CT Only: dbl adv 5 - Horde

[gregcaires]

Hello:

I'm looking for advice regarding how to successfully referee "Horde" for my teenage son and his friends.

I'd like to know if anyone has suggestions regarding how to make this adventure be a success.

Any idea how long it takes to play the entire "mini-campaign"?

Also, any suggestion regarding maps (aka floor plans). To date all their adventures have been on/involved starships, and floor plans help them visualize the action.

Please advise & thanks,

Greg

 

[Bob Weaver]

Earlier this spring, I did the whole adventure in one afternoon with my sons and some of my regular gaming group. It was a lot of fun. I made a few changes to the adventure as written.

• The players all had pre-generated characters drawn at semi-random - then they had to figure out who was the team leader, based on skills/experience. Each player had a specific role to fill. I had extra characters, so I kept them on the team as NPCs - they could be killed off by the Bugs, but it didn't end up happening.
• The PCs were not a free trader crew, but rather various ex-military hired by the Raschev government to be the new anti-piracy force. They were a mix of locals and off-worlders, so their skill and experience set was not limited to a backwater TL 6 world.
• The backstory was of a planet that was just coming out of isolation, but had had some past contact with Galactic society (to explain Power One).
• I did not tell any of the players even one thing about the adventure, so they were surprised by the arrival of the Bugs.
• I found a picture of the Chamax from the DeviantArt site (I used Google Image search, kw: Chamax, it was at the top) which was on our big TV/PC screen - but I kept the screen off until the moment the Bugs came crashing out of the ship. The 'Wow' factor was huge.
• I did not worry much about tracking individual combats, just enough to establish that the Bugs are hard to kill, but do splat nicely if you hit them hard enough. It was in my mind to limit their access to the laser weapons, or cause them to run out of power at a critical point if they were overly relying on them.
• Photocopy and blow up the map of the Raschev peninsula, or use a map-making utility like Hexographer to reproduce it in color. For the crashed Bug ship, I relied on description of the interior rather than a deckplan. Make it dark, cold, scary so they don't forget that the Bugs might be just around the corner.

Let the players decide for themselves what to do; there are plenty of NPC soldiers around to be the 'red shirts'; you don't have to injure or kill any PCs to make the threat very real.

As they handle each scenario, be ready to throw the next one at them - don't let them think they've won too early. I did not use all of the listed scenarios, as our game was a one-off; I wanted it to wrap up in 4-5 hours.

I used the opener, the rescue of the General, the trip to Power One, the second crash site, and the concluding scenario. But, I had the others sketched out in case I needed to throw them at the PCs.

Everybody worked together well; everyone got a chance to use their skills. One PC had a high level of Admin skill, so he became the chief Quartermaster; he got the team the vehicles, weapons and equipment they needed for the schemes they planned out. Make sure you've got a competent Medic in the mix; he will handle injuries from Bug attack and be the best one to analyze a captured Bug. Vehicle and repair skills, especially air vehicles were actually more important than weapon skills. Fire a shotgun blindly into a crowd of Bugs and you'll hit one. :toast:
As is always the case, the best advice is to be prepared, but be flexible for when the PCs do something you didn't expect.



Rock on! You'll have a blast!



Best regards,
Bob W.

 

[flykiller]

I have links to deckplans and referee advice in my signature below.

 

[creativehum]

Hey, Flykiller,

I thought your Referee Advice was great.

(I actually like doing detail work on PCs, but that's a taste issue!)

 

[Peter Newman]

Another good trick when running this adventure is to simply borrow a real world peninsula and use Google Maps for 'art'. Here is my choice:

https://www.google.com/maps/@-43.1072299,147.9304353,70570m/data=!3m1!1e3

The shape is a bit off, and its smaller and less mountainous but both share the key narrow spot.
With a few quick substitutions you should be good.
1) substitute 'Eaglehawk Neck' for Ismus of Joran'
2) Substitute 'Port Arthur' for 'La Adhar'
3) Put 'Power One' on 'Tasman Island'

The roads don't exactly match since the southern Jourin Peninsula has three main north/south roads and the Tasman Peninsula does not.

Also - the fauna is just different enough to me, and probably many non Australians, to help sell the whole 'alien planet' bit.

 

[gregcaires]

thanks

Great idea, thank you.

 

[sabredog]

Watch an old 50's giant atomic monster movie. "Them" is the perfect one for the adventure - it has lots of atmosphere for not just the players, but on how to handle the early incursions of the flying Chamax and the nests they set up.

Sewers....subways (some off hand report of a car with no one on it found blasting through the station...)...old warehouses and animal feed lots ("I had 200 head of beefalo in those pens last night and I'd like someone to tell me where the heck they are this morning?").....

Keep it creepy and don't go too fast - build it gradually until the very end, when the Horde erupts and pours across the countryside like giant army ants.

 

[sabredog]

Oh, and I'd make it last a few sessions with the slow build-up, then a one-night single climax to keep the pressure on.

I ran it with a side adventure on the world as a MacGuffin to get the players on the world and to give them things to do until I had ramped up the Chamax stuff. I didn't use the original idea from the book - too obvious.

The players would hear occasional background reports along with the mix of cargo and ship news they were really interested in, and the reports became more and more frequent until it became obvious something weird was going on. All those disappearances, and strange holes found in places overnight.

Their contact on world, a corporate factor they were working with took them out to his property one day for a BBQ before they were scheduled to leave and there they encountered the worried rancher I described in the above post. They went out to look at the feed lots with their patron and we were off to the races!

I pulled all the stops running a Grade-B monster movie adventure that even included the obligatory film lecture by a local authority who was sure it was some local wildlife mutated by the reactors that had leaked a couple of years prior. So he showed videos of "space ants" and their colonies, etc..

When the players eventually found out the "awful truth" it launched a full-on panic across the world of some invasion from space using the Chamax as a bioweapon ("I seen it before, on Gamma-6...ticks the size of air/rafts!", says the grizzled old Marine wino in the bar).

This led to people wanting to buy their way off-world, mass panic, looting, Aslan and Vargr living together (if I had Aslan & Vargr IMTU, that is), and all sorts of short bits to keep the players hopping. When the Chamax exploded out of the nests and advanced like some phalanx of devouring death the players were practically panicking themselves but managed to help save the world almost in spite of themselves.

I wrote up a sequel but never ran it. Someday, though, in the cold reaches of outer space.......????

 

[gregcaires]

Watch an old 50's giant atomic monster movie. "Them"

One of my favorite B-movies as a kid. "Creature Double Feature" on channel 38, Saturday afternoons in Boston during the early-mid '80s.

 

[gregcaires]

sequel?

"
I wrote up a sequel but never ran it. Someday, though, in the cold reaches of outer space.......????"

I'd be interested in seeing if you would like to share.

 

[gregcaires]

It worked!

Ran Horde today for my son and his friends and they LOVED it.

We ran all the episodes except Power One. A great element they introduced was playing theme music. During the panic after first outbreak, they nearly were run down by a panic truck driver. My son and friend were able to jump aboard, but needed to stop the truck to collect their colleagues and the wounded militiamen. They found the music from the truck scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark while they made their way to the cab and fought with the driver, all while dodging/running over Chamax in the road.

I can't remember all the other music they played, but they did play music from Aliens (where Ripley goes into the reactor to rescue Newt) when going aboard the first ship at the end to recover the Statis Field generator.

Great roleplaying, enhanced by tactical maps from Advanced Squad Leader, and a $1 bag of plastic Halloween spider rings (with rings snipped off) that totally creeped them out.

Thanks for the advice on how to run this adventure, one of my favorites.

The McGuffin they've been chasing for most of the past year has been for a ship they've been awarded by a patron in lieu of the (Death Station) lab ship they could have claimed as salvage. Since then they've been making their way (slooooowly) from Regina to Aramis, where their ship -- and likely the start of the Traveller Adventure campaign -- awaits.

More to follow.

Greg