We’ve been making good progress on the Buried Treasure TTRPG campaign book. One of the Fully Automated devs has been helping me build out the character section with the little profiles the other premade campaigns use for NPCs, and another has connected me to someone who is working on a PHD in phytoremediation, who can hopefully review the sections I’ve written on that for accuracy.
I’ve been running a second group of players through the campaign and they’ve taken a very different route through the material than the first, so I’ve been able to playtest sections we missed before and start making improvements. Playing those scenes helped me find ways to reorganize them to make them easier to run with no prep, moving descriptions around so details are introduced in the order the players are likely to encounter them, and to add dialogue ‘options’ that came up which I hadn’t expected. I’ve also added a bunch of new locations, characters, and simmering conflicts I’m really excited about.
But for now I just wanted to gather up some of the location art I’ve been working on and share it here!
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The next image is from inside that food forest, on the loop road which winds through the village. Fairer Way has a single streetcar running along that road: Gus ‘The Bus’ is a sapient synthetic intelligence and much loved by his community.
His design is based on ones from the late 1800s and early 1900s with the idea that they would be an easier starting point for a rebuilding society, though some other modernizations have been made. He uses a modern pantograph rig and overhead wire, and much of the deck has been lowered to improve accessibility.
I borrowed the monorail taxi pods from a German startup, they’re supposed to run in both directions on disused freight tracks. Monorails have their issues but I could see these being briefly popular during the setting’s post-war reconstruction until real trains were stood back up in the region. Perhaps the Reclaimers (the folks who made this village) got them after that. I like the idea that they have set up tracks for their streetcar friend and also a small network of single tracks switched to be able to merge with Gus’s tracks – basically these things can pinball back and forth wherever he isn’t (he’s not fast), and occasionally cut through the woods. Pretty much every structure is on the loop road, so Gus should be decent at making the town more accessible, but I like the idea of adding an option besides walking and bikes for navigating the food forest.