AAR: Den Of Wolves 2
After-Action Report for the Megagame “Den of Wolves”
When: Saturday May 7th, 2022
Where: St Louis, MO
AAR By: Tony Dougherty
Background Story
By the 27th century, armed with the advent of Faster Than Light (FTL) technology, Earth's nations had spread across the galaxy. New colonies had become self-sufficient and humanity had settled into relative peace - in part thanks to the formation of the Interstellar council. The council was made up of old-Earth nations and newly formed colonies who debated and negotiated for centuries to keep order.
Over the years, one nation - the Wolf nation - became more reclusive and suspicious of the other nations and eventually dropped out of the council completely. After several decades, “The Attack” as it became known, came from the Wolves as a complete surprise and completely crippled the combined strength of the Interstellar council. The attack seemed to come from everywhere at once using cyberattacks which disabled most electronic defense systems and hidden nukes on all the council planets that caused unimaginable damage.
A fleet of survivor ships gathered the last of the council nation’s population and resources and fled for their lives - the Wolves promising to eradicate the last vestiges of the Interstellar council.
My role
I think because this was my second play of Den of Wolves, I was assigned the role of Admiral of the fleet and captain of the Aegis, the flagship and protector of the fleet. We had ship batteries, a hangar deck with fighters, a medical bay, a brig, we could produce some of our own food and water and we received coordinates for the jumps. As the Admiral, I had a lot of authority over the other captains but I ultimately answered to the President and council.
I also had a handful of super-power, special action cards for when things got dire.
Due to a much smaller number of players than anticipated, many folks had to double up on roles. On the Aegis, we had an XO/Wing Commander and a Comms Officer/Logs Officer.
The other fleet ships
Again, due to a smaller number of players, several of the other ships were not in game, so we were left with the Icebreaker - our mining vessel and materials producer, the Lucas - produced a significant amount of food and water, Refinery 124 - converted mined resources into fuel, and the Endeavor - our research vessel.
Action Report
First Quarter
The first few turns were mostly spent getting to know the other players, attempting to understand the complexities of the ship and getting the fleet prepared for its first jump.
Even though we could produce our own food and water, I was very keen to have the Lucas provide us with what we needed. It was more efficient when it came to producing these resources and we could free up our crew for other tasks and get them trained up as specialists.
By the time the first Wolf attack came, we were not quite ready for a jump so we had to fight them off for the full round.
The Wolf attack hit us hard and we lost our weapons batteries, our jump drive, some of our food and water production and had to make some really hard choices for which rooms to fix first. Many of the breaks caused ongoing effects so we had to prioritize the fix based on the abilities of the room vs what ongoing effect we could live with. For example, our jump drive had to be fixed first so we could escape any Wolf attack but that meant the entire fleet suffered moral hits due to a different room being broken.
After this, we realized that Engineers were in high demand so we asked the fleet to train some up for us. I believe the Scientist got to work on some AI Engineers to lighten the load.
We also had the council give us our first direct order: They wanted to dictate the priority of the sickbay. With no Salvador in the fleet, we had the only sickbay and doctor so this resource was in high demand. I felt it was very micro-manage-y but I live to serve the will of the council (grumble grumble).
Second Quarter
Somewhere around the beginning of the second quarter, I had two different people talk to me about their suspicions of the First Officer on the Refinery. One person overheard him saying “I’m going to the latrine, and to do nothing else” and the other person was under pressure to jump early (before Admiral command). Now these things on their own I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at but together it was enough for me to approach the Refinery Captain and just mention to her to keep an eye out on her first officer. She asked for my sources but I didn’t want to put them in Jeopardy.
On turn 5 we had word that there was another vessel of survivors coming our way. I advised the President that ultimately, it was his decision on what to do with this ship of strangers but an option I put forth was to blast it out of the sky if they were concerned it was a Wolf ship in disguise.
The vessel arrived and was followed by an immediate Wolf attack. We handled the wolf attack pretty efficiently but the most interesting thing was the unauthorized action by the Lucas First Officer who retrieved all the suspicious survivors using a shuttle in the midst of the attack.
Once the attack was over, I gave the Lucas captain a stern talking to and took ownership of the injured survivors. I placed them all immediately in the brig under Marine “supervision”.
We interrogated the survivors and we couldn’t detect any lies in what they were saying - that they were from the same Nation as the folks on the Refinery ship and they narrowly escaped capture by Wolves.
After the interrogation was over, the Captain of the Refinery came over and asked me if the survivors could be released from imprisonment to be taken into care by the Refinery crew (as they were of the same nationality). I agreed, providing they allowed one unit of our Marines to accompany them and help secure them (if they did turn out to be Wolves).
Somewhere around this time when the press started throwing me under the bus, talking about how the fleet was losing confidence in my abilities. The next chance I got, I made an effort to talk to the press and gave a statement saying how everything was going smoothly, and that my actions had always been for the good of the fleet etc. I also gave a memorial speech on the lives lost during Wolf attacks.
A couple of turns later, the First Officer of the Refinery showed at my door to return the Marines that were supposed to be guarding the newcomers telling me that their services were no longer required.
I was “fuming” and marched over to the Refinery captain and chewed her out for disobeying a direct order. In one of my favorite moments of the game, afterI returned to my ship, I overheard her talking to her shipmates saying how pissed I was. She then came over to my ship and broke character to introduce herself and ask if I was OK with the roleplay brashness. I said I was good and we laughed about the roleplay. Afterwards, I thought about how classy that was - to make sure there were no real hurt feelings etc. That’s the sign of an excellent roleplayer and good all-round person.
It was about this time I first spoke to control and floated the idea of having all my Marines march in on the Refinery and declare martial law. I said it was probably too early in the game to mess things around too much so I asked them to think it through and be prepared.
Third Quarter
Another Wolf attack hit us and we jumped out after the first round of combat. We got hit fairly badly but the rest of the fleet got away unscathed. Our single doctor got injured and we had the dilemma that there was no doctor to heal them! We talked this through with Science and Control and the Science player got to work on some Stims to get the Doc back on their feet.
My XO told me that there were rumors of bad fuel processing and that’d be a good excuse to send our Marines in. I asked the Science team if they would analyze the fuel sample if we could get our hands on some. It was shortly after that when the Refinery Captain approached us and said we could have our Marines go back if we wanted as a sign of good faith. I jumped at the chance and also demanded some fuel samples which we immediately sent to the science team for analysis.
The sample came back clean but in my head, we didn’t get the choice of which fuel we were checking and therefore there was a chance they gave us a sample of a good batch while they were cooking up something nefarious elsewhere on the ship.
My paranoia got so bad that when the Refinery had a surplus of food to share with the fleet, I refused to eat it and had it sent to another ship lest it was poisoned.
We had some sickness going through the fleet but we took care of that by allocating a spare shuttle as a quarantine space so as to not affect other crew.
We got hit by another Wolf attack and lost our jump drive again. Fixing our ship was becoming a real problem - we had plenty of Engineers to go around now but not enough materials to fix everything. We had the Icebreaker go from ore mining to materials creation (as we couldn’t jump anyway).
I was using the Marines on the Refinery as spies but they were not reporting anything nefarious. I asked control to ramp up their spying efforts.
Fourth Quarter
Our Comms officer made a standard trip to the Refinery to deliver jump codes and came back to the Aegis injured after some “industrial accident”. I checked in with my Marine spies and they reported back that it may not have been an accident which confirmed my suspicions. I let the President know but we decided there wasn't quite enough evidence to act on, particularly because we didn’t know which of the Refinery crew was responsible. My suspicions began with the First Officer but the Captain was also on my radar as a traitor.
Science now had a cure for the disease and so ships were getting their healthy crew back and we got our shuttle back.
One of main discussions the council had been working on was distribution of the jump codes. Over the course of the game, the President had our Comms Officer change the way he was distributing the jump codes. There was a fear that the Wolves were accessing this code and that’s how they were hitting us so frequently.
This all culminated with one crazy jump where we had everything ready except for the jump codes. It was decided that I was to receive brand new jump codes and have every player report to the Aegis. I then ran around to every ship and plugged in the codes myself (away from prying eyes). We initiated the fleet jump and successfully jumped without the codes being known by anyone except me. Unfortunately, the jump we performed required a dice roll to see where we would end up and our Comms Officer, for the first time all game, rolled poorly and landed next to a Wolf Dreadnaught. Our flawless plan was not successful. My XO did his best to fight back but we received multiple hits and our morale track was one away from zero.
Towards the end of the penultimate turn, I was handed a document by control. It was proof that the industrial accident was not an accident. At the start of the last turn, I presented it to the President and he granted me permission to take control of the Refinery ship.
Before anyone knew what was happening, I ran to the Aegis, informed my team of the plan, grabbed a shuttle and threw everything we had it in - fighter jets, Marines, crew & resources.
We marched over to the Refinery and told the captain that the Aegis was all but destroyed and we needed a new flagship. I was to assume control and the captain would step down and become one of my trusted advisors. My thought being that if they were traitors we would use our Marines to forcefully take it over (the likely outcome) and if not, they would understand the situation and hand over the control.
The captain nodded thoughtfully and asked my permission to make an announcement to the crew on board. In the spirit of the roleplay and hoping for the best, I granted it. The Captain demanded that her crew rise up and fight the oppression. She then pulled a gun on me which complete confirmed my suspicions.
Control ran this encounter using boarding party rules where we were the aggressor so defense got the first attack. I think we lost one Marine but our overwhelming lethal force secured us the win when we took our turn. I played a card for a bodyguard's defense (from the Captains gun shot) and my XO took the bullet for me and saved my life in a vaillant dive across my body.
We took the 3 players as captives and the President made the call to have the Refinery Captain executed. Right before we were about to space her, something interrupted us…
Meanwhile…
While all this had been going on, there was much shuffling of tables and chatter amongst the other ships but because this is roleplay, we ignored it as we wanted to see it all play out.
As we were about to execute the Refinery Captain, we got a message from the Science ship captain who had docked with the Aegis (moved her table so they were connected). She told us to cease what we were doing and that they had taken control of the Aegis. Roleplaying ignorance, I thanked her for fixing up my ship and that I would be returning shortly but she clarified her initial message: She told us that what WE were doing was an act of treason and that the Aegis weapons were trained on us in the Refinery ship. We were to cease activities and send the prisoners to the Aegis. Under threat of destruction, and seeing no better choice, we sent our prisoners to the Aegis via a shuttle and were discussing next steps when the Control team called the end of the action phase.
The final team phase of the game let us take stock of what we had. We had a huge number of resources and a ship that was in near-perfect condition. We were to subtract some morale due to the use of lethal force but we over-spent our food and drink and our crew’s morale shot up.It’s as though we threw a feast of celebration with the entire crew.
This was the official end of the game.
Post-game notes
Had we continued, we would’ve drawn a destination card and immediately jumped, leaving the rest of the fleet behind. After all, we were the refinery ship and we had huge quantities of fuel. The rest of the fleet would not have known where we were going and the Aegis certainly couldn’t have followed us as we stripped it of all resources. I figured we could find food and drink at our next destination - another problem for another day.
Another favorite moment of mine was when the other players did final game morale rolls and realized how dire the Aegis ship was - they surely dropped to zero morale and had almost every room broken on board!
Once the game was officially over, we went around the room to give a short summary of our game experiences.
In a huge shock for me and the other Aegis players, the Refinery ship didn’t have a single Wolf on board! Turns out they thought one of us was a Wolf - with their suspicions leaning towards our Comms Officer. They saw the takeover as hostile and those being the actions of Wolves. That was also the reason the rest of the fleet turned on us - they thought we were the traitors and so took over the Aegis to do what was right in the face of a Military coup. In retrospect, we should’ve shared our suspicions with more of the other captains and we might not have faced the same scrutiny. Although we did have the backing of the President!
In a final twist, it was the press who was the traitor all along. She had been throwing me under the bus the entire game and it’s no wonder the entire fleet mistrusted my actions. I don’t think she did anything physical (like planting bombs, mind controlling crew, etc.) but she just sewed enough mistrust that we did the rest ourselves! She played a fabulous game. The control lead said he was thinking about activating another traitor halfway through the game but didn’t feel the need - we were distrusting each other enough without more traitors in the mix.
Also, I asked my XO after the game about the origins of the rumor about sabotaged fuel. I had assumed control had given him something substantial but I had completely misheard him. He was merely floating the idea that I could use that as an excuse to get our crew on the Refinery. Yet another thing that made me suspect the innocent crew.
The Aegis XO (Brian) and The Admiral (me - Tony)
Final thoughts
I had a fabulous time even with the small number of players and ships. A handful of players really got into the role play and there were plenty of things “outside the box” to make the game really interesting. There was no one player who controlled the entire game, no one who derailed us in any way, it was just a wonderful experience and I’m very glad I made the drive.
I think the smaller number of players (only 14) made the game very different. Not worse necessarily, just different. It meant that we knew a lot more about what was going on across the entire game. In some ways it meant the press had little information to share that I didn’t already know about but as I’ve already explained, they had a different role in this game!
I joked with my friend (the XO) after the game that I had driven 5 hours to find a group of people to play a game with who wouldn't immediately accuse me of being a traitor, only to find a group of people who immediately accused me of being a traitor! What does that say about me?!?
For more information
For more information about MegaGames in North America, check out https://megagamecoalition.com/
Many thanks to the writer, the organizers and control for making it such a great game (even though they didn’t have any many players as they were hoping for)
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If you’re interested, here’s the AAR for the first time I played Den of Wolves: dukesofhighland.net/blog/aar-den-of-wolves-1