Heartbreak at Suicide Ridge

I already talked about the Follow Rebellion where we (luckily) failed to awaken the elder god Kanaguk and destroy the world.

I played another Rebellion at Story Games Seattle just a few days later with a totally different group, half of whom had never played Follow before. Playing two Rebellions in a row was chance, not planning. They picked it through the classic process of elimination – including a finger-vote after we’d gotten down to the last two choices – then we brainstormed a setting.

Our choice? A Mad Max-style struggle to overthrow the warlords of Suicide Ridge, one of the few communities fortified enough to hold fast against the roving bands of waste-raiders.

How’d it go? We won the quest! On paper anyway. But we lost, well, just about everyone in the fellowship. After our most idealistic characters went down going mano a mano with the warlord, the community was left in the hands of a scheming defector from the warlord’s council (uh, my character) and a religious fanatic who had knowingly sacrificed mobs of the faithful in a classic suicide attack diversion. Only the terrible people in our fellowship were left to take over. So: the new Suicide Ridge, maybe not so much better than the old one.

But even in the midst of all our dirt and treachery, we had a great romance subplot. Kyron, thug-enforcer for the warlords (and secret rebel) was smitten with Helcat, a wild gang-runner in the wastes. The waste-gangs naturally raided Suicide Ridge – and just about anybody else – any chance they got, but we were trying to get some of the gangs on our side to help muscle out the warlords.

Their would-be romance reflected the tenuous but potentially game-changing alliance. Could the raiders be trusted? Was it true love, or was she just using him? When the quest was over, would they run off together to start a new life far, far away from here, or would she give him a shiv in the ribs?

Spoiler alert: it was a shiv in the ribs.

He forgot that true love has no soil to grow in the barren wastes. And that’s how you find heartbreak at Suicide Ridge.