We recently wrapped up a coast-to-coast campaign of Ted Bushman’s superb The Last Caravan and I thought it would be good to share some of the experience, impressions, and insights that came out of it.
If you’re not familiar, The Last Caravan is a collaborative, story-driven RPG about a group of survivors making a cross-country road trip in the aftermath of a short-but-cataclysmic alien invasion. The game is set in the continental US and does heavy trade in Americana tropes, regional curiosities, and more than a few winks to speculative fiction.
I don’t really intend for this to be a “review” in the traditional sense. I’ve already posted my commentary over on Ted’s itch.io product page. I really like this game, and I appreciate so much of what Ted and everyone else involved in making it is doing with it. There is so much heart, promise, and love going into the project, I want only good things for these folks.
My introduction to the game was through the original Kickstarter campaign in 2023. The editor, Graham Ward, is a personal friend for whom I have tremendous respect, so his involvement was all the enticement I needed to back the project. The rightness of that decision was powerfully reinforced when I sat down for a pre-alpha conceptual play-test of an in-development game by Ted. He floored me with the seeming ease he brought to ad hoc storytelling, rich narration, and concise description. The physical delivery of the books took a bit longer than anyone expected, but the production team’s craft and dedication were plenty to keep the faith that everything would be worth it.
I didn’t actually get to play any part of the game until 2025, when I got a chance to play with a couple of the contributors for a single session. The encounter we worked through was breathtaking, with subverted expectations, complex ethical calculus, and a feeling of sky-high stakes. You’ll have to take my word for it, I’m not spilling anything from that session. Suffice to say, Carson Wright is a storyteller par excellence and I hope to get more opportunities to learn from him.
Bringing new games to RPG players is a passion. Usually you can find me tabling D&D games, but that’s a title with a particular flavor and style. Sometimes we need to find other roads, go other places. I feel that strain of wanderlust, and I know some really great folks who do, too.
The decision to bring The Last Caravan to table was easy. That first session made it inevitable. I am beyond fortunate and grateful to the community of folks in my gaming circle. They have helped me with this site, given me the quiet little boosts I need to keep improving my craft, and stick with me regardless of whatever jumbled mess I’ve just laid in front of them. They were good company for an imaginary cross-country road trip, too.
The Gameplay
The Last Caravan is designed to be played as a continuous campaign, with each campaign taking between six and twelve sessions to complete. It is a road trip across the US, with the map divided into six zones. Each zone contains several unique regions, representing distinct geographic locales shaped by the unique cultural elements therein. The goal is to travel from the US eastern seaboard to the west coast.
The game employs the Forged in the Dark rules engine, so there aren’t any “special” dice needed to play. You can raid the Yahtzee box for its d6s (six-sided dice, but you knew that 
) and have just about everything you’d need.
Character definition is highly streamlined, with no real opportunities for min/maxing. This is not a “crunchy” game with loads of numbers or character-decision points. There are no hit points to track, no ability modifiers, no classes or subclasses. Each imprint is themed to fit a particular role: the Bandage provides healing and a supportive ear, the Wrench fixes things, the Bruiser protects their people. In the core book there are two “special” imprints: the Innocent (a sheltered person on the verge of change) and the Good Boi (it’s a road trip, of course there’s a dog.).
Numeric hit points are replaced with a Harm track - essentially a counter that indicates how much damage a character has taken. The concepts of abilities, skills, attributes, or proficiencies are expressed as “gambits” - specializations that differentiate the imprints from each other, as each imprint starts out better at some gambits than others.
This is not a heroic fantasy game. A caravan of players needs to work together and leverage the strengths of their characters in order to prevail. The challenges are rarely straightforward, the solutions to them are never singular.
I love this about the game! A caravan of hardened military veterans will have a totally different experience of the same initial circumstances as a caravan of “civilian” survivors. The entire design of the game doesn’t assume an “optimal” solution or party composition, and the mechanics of it fully support players formulating creative, collaborative solutions.
While other games induce anxiety attacks about perfectly “balancing” dozens of obscure variables, The Last Caravan gracefully steps aside and lets players play - the difference, the relief, is liberating. Encounters exist as experiences, not the ploy of some math-mugger trying to redistribute your enjoyment into his own coin purse.
The Lore
Players will have vastly different understandings of the nature of the world depending on the role they play. The Atlas (GM) should have read the full histories of both the humans and aliens. First-time caravaners will likely have a distinctly human-centered perspective of what befell their characters’ world. Everything in the game-world ends up colored by what the player knows or understands to be true.
I am personally looking very much forward to delivery of the next round of content. Ted completed a highly successful Kickstarter on two major expansions, as well as a solo-journaling game, that greatly expand the lore. As a backer, I’ve gotten a chance to play through the solo game, Homeworld Song. Even in an alpha version, it was poignant and enlightening, expanding the game’s rich lore in totally new directions while also providing a contextual bridge for incorporating aliens into the “core” game.
As a self-aware sucker for stories of complicated moral conflict, The Last Caravan is pure catnip to me. Ted has constructed a varied, complex tapestry of factions and individuals with complex motivations, steeped in conflicts, fueled by profoundly imperfect understandings of the very events that brought them about.
I could quibble with how quickly the in-game world has diverged from our own - two months worth of war with a technologically-superior alien civilization - but… I can’t. I was an adult in 2001, still was in 2020. Everything can change in mere moments; some things don’t get better. I will, however, give some praise to Ted (and the entire creative team) for not foisting the sort of dystopian hellscape on us that mass media pablum peddlers like to trade in. Even at its darkest, The Last Caravan has more in common with the second season (the good one) of The Walking Dead than it does with any of the execrable torture-porn that followed.
The Experience
Coming into this game, my personal aspirations were very high. It took more than a little effort of will to keep my expectations within reach. I would love to feel as though I am a storyteller that could compare at all favorably to the creative contributors attached to this game. This is not the case.
My own talents run more toward technical and technological considerations. In outlining a narrative arc for one of the in-game regions, I felt more adept at figuring out the mechanism a retired engineer turned park volunteer would use to disable a nuclear weapon than I did talking about him finding a religion of peace and reconciliation.
Full transparency, there were a lot of times that I struggled, in my role as Atlas, to turn the one-page prompt for a region into something playable. That’s how low I felt I had to set the bar for myself: merely playable.
Please don’t misunderstand, every region has a unique and compelling story prompt. Each of these prompts includes multiple suggestions for elements to optionally include, and the overall arc they create gradually builds stakes and tension to keep the caravan moving steadily westward.
My relatively short experience GMing games has been almost exclusively a matter of presenting a pre-authored story, spiced with a handful of embellishments. The more free-form approach of The Last Caravan pushed me out of that comfort zone, into a “growth edge.”
During session prep, I often had to balance between over-authoring and relying on improvisation. I especially had to fight an urge to write in more and more details to fully flesh out the structure of regional prompts. There were more than a few times that the players simply had no interest in following plot lines that I spent considerable time thinking through and mentally gaming out. On the other side of this, player interest or action outpaced my expectations and sometimes left me scrambling to reconcile what I had ready with where they had gone.
Rest assured, the upcoming Lost Highway and Westward Bound expansions are addressing this particular issue. Those books will feature some pre-packaged encounters, as well as expanded guidance on constructing your own. I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peak of a few of the draft encounters and they are fantastic - fully ready-to-play and, even better, they provide an excellent framework on which to build your own.
Our Caravan
We started our campaign with three players, but one of those had to bow out due to schedule conflicts (the real BBEG of every campaign). Fortunately, we picked up three more players who were able to carry on from the second session until the end.
The game was very accommodating to this shift. Having a character depart the caravan so early actually provided a narrative hook for the characters who started out with him. Their interest in reuniting with him motivated them to contact different factions and deeply personalize the story of their migration.
The book provides a few thematic templates for general guidance. These are a great aid for shaping and defining the themes and experiences, as well as for varying the tone of play across multiple campaigns. We went with the “kinship” group, which worked well to unify an otherwise motley group of strangers.
From the outset, I asked that the other players treat the campaign as a “play and learn” experience. They were not expected to have done any work in advance, including reading how to play, defining any aspect of their character, or learning any of the world lore.
Instead of having players construct elaborate character backstories in isolation from one another, I presented them with interview-style questions in the first few sessions. The goal of these was to encourage them to quickly lock-in simpler personal details and intersect their own stories with their fellow travelers’.
The “write your backstories together” approach always feels risky and usually starts out shaky. It can be difficult for players to know - especially when they’ve been asked not to study the source material - where the boundaries lie. Is it too great a reach to decide that my character was some sort of special forces operative? Does anyone care what their graduate thesis was about? How do I keep from dominating the overall story with my orphaned teen-aged refugee? It turns out that, while it’s not easy, navigating those relationships with each other, in a collaborative, respectful, and personally-engaged way is an important and rewarding part of the total game experience.
The trajectory of our particular caravan took us from a neglected relief camp in Georgia, across the middle of the US, through a never-ending blizzard and high mountain passes, to new home on the California coast. We utilized powerful alien technologies, withstood a hostile ambush, inflicted devastating losses on the invaders, and helped the survivors of both sides to seek out more cooperative, or at least more tolerant, solutions to seemingly intractable problems. This was not a journey of idealistic pacifists proselytizing feel-good vibes; there was violence, loss of life, and aggression. But there was also mercy, empathy, and - most importantly to me in the tense atmosphere of our real world - hope: a belief that there is a chance things could be better, if we try to make them better, together.
What Comes Next
I had a great time with this game, and with the group I played it with. They challenged my expectations and assumptions constantly, and I am (as ever) grateful for their attention and their company.
There is a slate of new content currently in development for this game. Some of it, such as the solo journaliing game Homeworld Song, is available to project backers in a preview format. The Lost Highway source book will expand the options for playable imprints to include several intriguing alien options. Westward Bound promises to be an immediate player favorite, putting everyone into an “oops, all dogs” caravan with a variety of all-new Good Boi variants.
You should absolutely check out the official soundtrack for the game from the group Architelos. It is some powerful composition whether you’re setting the tone for a scene or just spinning it in the background.
Keep an eye on the Mythworks Store for the books. As of this writing, the core book is currently sold out, but they should be restocking with a revised printing when the expansions come to market.
If you’re interested in playing The Last Caravan, I’m more than happy to help you live that best life. Members of the site can DM me to coordinate on making that happen.
Finally, there is lively discussion and advice available on the game’s dedicated channel in the Mythworks Discord. Ted Bushman and Graham Ward are very active there and I’m pretty sure they would love to hear about your experiences playing the game. There is a great player-community that is observably passionate about The Last Caravan.