AAR: Den of Wolves, Louisville KY 2023

After Action Report (AAR)

This year’s Den of Wolves game was Louisville's second megagame. I had players come in from St. Louis, southern Minnesota, Cedar Rapids Iowa, Detroit Michigan, Cincinnati Ohio, Indianapolis Indiana and probably other places that I don’t remember. For non-Americans reading this, essentially half a day of driving for some folks. One of my control team said I should get a kick-back from the local community for the tourist dollars my events bring in! 

So thank you to everyone who put your trust in us and I hope you all had a great time. 

The Aegis getting “direction” from the VP

It was the first time we had run DoW. I helped control at Gencon last year but this was 100% our event. We had a total of 3 on the control team and about half the players had played a megagame before, so it was a very different game from last year’s WTS where almost everyone was new to the hobby. 

Rather than go into a turn by turn review, I’ll just highlight some of the plot points:

The traitors

For the traitors, we picked players who played with us last year and ones in different roles on different ships. We had the comms officer on the Aegis, the council member on the Refinery and the captain of the Dione. 

The control secrets board at the end of the game

The Dione

About halfway through the game, the other players started to believe that the Dione was a waste of space and a resource sink. Therefore, the captain convinced his team that they should abandon ship and live on the Quellon. Except they left the chief engineer behind… That same turn, the engineer came to me and told me he was all alone and asked what to do next. Whilst I was congratulating him for his recent promotion to captain, the Aegis marines turned up and arrested him. The Dione team had convinced the fleet that the engineer was very suspicious for reasons I still don’t quite understand so they threw him in the brig. In the next turn, the council convened for a trial. It was about this time that the captain had put the dione on auto pilot and it crashed into the side of the shepherd. When I informed the council of this development, it reinforced their narrative and the engineer decided it was just easier to plead guilty. He spent the rest of his days doing hard labor on the Vulcan. (During the afterparty, he told me what a great time he had!) 

The media, probably saying there’s nothing to worry about when the Dione (empty table) crashed into the Shepherd

The Endeavor captain arrest

The captain of the Endeavor built a bomb and it was observed by Vulcan operatives. He was also working on “science” that included lobotomies (though he swears it wasn’t). Needless to say, he appeared very suspicious. The council decided he was a possible traitor and decided to apprehend him. When the marines turned up, the captain, refusing to be taken in, detonated his own bomb, injuring himself and the Aegis representative. Once they were both healed, the Aegis marines tried again to arrest the captain. With no bomb to use, he locked himself in a room and shot himself rather than being thrown in the brig. A true hero’s departure! He spent the last turn of the game writing “Aegis pig dogs” on the council whiteboard from beyond the grave. 

Last turn coordinates

The last jump happened a few turns from the end of the game. The Aegis gave everyone coordinates on little slips of paper, told everyone to keep them secret, and almost immediately jumped. The jump went well blah blah blah. 

Our wolf comms officer, hoping this jump was the way they’d jump from now on, repeated this but gave everyone completely different coordinates. Sadly for her, they didn’t jump immediately and even more sadly, some captains broke the rules and compared notes. Once they realized they’d received different coordinates, they reported this to the Admiral who immediately threw her in the brig. She went on trial in the last turn of the game and was spaced for her crimes (or maybe turned into food?!?).

I think the VP and the press secretary are in the wrong universe

The missing councilman

Somewhere about turn 3, I walked into the council room to see the council member from Gliese missing and in his place, the captain from the Vulcan. She was sitting there, arms folded, looking very stern and important but not saying much. I learned from the discussion and from control that the counselor was missing and they were currently deciding whether or not to recognize the captain. In addition, they were grilling her, asking about assassinations, etc. 

What I later found out was that the counselor was simply in the bathroom and so the Vulcan captain decided to sit in. This was that beautiful intersection of real world things meeting a role playing game of treachery and betrayal. This bathroom break turned into a huge political issue!

The sympathizer

Near the end of the game, I decided to pull an idea directly out of the BSG show, the one where Boomer wakes up with a stick of C4 in her possession with no idea how it got there. I picked someone from the Lucas who I hadn’t seen a lot from all game, and asked him if he’d seen the show. He said he had and I explained the situation to him and left him to think about it. A turn later he asked if he could go to the medical ship and have them run tests. Once the tests came back, I told him the results were that he was likely a Wolf agent but the choice of what to do next was in his hands. I also told the medical team and left them alone also. 

During the post-game wrap-up, I asked what choice he’d made and he said he decided to work with humanity to which he received a massive round of applause. 

The broken batteries

The Aegis wing commander, a good RL friend of mine, notorious for his bad roles, had been rolling pretty poorly all game from what I’d heard (it still makes me giggle knowing I gave him the dice-rolling role). In the last wolf attack of the game, he fired one of his Aegis batteries and rolled a 5 and all the control said was “click, nothing happens”. Then he rolled for his second battery and rolled a 6, which was met with the response of “click, nothing happens”. His sigh was pretty epic (sorry Keith).

A few turns earlier, some Vulcan prisoners had been reformed and sent to various ships as untrained crew. One of the wolves had asked us if the ones sent to the Aegis could be loyal to her and we thought that sounded like a great idea. They get there, sabotaged the guns and the rest is history.

There were many more stories but these were some of my favorites. 

More pictures to be found here, on the media page.

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