Rescue June Mayweather – Act 2

Last time, you will recall, the Rocket Brigade had tracked baron Aristodemos to his palace on a remote planet. He had kidnapped plucky reporter, June Mayweather, and certainly had no-good in mind. During the battle with the baron’s mechanical servants, dashing captain Stagg Wallop was killed, and the team were unable to prevent the baron from having his wicked way with June and then escaping in his personal rocket.

Now, read on.

A reformed Rocket Brigade with a new leader in captain Cody ‘Uppercut’ Kirby had traced the baron to an inhospitable jungle planet. He was now reinforced by a squad of picked goons, armed to the teeth and protected from the environment. With June in tow, the baron needed to recover a necklace that (we discovered by using Mythic) would chain June in mind and body, and kill her within 40 days unless a hefty ransom was paid.

For this game we had a first test of the Raygun Gothic rules, using the d6 countback dice resolution system. In addition, we incorporated our favourite elements from other games, including randomly occurring monsters, and natives with changing allegiances. Figures were a mix of Eureka, Renegade, Pulp Figures, and some D&D pre-painted as well. The main terrain piece was a Paizo flip map of a swamp, supplemented with some walls to lift some of the ruins into relief. GW trees were dotted around as well, and I ringed the uncompleted tree armatures at the edges to give the impression of dead and rotten swamp vegetation. And just to further help tie the map into the underlying board, I dotted some Miniature World Maker rubber swamps to break up the hard edges of the card.

The baron and crew trekked along the path, pretty much ignored by the natives who lurked in the thick greenery. Every turn, we randomly discovered who’s side the natives were on, and for every group in the jungle we rolled to see if a crocodilic monster or giant snake appeared and attacked. Once engaged with a monster, we rolled to see if a feeding frenzy started and another appeared. The natives spent most of the game fighting off these beasts, though a couple managed to shoot their poisoned arrows at one unfortunate goon, who went down.

The rocketeers bounced over the undergrowth, and found themselves in the middle of the path, directly in front of the baron’s picked squad, who gunned a couple down. Bypassing the main group in one direction, and bouncing over them in another (while firing his Colt .45 as he zoomed over their heads), the rocketeers cornered the baron in the ruined building. A goon had been trying to retrieve the necklace (requiring 3 successes in difficult checks), but he dropped his shovel as Cody lived up to his nickname and sent him reeling.

But it was to no avail, the baron’s man defended admirably, recovered and then knocked out Cody, and the baron calmly pulled his raygun and vaporised another rocketeer entering by the other doorway. Then, June still in tow and presumably still enamoured of the villain, the baron fled.

Again he slipped the net, but he failed to retrieve the necklace. The rocketeers were almost wiped out, and the final act will need to be prosecuted by a different unit of the galactic law enforcement agencies.

Rescue June Mayweather – retro-future game

Greg and I played out a single scenario last night using our own house rules, based on Song of Blades and Heroes, for the Planetary Romance genre.

Formerly this had the working title of Flaming Plasma, and was designed to be a fairly generic set of science fiction rules. However, this topic is soon to be covered by an official Ganesha Games product, so we have pulled back from that big picture. Now the working title for the rules is Raygun Gothic, or possibly Zeerust, two industry terms to describe that style of science fantasy that ran from the turn of the 19th century through to about the mid 1960′s. It covers both the pulp adventure of the interwar years (including our science fantasy StarGate 1900) and also the Sword ‘n Blaster adventures in the mould of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. For my own tastes it does not include WWII, or Atomic weaponry. Instead, it assumes the fantasies of the interwar period are a fair, if romanticised version, of what the future becomes.

The scenario ran as follows: Baron Aristodemos had kidnapped plucky human June Mayweather and spirited her away to his place on the Jungle Planet for a secret ‘wedding’. Doubtless there were good political reasons for this, but as we all know, those alien dictators are obsessed by Earth girls.

Heroic Captain Stagg Wallop of the Space Brigade led his team of Rocketeers to the palace to rescue her. Bestial primitives marauded in the steaming jungle. They were fearful of outsiders and vengeful against the Baron, probably because of foul experiments, or destruction of their holy sites to extract Phlebotnium, or something like that. Guarding the palace was a squad of the Baron’s mechanical men, robotic helpers armed with stun rifles. The Baron had to achieve 6 successes in Very Difficult Quality checks in order to ‘persuade’ June that life with him wouldn’t be so bad (all this stuff happens off screen, of course, but we know what’s really going on).

The Rocketeers broke into separate groups and approached the palace on three sides, with the Captain running straight up the main steps. A quick zap with a stun gun slowed his enthusiastic rush, but not until he had plugged the door robot with his Colt 45, causing it to stand shaken and confused for the rest of the game.

The men made their way through the upstairs windows and burst into the upstairs landing to spray the robots with Thompson fire. In two memorable moments, a robot fell back over the balcony with the sound of a crashing piano, and another robot was heard through the wall by a Rocketeer who made a successful listen Quality check. So good was his estimation that he  sprayed through the wall to get the mechanical menace.

As the Rocketeers cleared the landing in well aimed machine-gun fire, Stagg kicked in the door to the master bedroom, only to discover that he was too late. June was snuggled against the baron in flagrante delicto, clearly convinced that life was just fine this way, thankyou. Unperturbed, the Baron pulled a raygun from under the pillow, and killed Stagg in a single devastating zap. Then, with June clamped to his side, he jumped into the escape chute and rocketed away in his private ship. This, again, required a Very Difficult Quality check, which the Baron managed to perform with ease.

Each turn we rolled to see who controlled the beast men. They swapped sides regularly, causing no lasting harm to anyone, but they did get into the palace, so I expect there will be an awful lot of cleaning up to do. We now have a recurring foe in Baron Aristodemos, and the Space Brigade now has the death of Captain Wallop to avenge. And will June ever come to her senses and be rescued? How can she live with the shame of what has happened? Or did what we think happened really happen at all?

Find out next time in Raygun Gothic. [Cue stirring music]

Flaming Plasma – Planetary Romance

One of the major problems with this set of rules is dealing with vehicles. In the science fiction (or, more accurately, space fantasy) setting, vehicles can be expected to be present and they are potentially very powerful. The trick is to keep the spirit of Songs with its extreme simplicity, but you don’t want to make it so simple that it becomes possible for a man armed with a pistol to take on a tank because the combat results are all off one continuous table.

Flying Lead has a separate two-stage vehicle combat section, and this is a way of dealing with the problem. From game experience, however, Greg and I found that want we really wanted to do was shoot at the driver of the car rather than shoot the car. These are heroic, skirmish games, and not tactically intense anti-tank games. That’s just the way I like to play.

As I played with a number of different approaches – getting some good feedback from Alan – I came closer to thinking that the real feel I want from these rules is a pulp, space opera. I am less interested in having a gritty war-game than I am a dramatic war-game. I don’t mind impossible leaps and heroic actions. In fact if this could not happen in Flaming Plasma I’d call the development a failure. I still want the rules to be generic so that games can be played anywhere along a notional time, tech, or setting continuum. But the feeling I am realising I want is in that heroic, dramatic, pulp end of the pool.

This simplifies vehicle combat enormously. A strider may waltz into the playing arena, as may a megahyperdeathbot, but the action remains with the individual man. Weapons +/- are therefore constrained into a very narrow band reflecting ease of aiming, not power of attack. And so the results must be carried by Special rules characteristics. And this allows a lot more less-mechanistic colour. So I would like people to be able to play Aliens with this, but I’d also like to allow a Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon sword ‘n blaster game as well. This pleases me: it fits the vision of the game I want to play.

Flaming Plasma – scenario generation questions

Flaming Plasma is the name of the rules set I am building to enable me to play skirmish games in my Ornithopter setting. It is based on Song of Blades and Heroes, and has inspiration from several older rules sets. Importantly, I hope for it to be generic enough to be thrown into the ring with the plethora of other generic sets. Oh… the dream.

Anyway, I consider my greatest contribution to the world of rules to be in the tools for designing sessions – mini-campaigns. The format for Flashing Steel seems sound: asking Where, What, Why and Who questions and then fleshing out the details. The trick is to remain generic but still give sufficient flavour. Science fiction is just fantasy, of course, and  whatever you say can only eliminate some possibilities, and alienate some readers who saw it differently.

I read a set of rules once that claimed to be generic, allowing you to play with whatever miniatures you had. It then went on to describe the politics and economics of a notional world of the author’s construction. He described the factions and force construction principles. In short, he enabled you to play not anything that you had models for, but anything that HE had models for.

So this is what must be avoided. The goal is to be specific enough for the players to design their forces and decorate the table from the random items, but to be generic enough so that they do not have to share the same art sensibilities as the author.

StarBlazer Adventures may come to the rescue again, as it has already when I was attempting to overcome the problem of shooting at armoured vehicles. There are some great random tables in there. And these are the basic design principles I had in mind: http://shichitenhakki.wordpress.com/rpgs-using-mythic/ornithopter/ Is this too restrictive already? The stuff about no aliens? Should that be relaxed? Probably, or at least the language needs to be modified so the existance of creatures that are not-like-man is definitely possible.

On the workbench -good progress for Queen’s Birthday

Long ago – twenty years or more – I decided that I wanted to skirmish war-game because the entry was so much easier. You only need up to a dozen figures and you were playing, rather than paint a dozen and realise that you are only a tenth, if that, of the way through one side. But there was no usable set of skirmish rules as far as I was concerned. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have talked up the Song of Blades and Heroes engine from Ganesha games.

So now I can churn out a couple of complete ‘armies’ a weekend, and cover a much broader range of historical, fantasy and science fiction settings.

Take for example these beautiful Brigade Games swashbucklers, just perfect for the heroes of my 30YW/ECW games using Flashing Blades.

Or these modern Bundeswehr from Eureka Miniatures, painted in a generalised camouflage pattern and useful for my science fiction games. The rules for these, Flaming Plasma, are approaching a good play-test state.

So all is well. I see that Eureka have some modern French Foreign Legion that have not even made it on to the website yet. Man, am I salivating for them… FAMAS armed troops? You bet. Just the ticket for science fiction Colonial militia. I can’t wait.

But now: Mega Miniatures villagers. A topic that is a little dry, but one that is essential for Renaissance skirmishing. After all, someone has to be tending the pigs that the ‘heroes’ come to scrap over.