Paleao Diet - Ayah's Scavenge

Ayah’s Scavenge

I'm afraid it was back in August that we last heard of my prehistory heroine Ayah, I can't believe how fast time moves, anyway she is back.

Ayah escaped the demon Monkey men and is now trying to make her way north and hopefully join up with the rest of her Clan. She must find food and so I’m using the standard Palaeo diet rules for food and all the rest of it.

I rolled a dice to see if she had a trait in the game and it turned out she had the Hungry Trait which was quite appropriate as she hadn’t eaten for 2 days.

She has found the Big River and just has to follow the left hand bank until she arrives at the big white rock and then she can cross where the water is shallower and then continue her journey north to the where the Clan should be. They usually hang out in the summer in an area that’s the size of Europe, well realistically it’s maybe only one percent the size of Europe but it’s still a pretty big place. She has to find them or she will almost certainly die or be killed, which is pretty much the same thing. She has been lucky so far and you don’t get to survive before social security without a little bit of luck and skill, but it’s been touch and go these last 2 days on her own.

Ayah looks along the river back and is fairly sure she is in the right place. She’s been making this journey north each year for as long as she can remember and survival depends on certain markers on the journey.

Then she sees it, the large white rock and knows she was right. There is the possibility that the Clan might have waited here, it’s a specific spot that they will certainly have to go past.

In addition to the normal Palaeo rules I have 13 encounter tokens on the table, each one means turning over a card from a normal playing card deck, each Club represents a specific encounter, Lion, Crocodile, Goats etc, the King of Clubs represents the Clan. I am using the full deck (in spite of what Mrs V believes) and so there is likely to be about 3 specific encounters and 9 phantom ones. Obviously only 1 in 52 chance of it being the Clan.

My plan with this series of games was to reduce the odds of Ayah finding the Clan in each game. So providing she survives there is going to be a good chance that eventually she will re-join them. I was thinking this might take 5 games or so.

The vegetation along the river bank looks fairly benign and she can’t see anything that might be a danger, so she starts to move towards the rock.

She moves carefully and in the rules each time a character takes an action they roll a die, they can take 3 actions, the first 2 anything but a 1 is OK but the 3rd needs a 4,5 or 6 to succeed. Failing an action has repercussions, mainly by scaring any animals you might be hunting. Similarly there are 3 movement speeds, stealthy, normal or amble and fast or run. The faster you move the more you may scare the animals, so she takes one stealth and 1 normal action and forgoes the 3rd and most risky one.

That’s when she comes across 3 pygmies discussing the headlines in today’s paper (Jack of Clubs encounter). As she has moved slowly and successfully they don’t see her and she decides even though they are small, three of them might be more than she can manage at one sitting, so she avoids confrontation.

I cropped the picture to make it more dramatic, as well as fill a bit of space. As Ayah crosses some open ground the discussion about the headlines becomes heated and they still don’t see her.

Ayah searched the thicket that is between her and the pygmies as she entered it she saw a rabbit, a critter in the rules, it runs away from her. She had a spare action at that point and successfully used it to pelt the critter by slinging a stone at it. She needed a 6 to hit and kill it, she got a 6. In the previous 2 games I forgot she had a sling and was quite handy with it, at least she hit things in the past which is handy in my book.

The Hungry Trait means that she eats 1 portion of the first kill. A rabbit is 1 portion, so with blood running down her chin but her hunger assuaged she carries on circumnavigating the pygmies who failed to hear the rabbits plaintive rabbit noises, what ever they are.

Just to show the encounter tokens, as I said the pennies represent various encounters, good, bad or evil, usually the later two options prevail and she has to take her chances on the turn of 2 cards. In this instance they both turn out to be nothing more than the breeze stirring the trees and she prepares to carry on to the next thicket on the hill.

In this scenario in the rules, small animals or fruit and nuts can be found either in undergrowth, on hills and somewhere else that I can’t remember at the moment, the encounter tokens are down to me.

Just to show where she is in relation to the pygmies and the river. She is the one with blonde hair mid way up and off to the left but you probably knew that. Ahead of her is the lightning blasted tree and at it’s base is the offering stone.

If you look carefully you can see a penny not far behind the pygmies. The encounter tokens move in a random direction and random distance.

This turns out to be a small group of Mouflon Sheep and the Pygmies are not the sort to look a gift Mouflon in the mouth and move towards them very slowly. In Paeleo Diet each action has a possibility of causing noise and animals will react to that, usually by moving away but I’ve had some innocuous grass eating mammals attack my hunters in the past and so I’m usually very careful.

In this instance the hunters shoot and kill one of the animals and the other 2 run away, a most sensible option under the circumstances. They don’t usually run far and have come to a stop by a small thicket on their left and the last time we saw Ayah she was very close to the same thicket.

She was searching this particular area of undergrowth and had found half a portion of berries, which she was able to save now that she had satisfied her initial hunger, she will need them later. However a nice juicy Mouflon would be a very nice evening meal and you can just see her head to the left of one of the sheep, it’s probably easier to spot her base than her head in the picture.

She pelted it with her sling but missed and the sheep ran away. She failed her next activation and it continued to move away. She decided it was too dangerous to follow it across the open ground in sight of the pygmies, even though they were preoccupied skinning and butchering the sheep they had killed. So she continued towards the blasted tree and the offering stone taking care to keep well hidden. There is another thicket in front of her and hopefully she will find more food there.

This is the offering stone, the Clan always offer something of value to the Spirit of the river before they cross and Ayah must do the same or she will risk bad luck for the rest of the journey. You may think that she hasn’t had much good luck since getting separated from the Clan but at least she’s alive. At the moment, at least.

She has half a portion of berries, this is her last food and so is a worthy offering to the Water Spirits and she hopes it will bring her good luck.

One last stand of growth before she must cross the river, she searches it carefully but finds nothing. With a heavy heart and an fairly empty belly she moves towards the river. There is one more encounter marker close by.

It is the King of Clubs, the rest of her Clan, they are just preparing to cross the river having waited at this spot for two days to see if she would arrive. This is the sort of luck that making a special offering brings and she will always remember to thank the Water Spirit in future years.

There was great joy and rejoicing and they swapped tales of their daring deeds over the last few days but Ayah’s story was the most entertaining.

As this was going on another of the encounter tokens crested the small hill between the Clan and the river, neither of the parties wanted to tangle with the other and so the large monkey went on its way and the Clan made a successful crossing of the river and headed north.

Well that put paid to my projected series of adventures for Ayah, but I’m sure the Shell Clan will return in the future.

For Vampifan – ATZ - Faith meets the Hasslefree Girls

Another bleak part of downtown, Faith and Jane had made it here with out incident, but they were still hungry and looking for food and anything else that would help them survive this holocaust.

I’m not sure why Faith carries a gun because she is far better as a brawler and needs a baseball bat or something similar, Jane is the opposite, a crack shot but if she gets into a fight she is going to come out second best. Unless there are 2 of them in which case she will come out 3rd best.

There are 3 PEF’s (Possible Enemy Forces on the table and five zombies, these 3 zombies move towards Faith and Jane who are hiding in plain sight by the white car.

There’s another zed behind the fencing also moving towards them.

One of the PEF’s is resolved as 3 citizens, they win the meet and greet and go to the next stage but none of them pass their insight test and so do nothing.

Just a sexy little shot of 2 of the citizens and the zombie who is now closer to them than to Faith and Jane.

Frank it's only a figure of speech ;)

The zombies start to close in. Mumbling and grumbling about the lack of brains available, not to use but to eat.

Faith and Jane open fire on the 2 lads on the right, Faith misses but Jane hits and takes out both of them. Fortunately the noise doesn’t generate any more of them.

The citizens had ducked behind the blue lorry out of sight of Faith and Jane but have attracted a friend. Wang Mei fails her brains test big time and decides to do something stupid, like go and fight a zombie - single handed.

This turns out to be a good move and she kills the zombie.

The two girls fire at the last remaining zombie as it charged at them, Faith was rattled and missed but Jane was cool and hit it, then was appalled as it got back up. Wang Mei saw it and she again fails her brains test and attacked it single-handedly and again kills it.

This is looking to be pretty easy so far.

I did another meet and greet test and Faith lost but she decided to join Wang Mei’s group. Well after seeing how she deals with zombies you would, wouldn’t you.

The remaining two PEF’s were resolved at the same time, one is a group of smart looking citizens and the other.

Well they don’t look so smart.

This shows where everyone is located, it’s a bit like the showdown in the film The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

I think this shows the results of the insight test, I’m not sure how the official rules do it because it’s different in different sets and even different editions of the same set but in an instance like this I have rolled loads of dice and this is the number of passed dice by each character and so they activate in this sequence 3’s first, all the 2’s second and together, or even simultaneously, all the 1’s last.

The scruffy looking set of civilians came out the worst from the firing, maybe because they were the meat in the sandwich of the suits and Faiths mob who couldn’t see each other and so both fired on the bikers.

Wrong place wrong time.

Faith and Holly both missed their shots but Jane, true to form hit and killed Fat Willie and wounded Bubble, Keith at the back of the group hit and wounded Faith and she is on the floor rolling around, but he was shot twice by Lemon Moss one of the suits and is stunned but will get back up eventually and Donna was hit and killed by another of the suits.

The Suits were lucky and no one shot at them.

This shows Faith on the ground but luckily there are no zombies in the immediate vicinity.

Wang Mei and GoGo are hiding behind the bus. Well they don’t have shooters and so you would hide or even run away in this situation.

FOOD, I don’t know if zombies grin but this one must surly be grinning, three warm bodies to eat, it’s going to look like a bacon pig when it’s done.

Keith is still stunned but should have time to get up well before the zombie starts on him.

The noise from the shooting had generated a few more zombies.

And yet more, there were others as well but you get the idea, things were going down hill quite quickly in this game.

Wang Mei is attacked but with her fighting technique which I believe is called The Way of the Clawed Fist (also called hit em first and hit em hard) she dealt with it/him quickly.

The Suits were not having things their own way any more, one of the group has run away at the sight of the zombies approach, the remaining three of them laid down an effective fire for the moment.

More zeds arrive and there’s more on the way. Jane needs to look behind or she’s going to be in trouble.

She does turn in the end and shoots the poor chap in the bowler hat, but things are looking distinctly bleak.

The Suits are killing zombies but as with Wang Mei’s group there were more zeds on the way. The wee baldy chap in the grey suit was shot at and missed by Samantha the lass in the black coat, but Raymond and Lemon Moss were doing well with their shooting, knocking down zeds but the noise kept generating more.

Wang Mei can hear lots of shooting and I decided to do a Brains check to see how she would react. As you may remember if you were reading the text rather than looking at the pictures she is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and rather than continue to fight in the open she leads the other 3 girls into the bar, turning this into a defensive position. I would have to agree with that strategic thinking, except the Bar has no windows and no back door. She also failed to pick up Faith’s gun and Jane joined the other girls headed to the bar, leaving Faith outside wounded.

Well Jane never liked Faith anyway and much preferred her new best mates.

If only they had thought to barricade the front door as soon as they went in, rather than break into the liquor store. An easy mistake to make you would think, understandable under the circumstances, but it could be their last mistake.

You might remember in the opening introduction I mentioned that Jane wasn’t much of a fighter, well it looks like she’s not going to get a chance to improve her skills either because she’s dead.

The wee baldy man jumps the wall, in slow motion and heads straight at Samantha, her nerves fail her and she fails to fire as he attacks.

She kills him but he is replaced by 2 more.

Lemon Moss went to help Samantha fight off the 2 zeds but he lost his life in the attempt.

The zombie who was chewing on Bubble had moved on the Fat Willie and was now feasting on Donna. Keith who had seen the zombie eating his friends had understandably run away.

The Suits had also run away leaving poor Lemon Moss to be chewed on by a small zombie with a big appetite.

All in all a far cry from the previous game.

A small crowd was gathering outside the Bar and Wang Mei and her party had some hard choices to make.

They had found some food and drink in the Bar and maybe it was time to leave, they burst out and encountered the 3 zeds waiting for them.

This was the scene of carnage they left behind.

The fight was short but brutal and all of the girls survived and made their way out of the area.

A Zombie Horde, fortunately they appeared in dribs and drabs but even so they drove everyone away.

The Suites, Raymond and Samantha stayed to fight for a while before running, Lemon Moss is now a pile of bones, Elvis left the building almost immediately.

On the right, our original Heroine Faith was killed and eaten, Jane was killed and will be eaten and the Hasselfree Girls made it home free, this time.

The Bikers were all eaten by the same zombie except for Keith who ran away. The zombie is now suffering chronic indigestion and won’t need to eat for at least 3 weeks so it’s not all bad.

Well a completely different game from the last, very one sided one, there was much more going on than appears in this story but even then it’s another mammoth story line.

I didn’t realise there were 31 days in October Dohh so I get to complete the trilogy of games I wanted to post as my tribute to Bryan/Vampifan, I don’t think my flippant style suits the genre at all but I’ve had to rush these a bit as the past 4 days I’ve been running an internet game called the Virus. Part of that is posted on the Lead Adventurers Forum in the Cold War board and I’m really pleased how that’s coming on, but it’s going to be a long one.

Well if you are still here I’ll propose my last toast in October, - To Bryan and Zombie Gamers everywhere.

Cheers and all the best.