Military Adventure ideas/suggestions

[Jedi AlanRocks]

For a military style campaign I think (instead of straight combat) you could run a few adventures about the preparations for an invasion. Have the PC's scout out a planet and size up its defenses. How many ships are in orbit? How many guns are on the ground? Where are they located?

Or, inversely, you could have the PC's scout a planet that high command thinks an invasion might be coming from. Again, how many ships are in orbit? What might their target be? For example, if the PC's saw Snowtroopers or Aquatroopers loading up, that could indicate what the next target is.

Then the rub: The PC's are found out and have to beat a hasty retreat, or sabotage something important before the invasion fleet arrives (like taking down the defense mainframe like #6 did in BSG)

I don't think any PC will have trouble disobeying an order they know is bogus.

[BreederofPuppets]

I find that military campaigns, where the heroes are suddenly cut off from the rest of the military for one reason or another, make very fun games. Normal military life is strict and rank is layered. Lots of discipline is involved, and hundreds of things you do automatically in the military is lost in the game.

Better games, I think, is when the military folks, so used to having plenty of back-up, fire support, readily available, good quality weapons, descent intelligence and a clear set of orders, are suddenly left to their own devices, without back up, poor 'civie' gear, and save the days without knowing what they are getting into, and with sub-standard gear.

But, this is just me.

[mdlake]

A good story line to be sure, though for groups like mine, with little or no interest in military doctrine, history, paraphernalia, and the like, or even for a typical RPG group with Captain Kirk's disdain for The Rules, pulling off a story like that generally requires a lot of work. A GM has to lay a lot of groundwork to get the players to embrace the chain of command first, so they can feel its loss when they get cut off. I'm grappling with something similar right now running a paranoid conspiracy campaign set in a bronze age culture: I've had to spend several adventures before the campaign properly begins just to give the players a sense of what is normal, and to get them emotionally invested in it, so they can experience the disorientation of and outrage at the Sinister Plan undermining what is understood to be the normal order.

Returning to the original post, you can squeeze a bit of extra drama out of the issue of bad orders from above by allowing the PCs to discover somewhere along the line that what seems to be mere incompetence is motivated by treachery, and that they have an obligation to dispose of their commander, or at least get the word of his treachery out to someone higher up the chain--ideally while requiring the PCs to fulfill the original spirit or letter of their orders, or both. The PCs must outwit not only the enemy, but the treacherous commander and any co-conspirators he may have as they work to upset any clever plans the PCs create to overturn an already unfavorable situation.

If your players aren't willing to settle for rough justice and seeing a less-than-competent officer hanged unjustly as a traitor, you could even reverse it: let them discover that apparent treachery is merely a bad decision made far from the front lines by a commander who is doing the best he can with sketchy intelligence, or a true incompetent/traitor somewhere between him and the PCs in the chain of command. Otherwise a decent chap, he now has to be defended from false accusations.

[BreederofPuppets]

I was going to quote stuff, but I fergot what I wanted to quote, so...

I was going to run- and still might- a Starcraft campaign using the new d6 rules and see how that goes (there is a website out there that uses the of Star Wars d6 for Starcraft). The game would center on a squad of Marines assigned to guard the Mar Sara area (whatever planet is first invaded), and follows Jim Raynor on his little adventures with the Zerg and Protoss, right up until the Zerg eat Sara Kerrigan (guess who also happened to be on the same mission?). The whole storyline would take place around them while the heroes conducted important, but "their level" missions.

The unit had a very good commander stuck with a below average company. One Lieutenant was a self-serving son of a noble trying to hide from battle, another incompetent (this is the PC's LT), one is a up-from-the-ranks former Sergeant who has murderer his previous officers (and is letting his plattoon's mental conditioning to slip), and the last one is an excellent weapons platoon officer, shifted over because she made the mistake of begin good at her job.

Battle, murder, betrayal in morals and conflicts of loyal, justice served on the battlefield, bandits and pirates, aliens and monsters. This, to me, sounded like fun.