Holiday in Caledonia Masterpost

The year is 410 AD. The place is a veteran colony, founded by retired legionnaires in the far north of Roman Britain.

It’s been years since anyone heard news from the nearest town, let alone from Londinium or Rome.

This year’s harvest was bad. Winter is fast approaching. Starvation is a real possibility, if the things in the wood don’t get you first.

Welcome to Caledonia.

 

THE ADVENTURE

Holiday in Caledonia is a Campaign Starter Kit for Unknown Armies 3e. It includes pregens, a starter objective, locations to explore, and NPC cabals who strike back against the players. It can be run as a oneshot and if the players enjoy it you can run additional sessions where events set in motion during the first session play out. It's suitable for new players but not for new Unknown Armies GMs. 

 

SCENARIO FOLDER INCLUDING MAPS AND PREGENS 

 

PLAY REPORTS

Oneshot

 

Campaign

Session One

Session Two

Session Three

Session Four

Session Five

 

BONUS 

Music Post

 

McBride

 

THE MAKING OF 

I wrote this adventure after reading about veteran colonies, border settlements where soldiers who completed their 25 year term of service were given land. The veterans were supposed to consolidate Imperial control and civilize the frontier by intermarrying with the locals. After twenty five years in the army I don't know how qualified any of them would be for normal family life. I suspect the task of civilizing the veterans themselves fell to their wives. When I learned about this type of settlement I imagined a group of fifty or sixty year old dads endlessly fortifying the perimeter of their frontier settlement, not because it improved the defenses but because it was their household project to make their new home look like the places they spent the majority of their life. I chose the setting based on the video game Judero. It takes place in mythic Scotland and I really like the OST.

 

Holiday in Caledonia is similarly mythological rather than historical. Unknown Armies is a game where urban legends and gory myths are secretly true. The wilderness is infested with fairies and tribes of naked barbarians summon legendary monsters to fight alongside them. The Veterans should be Romano Britons rather than Latins, Goths and other people from across the Empire. Maybe more of them should be monotheist Christians. There should be more children. 410 is popularly identified as the end of Roman rule in Britain but that might just be a typo in a piece of unrelated correspondence from the Emperor. People at the time may not have experienced the end of Roman rule as an apocalyptic event. To a guy born in the 340s or 50s it might not have looked any different from what he'd known all his life. Weak or nonexistent authorities, civil war, a breakdown of trade networks, inconsistent communication, local tribes and kingdoms reasserting themselves...

 

Opie

 

This adventure is overloaded. There are too many family members. Too many personality traits. Too much on the character sheet. That's Unknown Armies for you. The players latch on to one or two things that resonate with them. The GM responds by emphasizing those things and developing them further. Parents have favorite children, or private obsessions that take precedence over managing their home life. Myths and legends introduce characters who disappear one act into the tale, or appear out of nowhere at the end and are treated as being present the whole way through. Being a parent is hard even when you do it right. The ones you forget about come back in the blowback phase, resentful at being ignored.

 

Family drama, getting old, and doing bad things that happened to you as a kid to other people as an adult let us test the Self, Isolation and Helplessness meters. The Unnatural and Violence meters take center stage in the typical Unknown Armies game and I have to consciously force myself to explore the others.

 

Millais

  

I've written RPG adventures where the pregenerated characters are bad people, and the players spend the session dicking around until they get their comeuppance at the end. Adam Scott Glancy developed this concept to its highest form with the intro to ICONOCLASTS and it's a classic for a reason. My d20 fantasy heartbreaker slopgame also gives the players an opportunity to commit atrocities in search of a payday. They have a choice to be the Glanton Gang or the Ogre Gods or Colonel Kurz. But even then the setting and rules encourage typical RPG player morality. Massacring fantasy creatures for their treasure is a way of life, slavery is intolerable and a death penalty offense. 

 

Holiday in Caledonia is about people who do bad things that are not run of the mill RPG activities. They own slaves. They beat their children, though probably not their wives (who would fight back and fight to win). Despite marrying barbarians and raising half-barbarian children they're incredibly racist. Given how soldiers behaved historically at least one of them is probably a rapist. Depending on how you interpret the relationship between Tarquin and Thracius, one of them might still be. And they don’t just get exploded at the end of the first session. You have to live with them.

 

Until you don't.