A.R.M.Y.M.E.N.

I've been looking for a wargaming club in my area, and there just don't seem to be any; everything I've found reference to either went defunct five years ago or more, is Warhammer/40K exclusive, or has broadened its gaming scope to be all-inclusive and thus there's one wargamer sitting amidst dozens of people playing Magic: The Gathering or trading Pokemon on their vintage Gameboys.

There are actually a large number of gaming clubs in my area; we've got a plethora of colleges, including my alma mater, and they all have gaming clubs and all put on their own annual conventions.  I was a member of the Geneseo Area Gaming Group, the organization for State University of New York at Geneseo, all four years of my college experience and an officer of some stripe or another for three of them, rising as high as the rank of treasurer, though primarily holding ceremonial posts such as "Minister of Wargames and Board Games."

But the thought occurs to me that now, as then, if I want wargaming to happen in my area I need to be the one to make it happen.  Running GAGG, the convention put on by the Geneseo Area Gaming Group, is rapidly approaching; I'm actually scheduled to run a couple sessions of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, 7th Edition during the course of it.  I feel like I've booked myself heavily enough for this year's convention; I need to have time to do the ordinary grown-up stuff of the weekend as well, like grocery shopping and spending quality time with Gina.

For the future though, it might be worthwhile to try and draw some people into wargaming with a big, flashy table display and bring a co-GM to help demo the game.  But how do I do that on my current shoestring budget?

Army Men.  Green and Tan Plastic Army Men.  They're cheap and plentiful to be had, they're big enough to where they and scenery would be eye-catching from halfway across the room, especially once you add in tanks and halftracks and helicopters and the like.

So I, assuming that there's nothing new under the sun, went looking to see what rules people had written to accommodate Green Plastic Army Men (when not melting them with a magnifying glass or, as my dad used to do in his youth, heating up a nail and pushing it into the poor blighters to create "battle damage").  I found a couple and did some reading, and none of them really spoke to me.

So I decided to write my own.

Tentatively entitled "A.R.M.Y.M.E.N. - Accessory Rules Making Your Military Escapades Nerdy," I'm trying to keep the rules as simple and straight-forward as possible to accommodate the player new to wargames altogether, while allowing for complex and creative tactics and strategies.  I'm not attempting to model any actual military with any sort of accuracy or realism; as I'm not and have never been a soldier, I think that trying to do so would be an exercise in futility on my part and would leave me feeling like I was being disrespectful to the brave men and women who actually serve their countries.

The warfare of A.R.M.Y.M.E.N. is the warfare of movies like THE DIRTY DOZEN.  It's meant to be dramatic and over the top, and above all provide a degree of spectacle.

The core mechanic is simple; individual figures and vehicles have various abilities such as Melee Combat, Ranged Combat, Morale, each with a numerical rating between 2 and 6.  To succeed at using an ability (for example, if a squad of Infantrymen wants to Shoot an enemy squad), roll under the rating on a six-sided die; a result of 1 is always a success, a result of 6 is always a failure.  Infantry figures have, effectively, one "hit-point" - on a successful hit, they're removed as casualties.  Vehicles can take more hits before breaking down and becoming part of the scenery.

I've got some rules for some additional stuff as well; while the default Infantryman is assumed to be carrying a rifle, figures cast with mortars, minesweepers, bazookas or flamethrowers can be upgraded to carry such weapons in game, for example.  Gray plastic army men are assumed to be mercenaries, and can be used by either side as cheap allies (though with poor morale compared to the Greens and Tans - the Grays would rather live to get paid another day!), and blue, red and black army men likewise represent special troop types.

One bit I'm particularly pleased with is that either side can be upgraded with the ability to, once per game, call in a long-range strike.  When this ability is activated, the player using it takes a step or two back from the table and uses a dart gun, such as those manufactured by Nerf, to try and take out enemy soldiers.  They get one shot and if they miss, too bad.

I've still got some writing to do but once the first draft is finished I'll post it here and include After Action Reports of playtest sessions.

A Dream and a Review

I might be spending too much time ogling toy soldiers on the Internet lately, because I dreamed about buying figures last night.  Or rather, I dreamed I was agonizing over which figures to buy while taking advantage of a sale (that isn't actually happening) at Brigade Games.  Is that just the saddest thing ever? That even in my dreams I sit there being indecisive and arguing with myself over whether the French Foreign Legion or the Seleucids will be more fun to paint and/or see more action at the table?

Actually, I think the reason I had this dream is because the yarn shop Gina (my loving and supportive better half) frequents also has an online presence, and is doing a "12 days of Christmas" sale right now and she's torturing herself trawling the deals and trying to decide (as money is tight right now, and she can't just buy 40 lbs of Crazy Zauberball sock yarn) which has the greatest value to her - what I was doing in my dream (the sale was 50% off all infantry figures site-wide) was exactly what she's doing right now as she sits across from me.

In other news...

I finished reading Harry Pearson's Achtung Schweinehund!: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat, which is something of a memoir of wargaming.  I'd read a review of the book at 28mm Victorian Warfare in which Mr. Awdry spoke very highly of it.  While I enjoyed the book, I think there's an age and continental gap; much of the book was really enjoyable, but there were quite a few points where I found myself rolling my eyes at Pearson's almost-calculated curmudgeonly attitude.  His tirades against fantasy gaming and the smugness that came across in his explanation of how he came to collect only 20mm Napoleonics sculpted before 1968 kind of felt like he was affecting an attitude to try and maintain a sense of superiority.  Of course, I don't know the guy personally and I'd probably really enjoy gaming with him as long as I didn't try to put any orcs on the table.  And again, I think there's an age gap; he was born in 1961 and I was born in 1987; my introduction to wargaming miniatures came via the same fantasy figures he so vigorously decries.  I'm actually planning to pass the book along to my father; while he's not a wargamer, he was a military modeler from around the age of 8 until his late 30s when deteriorating eyesight made it harder for him to assemble kits - and a 1/32nd scale E-100 tank frustrated him so thoroughly by having each link of the tracks a separate piece that he finally stopped.  I think he'll find the book amazing and appreciate a lot of what Pearson has to say as well; given that dad was born in 1959 they're basically the same generation just on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The Tentacle Beckons

I was talking with a coworker and fellow RPG enthusiast recently - I'd introduced both her and her boyfriend to Call of Cthulhu not too long ago, and they had a blast with the game, and that's impressive given that they both come from a background of hack 'n' slash dungeon crawling Pathfinder.  They showed up to the one-shot I ran with characters prepared and ready to go - a war correspondent and a big game hunter, complete with backgrounds and personalities.  She was telling me about how, after that session, her boyfriend (who is a longtime DM and player of D&D himself) couldn't shut up about how blown away he was by Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is really where I've always shined as a GM.  My first real experience behind the screen was running a heavily-modified Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, with several additional scenarios interspersed between each chapter and the Scotland chapter completely replaced with material I wrote set in a Silent Hill-style town.  The campaign ended up lasting something like 16 or 18 4-6 hour sessions, and featured the development of what we termed the "Shotgun Mythos" -- more Investigators died due to being shot with shotguns or having shotguns malfunction catastrophically in their hands then due to Mythos horrors.

After that a ran a short campaign set in Roman-occupied Alexandria, in which the PCs were manipulated by Nyarlathotep into exterminating a cult of Shub-Niggurath worshipers to further his own bid for cosmic supremacy, culiminating in the PCs calling up Shub-Niggurath to smack Nyarlathotep down.

Next campaign, again a fairly short one, only about eight sessions, used modern day Flying Saucer mythology and the Shaver Mystery in place of the Cthulhu Mythos, I think to excellent effect.  The high point of this campaign was the final scene, in which I revealed that everything past the first session was a hallucination shared by the PCs in a sanitarium following a toxic overdose of experimental dream-suppressant medication.

After that, I converted Nigel Kneale's teleplay for "Quatermass and the Pit" into a short campaign, with Nyarlathotep again manipulating the PCs into opening and activating the Martian cylinder, sending out psychic waves activating latent Martian genes in the people of London.  Under this psychic influence, Nyarlathotep revealed, the people of London would mutate into locust-like creatures, which he termed "the Megiddo Swarm," and wipe humanity from the globe at his direction.  The PCs managed to avert this fate using a Gate spell and, through a great deal of psychic effort, sending the cylinder off-planet.

After this, I took a break, as one of my players commented on my tendency to lean on Nyarlathotep as a villain, and I wanted to refresh myself creatively.  Since then I've run some Pathfinder, a couple assorted sessions of various OSR games, and a short (five session) campaign using the BRP mechanics set in the Caribbean at the time of Elizabeth's reign (which I originally started this blog to use as a campaign journal for, which just didn't work out).

Now maybe it's time to pick up the percentile dice and roll for SAN loss again.  Maybe that's why I'm so flighty and indecisive towards fantasy games lately; maybe I need to sink myself back into horror.  I recently got a copy of Dan O'Bannon's excellent adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, THE RESURRECTED, on DVD -- most published Call of Cthulhu campaigns tend to be very sprawling geographically, on the model of The Shadow Out of Time...maybe I should try to do something that sprawls chronologically instead.

Maybe set each player up with three Investigators, one for each of three different eras, with each character being somehow descended from their character in a prior era.  Have the main arc of the campaign take place in the 1920s, say, and one of the Investigators stumbles across an old diary belonging to an ancestor...and when they start to read it, I play a "flashback" sound effect, collect the 1920s character sheets and hand out the players' 1750s (or whatever) character sheets, and have them play out the events of what the character in "the present" is reading.  And later they get access to older documents (such as a ledger maintained by a cult, decade after decade, for hundreds of years) and read about the exploits of their ancestors further back (flashback sound effect again), and I had out character sheets for 1028 AD or whatever, and it's only be piecing together the information they've found in the present with the incomplete information their Colonial ancestors and Dark Age ancestors had that they manage to tie together all the clues and defeat the cult once and for all.

It's a thought!