If you could undo a mistake, would you? What if it was a really bad mistake? What if it was one where innocent people got hurt? How about if you could go back and somehow change somebody else's mistake? Would you rob them of the choice and the lessons that come with it to prevent the harmful consequences? Even if the seeds the lead to that mistake were already planted, you couldn't be sure that the person wouldn't just make the same mistake again, and that the outcome could actually make things worse? Even if you had the ability, would you have the right?

At what point does it become too risky to try to do the right thing? If trying to help can do even more harm, is it ever right not to try? What if helping someone puts others in danger?

How gilded must a cage be to be worth throwing away freedom? If you know the heavenly dream is false, but those who share it with you are real, is that enough? Or would you strive to free yourself from the illusion? If the reality that awaits is cold, hard and miserable, would you try to wake the others, or leave them to their dream?

Welcome to Stalliongrad!

background image by WhiteDiamondsLtd, logo by Lightning5trike

Larger images here and here.

This week marked the end of my seventy-week-long FoE: Stalliongrad campaign, a locally-ran game that rigorously playtested the tabletop rules for the Fallout: Equestria RPG. It was an amazing game with some awesome players. FoE: Stalliongrad was a tale of the rise of Stalliongrad in the Equestrian Wasteland from a ruins filled with dangerous monsters, warring factions and struggling, isolated pockets of ponykind to a center of civilization and sanctuary that would be much needed in the brutal years immediately following Sunshine & Rainbows. (Towards then end of the game, the PCs even got to participate in the Battle for Fillydelphia -- their mission: to swoop into the warzone and rescue the children in Red Eye's school!)

"Sunny Stalliongrad" was the name given to a Stalliongrad in an Equestria where the megaspells never fell -- where C.A.R.E. had worked, forcing both sides to find a diplomatic resolution. This was a shared dreamworld, one that the player characters found themselves trapped in... and unsure if they wanted to escape. Imagine Tranquility Lane re-envisioned as a benevolent shared dream -- the sleepers in reality held in suspended animation in a hive of changeling pods, their false reality overseen by a changeling queen.

The campaign ended with the defeat of King Castling, the Steel Ranger elder who had undergone a Nightmare Moon-style transformation, clad in starmetal-plated power armor, and the establishment of a new order in Stalliongrad, including a peaceful arrangement with the Enclave. For the epilogue, Discord offered a chance to go back and change the past in such a way that the world presented in Sunny Stalliongrad was a probable outcome. The characters could throw away all the effort and sacrifices, both their own and those of so many others who had brought both Stalliongrad and the Equestrian Wasteland as a whole to the edge of a brighter future, for a chance to save everyone in the past and prevent all the destruction and horror that had followed. Of course, there were no guarantees. Changing one moment in the past might simply create an alternate timeline, or do nothing, or lead to all new and different destruction and horror... or even cause all of time to collapse from paradox into a state of primordial chaos. But there was a fair chance they could make the dreamworld come true.

What would you chose?