Deep Wilderness Campaign as introduction into RIFTS.

[Natasha]

Difficult to say, really, because it depends on the group. I have found this kind of thing is a balancing act between pressing Play and Fast Forward... mostly Fast Forward if it's just man vs wild with loads of exposition and perhaps a few rolls to determine how well or not things go.

[Jorick]

The problem, I think, is repetition.

Any adventure through the wilderness is "exciting" because it's constantly fraught with peril, the body is pushed to extremes and must be cared for, the scenery changes constantly but gradually, and lots of little choices need to constantly be made between the big choices. Gamifying this experience for a roleplay setting in an interesting way is tricky/impossible, because you're basically making the same skill checks over and over again. Think "Oregon Trail." That's a cool game, but it doesn't translate to dynamic roleplay.

One way to do it is making the journey a series of "dungeon crawls," just in the outdoors. Get from here to there, and in between is basically a maze of obstacles (you can't just go straight through in the wilderness), and different choices (in direction or whatever) result in different encounters or challenges (just like a dungeon).

You can add the darkness of night and weather (and relevant time constraints -- get around the cliff and find shelter before the storm/nightfall -- to such dungeony problems as monsters/plants/people/monster-plant-people (hunted by a lanotaur manhunter? sat next to a carnivorous tree? attracted a t-rex to the brontosaurus you killed for food?), natural traps (quicksand, rapids, etc.), cool/horrifying ruins of the past, etc.

Another aspect of wilderness travel and survival, that becomes significant in short time in the real world, is the relationship between the adventurers. This is a bit hard to mimic among the players, because they don't actually feel the stress of travel, and they usually want to get along as a heroic team (or something like that). In a related example, if you play a squad of soldiers, you're usually not playing a bunch of stressed out rooks getting spooked by everything and struggling to keep discipline when the crap hits the fan. You're usually playing a relatively thoughtful squad of steel eyed soldiers. Sometimes the players may want to be the fool who gets too curious and hilariously causes a mountain full of orcs to attack (maybe the roll a hatchling dragon is supposed to play, in Rifts), but basically everyone gets along and the drama is limited to words.

I can see two options here: 1, make sure every spat, either in game or real, has dire consequences. That argument they had costs them needed time (maybe the manhunter on their trail catches up, or a pack of dinosaurs stalked them while they were yelling at each other and they're surrounded, etc.); 2, introduce problematic NPCs (save a bunch of folks from a splugorth slaver, follow a guide or guides -- any sort of companion(s) will do).

In any case, I'm a big fan of making the wilderness of Rifts, especially outside the Domain of Man (therefore the wilderness includes the entire Northeast, from Cape Cod to through the Appalachians) incredibly dangerous (and the Magic Zone, because it's constantly coughing up all sorts of bad, should be even worse in terms of encounters). The books give you things like Splugorth, Shemmarians, Archie, Mechanoids, mutant barbarians, prospectors, dinosaurs, and Native Americans in that region. But I truly think the constant imminent danger needs to be made clear.

For example, see this story (among many) in Outside Magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/1825851/consumed

The tagline basically spoils it anyway, so I'll go ahead and summarize the salient points.

First, an amazing adventure kayaker breaks all sorts of records Kayaking dangerous rivers in Africa. His process is informative. No river, even the largest, is completely navigable. Many rivers we think of as navigable today are only that way because of man-made locks and dams (most of which are long gone in Rifts). To break a kayaking record, he has to navigate more of the water than was done before. Where another man may have portaged a certain stretch of river, he attempted via kayak. (see also the history of portaging [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage --but please find more significant sources, and I'm sure your imagination will be sparked], just to get an idea of how fur trappers, and what have you, had to navigate the Northeast, and other places, before it was the "Northeast").

He would meet up with a companion at predesignated points along the long rivers he navigated. Sometimes, between meetings, he'd have to camp by himself on the banks of the rivers, fearing the crocodiles, the hippos, the lions, the warring peoples, with no possible protection from the dangers. Every night's sleep was a gamble.

But he lived, and became famous. Eventually he wanted to retire, but a couple other adventurous soles wanted his help navigating the Congo. He was the only person on earth who could help them, as he had done parts of it himself. The most fascinating and tragic part of the story follows. There was a war in the Congo. All the dead people caused the crocodile population to explode. The three had become quite good at spotting hippos and crocs. They could splash the water with their paddles to make the hippos show their heads (imagine how often they had to do this -- I backpacked the Talkeetnas in Alaska, which are mostly rolling tundra with long sightlines, but every crest of every hill, and every bunch of bushy willows, and we shouted "Hey Bear," just in case, so we wouldn't spook the monsters). They'd spot crocs slink into the water as they passed, and they increased their speed, hoping to outpace the reptiles.

They passed a village, a river village, that could no longer use the river, because so many of their people had been taken by the madly reproducing crocs. They saw three small crocs enter the water and increased their speed as normal. Tense, but they'd lived this long. Then, unseen until the last second, an 18 foot crocodile raised itself from the bottom of the river, pulled the fearless guide off his kayak, and dragged him down to death.

The croc knew how to eat a man off a boat.

Translate this to Rifts. Much of our wilderness fears the sound of a gun, and dislikes the presence of people. Most wild animal attacks happen because of an animal's fear. Sometimes, like the croc in a war zone, they learn to like the taste of human. But mostly, the shark is "tasting" you, or the bear is flipping out because you spooked it while it was digging for ground squirrels, or the hippo just doesn't want you near its mud.

In Rifts, the sound of gunfire, or a car engine, or talking, means food for anything that eats meat, just as surely as a kayak means a nice squishy morsel sits on top for a sneaky 18 ft croc. And that's just the animals. Warring factions in the jungle have nothing on demons, necromancer cabals, dragons, Splugorth, and territorial/paranoid people with magic and MD weapons. That 18 foot croc is everywhere, always, except you need the equivalent of a tank to kill it. And you're also being stalked by someone intelligent for some reason.

The players' smallest choices should have large consequences. Even if they choose to go the "correct" way, and avoid a trap you set for them the other way, show them that they barely escaped with their lives ("as you crest the hill, you see a large pack of horrible stuff in the valley where you almost chose to go"). They need to get water and food. Make them think for it, make them walk to the water carefully, and hunt quietly. They should know they only get moments to carve up a kill before the monster comes smelling blood.

If they don't have the requisite skills to deal with the wild, give them a guide who can teach them (and then betray them?). I never try to kill players. I will save them with reinforcements before it comes to that (unless they really walked into the problem stupidly). I want the story to play itself out. A story of survival is all about thoughtfulness, fear, perseverance, and small choices becoming big choices (an RL example: cross some slippery wet rocks with a pack on your back and twist your ankle in the middle of nowhere and you're a dead person--so you better make a big deal out of some little wet rocks and the way you step on them).

The trick is to keep this engaging and exciting. I think they can and should see new things each session. The old lessons should be repeated quickly ("we remember to approach the water super carefully this time") without fuss, and new lessons should appear. A new monster can be fantastic in and of itself (think of Jurassic Park, and seeing the herds, and then the sick triceratops, and then the goat disappears because the T-rex is there, and then the velociraptors get out). People on the way with different motivations (homesteaders, refugees, slavers, robots on patrol, natives defending their land) provide just as much stimulation. Beg the aggressive Iroquois for safety from the monsters hot on their trail. Save the slaves from the slavers, and get directions to something useful -- and that useful thing should feel like an award worth millions to the struggling adventurers, as the choice to put themselves in harm's way to save the slaves while the characters were on the edge of starvation themselves was almost too much to bear.


I love this kind of story. Rifts is a pure post-apocalypse, but instead of desolation and nuclear winter, the apocalypse was caused by both an explosion of "life energy," and an explosion of life. All kinds of it, all over the place. And it's all struggling to balance itself out, while being constantly inundated with new invasive species. Exhausting and thrilling. I hope you can turn it into a great story.

[guardiandashi]

One thing I would consider is to rethink the idea of no ranged weapons at all, but still have them in the boonies.
The thing to consider is what classes and character types do they Get? Because some will handle that environment better than others.
Another thing I would do is look at the fallout game series and then throw in a bunch of man vs wild or various survival type shows. The thing is I know that would likely get boring to me fairly quickly. That's why I say give them açess to ranged and even mdc weapons, but be extremely stingy with ammo and especially eclips, so they can go through that big scary thing or go around and save the ammo for later. It brings a whole different dynamic to the game.

[dreicunan]

I've decided I'm going to do the opposite, and begin the campaign on whatever's left of Cape Cod. They're going to start with nothing, LVL1, having "lucked out" and crashed, which killed their slavers. The first sign of civilization they'll find is a dreary, cold, wet, hard fishing village, whose men brave the post-RIFT seas in ratchety little boats like whalers of old.

Did the slavers not have any gear to take? If they didn't, how were they enslaving people in the first place?

I would echo the advice about giving them access to ranged weapons and just being a bit stingy with the ammo/e-clips.

[Eagle]

I like the idea of starting them in the wilderness, but since you're new to GMing, and they're new to playing, you may want to give them a more traditional RPG experience.

Honestly, a lot of what you've described sounds like a Tolkien-esque "listen to the GM describe how hard the journey is over and over again". If they don't have much in the way of weapons, they can't really experience a lot of what Rifts has to offer. They're just going to be running away from fights, because everything will kill them. They're going to get bored with that after like one session. I played in a D&D game once where our characters got transported to a super-lethal version of the Amazon jungle, and we had session after session of "monster attacks from ambush, you fight it and eventually kill it, you use up all your healing spells, now dig in for the night and hope you don't get attacked until you can refill your spells". It got incredibly boring because we weren't making any progress and it was just the same thing over and over again. You don't want to do that without even letting them play a few combats. You'll lose your players.

You want this to be enjoyable and exciting for them, not a chore that they have to work through. Any time you think "this will be character building", throw out that idea immediately. Your players are choosing hanging out with you over playing Angry Birds on their phones. They have virtually unlimited avenues for entertainment. Don't make this one suck or they won't come back.

What I'd recommend is that you go ahead and let them have weapons. Hit them with a few weird monsters at the beginning so they can see why Rifts is unique and cool. They're in the small fishing village, and then a Fury Beetle comes rampaging through the town square. They have to help a fisherman with a robot arm fight the monster. One of the players grabs a mega damage rifle and he shoots at the creature. He misses. Describe the scene as the laser blast disintegrates the front half of a parked car and continues into the forest behind it, knocking down several trees. Then he shoots again, hits the Fury Beetle, and it just leaves a small wound. Uh oh.

Feed them a few easy encounters, nothing that will get a total party kill. Maybe have a few NPCs travelling with them, and make sure that any lethal surprises hit the NPCs first. Let the NPCs be the redshirts from Star Trek, their job is to die to show the players how dangerous this strange new world is. I'd do this for a few sessions so that players can adjust to the idea of roleplaying, learn how the game works, and just generally get their feet under them.

Every game session, let them encounter a new town, or a new danger, something unique that they haven't faced before. Maybe they encounter a sickly old man in the woods, carrying a bunch of high tech weaponry. He's old and frail, and he has come out into the woods to die. He'd love to fight a monster one last time before the end. The players talk to him and find out that he's a Juicer going through Last Call, and he's 22 years old. How do they react to that? They can't save his life. Do they help him get his wish? If he's going to be eaten by a big monster, do they help him fight it? Let it eat him? Whatever they do, he dies by the end of the game session (either in his bedroll, coughing and wheezing, or in combat). It shouldn't be a difficult encounter, combat-wise, the difficulty comes from players deciding what the right thing to do is. They can get more into the roleplaying aspects, particularly when their character might do something different than the player himself would.

You can describe "and then you travel for 3 weeks through the brutal forest. Bob shoots a deer and forgets to switch the gun to the SDC setting. You find part of an antler, but it doesn't taste very good. Several times you freeze in place when a big... something... flies overhead. You are very tired and hungry when you arrive at a small village on the banks of a river..." That will keep the game moving, rather than have them roleplay out every time they cross a river or climb a hill. "Now roll to see if you contract malaria" isn't very fun.

You may want to do it like a lot of formulaic TV shows. Have two plots per game session. One of them is minor, and can be dealt with pretty easily (or it only involves one person). The other is the major plot of the adventure that day. Things that contrast with each other can help show how the Rifts setting is different. Maybe Bob starts having weird dreams in the night, and when he is awake he starts seeing things that no one else in the party sees. Maybe it's a ghost, or maybe it's a little magical creature that is just screwing with him. But then the main adventure involves a group of Coalition Skelebots (describe them as Terminator-looking black robots) that are headed for that friendly village that helped you last session. The Skelebots don't see the players as they pass by, but you do see them gun down a passing green skinned Futurama-looking D-bee. The guy didn't do anything, they just saw him and announced in robot voices "alien creature spotted, proceed with extermination". What do you do when you realize they're headed for the village you just left?

And then you've got the overarching plot, the reason they're fleeing in the first place. Maybe there's a Splugorth slaver on their trail. He doesn't have to show up all the time, and probably should only rarely show up at all. The players know that this thing will capture them if it finds them (they're nowhere near powerful enough to fight it, and they know it). And that's why they're on the move. Like Frodo and friends running from the Nazgul, they know it's on their trail, and they might see it in the distance (or evidence of it) every once in a while. But it's really just there to keep them moving.

That's what I'd do if it were my game, anyway.

[Willy Elektrix]

I offer this word of warning:

Players like Rifts because they can be cool, weird, and powerful characters. GMs like Rifts because the world is wild and unpredictable. The limits of your scenario take away some of the best parts of Rifts. I think you and your players will both have more fun if you give them the full Rifts experience.

That's my two cents!

[Nightmartree]

Gotta remember the wilderness in rifts is FAR from a stroll in the woods, there is a good chance that in the deep wilderness as you put it the only places your not running into something dangerous ever few miles is when something REALLY dangerous is nearby.