Second Round of Playtesting and a New Adventure.

My player group is ready for the next chapter in the adventure, and I am still trying to finish writing up the first adventure, but I can't string them along forever, so here is the cover art (minus all the layout) for the second adventure, which will come out shortly after "Bubb's Diner".

The characters will face mechanical menaces in a more in-depth "dungeon-like" setting beneath the sands in the hex zone "Bulwark". This one won't feature much in the way of hex crawling, but will feature a Multi-Stage Big Bad, and successfully completing the adventure may unlock a new character class...

Lizard-Folk Character Class

The "Bubb's Diner" adventure includes a couple "Unlock-able" game features, if the characters discover/ enable them.  At the end of the adventure, the Characters have the opportunity to bring a large tribe of displaced Lizard-Folk back to the "LastBest" zone of the New-Lootis region of the game world.  Doing so will likely cause some tensions among the human survivors who are already struggling to find enough salvage to trade for food, but will also bolster the ranks of combatants willing to take on the Mutants lurking in the nearby mountains and foothills.  It will also allow the players to select from an additional character class when creating new characters in the region.

Lizard-Folk have some natural armor, and can choose from a wide variety of specials that include regenerative abilities and combat specialization, or go the route of a shaman with strange quasi-magical and mental abilities.

Marketplace Illustrations: Page Two

This image features the second page of the meager selection characters will find when browsing the marketplace for gear.

The compass is expensive, but a necessary item if the party does not recover the one from the ratling compound in the previous part of the adventure.

One of the ratlings (Long-Tails) the characters will face off against in their small compound. This is from the only encounter where the ratlings are strictly melee combatants, and a nice break for the characters from dodging small arms fire.

Marketplace illustration for Bubb's Diner

This image features one of two pages of assorted gear that characters can purchase after completing the events in the first part of the adventure, and before they set out into the waste-land searching for the ruined diner. 

By design, there are likely not enough goods to meet all the needs of the characters, as "The Downs" is tasked with outfitting soldiers to patrol the scrub wastes throughout the regions known as "Last Best" and "R|E|NAH", and to send war parties into "Bulwark", the region to the Northeast. 

While the main story will lead the characters Southeast, a side-quest to acquire better gear could lead them into Bulwark, where they will find themselves a bit too under-powered to stay for long...

Playtest sessions complete for Bubb's Diner.

The party completed the playtest adventure.  It was good for three sessions, but we never cover as much ground as I intend.

The characters ran from a towering beast, but ended in an underground lab/lair of a Scientist Prowler, who fired tranquilizer darts at the party while they fought his vivisected abominations.  They were all knocked out  before they could fight their way to the him, and awoke retrained in a small operating room strapped to tables.

The infected character and the savage discovered their right arms had been swapped in one of the Scientist Prowlers experiments. The procedure was successful, but the party managed to escape before the Scientist was able to attempt to swap the heads of the other two characters. They took his research notes, a mutagen canister, and as many rations as they could cram into their packs before heading back to the desert to search for the lost diner.  Unexpectedly, they let the scientist live after overpowering him and recovering all their gear.

The night concluded with the players reaching the diner to find a strange lizard-folk cult awaiting their arrival, as was foretold in a prophecy by their fanatical leader, a strange shaman with telekinetic abilities and regenerative properties. The players uncovered his plot to displace his former tribe, and force them to move into the "New-Lootis" region, and their role as sacrifices before the massive clan arrived.  An incendiary grenade tilted the odds in the favor of the party in the grand melee that ensued, but one character went down in the fight.  The fight ended with two other characters within 1-3 hit points from being out of action themselves.  Encountering the peaceful Lizard-Folk horde, the players marched back across the desert with the refugee Lizards, unlocking them as a playable character class in the region.

Players also unlocked improved medical procedures thanks to the mad scientists notes, and attribute points that are permanently reduced due to being taken "out of action" can be regained for a steep price.

A couple "actions and specials" were overpowered, and adjusted, as well as the difficulty level of the final fight, for the inclusion in the module.

The module will feature the unlocked character class template for playable Lizard-Folk.