Giant Robots, Vast Wastelands, and Big Dreams in This New AP
What's that sound echoing across the wasteland? Oh, it's six idiots rolling dice.
Roll for Distraction has just started their new actual play season, Starfall, which will be a campaign of indie mech system Salvage Union! Salvage Union is a post-apocalyptic mech TTRPG with simple mechanics, but a very high degree of customization. You play as salvager mech pilots who scour a post-apocalyptic wasteland for valuable scrap in lumbering machines.
Starfall will follow a band of wastelanders called The Crows, who live in a slow-moving behemoth called The Nest. The scrap the mech pilots gather from the ruins of civilization is the lifeblood of the collective. The wastelands are made more dangerous by roving bands of raiders, corporate operatives, radiation storms, and unnatural monstrosities. Along the laborious journey of The Crows, one hope keeps them going: Starfall City, the lost jewel of mankind. A city with as much food and comfort as ten corporate arcologies, but free from their oppression. While some dismiss Starfall as a myth, many cling to the hope that its hidden entrance will be under the next piece of scrap metal that they dig out of the dust…
You can watch the first episode here: YouTube Spotify
Roll for Distraction features six IRL friends who decided to start documenting their escapades during the pandemic, when they were forced to play remotely. While their adventures began with Dungeons & Dragons, the show was completely reformatted after the OGL fiasco. Rather than continuing their D&D games, the group shifted its focus to instead be about discovering what else is out there, with short campaigns of about 10 episodes each.
They started with a Cyberpunk RED campaign titled The Family Jewels, which followed a family planning a heist against their greedy corpo grandfather. Then they played a Lancer campaign titled The Lost Colony, which was a runaway success that got their YouTube channel from under 300 subscribers to over 1000 in about a month. They just finished playing a game of Monster of the Week titled The Devil You Know, which followed college students in New Jersey hunting (and being hunted by) the Jersey Devil.
Seasons run for around 10 episodes, and each episode is edited to be about 1 hour in length, so the time investment is comparable to a season of a typical streaming show. Episodes come out every other Friday at 10:00 AM EST, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean. YouTube members watch new episodes 24 hours early. The show’s guiding mantra is “unprofessional gameplay, presented professionally”, meaning that while they keep all the puns, jokes, and titular distractions in the edit, they still make sure to create a pleasant audio-visual experience and tell a good story.
