#RPGaDay2025 - 7 Journey

 


#RPGaDay2025 - 7 Journey

Do I take this literally or figuratively?

Literally, a journey have a beginning location and an end location. I tried to experiment with that idea when I wrote the FUBAR supplement, FUBAR 66. The premise of that game was that the story unfolded along a single linear path, but we didn’t necessarily know what the checkpoints along that path might be, or what order they’d appear in. So we might shuffle together location cards like “roadside diner”, “intersection”, “petrol station”, “children’s playground”, “24-hr express mart” and “abandoned farmhouse”. We place them face down on the “road”, and then we might have a pile of tokens split between the various locatons to indicate the troubles that might be there. Characters face down the issues at the location or might go travelling onward to the next location, with any leftover trouble following them onward as they rush toward the journey’s conclusion. Let’s say you roll a d6 as you approach each new location. 1-2: the unaddressed tokens are discarded from play, 3-4: the unaddressed tokens don’t need to be faced at this location but they still might appear in the future, 5-6: the unaddressed tpkens are added to the locations here and make the scene more difficult.

It was a clever idea, and worked reasonably well to reflect kinds of stories that might be seen in movies and stories about road trips.

Figuratively, every character is on a journey. They’ll have a starting point, but the vicissitudes of fate will often find them deviating from their intended path and aiming in a variety of directions as their story unfolds. A player can rebel against the various forces pulling at them, can go with the flow, or can try to balance these forces against one another. That’s part of the fun of the game.

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