Majestic 13: Special Mission #2, "Urban Assault!"

 "Keep sharp, kids, we got another live one today. Goddamn, I hate when FORCE drops their pet monsters off in the city like this! How the hell are we supposed to maintain OPSEC when there's a goddamn acid-spitting space octopus hanging around the pawn shop?" The Lieutenant continued to curse and grumble as he brought the van to a halt and threw it in park.

"Oh, shit..." Maria breathed, and pointed.

Shimmering into view were a number of figures in glittering, iridescent carapace armor, marching in unison, rifles at the ready. FORCE troopers were back. And with them...

 "Oh god, oh fuck, what is that?" Becky said, gagging. Behind the FORCE troopers shambled a pair of hulking monstrosities, gangly arms nearly dragging on the pavement, rudimentary heads lolling, featureless except for a pair of unseeing eyes and a lipless mouth lined with chisel teeth.

 The Lieutenant cursed again. 

"FORCE brought some backup. Higher ups call those 'shock troopers' for lack of a better name. Dumb as shit but savage in hand-to-hand combat. Keep back and keep your guns up."

*** 

 I haven't gotten any games in this month, so it was time to get moving - especially since I've got a long weekend this weekend. And it's been more than two months since my last game of Majestic 13, which is frankly unacceptable. So I got the table cleared off and set up for my next mission - a Special Mission, since my team had reached a rating of 6. This time we're back in an urban environment (the Last Liners' forte), facing off against five FORCE Troopers and two FORCE Shock Troopers - which I've chosen to interpret as 'roided up, maybe genetically altered FORCE aliens, with reduced mental capacities but boundless aggression and sharp claws to match. They don't have the armor that the stat block lists, but maybe it's sub-dermal implants? Either way, I'm using old RAFM "Ghasts" from their "Call of Cthulhu" line to serve as them. 

 

As always, Special Missions have their terrain and deployment predetermined. I realized I was doing it wrong previously by not rolling up a secondary mission - this time around it's "Gear Collection," with two tokens in the centers of the enemy side board quadrants, each of which give the figure picking them up +1 damage for the rest of the game. 

 For the first turn, the FORCE troopers had an initiative penalty, allowing all five of the Last Liners to act before them, spending the first turn spreading out into cover - and Maria reached the first of the gear caches. Unfortunately, once the aliens activated, things went to hell quickly. 

 As FORCE spread out, Hank, Becky and the Lieutenant all got shot with their plasmonic rifles, with Hank taking a critical hit. The Shock Troopers then pounced on Becky and Hank, eviscerating both of them almost immediately. 

 The Lieutenant took a pot shot at the Shock Trooper that had mauled Hank, then fell back to another cover point. Meanwhile, Maria called in a drone strike on the FORCE soldiers, and Sarah-Jane, sniping from cover, took a shot at the Shock Trooper standing over Becky's body. The FORCE troopers began to spread out, moving into positions to better gun down the Last Liners. 

 The two Shock Troopers converged on the Lieutenant, but failed to land any hits on him! He ducked and darted to another cover point, applying first aid to himself. Maria got out of the FORCE troopers' line of fire and Sarah-Jane kept sniping; staying in cover spared them both a few hits from the plasmonic guns.

 One Shock Trooper spotted and followed the Lieutenant, while the other wandered off, into Maria's field of fire. She squeezed off two shots at it before it took notice and charged her.

 Astonishingly, both the Lieutenant and Maria managed to kill their Shock Troopers - only to be knocked out of action by the post-mortem shockwave that FORCE's troops release! 

 Sarah-Jane continued to snipe at the FORCE Troopers from cover, and between the damage they took from the drone strike on turn 2 and her rifle, she managed to take out three of the five troopers before the clock ran out.

 Moving into the post-game phase... Ouch. Four agents put out of action means four rolls for survival. While Hank got the All Clear, the Lieutenant, Maria and Becky were not so lucky. 

The Lieutenant came out with a traumatic brain injury, reducing his Dexterity from 16 to 10.

Maria II lost her left arm at the elbow. She's stuck using only pistols going forward.

Becky has PTSD, and will have a -2 modifier to all rolls for the next game. 

On the plus side, the Last Liners successfully requisitioned a high-powered sniper rifle for Sarah-Jane. Sarah-Jane's current hunting rifle is being given to Becky to give her a little more firepower, and Becky's pistol is going into the team's storage unit. 

***

Hank wheeled the Lieutenant's wheelchair into the room. The old man looked smaller and grayer than he'd ever looked before, the side of his head shaved to allow the doctors to suture the wound FORCE had given him. The rest of the team was already there; Becky's hands shook as she lit a cigarette, and Maria contemplated the thin jointed steel prosthetic where her left arm had been. 

"Hey Becks, light me one if you don't mind." The Lieutenant's voice was thin and weak. 

"Smoke 'em if you got 'em, right?" Maria laughed bitterly. 

Sarah-Jane said nothing, just looked out the window, one hand resting on the first aid kit she never went anywhere without. She'd been a veterinarian before all this - a healer. Now her days were spent dealing death and hiding from retribution.

"How much is Majestic gonna take out of us?" Hank asked, shoulders slumping. "I mean hell...I've died, Maria's died, we've all been shot, stabbed, clawed, sprayed, injected... When have we given enough to this fight?"

"How much is Majestic gonna take?" The Lieutenant took the cigarette from Becky gratefully. "How much you got for them to take, kid? Because it's everything we have and then some until FORCE is kicked off the fuckin' planet."

"You know, meeting you might have been the worst thing that's ever happened to me," Maria said suddenly. 

"I get that a lot," the Lieutenant replied somberly. "Hell...for what it's worth, I'm sorry you kids have been dragged into this. None of us deserve this shit."

Maria contemplated the prosthetic silently for a moment. 

"They'll clone me again if I die, right?" she asked.

"Sure, as long as they can get a viable clone." 

"My next clone won't be missing an arm, right?"

"I don't like where you're going with this, Maria." Hank interjected.

 "Somebody give me a gun," Maria said with a grim smile. 

"How about we don't traumatize each other further, yeah?" Hank said. "Don't do FORCE's work for them. Make those fuckers earn every drop of blood we spill." 

Majestic 13: Special Mission #1, "Ambush!"

 It's been on my mind lately, and I haven't done any gaming yet this month. If I want to continue meeting my goal of a minimum of 2 games per month, I need to get rolling, so I unpaused the "Last Liners" campaign for Majestic 13, and set up for the next mission. As noted in the last game, this time around it's a Special Mission. These occur any time your team level is a multiple of 3, and represent the alien overlords of FORCE catching wind of your team's successes and deciding to remind you of how weak humanity is in the face of their technological superiority. 

Called in on a mission, the Last Liners deployed in a sticky, humid forest glade. Expecting a monster, they instead found themselves facing a squad of six alien humanoids fully encased in shimmering, iridescent armor and carrying powerful energy weapons. 

I didn't take a lot of pictures during this game, to be honest, and having played it before (two years ago almost to the day!), it's not a terribly exciting game. It's a lot of moving back and forth between cover points and taking pot shots at the FORCE troopers.

The big points this time around:

I managed to successfully Call for Aid on the first turn, choosing to request a drone strike against the FORCE troopers. I needed to roll a 6 or better on a D20 for the drone strike to successfully hit its target. I rolled a 4.

I did get lucky, and while every member of the Last Liners was injured during the course of the mission, only one was put Out of Action; Maria failed her save against a grenade, getting blinded and taking damage, and then was immediately hit with another grenade, failing her save again and taking enough damage to take her off the table.

The Last Liners managed to successfully take down three out of the six FORCE troopers within the time limits of the mission; so not exactly a successful mission (it technically counts as a failure per the Majestic 13 rules), but not as bad as it could have been! 

Rolling into the post-game process...

Maria died of her injuries, but Majestic 13 doesn't let good soldiers rest for long. A clone, Maria II, was decanted, and seems entirely normal, unlike the enhanced clone, Hank II, that was produced after the last game.

The team is now rated at Level 4.

The team successfully requisitioned a laser sight for Becky's pistol, but failed to get a second pistol for her. They also failed to get a Spy Satellite Link for their base. 

I have just a few days left to get my second game for February in, so I'll be rolling up another mission for the Last Liners soon. 

Majestic 13: Special Mission "Ambush"

 I've played another game?! Yes! I did not sleep well (or much) last night, and decided three hours of sleep in the ol' tank was not enough to fuel me through an 8 hour work day, grocery shopping and cooking dinner. So I took a personal day, did my grocery shopping early when the store was practically empty, kept meals simple for my wife and I, and allowed myself the luxury of a restorative solo game. After all, this is a special round of Majestic 13 - my first "Special Mission."

The sinister invaders known as FORCE have taken note of my team, and dispatched a strike team of FORCE troopers to eliminate them. To represent FORCE on the tabletop, I painted up a half-dozen "Ferox Mercenaries" from Khurasan Miniatures - this is a company that I think has flown under a lot of peoples' radars, but they make some really cool stuff in both 15 and 28mm scale, their castings were super clean and their customer service excellent and friendly. I've assembled them with helmeted heads and painted them with Turbodork colorshift metallics - "Laserface" (which shifts maroon to yellow-green) for their armor and "Let Them Eat Cake" (dark blue to red-violet) for the gun casings. Some details in silver (washed with Nuln Oil) and the eyes on the helmet picked out in Vallejo Fluorescent Green and they were done. 

I really need to make more trees my next terrain investment.

A lot of this game boiled down to figures moving from one piece of cover to another, taking pot shots, and moving back towards other pieces of cover, so I'll just highlight a few key moments.

I also finally got everyone's name written on their bases.

I successfully upgraded my team's base defenses following the last game, meaning each of these FORCE troopers took 1D6+3 damage before the game even started. I rolled really well, and two of the aliens started play with 21 HP instead of their customary 30. This really helped me out a lot. 

Turn 1, Agent Moseley (newly equipped with a sniper rifle) took up a position behind the chimney of an old, abandoned cabin, and on Turn 2, he scored a critical hit on FORCE Trooper # 2, killing it. Boom, headshot. Even better, both he and Agent Arnold succeeded on their saving throws to avoid taking damage when Trooper #2 subsequently imploded. Yes, the FORCE troopers implode on death, to insure that their technology doesn't fall into human hands. Stingy bastards. 

Turn 3, Agents Klass and Barker were temporarily blinded by an alien grenade. Both agents cleared their vision, returning fire. Turn 4, another grenade was thrown, again blinding Barker. This is becoming a theme with him after the last game. 

Immediately following this, Agent Arnold successfully Called for Aid on Turn 4, calling in a drone strike against the FORCE troopers. An attack roll was made successfully against each of the five remaining troopers, and the damage dealt was enough to kill three (#s 1, 4 and 5) of them simultaneously, while reducing the remaining two to low single-digit hit points. Unfortunately, the rolling wave of concussive implosions took both Agent Barker and Agent Moseley out of action as well, and left Agent Klass stunned. 

The remainder of Turn 4 and Turn 5 were spent mopping up the remaining two FORCE troopers. Keel's Killers were successful in their mission, though they paid a price for their victory.

Rolling into the post-game, while Agent Moseley recovered quickly and will be good to go for the next mission, Agent Barker succumbed to his injuries, his internal organs pulverized into jelly by three concussive implosions. Majestic 13 is loathe to let a good agent go though, and a clone of Agent Barker was decanted and added to the Keel's Killers roster; an imperfect and slightly weakened copy of the original, Barker II is nonetheless a welcome addition to the team. 

He died doing what he loved; shooting aliens until he went blind.

Following that, my team's requests to requisition new gear got lost in the bureaucratic maze of Majestic 13, but I did successfully add another upgrade to my base; an Emergency Medical Facility was built, which will hopefully reduce my losses in the future. I know I've been really lucky so far in not having characters die every mission, but the loss of even one good soldier is too much. 

What's next? Well, uh...I only have three more painted monsters that can serve as aliens on hand, and I have no idea what I'm going to use for my FORCE Shock Troopers in the next special mission yet. So I might have to slow my roll a little bit with how many games I'm playing and spend more time painting.