforced by the Call for Aid move, which enables players\nto get certain benefits that they can’t get anywhere else – like access to rare\nequipment, or the ability to perform an action at a larger scale – often in\nexchange for tying themselves more closely to that faction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, like most PBTA games,\nLast Fleet also comes with a set of charged relationships between the player\ncharacters, to get things going. These are handled fairly loosely initially,\njust little seeds of friendship or rivalry or a grudge or suspicion. But then\nthe game’s core mechanic reinforces that. The nub of it is that you can\nvoluntarily ramp up pressure on your character in exchange for bonuses to your\ndie rolls – an effect that allows you to succeed at almost any roll, if you\nwish. But to get that pressure down, you have to take actions that generate\ninteresting relationship drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s three ways to do it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n