About a year ago I wrote The Starting Adventure Primer, which ended up getting quite a few eyes on it. In the post, I broke down my opinion on what makes for a good system starting adventure and then picked 5 adventures to serve as the ideal examples worth reading. If I were to rewrite that post today, Last Voyage of the Bean Barge by watt for Cloud Empress would make that list. 

You can consider this post a review of sorts, but it’s more an addendum of the prior post. I want to talk about why I think this is a good adventure, but more importantly why it’s a good starter adventure. Spoilers abound. 

Before I dive into the meat of the adventure, a quick note. This is a great example of the benefits of iteration and a strong editorial team. Watt brought on Roz Leahy for editing with additional sensitivity editing from Monroe Soto. Bean Barge was originally released back in 2022 as a primer/promotion material for the then upcoming Cloud Empress Kickstarter. A lot of the bones that would end up in the final version are present in that initial release, but through the development process it was carved into something significantly easier to read and run at the table.

Getting Started

As mentioned above, Last Voyage of the Bean Barge technically released ahead of Cloud Empress itself, but it was through the Kickstarter in 2023 where it would be polished up and released as a standalone zine alongside the core zine, setting guide, and Year One Adventure Bundle. The PDF for Bean Barge is free and can be found here if you’d like to follow along. 

At its core, Cloud Empress is a hack of Mothership and generally seems to follow the “anti-canon” precedent of its predecessor, with a “setting heavy, lore light” mentality. Now, that’s not to say there is no lore, just that it does not intrude upon your ability to use the game and setting in the manner of your desire. With that in mind, there are some very important details that set the stage for your adventures to come and this is where Bean Barge really shines:

1. This is the post-post apocalypse. Humans are still kicking around, but civilization has crumbled from its heights and folks are just trying to rebuild. But the land is poisoned, there’s weird magics afoot, and all manner of strange creatures roam the wastes.
2. The land is shaped by the Imago, the giant cicadas at the heart of the setting. In fact, the Century Brood has come a decade early, meaning the Imago are out in massive quantities.
3. The Cloud Empress herself is missing. The GM and maybe some of the players that read the setting guide likely know her fate, but it is the grand mystery at the heart of the system, as it is said the Empress can grant wishes.
4. The Lordlings that live in the cloud cities have launched the 29th Expedition, a guise of attempting to find the Empress that’s really about asserting and maintaining the hierarchy. The 29th Expedition is not going well.

The Hereafter has two formal seasons, winter and summer. Winters are harsh, with folks often keeping cooped up inside to survive. Summer is a time to stretch your legs and explore, and this is exactly where the players come in. They are part of a Summer Adventuring Party.

When you form your adventurers and get ready to start playing, the GM can do the classic 30 minute lore dump to set the scene, but this is part of why I like Bean Barge so much, as you don’t really need to do that. How do you account for the difference in player and character knowledge? Wouldn’t the characters already know about the missing empress? The Century Brood? The 29th Expedition? No. They’ve just spent the winter in Delta City. This is where the adventure begins, high in the clouds in a dilapidated old town that’s hanging on for dear life. The adventurers may not have lived there forever, but the landscape below has changed during their stay, so the characters learn about these changes at the same time the players do. This background information is drip fed over the course of this first session. 

At the start, you’re set to hop aboard the Bean Barge on a voyage from Delta City down to Snek City in the Lowland Wastes. Those who have read the setting guide know that Snek City has been overtaken by the 29th Expedition, so there’s a chance you may encounter them simply by following the intended course, though the rumors spread by cloudling soldiers at the docks while you wait to embark should start to clue you in. There are also whispers of the missing empress and the early return of the Century Brood, but your goal is far simpler: go start a nice summer after the miserable winter you just spent in Delta City.

Now of course, this is the last voyage of the Bean Barge, so things are not going to go well. Primarily, shortly after you disembark, you will come face to face with the Imago as they attempt to rip the vessel apart to gain access to the dead bodies aboard and the Chalk engines that keep you aloft. So we start slow, information is drip fed, and then you get a very chaotic introduction to the setting’s most dangerous entity. Great stuff. It lets you hop right into play with little need for homework or extensive note taking and then ramps up into what is sure to be a chaotic finale, leaving you wanting more. Exactly what you want from your starting adventure. 

The Pieces

Bean Barge is short. Including covers, you’re looking at 12 pages. You can run this in a tight 2 hours if you have characters ready ahead of time and folks know the basics of the system. The barge itself is 3 levels, with each room getting a terse but well written description. You get a nice ASCII map, which I love, but is a bit tonally inconsistent with the rest of the aesthetics. There’s a random encounter table, a timeline (more on this later), and 5 characters to interact with. This post is already getting long in the tooth, so I won’t dwell too long on the characters, but I do want to note that they’re all very memorable individuals and have tons of potential for interactivity. If there’s one thing that’s missing, it’s stats for the Imago that will eventually assault your vessel. I know it’s easy enough to grab the core zine and flip to the right page, but Bean Barge is a self contained product, so it’s preferable that the needed stats are included.

I had briefly leafed through the adventure upon its arrival in my mailbox, but I picked up Bean Barge to read in full a half hour before I was set to run it. I can dig a meaty adventure, but this is very conducive to how I currently run games with my packed schedule. Any adventure that is both good and can be run with minimal prep already gets high marks in my book. I have little tiny gripes about some of the information design, but with 12 pages you can basically just run this thing on the fly. Again, an ideal situation for a starting adventure. Minimizing the time it takes to get from picking up an adventure to bringing it to the table is a positive in my book, as that makes it significantly easy to run on a whim when your regular group is down a player or bring to a convention for a quick spontaneous session.

The Timeline

Adventures generally come in two broad forms: active and reactive. In an active adventure, action is driven directly by the players in pursuit of a goal. In its most basic form, this is a dungeon, with the pursuit of treasure standing as the force that creates and sustains momentum. In contrast, reactive adventures rely on narrative cues that the players must react to. A common example is a horror adventure, where the monster slowly picks off victims one at a time. Sometimes an adventure mixes these two forms together. 

Bean Barge is a reactive adventure. Action is primarily driven by one key feature, the “Timeline if PCs Do Nothing”, which this adventure frankly would not function without. For those familiar with storygames, you’ll often hear these types of timelines referred to as Clocks. Not every adventure strictly needs a Clock, but they are really helpful when running single location adventures like this one. 

A key aspect is that Clocks are not “railroads”. They present an escalating series of events that occur if the players don’t act, but the players still have agency in how they act. While you gain a good grasp of how the arc of a session might play out by reading the Clock in preparation for running the adventure, it does not present a story or a single narrative path to follow. Your players are going to interfere, and that’s kinda the point, but it does mean the GM needs to be flexible and ready to adapt.

In the Starting Adventure Primer, one of the pieces of advice I had was to make the goal of your starting adventure very clear to the players. They will already be learning how to play this system and figuring out who their characters are, so we don’t need to add analysis paralysis on to the top. Get them pointed in a direction and have them start making choices early. Bean Barge does a very good job at this. Namely, you are onboard a flying death trap. If you do not act, your character will die, and that is abundantly clear. However, it does get more narratively compelling than that with the introduction of some complications. At the heart of the adventure is a murder. The body lies hidden in an escape pod on the lower level of the ship, which is what attracts the Imago to attack the vessel. However, one of the NPCs will also hijack the vessel, directing it towards an Imago feeding ground in a quest for glory and riches, which in turn causes the creatures to be attracted to the vessel to begin with. This unfolds over time, so it isn’t immediately apparent to the players, but the circumstances create a number of impactful choices. Do you attempt to storm the bridge and retake the controls? Do you fight off the Imago attacking the ship? Do you launch the dead body and the Chalk engines attracting the Imago? Or do you just jettison yourself out using the remaining escape pods, leaving those on board to their fate? Maybe some combination of those. But the Clock ticking forward keeps the tension up. There are no perfect solutions, but you have to do something. 

Bringing it Together

Alright, I’ve rambled on here for vastly more words than the adventure itself, so let’s break this down into something more concise. What makes Last Voyage of the Bean Barge a great starter adventure?

• No homework required. If you’ve got pre-gens ready or even want to make characters at the start, all the background information on the setting that is crucial to understanding what will come to pass is contained within the adventure’s introduction. 
• Very little prep needed. On the other side of the coin, this is an incredibly easy adventure to run.
• Key themes of the system and setting are learned through play. The players start in the cloud cities above and travel to the wastes below with a cast of NPCs that represent the various aspects of society.
• Pieces of the core text are shown in action. If you have a bestiary, I better be seeing some of those creatures in your starter adventure! Bean Barge gets a nice double dip by showing off both a floating barge and the Imago.
• Get them making choices. With the clock ticking, the players get a bit of time to get acclimated and chat up the NPCs, but then the tough decisions start coming and don’t stop until the end. Making choices is the easiest way to start learning who your character actually is during play and gets those dice rolling early.
• Don't be afraid to go big right off the bat. Killing rats in the basement is boring! These giant cicadas are the heart of the setting, so showing them off early is key.
• Leave them wanting more. I wouldn’t say that starter adventures need to be contained to a single session as a hard rule, but you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. Getting systems in front of players is hard, but keeping them playing is even harder. In the case of Bean Barge, you end the adventure crashing to the earth in a climactic finale, ripe and ready to start hex crawling. 

Bonus: Bean Barge in Action

If you snag the PDF of Bean Barge, you might find it unassuming compared to the wall of text I have written about it. This is one of those adventures that seems simple on paper, but shines during play, so I figured I’d write a short little play report to give you an idea of one of the potential outcomes.

I run a weekly open table game with a focus on making sessions as self contained as possible so folks can drop in/out as needed. This means I run a lot of one-shots, but my favorite format is the “episodic campaign”. This involves using a single system to run a series of self-contained sessions that link together in a loose narrative arc for those that are able to make it to most of the sessions. Cloud Empress set this up perfectly for me with the Year One Adventure Bundle, so I’ll be running the game for the next month or so (which is also convenient for brainstorming, as I’m in the midst of writing an adventure for the system). 

For our dive into Bean Barge, I had a pair of players. One took the reins of a Lordling from Delta City looking for adventure while the other was a Courier whose previous barge had been hijacked by cloudling soldiers joining the 29th Expedition. I won’t bother writing this out in proper prose, but here are the basics on how things went:

• Arrived late to the barge, which took off immediately after hopping aboard.
• Onion told PCS that the other four passengers were down in the Observation Room, but they couldn’t do the full tour at the moment, as they needed to tend to their duties.
• The PCs met Genmo in passing as he was leaving the Observation Room to go elsewhere.
• By the time the PCs got into the Observation Room, only Cyppa was left. They took some interest in her and were able to help bandage her wounds, but ultimately didn’t have the type of healing she needed. She would later succumb to her wounds while the PCs dealt with other matters.
• The ship began changing course. Unbeknownst to the players, Genmo had taken over the controls. It wasn’t long before a juvenile Imago would latch itself to the underside, causing the whole barge to shutter.
• The PCs split, with the Courier trying to get to the bridge and the Lordling investigating the disturbance below on the mechanical deck. 
• The Lordling made it downstairs to find the state of the escape pods and dead body, along with one of the Imago ripping its way through the hull.
• The Courier ran into Onion on the way to the bridge. They both tried to break down the door to the bridge, but didn’t have any luck before hearing shots ringing out from the Lordling down on the Mechanical Deck. 
• As those two rushed down to join the Lordling, the Imago managed to rip its way fully into the hull. With a blast from Houndscratcher (which was commandeered earlier) to push the Imago back, the three of them crammed themselves into one of the working escape pods and fired it off to tumble towards the wastes below.

It was a quick session, about 2.5 hours including getting characters set and a quick explanation of the system. Menfa was elsewhere, so they didn’t end up encountering her and the troubles with the bridge door left Stello and Genmo unexplored beyond their brief introductions. But overall, I was thrilled with how everything went down, which left them with a powerful (but currently depleted) weapon and a newly out of the job traveling companion. We pick up The Seed Vault next session!