HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
Yeah yeah, it's a week late. Sue me already.
T2K was the first purely military RPG I was ever introduced to – a game where all PCs are members of a military organization, and are soldiers trapped behind enemy lines after the collapse of a spearhead offensive deep into Poland during world war III.
The game immediately caught my interest because of the serious length and math involved in character generation, while still remaining fairly simple AND well balanced for a game that uses random die-generated ability scores. It also caught my eye because of the pencil-sketch artwork that graced the cover of the rules booklets inside the boxed set as well as the interior pages.
And what a boxed set it was. Two rule books (player and GM), a map, some TOP SECRET reports on enemy troop movements, a booklet of nothing but game rules charts and tables, and another of nothing but price lists and descriptions of goods, and yet another with character generation rules overviews, skill lists, and language charts, plus the character sheets – one sheet for rolling up characters, and another for actually recording the information once the character is finished.
The setting of the game is an alternate future (now an alternate history, since we are well past Y2K), where World War III started on both USSR fronts - first with China, and then with NATO when Germany united while Soviet attention was focused on the Eastern front. The war escalated into a series of limited nuclear exchanges – at first against tank formations in Asia, and then against the occasional urban target on other fronts, and even a very limited exchange with the U.S. However, the nuclear exchanges and extended fighting, combined with complete devastation in the Middle East, result in a near complete destruction of all petroleum fuel sources. Suddenly, WWIII is being fought by tank battalions that have to stop and distil their own ethanol fuel while on the move. The breakdown in communications and civil structure result in military units moving into a cantonment-style of living – advancing and fighting during the spring and summer, and moving into towns and cities in the fall and winter to harvest crops and weather the winter.
The game begins when the last major advance of NATO forces under US command is cut off and destroyed outside of Kalisz, in Poland. Seems the Soviet forces have managed to get enough fuel to their tank divisions to move a large number of them from the Eastern front to the NATO lines, and they catch the NATO forces by surprise, cutting off retreat and leaving a few small independent units left as they shatter the main thrust of the offensive.
Players roll up military service characters and start out as stragglers from this battle, and must escape fro the vicinity of Kalisz in order to survive. Character generation, as I lead on about above, is done through random stat generation followed by a point-buy skill purchase, wit the number of skill points (and the amount of money you start with to equip your character) being inversely related to how good your stats are. Good stats = very young with no experience or stuff. Crappy stats = older character, lots of skills, more gear. In fact, I liked the character generation system enough that I must have rolled up a hundred and fifty different characters over the years, at the very least.
One of the interesting effects of the chargen is that the average group of 4-6 players will have a LOT of gear when they start up. More bullets, grenades, rockets and stuff than they will know what to do with. So you strap it all into trailers and stick it on the outside of your vehicles and roll. This seems to suit the feel of the beginning of the game, as the players have the opportunity to effectively loot a large amount of military hardware before being told to try to return home on their own.
And it leads to what is usually one of the first events in the game, after a firefight or two. The first vehicle break-down. So, you are on the run from a major military presence, trying to make as much distance as possible, when your LAV-25 breaks down in some farmer’s field in the backwaters of Poland. The options are either to stop and try to fix it by jury rigging (not a good idea early in the campaign, when you are close to major troop concentrations), or ditch it and double-up in the other vehicles. And suddenly you find yourself leaving a LOT of your cool starting equipment behind in that broken down LAV.
As a game based around military conflict, there is an obvious bias of the rules being about conflict and conflict resolution systems (ie: combat), but since the players will often be on the move from town to town, a simple system of determining NPC motivations is also given using a deck of playing cards. It also doesn’t take long for anything but the largest group of characters to realise that they have to deal with the local populace in order to survive or return home or accomplish whatever other mission they give themselves – they will need food, ammunition, fuel and help along the way.
The game system is percentile driven, with skill checks either being against the skill %, or doubling or halving the skill based on the difficulty of the check. One of the oddities about the system for many players is that the small arms combat system uses ‘shots’ instead of bullets, where a ‘shot’ is roughly three rounds of ammunition spent. This makes for simpler combat book-keeping and also some confusion over assault rifles with only 10 shots and the venerable 1911 .45 ACP sidearm only having two ‘shots’. The combat system scales fairly well, however, from townfolk with Makarovs up to the level of tanks shooting at each other, all using the same system.
The combat system, after one or two test runs, is very simple and fast. In fact, the majority of the time we spent playing the game was on two tasks. The first was roleplaying interactions with locals, trying to acquire their trust to allow us to hide in barns as the soviet tank battalion rolled through town, trying to negotiate fair prices of weaponry (which there is an overabundance of in post-war Poland) versus cheese and bread (which there is nowhere near enough of). Never before or since have I played a game where we traded a collection of 12 state-of-the-art German assault rifles with ammunition in exchange for 12 dozen eggs, three wheels of cheese, and four dozen loaves of bread. The second was logistics – figuring out how much we could carry, where to carry it, and what to leave behind. We routinely had to leave ‘caches’ of equipment behind as we travelled, and of the two times we went back to get them, once the cache had already been ransacked by the locals. We also got to see that old LAV-25 we left behind on the second day out of Kalisz again a few months later, as the field command unit of a local warlord we were trying to usurp in order to help the village we were hiding in because the warlord was trying to take half of their harvest that year (and we were willing to take him on for only one quarter of the harvest and the goodwill of the citizenry).
The game had a large series of modules written for it, a campaign tracking a group on their way home – first through some major cities in Poland, and then on a boat, then recomissioning an old train to cross to Germany where the last boat is leaving shortly to bring soldiers back home to the US. Later adventures were set in the civil unrest of a post-war United States.
There was another edition of the game, very different from the first edition, that I’ll probably cover another day.
T2K was the first purely military RPG I was ever introduced to – a game where all PCs are members of a military organization, and are soldiers trapped behind enemy lines after the collapse of a spearhead offensive deep into Poland during world war III.
The game immediately caught my interest because of the serious length and math involved in character generation, while still remaining fairly simple AND well balanced for a game that uses random die-generated ability scores. It also caught my eye because of the pencil-sketch artwork that graced the cover of the rules booklets inside the boxed set as well as the interior pages.
And what a boxed set it was. Two rule books (player and GM), a map, some TOP SECRET reports on enemy troop movements, a booklet of nothing but game rules charts and tables, and another of nothing but price lists and descriptions of goods, and yet another with character generation rules overviews, skill lists, and language charts, plus the character sheets – one sheet for rolling up characters, and another for actually recording the information once the character is finished.
The setting of the game is an alternate future (now an alternate history, since we are well past Y2K), where World War III started on both USSR fronts - first with China, and then with NATO when Germany united while Soviet attention was focused on the Eastern front. The war escalated into a series of limited nuclear exchanges – at first against tank formations in Asia, and then against the occasional urban target on other fronts, and even a very limited exchange with the U.S. However, the nuclear exchanges and extended fighting, combined with complete devastation in the Middle East, result in a near complete destruction of all petroleum fuel sources. Suddenly, WWIII is being fought by tank battalions that have to stop and distil their own ethanol fuel while on the move. The breakdown in communications and civil structure result in military units moving into a cantonment-style of living – advancing and fighting during the spring and summer, and moving into towns and cities in the fall and winter to harvest crops and weather the winter.
The game begins when the last major advance of NATO forces under US command is cut off and destroyed outside of Kalisz, in Poland. Seems the Soviet forces have managed to get enough fuel to their tank divisions to move a large number of them from the Eastern front to the NATO lines, and they catch the NATO forces by surprise, cutting off retreat and leaving a few small independent units left as they shatter the main thrust of the offensive.
Players roll up military service characters and start out as stragglers from this battle, and must escape fro the vicinity of Kalisz in order to survive. Character generation, as I lead on about above, is done through random stat generation followed by a point-buy skill purchase, wit the number of skill points (and the amount of money you start with to equip your character) being inversely related to how good your stats are. Good stats = very young with no experience or stuff. Crappy stats = older character, lots of skills, more gear. In fact, I liked the character generation system enough that I must have rolled up a hundred and fifty different characters over the years, at the very least.
One of the interesting effects of the chargen is that the average group of 4-6 players will have a LOT of gear when they start up. More bullets, grenades, rockets and stuff than they will know what to do with. So you strap it all into trailers and stick it on the outside of your vehicles and roll. This seems to suit the feel of the beginning of the game, as the players have the opportunity to effectively loot a large amount of military hardware before being told to try to return home on their own.
And it leads to what is usually one of the first events in the game, after a firefight or two. The first vehicle break-down. So, you are on the run from a major military presence, trying to make as much distance as possible, when your LAV-25 breaks down in some farmer’s field in the backwaters of Poland. The options are either to stop and try to fix it by jury rigging (not a good idea early in the campaign, when you are close to major troop concentrations), or ditch it and double-up in the other vehicles. And suddenly you find yourself leaving a LOT of your cool starting equipment behind in that broken down LAV.
As a game based around military conflict, there is an obvious bias of the rules being about conflict and conflict resolution systems (ie: combat), but since the players will often be on the move from town to town, a simple system of determining NPC motivations is also given using a deck of playing cards. It also doesn’t take long for anything but the largest group of characters to realise that they have to deal with the local populace in order to survive or return home or accomplish whatever other mission they give themselves – they will need food, ammunition, fuel and help along the way.
The game system is percentile driven, with skill checks either being against the skill %, or doubling or halving the skill based on the difficulty of the check. One of the oddities about the system for many players is that the small arms combat system uses ‘shots’ instead of bullets, where a ‘shot’ is roughly three rounds of ammunition spent. This makes for simpler combat book-keeping and also some confusion over assault rifles with only 10 shots and the venerable 1911 .45 ACP sidearm only having two ‘shots’. The combat system scales fairly well, however, from townfolk with Makarovs up to the level of tanks shooting at each other, all using the same system.
The combat system, after one or two test runs, is very simple and fast. In fact, the majority of the time we spent playing the game was on two tasks. The first was roleplaying interactions with locals, trying to acquire their trust to allow us to hide in barns as the soviet tank battalion rolled through town, trying to negotiate fair prices of weaponry (which there is an overabundance of in post-war Poland) versus cheese and bread (which there is nowhere near enough of). Never before or since have I played a game where we traded a collection of 12 state-of-the-art German assault rifles with ammunition in exchange for 12 dozen eggs, three wheels of cheese, and four dozen loaves of bread. The second was logistics – figuring out how much we could carry, where to carry it, and what to leave behind. We routinely had to leave ‘caches’ of equipment behind as we travelled, and of the two times we went back to get them, once the cache had already been ransacked by the locals. We also got to see that old LAV-25 we left behind on the second day out of Kalisz again a few months later, as the field command unit of a local warlord we were trying to usurp in order to help the village we were hiding in because the warlord was trying to take half of their harvest that year (and we were willing to take him on for only one quarter of the harvest and the goodwill of the citizenry).
The game had a large series of modules written for it, a campaign tracking a group on their way home – first through some major cities in Poland, and then on a boat, then recomissioning an old train to cross to Germany where the last boat is leaving shortly to bring soldiers back home to the US. Later adventures were set in the civil unrest of a post-war United States.
There was another edition of the game, very different from the first edition, that I’ll probably cover another day.
