21 May, 2011
I saw this in a clip from the computer game L.A. Noire today was instantly smitten, so without further ado — the 1937-39 Delage D8-120S:
The Delage is a French automobile designed by Louis Delage (with funding from Delahayde) and powered by a 4.7 liter straight-8 motor, 120 hp (pretty darn good for the time!) Custom bodies were designed for the steel chassis (the above is a Georges Paulin’s design house.)
Size: 2 Def: 6 Str: 8 Spd: 100 mph Han: 0 Crew: 1 Pass: 1 Cost: $10,000
17 May, 2011
I restarted my Battlestar: Galactica campaign a few weeks ago, now that the new gaming group has gelled. Right off the bat, I wanted to do something different than the last campaign, which was a “second fleet” scenario that was running alongside the at-that-time new series.
For that, I decided to follow the Caprica model and do some serious retconning on the setting: while it is still a few decades after the first Cylon War, and most of the trappings of the new show are still around, i started tinkering with the basic premise of the first few “seasons” — instead of jumping straight to the new sneak attack, as with the last campaign, I’m starting a few years prior (undefined for the players, but hinted at if they’re paying attention to the background material — the CNP is nearing initial rollout, Galactica is slatted to be turned into a museum.)
I am using a lot of the material from Caprica and Quantum Mechanix excellent Map of the Twelve Colony of Kobol for the setting — fleshing out the rest of the 12 Colonies, instead of sticking with just Caprica, Gemenon, and Tauron. Most of the characters are from the lesser colonies — Arelon, Scorpia, and Canceron.
As with last time, the characters are heavily crafted with background hooks: family and friends, favorite locales, homes, etc…all the stuff they could lose later.
New to the setting, but what could be inferred from the two shows: there are still robots a-plenty in the Colonies, but they are non-AI; artificial intelligence is banned, according to the miniseries, and I have special squads of Colonial Security Service personnel whose job is to stop illicit AI development and manufacture…but they have butler bots, sexbots (but heavily controlled — in my campaign, I’ve inferred the Cylon rebellion started with the sexbots and caretaker androids — the stuff they were trying to make as self-aware and responsive as possible), and the like. There are self-driving cars. There’s virtual reality gaming and augmented reality similar to the stuff in Caprica (or on your smartphone, for that matter.)
The Colonial Fleet has been steadily forgetting the lessons of the Cylon War and modernizing their ships with heavily firewalled networks for faster response and more precise control of the vessels. There’s a compartment of people whose jobs are computer security and the safeguards on the ships are much improved — the Cylons won’t just cut through their electronic defenses like butter…but they will, in theory, eventually win out. (Hence the need for the CNP back door.)
The Colonial government has been expanding quickly and taking it on itself to dictate to the various colonial worlds — think the European Union vis-a-vis its members. Some of the worlds are “deadbeats” (like Greece or Portugal), others are the financial engines of the colonies (these are Leonis, Caprica, and Tauron), and some are like Brussels or the District of Columbia — purely government sinks of support (Libran and Picon.) These worlds aren’t over their tribal identities, and they aren’t working together as well as the federal state in Caprica City would like. They smuggle, they play fast and loose on spending and taxation, and there’s a sense in the younger Colonials that the Cylons are gone, no longer a threat…a position the government has been fostering for political reasons for years. The fleet is always on the edge of downsizing.
The beginning episodes are dealing with the Expeditionary Task Force — a group of detached duty battlestars and militarized civilian exploration vessels that are charting the surrounding star systems, setting up mining and science stations, and conducting deep-range early-warning missions to watch the Armistice Line (and occasionally breech it.) They know the Cylons are doing the same, but neither side has caught the other outright. There are also pirate activities that muddy the waters, so that Cylon presence hasn’t been proven. There have been outposts that have gone missing — crew, cargo, ships…pirates? Cylons?
One of the things we’ll see is that people and their personal effects — diaries, media libraries, etc. go missing — but not the tylium they’re mining, not the ships and buildings. Why would pirates steal people and not the valuables? Why would Cylons kidnap people that are relatively low on intelligence value? The point is to play up a much more mysterious Cold War scenario, coupled with the sorts of internal political intrigue that make governments too slow to respond to threats — even obvious ones.
Added to this, Colonial archeological teams have been finding evidence that there was an older, advanced civilization predating the Colonies foundings by tens of thousands of years…was it the Lords of Kobol? Are their history and scriptures wrong? This is causing backlash from the religious community and portions of the political apparatus — could Colonial society have existed before Colonization? Aliens? What’s going on..? (All of this has happened before and all will happen again…maybe the gods play out this scenario over and over through time?)
The goal: eventually the characters will discover the Cylons are either training people to act as agent provocateurs or are possibly recreating them in android form…but using biological means to disguise them. There will be more than the 12 models, but they are usually not perfect copies, mentally; the 12 are the leaders and will vaguely resemble the Lords of Kobol (the whole historical cycle thing again) in their personalities, but will be monotheists. No “Final Five” stuff.
17 May, 2011
Well, I was hoping to push a few posts out this weekend, but my mother was here visiting me, her new daughter-in-law and new grandchild. Since I haven’t seen my mother in seven years, it behooved me to actually spend time with her.
Posts coming tonight and tomorrow.
The cookout for her on Friday did provide a nice recipe for you guys:
Black Campbell Steak (or whatever you wanna call it)
Take a bunch of thin steaks and put them in a big container. Pour in enough beer (I used Blue Moon’s Summer Wheat) and bourbon to cover the meat — I did a 2 to 1 ratio (favor beer) and did dilute it a bit with water. I did six steaks, so I used about 4 cloves of chopped garlic, about a tsp each of oregano, parsley, basil, about double that sea salt and black pepper. Cover, shake a bit, refrigerate until an hour before cooking, then take it out, shake again.
Grill over an open flame for about 5-10 minutes depending on temperature. They should come out tasty and very, very moist. Succulent, you might say, were you inclined to it.
10 May, 2011
“Why?” you ask. ” ’cause,” I respond.
9 May, 2011
4 May, 2011
There are always challenges when putting together a group of characters for an RPG game, and a military game has special challenges. Like all groups there are the main issues:
1. Who does what? All groups specialize — Player A has a fighter, Player B a wizard and so on… In a military game, you have to decide what kind of group you need. Is it a special forces platoon or A-Team? A marine fire squad? Viper pilots on a battlestar? Various different positions on a starship?
First thing to remember for most military groups — and the US Marines stress this — you are a rifleman first. Are you an Arabic linguist? You probably handle radio work, translation or interrogation in a fire team, but you are still a rifleman. Skills will overlap, but your job in the squad might be different — for a squad, there’s usually one guy with the big radio, one with the SAW or M249, maybe one or two guys with an M203 (or if the war god’s smiling on you the new XM-25 25mm “Punisher” or six-shot 40mm grenade launcher.) Somebody might have a SMAW or Dragon for heavy targets…not everybody is carrying all this gear; weight is an important issue for the infantryman, even one that’s dropped off by a vehicle. Between your armor, MRE or two, your water Camelback, radio, ammunition, and weapon you are one hot and heavy sucker. Try running half a mile with 80 lbs of gear if you want to know why you don’t carry four weapons…I’ll wait.
For a special forces Alpha detachment there’s a 12 man team (often broken into 6 man squads) that are led by an officer or warrant officer. Everyone else is a sergeant (E5-E9) and specialize in something — communications, medical, demolitions, technical…everybody’s got a speciality, but most of the team cross-trains so that if your medic catches a 7.62mm projectile is a sensitive area, you can cover his skill set. When everyone is healthy and hale, you call for the specialist, even if your skill rating is higher than there’s for whatever reason. In real life, you don’t have a character to review — you’d call the “medic” for a first aid situation.
For games where the character do vastly different job — say you have four players for Battlestar Galactica: two want to play pilots (one a viper, one a raptor), another wants to be the chief, another the commander. Let them…it will require the GM to do a bit more work to make them work together, but — fraternization issues aside — officers and enlisted aren’t working completely separately.
2. The matter of ranks and chain of command: In a special forces team, most of the guys are going to be sergeants with maybe an officer. If the players have issues with being subordinate or superior to the other players, make the officer an NPC. Most of these teams went through hell to get selected; there’s a lot less of the military BS for the special forces, the men are much more likely to treat each other as equals, with rank being something they worry about when the brass is around.
For a military team where the players are enlisted, there’s a lot less worry about rank structure. If you’re not an NCO, you listen to the NCOs; if you’re any enlisted guy, you listen to the guys with the shiny stuff on their collars. (Caveat to this — most sergeant majors are given a lot of leeway by junior officers because 1) they have serious experience and 2) they work for company and higher level officers…they can put the hurt on you through that general, colonel, or major they work for.
If you have a mixed rank group — that being an enlisted guy, an officer, maybe a warrant officer — there are limitation to how they can interact. Most military have rules against fraternization between officers and other ranks. That will limit the “off-duty” interaction, and in the field there’s going to be a certain barrier. Simply put: the officer is your boss. But unlike a civilian boss, this guy can have you restricted to quarters, order more work on your schedule, or if they’re senior enough bring you up on charges. Sergeants and lower ranks aren’t supposed to fraternize, but they do. Warrant officers are the odd men out — you’ll see them in some services, not in others. These are technical specialists whose jobs require officer authority (say helicopter pilot in the US Army, or sailing master in the 18th Century British Navy), but because they aren’t commissioned by their government but warranted their position by command authority, they don’t often have the responsibility of commissioned officers. They’re part of the officer club, but no one looks too hard if they’re friendly with the NCOs, so long as it’s kept professional.
Next time: Some insights into military life they don’t tend to show in the movies and TV…
2 May, 2011
The role playing game is the direct descendent of the wargame, so it’s no surprise that combat — personal, vehicular, or mass units — is often part and parcel of a game campaign. Often, an RPG setting is inherently militaristic, even when it pretends not to be, and sometimes it’s very overt: Dungeons & Dragons may be high fantasy about (essentially) murdering and robbing not-so-defenseless critters stuck in an underground maze, but better camapigns involves more than a string of dungeon crawls — with chivalric pursuits like saving a village/town from orc hordes, or warring on the local (and evil) magistrate. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Babylon 5 — most sci-fi properties are intrinsically militaristic as the characters are often members of an armed force. Redcoats fighting Martians in Space: 1889 are commanding cloudships or commanding/fighting with military units. Espionage games are often tied to uncovering or stopping military dangers (at least during the Cold War), but special forces guys are usually the ones in the black turtlenecks backing you up in that raid on the secret subterranean base.
Military-oriented campaigns, or even police procedurals where there’s a rank structure to adhere to, have certain challenges for the player and GM alike.
The most obvious to someone who has been in service is that not all players are likely to be equal. In the military — be it the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy, the forces of some fantasy army, the Colonial Fleet, or Starfleet, not all the characters are going to be the same rank unless that is specifically how the players and GM want them to begin play. That’s just a fact of military life — someone’s always your superior, often someone is your subordinate. There’s always an idiot in the chain of command — the sort of congenital moron that’s going to get someone dead when the action starts. Sometimes, that’s going to be a player character.
So how to handle the rank situation. There’s the standard approach — everybody starts out the same rank or in similar positions: you’re all starting as Starfleet ensigns, you’re all midshipmen in HMS Victory, you’re sergeants in the Roundheads, you’re detectives or special agents in whatever police department or secret service. It’s easy, it’s fair, and if you’re group tends toward power players, or tends to run to the slightly immature, this is a great choice. All the players work up through the ranks at — they hope — the same pace.
Problem 1: That’s not how it works. In real life, you’ll get promoted at different rates simply because not everyone is going to shine all the time. Player A might be the guy that saves the platoon with a mad rush across the field, Tommy gun blazing. Player B might have been just as important to the success of the mission, flanking the Nazis while A is trying to get himself sent on to his maker…who gets mentioned int he dispatches, really? Now A’s a sergeant and B’s still a corporal.
A and B are still comrades and friends, and maybe Sergeant A listens to Corporal B’s suggestions, but in the end, unless there’s an officer in the area, A’s in charge. He makes the final decisions, and it’s on his head if it goes sideways.
Officers tend to have a bit more friendly relationship with each other, but there’s usually rules against fraternization between enlisted and officer for good reason…as Trevor Howard’s Captain Bligh puts it in Mutiny on the Bounty “You can’t expect unquestioning obedience from a partner in last night’s debauch…” So Captain C and Lieutenant D are friends and often will listen to each other’s consul, but in the end, if C gets an order from his superior, he tasks his people (including D) as he sees fit. D might ask for enhancement or clarification on an instruction; the player of D might try to convince C on another course of action but in the end, C’s the man on the spot.
Some players will have trouble with the rank structure and the notions of military order. Role playing for most of us is about getting outside the strictures of our normal lives and being the hero…so in games like this it’s important to point out early that there are consequences to too much insubordination. Even Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica can’t escape punishment for her actions, even though she’s far too valuable to the ship to just lock in the brig or cashier from the service. Even Apollo, who actively mutinied on multiple occasions was held to task for his breaking good order.
Another problem the GM will encounter at the character creation stage: one of your players is determined to crap all over the campaign from the start and wants to play that character who’s great at what they do to the point that the command structure puts up with their crazy antics. I had one player in a recent Star Trek campaign that wanted to play that engineer that’s too too good for discipline, and isn’t really a fan of Starfleet. Well, there’s no press ganging in the Roddenberry universe, so why would they put up with this crank; it’s not like everyone in Starfleet (even Dwight Schultz’s character) is super-talented…no one with shiny stuff on their collar going to put up with a prima donna for too long.
Make sure, before you even go to pre-production — as it were — that every one is on board.
A related problem to those above: while a lot of role playing gamers join the military, not all are veterans or servicepeople…those with no experience of the service often are nervous about playing characters from a culture they really don’t understand — especially if there’s a vet in the group.
Well, you probably aren’t a half-elf warrior princess, either, but that doesn’t stop a lot of players…being an army sergeant shouldn’t either. If you have a vet in the group, they’ll be happy to throw you hints as to how to act like a soldier: what you can get away with, what you can’t, how your life is structured, how the justice system works for troops. You don’t have to be proficient in tactics, orders of battle…just have fun.
The intimidation factor is often higher for GMs without military experience running a military-based campaign for people who were in service. Don’t sweat it — use their experience to enhance the game. Ask about how UCMJ works, how rules of engagement are structured and decided upon, etc. The internet can get you a lot of the basic stuff, but it doesn’t explain that most of your day in the motor pool pretending to fix that vehicle you’ve signed for, or that all operations might stop for a day of remedial training on how not to be stupid driving after somebody in a completely different country rolls their water truck.
Like any other setting you might jump into playing verisimilitude is essential to really capturing the flavor of a campaign — if the military is involved, you should strive to capture the life, even if you have to exaggerate a few things here and there to do it. There are plenty of good movies, novels, stories that detail the life of soldiers in or out of the combat zone — read up or watch them. For franchise settings like Babylon 5, which does a better job than Star Trek at catching the military life (and honestly, what sci-fi show didn’t do a better job?), but it pales in comparison to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, or the early seasons of Stargate SG-1.
As with anything game-oriented — first and foremost, have fun. Everything else is icing on the cake.
29 April, 2011
The first week, Sofia was generally quiet, good-natured, and very regular with her feeding/waking schedule. However, starting this weekend, she’s now into hour-long crying jags that seem to be near impossible to assuage. This is making getting any kind of work or blogging down virtually impossible. Swaddling seems to help, and she responds better to the wife than to me…
So expect the posts to be slower coming than usual until this starts to shake itself out.
I am however, working on a few ideas for how to run military (or any hierarchy)-based campaigns, tidbits on creating verisimilitude in your setting, and hope to have a chunk of house rules for James Bond: 007.
27 April, 2011
Adorable…until they’re big enough to eat your face. And even then, they’re still pretty cute.
27 April, 2011
Do you have anything in particular you would like to see here on the ol’ blog? A review of something? Perhaps more material for a system, or some thoughts on how to handle a particular issue at the gaming table? Feel free to comment!
The Black Campbell