Golden Sea is a one-page microgame written by Grant Howitt. Every month he writes a free 1PG and releases them via Patreon. Grant is the name behind other games like Drunken Bear Fighter, Honey Heist and Pride And Extreme Prejudice. Most of them lend themselves well to quick, light-hearted sessions. Golden Sea is one of the more serious examples. (If you want to try it yourself, I really have to recommend J. Wagnaar's redesigned version. Grant releases games as an angled photo of a collage document. It's a unique look and I guess it's his signature style, but I personally find them difficult to read.)
Characters get three stats: Physical, Social and Mental. Numbers are generated by rolling 5D6 and removing both the highest and the lowest. The remaining numbers get assigned as the player prefers. There are also eight Paths which each have three Abilities. Each player selects two Paths for their character and chooses an Ability from each. It's a very simple system, but the Paths and Abilities make it possible to differentiate characters well. Task resolution is by rolling 1D20 +stat +any Ability that seems applicable vs a target number.
The setting is post-apocalyptic, but so far past its apocalypse that it's retreated into myth. My big mistake of the evening was not communicating that aspect of it to the players. When I described it as post-apocalyptic, they imagined a Mad Max-style chase across the desert. There were five characters: Idonou, Yu Tuu, Sherlock Holmes, Valium and Nameless. If you think the names reflect how serious the game was going to be, you would be right. I went with it, although it would have been nice to explore the implied setting and I might suggest it to my regular group the next time our current GM is out of town.
As well as the Golden Sea rules, I had an oracle app for my phone to give me random ideas, and a copy of Joel Priddy's Knave Fancypants document which includes the Buildings Are People hex exploration rules.
I started the session by informing the players that they were a company of traders,with an antigravity skiff loaded up with chocolate bars from the last working factory in the area and their job was to travel through the characters' home towns swapping the chocolate for barter and returning with a load of water from the only river in the desert. The players all marked the characters' towns on the map, and the logical choice for first stop was Sherlock's town. I asked him what the settlement's major resource was:
"Drugs."
Well, okay then. During the final discussion before starting the players introduced a couple of complications for the characters which I was happy to adopt. First, they had to keep the chocolate from melting in the desert sun, and secondly they couldn't move diagonally across map squares, only horizontally or vertically. That meant that drugtown was the only settlement within reach of the company's skiff with the provisions they had. Valium suggested rationing their supplies to reach a second town (on the map its resource appears to be 'volcano') but the other characters vetoed that idea.
Before starting I consulted my oracle and informed Valium that one of the company owners took him aside on the final night before they were scheduled to leave and told him that one carton of chocolate (subtly marked on one corner) was from a production run that got contaminated in the machinery and it could potentially make people sick. They still had to sell it, but it was his responsibility to make sure it went to a customer far away from the home town so they'd be less likely to make trouble. Valium instantly told the other characters, because they were all in it together. None of them objected to making the sale. Margins were tight, they needed a profit.
I rolled for weather and got a result of 'worsening from yesterday'. I ruled that meant clouds and wind, with the potential for a sandstorm to develop if it picked up further. The characters were cheerful enough, clouds made it that much easier to keep the chocolate solid. They left early in the morning, had no encounters, and enjoyed an uneventful day. The weather steadily worsened over the next few days, but the threatened sand storm never arrived, and eventually there was a sudden change back to sunny skies. That raised the prospect of the chocolate melting, so they rigged a cover out of white sailcloth to keep direct sunlight from hitting it. That worked and they were able to proceed.
That same day the dice ruled for an encounter and they noticed a column of smoke in the distance. Sherlock had picked a set of binoculars as his starting equipment. He checked for the source, but found it was below the horizon. If they wanted to know what it was, they'd have to turn aside from their route and maybe add an extra day to their trip. They were on their last day of supplies, so voted to leave it and continue on to drugtown.
They never saw it, but the smoke was from another trading skiff that had been brought down by desert raiders on hoverbikes. On the map, they were now on a direct line between the crash site and drugtown. Sherlock had described it as a town run by opposing gangs. That make it seem like a reasonable destination for the raiders to be headed to trade their plunder for a good time. I asked the players if they altered their route at all. No, they decided to stay on the most direct path to drugtown.
The skiff had nice big sails to catch the wind and attention from any observers nearby. The approaching bandits easily noticed their vessel. The characters spotted them on the approach and Idonou tried to sharpen a couple of poles into spears. He rolled badly and failed to put a point on them, but handed them out anyway. A pole is better than no weapon. The bandits overtook and separated into two groups of two and three, approaching on opposite sides of the skiff. Their leader made an obvious 'pull over' gesture. Instead, Sherlock showed his pistol. That group of raiders dropped back, and one of the two on the other side threw a burning molotov onto the skiff's deck. The rag fuse went out before it hit and the petrol failed to burn (a bad roll by the GM). It made a fairly good distraction though, and the bandit who threw it used the opportunity to try climbing onto the skiff. The going was difficult (another bad GM roll) and Nameless kicked him off before he managed it. He went tumbling into the sand.
The riderless hoverbike wobbled away and toppled over, kicking up a fountain of dirt. The second got closer to throw another molotov, but Nameless fended him away with a pole. (Nameless had 6-5-4 for his stats, and would be the hero on more than one occasion during the evening.) Sherlock made a difficult called shot and smashed his remaining bottles with a bullet to the saddlebag.
With one bandit dispatched and other disarmed, the party thought the fight was over. That was when the bandit leader swooped up from his position directly behind the skiff and threw a molotov. This one splashed burning fuel across the deck. The characters scrambled to smother it with a tarp, while Yu Tuu swerved the skiff and knocked the leader off his hoverbike. At the same time, Sherlock shot the other bandit in the head.
Yu Tuu saw two dismounted hoverbikes ahead and discovered that the last two bandits had stopped in order to throw molotovs in tandem as the skiff passed. He swerved again, but at the speed involved he was only able to get out of one bandit's range as they passed. A molotov smashed against the skiff's hull and they were on fire again. Yu Tuu brought the skiff low and turned it in a tight circle, scraping the burning fuel off against the sand. They were scorched but undamaged and turned back to claim the dead bandits' hoverbikes as extra barter for drug town.
Link to part 2.
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