Surviving "Mission Arcturus"

[kmsoice]

True confession time, my 2300AD combat experiance has been limited to small firefights; never a military style engagment. So I was reading through my copy of "Mission Arcturus" (why? ... because it is fun) and it occurs to me "Is this survivable?" Two ambushes (the elevator, the cargo hold), an assault on the fusion plant AND THEN the two returning teams from the computer center and the spin habitat (bottom of page 41, ... did anyone remember that little detail?!). I realize that that Kafer stupidity and those combat walkers will level things quite a bit but still it seems super ugly to me.

The adventure on pg38 of "Kafer Dawn" sounds pretty tough too but unlike "Mission Arcturus" the players have room to maneuver, the option to take the initiative and the time+equipment to improvise an impressive defence. So if the characters play it smart (I know, always a big IF ), I can see surviving Kafer Dawn.

My point is, has anyone run "Mission Arcturus"? How did it go?

 

[Sturn]

Been a long, long time ago when 2300 AD was new, but I ran a campaign with a couple high school/college friends. This is how I recall this mission went:

PCs were advisors to the US Marines (a platoon?). They were advisors due to their experience fighting Kafers with the Tanstaafl Free Legion.

I didn't completey "roll" play every fight. Some of the fighting, since so many numbers were involved, could take a while. So, I did some "role" playing of the firefights. Of course everything directly involving players was done so by the book. But, firefights on the side with Kafers and Marines were not always rolled out as the players watched. I would let players know that, "A Marine just went down on your right flank" or "The Marines took out the 3 Kafers that were to your left while you PCs were rolling out the engagment with the Kafers to the front". Etc.

The Kafers were eventually exterminated of course, but there were several Marine casualties. I recall a PC being badly wounded, but don't recall the details. I do recall a Marine walker being instrumental in the battles.

EDIT: This brings back good memories. I'm one of the few that actually liked the 2300 AD rules system (I did have a key combat house rule that didn't change the outcome or balance while making the system greatly easier to run). I would still be playing 2300 AD instead of Traveller if it wasn't for missing key elements in the setting - No large area for the players to run about in being Mercs, Traders, whatever they wished to be. The setting limited what the players could due, it wasn't as open-ended to players used to Traveller.

 

[epicenter00]

I've actually run it three times in my life for different groups of players. I usually play military-oriented campaigns in 2300 (not necessarily in the military but sometimes mercs and such) so the players have usually been fighting on Aurore for a while before doing Arcturus as advisors.

Some of the gunfights are super-nasty, especially the first one. If the players don't understand how Kafers work, their survival can get really iffy - including much of the Marine force being dead. Eventually, the players figure out that the BH-21s are critical because the Kafers don't have anything that can hurt the BH-21s in most fights. Canon Kafers are stupid and won't think to shoot/reload their grenades against walkers until it's too late. In addition, if you play a lot of "mil-sim" type missions in 2300, you realize that the Kafer military is designed to lose - they're entirely lacking in anything threatening in the realm of anti-vehicle missiles. Players in a surplus hovertank are pretty much invincible against the laughly bad Kafer portable anti-armor missiles. It gets really ugly when players have their own little aircraft - Kafer anti-aircraft missiles are horrible.

Players who are in combat armor are very much able to shrug off hits from Kafer shotguns, but Kafers never wear combat armor of any sort, so they just get ripped up by whatever weapons the players have (one of my players did excellently in a game using that SS-7 air rifle). Most fights are over before the Kafers even get smart. It does lead to amusing situations like one of the players sneaking ahead to scout, being seen and suddenly Sergeant Ortega is like, "Defensive Positions!" while the players just get up and charge into the room getting very close where they can see (and kill) as many of the Kafers as fast as possible - the way the scenario is done, it's very easy for the players to see the Kafers first, and anyone experienced with Kafers know if the Kafers see you first, you're screwed. A smart Kafer is like Captain America without the shield or Neo from the Matrix movies. A dumb Kafer is a paper target at the shooting range. If you see them first, the Kafers are dead. It's either/or. If the Kafers see you and you're close, call an attack no matter how badly prepared you are, and kill as many Kafers as possible while they're getting smart. Never engage, then pull back because then the ball's in the Kafer court and they'll trounce you.

Now, the Combat Walkers don't always live to the end of the mission, but that's why they're NPCs. Interestingly, twice with two separate groups, the players came up with the same solution for the cowardly BH-21 pilot; when the more gung-ho female pilot's BH-21 gets damaged they exchange suits and the cowardly guy is given the job of covering fire (or sometimes he's just given a weapon and told to stay in the back, no suit at all).

 

[Peter Schutze]

I've referee'd Mission Arcturus only once for a mixed group and don't remember any specifics beyond that one player "died" very early on.

The results really depend on players backgrounds whether 2300AD or a fantasy setting ....
For a group where with absolutely no military experience (even strategy gaming) fights were often tough challenges even with me fudging in the players favour. The same encounter with a group of junior military types a few weeks later was a cakewalk even with me cheating blatantly.

>I would still be playing 2300 AD instead of Traveller if it wasn't for missing key elements in the setting - No large area

Hmm, there's a lot of 'blank space' available even on the detailed inhabited worlds .... not to mention scope for small mining outposts etc in side systems

I slowly added lots of small sites eg "enclaves" to inhabited worlds in keeping with the existing flavour of the arm eg French (minor european nations), Manchurian (many nationalities) and American (the small pacific powers) arms

little private outposts were placed all over the map especially a small fuelling station type setup in each system along the main routes

 

[epicenter00]

EDIT: This brings back good memories. I'm one of the few that actually liked the 2300 AD rules system (I did have a key combat house rule that didn't change the outcome or balance while making the system greatly easier to run). I would still be playing 2300 AD instead of Traveller if it wasn't for missing key elements in the setting - No large area for the players to run about in being Mercs, Traders, whatever they wished to be. The setting limited what the players could due, it wasn't as open-ended to players used to Traveller.

As Peter pointed out, most worlds in the 2300 Colonial Atlas are actually not very well exploited, many aren't even very well explored. There's a note somewhere in the 2300 book that most of the colony worlds listed actually have enclaves and similar "smaller" (10,000 people or less) that aren't mentioned or listed in the supplements; you can easily put in even larger communities on certain Frontier worlds without appreciably influencing the "canon" of the Colonial Atlas (should you wish to follow it to the letter).

Trading, beyond certain concerns about getting products up and down the gravity well, is very easy to do in 2300. In fact, given the greater detail in the Colonial Atlas, it's actually much easier to determine what products are likely to sell without dealing with Traveller-style generation charts for commodities (I don't know what to tell you if you actually liked those charts, though).

Exploration of totally unseen worlds is actually more possible in 2300 than it Traveller, I think. Once you get over the big hurdle of getting your own ship, it's really not many weeks journey to get to the end of an Arm into unexplored space; likewise, it's not so hard for players who absolutely adore the "exploration/contact" stuff to sign aboard the Bayern.

Mercenary work is a little iffy. In theory, the Kafers and the war on Aurore and the events of Invasion and the second invasion of the 2320 timeline should give players all the mercenary work they could ever hope for. Mercs are in high demand due to the Kafer War. The problem, of course, is that Kafers are aliens and once you get their schtick down, they're simply not as interesting to fight against as other humans. Sad but true. However, if your players aren't the kind who want to go blazing into combat with missile-tossing RPVs, hovertanks hosing everything that moves down with plasma gun fire, and combat walkers stomping over what's left, there's actually plenty of "lighter touch" mercenary work to be done - again, the CA and similar supplements for 2300 pretty much write such adventures themselves. The entire concept of "Troubleshooters" are pretty much mercenaries who are empowered with pretty much carte blanche to investigate and resolve problems out on the Frontiers for corporate and governmental officers in the Core. Possibilities of tangling with disgruntled colonists, criminals, wildlife, weird alien artifacts, and of course, other troubleshooting teams are pretty much endless. If you want to play the "darker" versions of 2300 (which I partially did) you can have all sorts of nail-biting scenarios that the more believable nature of the tech in 2300 makes possible.

For instance, I had a pretty stock scenario where a Trilon agricultural enclave on some Frontier world had stopped transmitting. Orbital photography showed very little activity at the colony site and that the cargo containers filled with supplies that the RPVs dropped off periodically were just lying where the retarding parachutes had left them. Local law enforcement had sent in some people, but when they hadn't returned the French government complained to Trilon. Trilon hired the players as experienced troubleshooters to go in and investigate the problem and see what was going on. The players arrive after hitching a ride on a fast courier going to Kie-Yuma that drops them off.

The players eventually find out that the sprawling agri-colony made an ideal smokescreen for the Trilon bioweapons division that was testing out drugs designed to suppress the Kafer intelligence reaction with the aim of actually making people dumber temporarily as a method to increase worker productivity and population control. The result was a spontaneous "species jump" of human bacteria to Kafers, which then mutated in the Kafers again and reinfected the humans, leading humans to react by becoming feral and utterly sociopathic and homicidal. When the Bioweapons team learned the Agri Division had already sent troubleshooters out, they in-turn sent out their own merc team with orders to ensure the players didn't find anything and if they did, that they were not to return. They were outfitted with biological protection and diagrams of the agri-combine's biogas reactors so they could create an "enhanced conventional detonation" that would wipe the site out (after they had retrieved whatever data they could). Unbeknownst to Trilon, the French government had sent out an intervention team of gendarmes as well to investigate the deaths of French law enforcement in the area as well...