Gameplay Notes: House Rules, New and Expanded Skills

House Rules

Custom Character Creation:
Players could put eleven points into their aptitudes, each of which needed at least one. This could allow for anything from a rather lopsided character with three superior and two inferior aptitudes to a rather balanced character with one superior and no inferior aptitudes (I warned them, however, that well-balanced characters were a little like well-balanced people: kind of boring.)

Custom Equipment:

When it came to equipment, we followed a sort of BYOB rule for up to three guns or other high-value items that we actually own, or close approximations to them. For example: my brother's Winchester 70 shoots the somewhat-rare .270 WSM (didn't exist at all in 2000) and my niece wanted something with more knockdown power than her Browning BL-22, so they got a Winchester 70 firing .270 Win and a Browning BLR firing .243 Win, respectively.*

I also let them bring up to two of their own horses. I did NOT let them bring their own vehicles or bug-out bags, and I made them pay for their ammo. Had I not done so, I'm not sure if we would have had any need for the preparedness credits at all.

*in hindsight, I probably should have given her a rifle in .223 Rem. Not the greatest round in terms of ballistics or stopping power but it would be more plentiful.

Expanded Skills
I've already mentioned that Demolitions will be expanded to include the making of bombs as well as the arming and disarming of them. I also expanded Schooling to work for oddball or overlooked skills in much the same way as Preparedness works for oddball or overlooked items. If, for example, the characters needed someone who spoke French or could read a medical chart, they could roll to see if anyone ever studied that skill and remains familiar (qualified on an outstanding success roll) with it.
As with preparedness, this skill can only be used in a scenario as many times as the character has dice in it and Hooah may NOT be used to change the die roll.
Some examples of difficulty levels (for the average 20th Century American):
Routine-Imperial to Metric conversion, basic Algebra or HTML coding, general Civil War history
Standard-Spanish or French, medical terminology or electronics, general English/Russian Civil War history
Hard-Greek or Hebrew, safe cracking, paramedic training or computer programming
Oscar Charlie-Classical Gaelic, advanced surgery, the US Internal Revenue Code

New SkillsPresence-based skills

Recruitment works a lot like Personal Interaction, but is more about about changing someone's beliefs than their behaviour. Where Personal Interaction might be used to make a double agent out of a UN Stormtrooper, Recruitment would be used to convince him to abandon the occupation forces entirely and maybe even take up arms against them.

This skill is compared again the the opponent's Toughness or Personal Interaction skill (whichever is greater). Winning the contest means that his attitude changes by one degree (from an evil to neutral one or a neutral to good one, for example.) Two rolls would be needed to make a good character out of an evil one (or vise versa) and a third may be necessary before he would become part of your resistance group.

Getting people to change long-held personal convictions, especially when doing so carries a great risk of personal harm, is difficult and the dice modifiers should reflect that. I'd advise a -2 modifier for dealing with someone on the opposite end of the attitude spectrum and a -1 for adjacent attributes i.e. Sheep and Mercenaries. Positive modifiers could be given, say, for those who have reason to like you or who have reason to hate your enemies.

Recruitment of one person can only be attempted once a day. It can't be used in combat and failing the first roll against any UN authorities or their hirelings will likely result in that. Player Characters are immune to recruitment, though the player may choose to betray his teammates if he wishes. An NPC may only pretend to turn his coat as a means of infiltrating the resistance, and should probably be made to prove themselves before they're trusted too greatly.

Brainwashing is pretty much Recruitment in more hostile settings. Questioning, drugs and torture can't be used in conjunction with Brainwashing, though a highly successful roll may net some information, and three successful rolls will, of course, get you everything your prisoner knows.

Brainwashing can be attempted once a day. Player Characters are immune to it and NPCs can fake it. This could be used among more sinister resistance groups (cults) or as a means of convincing a character to conduct very harmful or disreputable acts (suicide bombing or attacks on civilians). To simulate reprogramming, just think of it as brainwashing in reverse. 

Prowess-based skills

Rapid-fire deals with rapidly discharging a normally slow-firing weapon while maintaining a modicum of accuracy. Normally this would mean fanning a revolver, but skilled shooters can also do it with lever, bolt and pump-action weapons. Can only be attempted at a skill level of familiar or better and at point-blank or close range. This is a hard-difficulty task under most circumstances; standard with certain types of weapons (an Ithaca 37 or Lucas McCain's Winchester). Failure means that the weapon fires as normal. Catastrophic failure means single shot and -1 dice to accuracy.

Everyone in our party got a starting level of familiar.

Primitive Small Arms deals with the use of any projectile weapon less sophisticated than a Trapdoor Springfield, such as a bow or muzzleloader. Anyone skilled only in modern small arms can use these weapons at a -1 accuracy penalty, and must make the occasional difficulty roll to see if they run into any misfires or other accidents.

Most members of our party got a base level of familiar. My brother and I are both qualified.

Animal Handling refers mostly to horseback riding, though would also be used with other animals such as dogs or mules and other forms of transport such as pack animals or wagons. Often considered a leisure activity in better times, horses and mules have once again become a common sight in fuel-starved America and are used on both sides of the insurgency in more remote regions.


Riding a well-trained horse at a lope in good conditions is an automatic task for most people, and one with at least qualified should only make dice rolls in non-standard situations. Occasional standard-difficulty rolls would be needed in the case of haste, bad weather, poor training or temperament, and sudden surprises. Hard or worse would be needed if these were combined. Failing these rolls will give DR3 or so to the rider and may injure the horse as well.

Horses in combat:
Don't put your horse in combat if it can be avoided; ride to the general area, find a good hiding spot to tether it, and dismount. Horses are smarter than us and will try to run away from things that could kill them. Dedicated warhorses are rare even in military herds and automatic weapons can do pretty terrible things to them.

All horses have a strength of superior and a toughness of trained or expert (smaller animals like dogs and donkeys have average strength and qualified or trained toughness). Most have inferior guts and a coolness under fire of qualified (trained for police/rescue horses, expert for war horses). They roll coolness under fire pretty much every time they get shot at. Horses have HOOAH if their riders do, and both will want

Failure means that the horse becomes spooked. Bringing a spooked horse under control is a hard task or worse. Failing this roll means the horse will attempt to escape the combat zone and may throw the rider.

Injuries and recover
Horses can't be pained or suppressed from combat injuries and will probably remain ambulatory in spite of anything short of combat ineffectiveness or wounding to the legs. However, weapons have +2 DR rating against them.

Stabilization, Healing, and Recovery uses the medic skill and works for horses the same way as it does for humans, it just takes twice as long.

Members of the Resistance Fighter class get an Animal Handling skill skill level of qualified. Elite Military and Paramilitary get a skill level of familiar. Skill levels for our party were divided between qualified and familiar. My niece and brother get a level of trained.

Lastly, Crime is a brains or guts-based skill: the knowledge of how to commit, conceal and solve crimes. Picking a lock, hotwiring a car, counterfeiting, forging IDs, cooking meth, and setting up a racketeering ring all qualify. Picking up clues to those acts would probably fall under crime or awareness, whichever's higher. This could be used to determine the success of a criminal act, or in a skill contest between a perpetrator and investigator.

This refers to more subtle acts of lawbreaking and doesn't apply to things like terrorism, murder (unless you want to hide the body), possessing explosives, discharging weapons in city limits or other typical acts of RPG mayhem. Nor does it involve specific crimes that could probably be handled under other skills (Escape/Evade/Infiltrate for sneaking into a bank, Computers for hacking, Awareness for telling if that arms dealer you're talking to is an undercover cop, Medic for organ harvests and Repair/Maintenance for running a chop shop).

It may or may not be used for counter-intelligence activities like criminal profiling or network analysis, depending on whether or not one sees those as junk sciences.

Paramilitary get a skill level of familiar.

00: Character Creation and the Battle of my Brother's Trailer

Main Cast:
My nephew as Caleb the Redneck-Gangsta Hybrid
 

My niece as Kate the Deranged Sniper

 

My brother as Steve the Carousing Sailor

His girlfriend as Maria the Latvian Volunteer

Me as Jimmy the Terror Cell Organizer Peanut Farmer from Georgia Wise and Valiant Freedom Fighter

Steve too took the Reservest/Support class while Kate was a Resistance Fighter. The rest of us are enthusiasts. We didn't bother with attitudes (even mix of Patriots and Survivors I suppose, with a bit of anti-Russian Avenger in Maria) and our temperament is crazy but medicated normal.

Gameplay:

Our first session was spent on character creation and familiarization with the game rules. We also worked out some house rules, which I'll explain in the next post. I had intended to introduce the players to the combat system via an attack on our location (yes, the literal place where we were all sitting that night) by three black UH-1 Hueys carrying a thirty-man platoon of Italian Paratroopers. For game purposes, we were assumed to have had our guns in the trailer with us.

We didn't get to fight that particular battle. The players recognized it as the Unwinnable Training Simulation it was and refused to stay in place. They opted instead to bug out into the nearby woods and ambush one of the Italian squads before heading deeper into the hills.

A shot rang out from Caleb's 30-30, covering the 300 meters and hitting the Italian Sergent in the face. This first round wisely removed him and his M203 grenade launcher from play. Kate's .270 and Jimmy's .300 mag responded in quick succession, dropping two of the M59/42 machinegunners* (the third, using a tripod-mounted variant that would take longer to bring into play, could be dealt with next turn). Caleb and Maria didn't take part in the fight; they were given shotguns and instructed to run interference on the other squads should they come to the third one's aid before we were done (actually, they had gone to bed at this point).

The Italians rolled coolness under fire with variable results. They caught sight of our position near the end of their turn and sputtered away at us with AR-70/90 Berettas and SCS-70/90 carbines, but the little washout and boulders we were hiding amongst provided ample cover. Our hunting rifles barked out again, and their assault rifles responded, tearing into the foliage with a much greater effect this time.

We really should have high-tailed it out of there at that point, but we decided to stick around and trade lead with those goombas (we really wanted their guns). When the dust settled we had killed or wounded eleven of their's with the loss of one of our own (me!). Not that bad considering that simulations of the initial setup often had none of us still combat effective after the second volley.

Of course that was just a sample battle to make sure that everyone know how to play. The actual campaign was set for next Sunday, and in the meantime I've instructed my players to educate themselves on the topics of leaderless resistance and the clandestine cell structure, with special emphasis on the tactics of the IRA and Viet Cong.

*Interesting history behind that gun. A cousin to the Yugoslavian M-53 and German MG-3 which can be found throughout the armies of Western Europe, and a grandchild of the MG-42. Many parts are interchangeable between the different weapons and a Wehrmacht soldier could easily mistake one for Hitler's Buzzsaw at first glance.

The West Germans had a problem when they started rearming in the '50s: they knew the old MG-42 was pretty much the best medium-machinegun ever designed, but it was politically unfeasible for them to keep using it. So they came up with the Rheinmetall MG-1, an MG-42 in every way except chambered for 7.62 NATO barrel and with an adjustable rate of fire. The MG-3 is that with some finer adjustments, and the others are just a bit simpler. Vintage '42's are still popular amongst American collectors and a few may even be taken from war stocks to equip the Blue Helmets (Soviets and Yugos didn't throw anything away).

Background Notes: Entropy

"In a more homogeneous society, the growing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a privileged minority might be expected to produce a strong reaction on the part of the majority. In present-day America, however, no such reaction is likely to take place. Although heavily outnumbered, the unified few rest secure in the knowledge that any insurgency will almost certainly dissipate in quarrels among the fragmented many rather than in open rebellion; during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, black, Hispanic, and white rioters turned on Korean middlemen rather than march on Beverly Hills. The belligerent guests on the never-ending talk show, urged on by the screaming audience, will continue to enact allegorical conflicts, while, off-camera and upstairs, the discreet members of the class that does not exist ponder the choice of marble or mahogany for the walls of the executive suite from which they command."
-Michael Lind

[GM: What if the masses had marched on Beverly Hills at the end of the Cold War? What if that decade had been a lot worse overall? As a Millennial, I look back on the 1990's as something of a golden age: good wages, cheap gas, bland culture, moral degeneracy, and all the other hallmarks of a society gone as high as it'll ever go. That's why I decided to change the setting for this RPG from near-future to alternate-history: what if my formative years had been every bit as bad as the 1980's action movies predicted?]

Robert Donner:
They called them the 1992 California Riots and they were wrong on all three counts. The riots weren't exclusive to 1992, they didn't only happen in California and "riot" wasn't always the best term to describe them. More like "insurrections" (or, less charitably, "pogroms"). Clinton did his best to ease tensions and keep a lid on those boiling pots, but that was all he could really do. The violence had been a long time coming, burning over areas that still showed scorch marks from the '60s, and everyone knew it would boil over again.

We on the Right weren't happy back then either. Ruby Ridge was that year, Waco was next year, those of us with longer memories still recalled Kent State and the MOVE House. Oh, some folks were still content with voting, but even the dimmest bulbs were starting to see what a useless gesture that was. Pat Buchanan's and Jerry Brown's insurgent campaigns both performed well, despite the parties using every trick in the book to railroad them out of their primaries. The Reform Party took over 25% of the vote in 1992, 12% in 1996, and probably won't field a candidate at all in what will be more or less a ceremonial election this year.

Throw in NAFTA, gun control, information blackouts, the War on Drugs, the prison system, a protracted ground war in the Balkans, and it wasn't long before someone expressed that displeasure through what Clausewitz called "politics by other means". Tim McVeigh expressed it with bombs under the cars of federal agents. I expressed it with molotov cocktails through the windows of abortion mills. Next thing you know our country is falling apart and we're all fighting over the rotting carcass.

By 1998 America was full of burning federal buildings and those remaining had converted into mini-fortresses. The newly-formed United States Garrison force was holding the major population centers, minus the worst of the ghettos plus the large thoroughfares. We were left with most of the countryside and inner city and could could generally check any incursions by all but their strongest convoys, though we could never truly consolidate our gains for fear of getting carpet-bombed.

None of these events occurred in isolation. Canada was likewise mired in a multifaceted ethnic and geographic civil war: the West and Maritime provinces are fighting the central government, the French and First Nations are fighting the English and each other. Mexico broke like a pane of glass under the burden of racial, economic, and political disparity. Nations around the world were butting heads and making alliances, filling the vacuum created by our departure from the world stage.

We made our move on Washington DC itself in the spring of 2000, in one of our biggest conventional actions to date. But it was not the new Yorktown to which we were marching, but the new Culloden: The president had called upon the aid of the International Community, who responded in force against the "extremists" threatening the legitimate United States government. They hit without warning and overwhelmed us, sending the surviving remnants trailing back to their backwoods sanctuaries. Many were cooked alive in their compounds, but those of us who read Mao did a bit better.

Some folks think the whole thing was planned as part of a conspiracy to destroy America and bring about a one world government in the new millennium. I don't. I think the Blue Helmets just saw this country unraveling, feared it would give their own folks the wrong ideas and decided to take action before things got too out of hand. Not much different from the Allied interventions against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, just more successful.

That was six months ago. At that time I commanded a 1,500-man light infantry battalion and there were about 27,000 militia members in the lower Shenandoah Valley alone. I now find myself with a 6-man staff and about a dozen contacts with the small, dispersed direct action cells that make up the remnants of my formation. I don't know how many resisters are left in this region and I don't know how many won't die or quit over the course of the winter. Our goals at this time deal primarily with evasion and survival; we'll regain our strength, striking out at our enemies when we can and reorganizing our forces for the kind of war that John Singleton Mosby might have liked.

Gameplay Notes: Schedule and Postponements

C-Day was set for last Sunday but had to be cancelled due to recurrent power outages. We've rescheduled for this weekend and hope to begin regular gaming shortly. Game updates should come in the week after our first session; supplementary information shall be provided as the opportunity and inclination takes me.

Your humble servant,

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Donner
9th Shenandoah Ranger Battalion
Virginia Militia