Aftermath — Daniel’s Wasteland Let’s Play
An eight-volume dossier arrived at the desk this morning bound in soft chewed paper, the cover stamped with a tiny clawed paw-print and the words Raid on Enjo. The Keeper, who has filed paw-and-claw dossiers under A for Aftermath since the catalogue clerks first met the term, opens the bundle and reads on.
The series chronicles Daniel (@dungeondive)'s November-and-December-2019 Let’s Play of Jerry Hawthorne’s Aftermath — a post-calamity beast-epic from Plaid Hat Games in which the humans have vanished and the critters left behind manage a colony, hunt for scrap, and dare the ruins. Daniel coins the channel term critter crawl in the opening volume and never quite manages to stop using it. Seven Let’s Play volumes track a single mission — Raid on Enjo, in which a guinea pig and a mouse must climb the ruin of an old vending machine for one last bag of onions noodles — and the eighth volume is the formal critter crawl review.
The frame Daniel lands on is that Aftermath is Jerry Hawthorne’s best game since Mice and Mystics — likely the distillation of what Jerry has been working toward. The encounter-card-references-storybook design produces hundreds of narrative moments from a small deck. The four-character-personal-goal campaign win makes one box replayable. The art lands without slipping into cute. The rule book, however, continues a Plaid-Hat trend Daniel began grumbling about in Comanauts — too thin to teach the game and too dry to make a reader excited to play it.
The Exhibit Catalogue:
- Aftermath — Let’s Play — Introduction — Daniel coins critter crawl on the channel and explains the four-personal-goals win condition
- Aftermath — Let’s Play — Part One — gecko warband, opposed-skill-test combat, and the worst dice luck of any campaign Daniel can remember
- Aftermath — Let’s Play — Part Two — a defence-card colour correction, two costly nests, and the Toxic Water discovery
- Aftermath — Let’s Play — Part Three — the encounter-card-meets-storybook design explained, and the Hunt mechanic introduced
- Aftermath — Let’s Play — Part Four — heavy objects, low visibility, forced movement, and a deliberate cliff-push for the boss-fight chamber
- Aftermath — Let’s Play — Part 5 — Red-Eye Wee’rd, an action-figure-vest reward, and a roach swarm Daniel openly calls anticlimactic
- Aftermath — Lets Play — Finale — the colony phase walkthrough, Smokey the cat, and a build menu featuring blade bikes
- Critter Crawl: A Discussion and Review of Aftermath — Jerry’s best since Mice and Mystics, with a rule-book gripe that has been building since Comanauts
Filed under A for Aftermath, on the paw-and-claw shelf.
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– The Keeper
Notes that of all the catalogue’s beast-epic dossiers, this is the only one whose dungeon is an old vending machine and whose final boss is a rat with rusty-metal claws, which is, on reflection, exactly what paw-and-claw fantasy was always promising.