Although Kaserne on the Borderlands is on vacation right now, I still have campaign thoughts. One of them is that the default in 4e is to separate non-threatening-but-edible animal encounters (hunting results) and dangerous animal encounters (card draw results), and I mislike that. I’ve been wanting something a bit more in-depth for both random encounters and Pettimore’s hunting expeditions. Here’s a first stab at it, informed by Wikipedia’s inventory of Polish wildlife:
Yeah, that’s a percentile table. Don’t judge me. Right-click it and select “open image in new tab” to embiggenate.
As mentioned in my previous post on my campaign’s homebrew specialties, I’ve also added a few more drugs to the team medics’ pharmaceutical inventories. Here’s how we’re handling them:
Antacid
Provides +1 STAMINA to resist food poisoning.
Anti-Diarrheal
Once you’re ill, one dose provides +1 to one infection (STAMINA) roll made for any disease that has diarrhea as a symptom. Dying ass-first sucks.
Anti-Psychotics
Provides +2 to your EMPATHY roll to recover from long-term mental trauma after your counselor makes a successful MEDICAL AID roll.
Antiseptic
A liquid compound suitable for cleaning medical equipment. Used during a surgical procedure, one unit ensures the patient doesn’t have to make a STAMINA roll to avoid infection.
Hydration Salts
When taken in conjunction with one ration of clean water, a character suffering from dehydration immediately heals one point of dehydration damage. Further doses have no additional effect.
Morphine
Used for sedation and pain relief. One does allows an attending physician to roll an extra d8 (treat as an ammo die) for stabilizing critical injuries or otherwise conducting surgery. A second dose allows an additional d6 on the roll, but one or more 1s on an extra die mean the patient is addicted (if he survives the procedure).
Multivitamins
A month’s supply for one character gives +1 STAMINA to resist disease or infection during that month.
Stimulant, Mild
Once per day, one dose restores one point of Stress.
[We’re also using this rule for coffee, which makes it a desirable trade good for more than – ahem – flavor reasons.]
Stimulant, Strong
Injected pharmaceutical. One dose provides a +2 to MEDICAL AID when getting a downed character back on their feet from incapacitating damage. Also usable for other story-appropriate effects.
I’ve thrown together a few custom specialties over the last few months. Some fill gaps in the 4e character model that my group has identified. Others are just there to add flavor (but should still be worth the 10xp investment). The following are currently in play on PCs or allied NPCs.
Herbal Medicine (Medical Aid)
When you attempt to forage, you may choose to gather medicinal plants rather than edible ones. If you succeed, roll 1d12 on the following table and gain one dose per success of the indicated medicine:
Pain reliever
Pain reliever
Pain reliever
Anesthetic, local
Antibiotics
Antacid
Anti-diarrheal
Multivitamins
Sedative
Stimulant, mild
Stimulant, mild
Stimulant, strong
[Some of these meds are also homebrewed. I’ll eventually post them too.]
Jerry-Rig (Tech)
Gives a +1 bonus to SURVIVAL when scrounging for parts and a +1 bonus to TECH when repairing or improvising construction of simple machines.
[We’re currently monitoring this one to see if it’s too powerful.]
Meteorologist (Survival)
Roll SURVIVAL when you spend a stretch or more making weather observations. If you succeed, the Referee should tell you the upcoming weather trend for a number of days equal to the successes you rolled.
Storyteller (Persuasion)
Once per shift, roll Persuasion when you spend a stretch (5-10 minutes) telling a moving or inspirational story. For each success, choose one audience member who may remove 1 stress.
[We’re also monitoring this one to see if it’s calibrated appropriately.]
I purchased my copy of The Poisoned Chalice at full price and am receiving no compensation for this review. However, in the interest of full disclosure: author Alf Bergesen and I are long-time collaborators. We’ve been playing in each other’s play-by-post games for over a decade, and we coauthored Tara Romaneasca, the Romania sourcebook for Twilight: 2000.
I don’t often review stuff, mainly because of some undefined unease about the process. This is probably unfair of me because, as an author myself, I appreciate any attempt at a thoughtful review that shows someone actually read and paid attention to my work. This post, then, is an initial attempt at a module review. Reviews probably won’t be regular features here, but I do want to make some sort of occasional effort toward highlighting products that I find interesting, useful, or praiseworthy.
By the Numbers
The Poisoned Chalice is a module for Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. It’s PDF-only, available on DriveThruRPG through Free League Workshop, that publisher’s community content channel. At the time of this writing, the product link is https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/437864/Twilight-2000-The-Poisoned-Chalice and the module is priced at $1.99. For that princely sum, you get a 19-page module (3 pages of front and end material, 16 pages of content) and a 27-hex x 18-hex battlemap in 4th edition’s 10-meter scale.
Something that’s always bugged me about Twilight: 2000’s vehicle combat is the relative lack of anything meaningful for the person in the vehicle commander’s seat to do. Sure, many of them have their own pintle-mounted MGs, but there’s no command function. This recently came up in a Kaserne on the Borderlands session and my table had a brief discussion about it. Here’s what we came up with:
Vehicle Command: As a slow action, the vehicle commander may coordinate the actions of his vehicle's crew. Make a Command check. With success, this counts as help (Player's Guide, p. 46) for each other crew member's actions this turn.
Timing wasn’t an issue because of our house rules on initiative. The table agreed that the commander should act first to determine success or failure on granting the bonus.
In the interest of balance, we restricted the benefit to actual crew positions, not passengers. There was some debate about whether human cargo using firing ports should benefit, but I felt that was excessive. If you want an in-game rationale, assume that only the actual crew seats have jacks for the vehicle’s intercom.
This seemed to work well as implemented. The commander’s player felt his XP investment in Command was being rewarded, and the gunner appreciated the extra +1 to offset penalties. The driver was a NPC, so he didn’t have opinions, but the bonus was there when needed.
One of the PCs in this campaign has the Cook specialization. With the campaign centering on a farming village with adequate food production, the party hasn’t yet had to subsist on its own in the wilderness, so foraging and hunting are more supplements to the local food reserves. This makes Cook something less of a good investment.
The community currently has 71 residents (including PCs), so it burns through 71 rations of food a day under normal circumstances. The PC in question has assumed a discussed-but-not-seen-on-screen role as the village’s head chef. Up until now, it’s been solely a roleplaying factor, but we recently negotiated a means for giving it some mechanical effect.
Each day that the PC spends a shift supervising food production, the player makes a Survival check. Each success reduces the community’s total food consumption for that day by 5%. This represents increased efficiency in the communal kitchens – basically, the same effect as the specialization’s as-written function, but scaled up.
This whole scene was a result of rolling into the topmost hex of my weather hex flower table (to be detailed in another upcoming post). That result for weather indicates some sort of hazardous weather. Because the previous day had been extremely hot, I decided to throw in a day that would have been a red flag warning in modern National Weather Service terms: hot, low humidity, and high winds, perfect for starting and spreading wildfires. I struggled a little bit on how to make a wildfire interesting and “winnable” before settling on a field fire that would start small enough to be manageable… if not for some complicating factors.
The action sequencing for this “fight” ran according to my normal initiative house rules, with the farm NPCs assisting the PCs and the fire acting in the NPC phase. Attempting to extinguish an adjacent burning hex was a slow action requiring a successful Stamina roll. This received the usual +1 bonus for each helper, and an additional +1 if the PC was foolish enough to stand in a burning hex and try to extinguish it.
Good enough so far, but how about the fire “fighting back” and spreading? Well, I decided that while the initial UXO blast that sparked the fire was “natural,” the weather and – ahem – other conditions were right to attract entities that would drive its spread. What the PCs couldn’t see (until Minka and Pettimore uttered their respective prayers) were the two hexes that I had designated as holding the initial entities:
On each NPC/fire turn, I rolled 1d10 for each active entity. For each success (6+), the fire spread one hex. For each maxed die, a new entity would join the fight – which would drive faster spread on subsequent turns.
For each hex of spread, I chose a burning hex and rolled an appropriate die to randomly determine where the fire would go. For example, this would just be a d5 (or d10 / 2) roll:
After all spread had been resolved, each burning hex rolled a normal intensity C (2d8) fire attack against each character within its flames.
So far, this would work perfectly well for fighting a normal fire, perhaps with some mechanism for randomizing the spread rather than picking the source hex with deliberate ill intent (and for pushing the spread downwind).
As far as the entities went – Minka dubbed them “fire sprites” in the team’s after-action review and the name stuck – I decided that they’d be invisible to the PCs, but anyone who spent a turn studying the fire’s spread would get a Command or Survival check to realize the fire was acting unnaturally. With success, they’d be able to perceive the fire sprites. Minka was designated as getting automatic success because of all the PCs, she’s been leaning the hardest into the local folklore. If we’re putting it in D&D terms, she’s the party’s druid to Pettimore’s paladin – but as it turned out, both players independently did things that made me say, “screw it, you can see” without a roll – as did Arkadi’s player a couple of turns later.
Banishing a fire sprite required total melee damage (or Thoughts and Prayers damage) of 5 points. I also was open to creative solutions, but Minka, Pettimore, and Arkadi solved the problem rather efficiently once they could actually see it.
It should come as no surprise by now that the tinkering with rules continues in my Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign.
Improving Coolness Under Fire
I’m not a fan of the rules as written because of the chance to lose Empathy on increasing CUF. As there’s no way to improve attributes during play, that’s a permanent hit to any EMP-reliant character. We’re currently assessing the effects of the following house rule:
At the end of each session, roll your base Coolness Under Fire die.
If the die comes up its maximum value and you were in combat during that session, increase your CUF by one step, to a maximum of A (d12).
If the die comes up a natural 1 and you took a critical hit or were incapacitated from stress during that session, decrease your CUF by 1, to a minimum of D (d6).
Initiative
I’m definitely not a fan of a random initiative system that doesn’t reflect character proficiency (leaving aside the poorly-named Combat Awareness specialty). Our current initiative system, which we’ve been using since the first session, is:
At the beginning of each round, each player rolls Coolness Under Fire (adding Unit Morale if the PC is within voice or visual contact of a teammate). With success, they act in the fast phase, before all NPCs. With failure, they act in the slow phase, after all NPCs. Characters in each phase may act in any sequence and players may (briefly) discuss tactics and order of operations before declaring actions.
As a play aid, I’ll watch the dice log and drop a brief summary of the rolls into the chat. A typical turn sequence may look like:
Fast phase: Red, Leks, Magda, Arkadi, Pettimore (in any order)
NPCs
Slow phase: Minka, Zenobia, Miko (in any order)
This incentivizes keeping the team close (no lone-wolfing), rewards both individual proficiency (Coolness Under Fire) and team cohesion (Unit Morale), and allows the sort of coordinated action that we see in both documentary and cinematic examinations of small unit tactics.
My Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign has been experimenting with a couple of tweaks to specific weapon classes. Reception has been generally positive so far, so I’m posting them for public consumption.
The point of having a belt-fed machine gun is sustained automatic fire, whether for lethality or suppression. The problem I see with 4e’s rules as written is that the only thing making machine guns better at this than assault rifles or battle rifles is their larger magazine capacity. Given an equivalent shooter and rate of fire, all automatic weapons stand an equal chance of jamming or breaking down when pushed.
Shortly after the game released, there was some discussion on Kato’s forum about this topic. The usual suspects suggested a few different options. The solution my table is using is to ignore 1s on pushed ammo dice. When pushing a machine gun attack, only 1s on the base dice will reduce Reliability or cause jams.
We have one machine gunner in the party, and this doesn’t seem to be game-breaking so far. Balancing factors include increased ammo consumption (he’s encouraged to use his full ROF more) and rigid enforcement of the penalty for hip-shooting a MG (p. 65 for those following along in the Player’s Manual). The net effect is that he spends the first turn or two of combat getting into a good shooting location with partial cover before he opens up, which, to my mind, is functioning as designed.
Separately, the PCs recently scavenged a Steyr AUG from a downed opponent, which has forced me to codify something I’ve been chewing on for a while. I have a tiny bit of trigger time behind both AUGs and FS2000s and have handled several other bullpup assault rifles, and I was looking for a way to model their unique handling. Their balance and overall length makes them quite handy in tight quarters, but ergonomics can be awkward for certain actions.
My current solution is to treat a bullpup assault rifle as a carbine. This means that a bullpup takes a -1 rather than a -2 for attacks in the same hex, and a -2 rather than a -3 for one-handed fire. To offset this, reloading a bullpup is always a slow action – it’s impossible to make a Ranged Combat check to reload as a fast action.
(I’m not sure what I’ll do, if anything, if the PCs get their hands on a bullpup LMG or SMG. My interim solution is to just avoid letting them have a Steyr AUG Para or an L86.)
With my Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign revolving around a village, one item that’s been on my players’ minds is the need for their characters to maintain awareness of their surroundings. A hex is something like 60 or 70 square kilometers, so exploring and mapping it doesn’t necessarily reveal everything it contains. Nor does this keep eyes on it after the initial pass. This is a bit of a gap in the core book’s rules, so we sat down at the virtual table to homebrew a downtime action. This also enables players who aren’t regularly able to make sessions to contribute outside “I brew fuel… again.” Here’s what we came up with:
Patrolling
Designate the hex that you’re patrolling (which may require travel time to reach). Roll Recon (additional recon team members may assist if they have Recon D or higher), modified as follows:
Scout specialty present in the group: +1
Open terrain: +1
Woods or mountains terrain: -1
Ruins terrain: -3
Dark: -1
Light precipitation: -1
Heavy precipitation: -2
Cumulative per person in the patrol above three: -1
The patrol finds one item of interest per success. These may be:
landmarks
exploitable resources
hazards
active threats
intel/clues
salvage items
plot
On double 1s, something unpleasant (but not lethal) befalls the patrol.
(It’s not as rigorously-programmed as the core rules’ actions, but it has worked for us so far. I try to get a general sense of what each PC is looking to get out of their patrol and provide appropriate results so the player feels like the time was well spent.)
