Tons of great ideas packed into this one, and it correctly observes how freakish the Washington Monument looks ever since they put the red blinking aircraft-avoidance lights up top, flashing like hellfire in the eyes of a hungry vampire.
A hexcrawl that is ~maybe~ a bit long relative to the encounter table that feeds it, but with solid gold on that table. Sure to leave a lot of memorable experiences for the PCs/Players.
The team gets battered by ever-shifting conditions unless they're in a "Stable" area, but "Stable" is not always the same thing as "Safe", providing the closest thing to a big Boss Fight as a logical quasi-twist. That's a nice touch, and a solid way to give "givable" stakes to the missions "ultimate" encounter.
I'd probably remake the map if I ran it, but that's my intuition against the author's intuition/playtesting, so I'm reluctant to call that "the right call". It feels like having the players have to voluntarily take on so many extra hex grids to encounter the big fight, still a minimum of 4 unexplored hexs from safety, might be too much of a rug-pull. That big fight is no joke either, >20hp, a 4d6 one-off attack, "Thorn" defensive ability, and zombie summoning. Great setup, I'd just consider moving it closer to the escape border ~or~ making victory over the 555 foot vampire stabilize the city. Or maybe have Marine One parked there so the team can fully self-extract?
There's nothing I would cut, and very little I would change or add. I think it's very close to a perfect metadimensional trip, squarely halfway between my maybe-too-simple 'CRAT : Berlin' and the wonderful 'Mandelbrot Set' in terms of complexity and length.
Play zine
METAFLUID FALLOUT's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
SUBSTANCE | #6 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
Overall | #11 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
STYLE | #15 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
This zine rules! A fantastic story full of different prompts and circumstances, detailed but malleable scenarios, tons of NPC stats and resources, as well as interesting player mechanics to keep them engaged in a pretty wild setting.
A Washington quite literally out of time, shattered across multiple timelines and scenarios in a shrouded hex-grid. Players search for stability with a Stability Detector, a really useful way to keep them pushing the narrative without feeling like aimless. Upon death, dead players can return as an alternate version of themselves, swapping out traits and bringing possible danger with them. I'm a big fan of mechanics that allow players to stay in play and offer risk to their resurrection, it's a really solid way to let players explore more of the game and their character concepts.
The game and it's timeline a lot of interesting conflicts and scenarios for the players to navigate, ranging from a thrill-seeking time-travelers, roaming dinosaurs, godlike-entities, apocalyptic futures, endless bloodbath, all-out nuclear war, and the literal night of The Watergate Scandal. Concepts that dance between capital-W Weird Fiction, pulp classic concepts, and actual political conflict rolled into one!
The design of this book is very classic FIST, mechanical diagrams and narrative excerpts alongside some some handmade art for the cover page. It's formatted well while still being relatively convenient for black&white printing. I think some of the formatting on certain paragraphs can get a bit crowded and bunch up in a way that was a bit hard to parse at first glance.
Overall it's a fantastic zine and mission module for FIST, really highlighting its versatility as a game and as a setting.
Metafluid Fallout packs a lot of adventure into just 16 pages. Washington DC has "Gone Wrong" and your FIST team must escape from a dangerous clash of timelines before they are lost forever.
This journey across timelines takes the form of a hexcrawl. Players roll dice to determine what the next hex or "timeline" may contain. These encounter range from the time of dinosaurs, modern US history, and even strange far off futures. The excitement of not knowing what's coming and the thrill of risking just one more encounter before safety make the main appeals of this mission.
The map is obscured from the players meaning they don't know how far they are from their goal or even what direction they want to go. This rule has one exception in the form of the "Stabilty Detector." This device acts as both a compass and a divination tool. The detector points you in the direction of "Stable Hexes"; points in the journey to rest and regroup. It also gives players a hint of what the shortest path towards the "Stable Hex" may contain.
The "Stabilty Detector" is an ingenious way of making the players decisions in the hexcrawl feel intentional and layered. Maybe the stable hex is north of here and the direct path is described as "cruel and dangerous." The player may choose to go around the long way and risk the danger of extra encounters to avoid the obvious danger. This tiny bit if agency allows players to make meaningful choices instead of advancing blindly without thought.
The author writes the encounters in specifics instead of generalities. This allows the referee to lean on the module more reliably without having to the fill in too many blanks themselves, which is always an option. This fact makes the game friendly to players and referees of all experience levels.
Overall, this mission will give most players a deep and smooth experience.
I would like to see more encounters written, only because the hexmap is so long. It seems guaranteed you will have repeats of encounters, possibly multiple times.
Metafluid Fallout is a scenario for FIST. It works both as an excellent follow-up to Mandlebrot Set, or as a standalone.
The PDF is 16 pages, with a clean, well-organized layout and easy to read text. There's a custom cover and a rad photobashed hexmap, as well as several public domain illustrations.
The scenario is a hexcrawl without map information, but with the ability to get a premonition about what's in an upcoming hex.
Like Mandlebrot Set, Metafluid Fallout takes place in an unstable zone of spacetime. As a result, the encounters are wild and flavorful, with some being big and bombastic and others skirting existential horror. More than a few are both.
There's a really neat mechanic for replacing player characters in here, with PCs having decent odds to come in as an alternate timeline replacement, as well as new PCs bringing trouble with them when they arrive.
Overall, the writing in this module is incredibly good, and the scenario design is equally strong. If you want an extremely eventful hexcrawl, you should pick this up.
A rather beefy adventure for Fist. A Hexcrawl involving Timetravel with quality art throughout.
Very nice!
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