The whole table for the RW playtest

I just wanted to include this shot b/c it allows me to talk a bit about using your gaming space. The two roads are not meant to be parallel, but are two lengths of the same road, the top road in the picture leading to the bottom road. There is a crease in the felt table-cloth (invisible in this picture) that was the dividing line. The objective is the the town of shanties and tire walls at the end of the bottom road.

Actually, the first scenario we did had the cars going along each road to “encounter points” that generated encounters using playing cards (a black card = a road block; a face card an ambush by raiders; etc), and the survivalists were on the road until they encountered a safe town in which to trade and find a haven. It worked surprisingly well with a little suspension of disbelief, and a lot of moving of terrain as a bridge spanning a rocky gorge appeared and disappeared as the protagonists traveled down the road. That is a great feature of setting this in the desert b/c there is so little distinctive terrain to lay out or pick up. A few cacti and tumble weeds flesh out the desert, and when a rocky outcropping appears it’s quickly laid out, or picked up. This is as opposed to doing a road-trip scenario in Germany with forests giving way to farmland, industrial centers to theme parks. Each of those would be one scenario in itself!

Oh, a quick note on the car wrecks along the highway. If you want to work off some frustration by just breaking some stuff and having it serve your needs, buy some hotwheelz or matchbox cars and squash them in a vice, and whack them with a ballpeen hammer! Great fun, and you can get some really authentic looking automobile wrecks from them. Oh, and don’t be squeamish, when they say “die cast metal” they are NOT messing around. They are hard to hammer into! To finish, dash them with a dusting of black spray paint for fire-scorch marks, and a layer of Flat Varnish to take the new-car shine off the toy cars.