2nd Edition Book 1: Mercenary

[rancke]

I’ve got a fair bit of experience with operational level roleplaying like this, so maybe I can help. The first game I played that worked at this level was Tarsh War, a scenario set in Glorantha where you play commanders and advisers in a military expeditionary force. You play a character and roleplay that character just as you’d do in any RPG or freeform game, but it just so happens that some of the NPCs you interact with are your subordinates that relay your commands to spy networks, magical covens, scouting troops and even infantry and cavalry units of thousands of troops.

One particular tabletop wargame session stands ever green in my memory.

The background was a standard fantasy RPG campaign. The country we were in had been at war for entirely too long and manpower resources were down. A number of regiments were deactivated as a result. So if you could gather 100 men, the king would reactivate a defunct company and make you a captain (and pay the men). If you could gather another 100 men, you could become a major of a battalion. Another 200 men made you an lt. colonel of a rump regiment, and another 200 a colonel of a full regiment.

We, the PCs, had been doing standard heroic questing for several game years, not so much for the loot (though we didn't mind loot at all) but for the glory and fame, since that in turn attracted volunteers for our regiments. And we'd finally achieved our full regiments and colonel's ranks. And then one day when we showed up to play, the GM had a big tabletop battle set up with about a dozen units on each side. It was a battle set in our campaign world, and we would take the temporary roles of the generals on our side while he'd play the enemy.

And just as we were about to start, he casually pointed to a small rectangle of miniatures and said, "Oh, by the way, Hans, that is your regiment, and Carsten, that one there is yours."

You get a whole other involvement with your troops when some of them represent three years' worth of gaming...


Hans

 

[nats]

I suppose the classic mercenary involvement I always think of as being very playable as a Traveller RPG situation is The Wild Geese. I can imagine that would be the kind of ops size (possibly also an SAS type op) I would like to play as a Traveller Merc game probably wouldnt want to get any larger than that. Once you start adding fighters, helicopters, tanks and other vehicles it starts getting a bit overwhelming for a really good RPG experience I would imagine especially for the referee trying to keep tabs on it all.

Playing a miniature game is not what I would say is really a Traveller RPG experience and I never got into Striker for that reason - too many rules.

For me Mercenary should include an involving abstract system where environment, evasion, surprise, enemy quality and size etc can all be semi randomly generated for the whole war but then the individual skirmishes can be generated for fighting as a smaller scale rpg experience (possibly with limited miniatures) where the results can be fed into the larger 'war'. Similarly ships skirrmishes using standard or high guard rules and vehicles battles using special rules of their own could be fed into the war as well.

Starships Troopers is another example of a type of operation that would be well suited to Merc Traveller type play - maybe players taking on two or three characters in the different forces and flitting between them so they can each be part of all the various Naval and Ground battles that are taking place at various locations. This way the RPG style of play could be retained but an overarching war provides a solid storyline as a background to the characters direct gameplay sessions.

This could be fun for the ref as well as he directs the large ongoing war between RPG game sessions.

 

[simonh]

I suppose the classic mercenary involvement I always think of as being very playable as a Traveller RPG situation is The Wild Geese....

I once played in a one-off game based loosely on Where Eagles Dare, except we got to play a small patrol of low morale, low rank, no prospects German guards. Now normally games where you play no-hope characters are pretty lame and are just railroady and boring, but this was genius.

We started off heavily constrained in what we could do and being bossed about by swaggering SS types, but the more the hyper-competent allied NPC special forces team blew stuff up, assassinated high ranking officers and swashbuckled their way through elite units the more freedom and scope for action we had as characters. The worse our side had it, the more fun we had.

The bit early on where we rode the cable car up to the castle knowing, just knowing that the allied team was on the roof, but having no in-game justification for doing anything about it was deliciously frustrating. We were accompanying some generals, so couldn't do squat without looking like a bunch of clowns to the higher ups.

Until we got massacred by driving right into and ambush and some hidden land mines. But hey, it was just a on-off and it was really just down to some crappy rolls.

Simon Hibbs