Alien Menace Campaign Prep continues
I’m sure that once I’ve got the hang of this, it’ll be faster and easier. For now, making slow progress, but I get a lot of help, mostly from +Eric hil and +Brian Ronnle .
The good:
- All the PCs are basically done.
- I’ve got their basic equipment in place – weapons and armor
- Doing the equipment inspired me to write a very short Pyramid article, which needs some minor polish, but is I think a really awesome idea
- I’ve got a good starting map
- I have an outline for what I want to have happen in terms of opening scenes
- If I can pull it off, there might be something neat, but if not, it’ll still be OK
- The house rules I’m using – particularly Armor as Dice, make it really easy to gauge how threatening the bad guys are
- I’m getting better at this token thing, thanks to +Nathan Joy‘s suggestion of TokenTool. That’s just damn handy. Also, while the native microsoft paint/edit programs suck, the Snaggit Editor rocks, so I was able to add facing coloring to the token pictures I made. I can do that with any tokens, which is damn handy.
The bad
- I really should run through a sample combat before game day with me in the GM seat.
- While I know that it should be possible to have multiple, pre-staged encounters in the map, with bad guys queued up and ready to kill good guys, everything I do just adds all the bad guys to one giant combat tracker.
- The invisible bad guys are darn near invisible to me too. Eric’s promised to show me how to deal with this with Advanced Frame, which is apparently pretty powerful.
All in all, I feel kinda-sorta prepared for my first GM experience in, as Obi-Wan said ” . . . a long, long time.”
Cast of Characters
Looks like the team of six starting troopers includes:
- Colton: A very smart artificer type, with a penchant for grenade launchers. He’s wiry and very thin, but can press more than half again his own weight. While he loves his pistols, his weapon of choice is a six-shot grenade launcher. Broadly skilled in Combat Engineering and dabbles in all things mechanical and electronic.
- Ianali: A man with a colorful and variable past, he’s found his calling as a combat medic, and it’s hard to say whether the emphasis is harder on the “combat” or the “medic.” If you have holes in you that aren’t supposed to be there, you want him near you. If he’s not near you, he will be, no matter what.
- AB: A towering chunk of raw fury, he pities the fool who gets in his way. Spectacularly strong, he carries an awful lot of ammunition, and . . . is that a rocket launcher on his back? Yes. Yes it is. I don’t think that’s standard issue. With that many millimeters of projectile, he must be the team lead.
- Enrique: If you need to get close to, find out about, or otherwise reconnoiter something, someone, or somewhere, he’s your guy. If that someone needs a bullet to the head from a long, long ways off, that .50 Barrett rifle he carries around helps out more than a little.
- Christine (NPC): A “former” lots of things. Former gangbanger. Former soldier. Former gymnast. Former beauty pageant winner (but don’t ask her about that – she gets mad – it’s not her fault her mother dragged her from city to city, oh, nevermind). Sneaky, fit, with a preternatural sense of when something’s about to go wrong, she distinguished herself in several hot combat conflicts. Some were public, some not so much. Not too many locked doors can keep her out either.
- Ethan (NPC): The very model of an Army Ranger, “the Captain” is a consummate soldier. Hoo-ah! When he’s not kicking ass and taking names, he tends to relax by attempting to draw his companions into political debates and discussions of military history over bottles and bottles of wine.
Ethan’s a pure combatant, and maybe the best rifleman in the group (despite being 50 points less than any PC). Christine makes a good point person, and with Danger Sense and good combat skills, can lead a team. Colton and Ianali, while no slouches in a firefight, are the teams technical and medical specialists. In different ways, AB and Enrique bring the hurt – AB can carry over 115 lbs of gear before hitting medium encumbrance, which is a lot of boom-boom, while Enrique carries a weapon that does 6dx2 pi+ damage, even before he decides to get clever with fancy ammo.
I think they’ll be a capable team. They’ll need to be.
If you are not busy tonight or this weekend I will.show you how to use the preset encounters and utilize the tracker.
Nice cast! Sounds like a lot of fun. Good luck!
I'm looking forward to blowing shit up.
Boom boom boom boom!