Tag Archives: campaign concepts I’ll never get to run

The Tale of Vandal 6-1

A few days ago, someone in the Twilight: 2000 subreddit asked about campaign starts. Here’s my contribution:

I’ve been playing since 1st edition and my preference remains the classic Escape from Kalisz campaign seed. Having said that… a few years ago, I introduced T2k v2.2 to a group who’d (with one exception) never heard of it. I started the campaign on 06 July 2000, about a week and a half before the Kalisz breakout. The PCs were the 7th Combat Engineer Battalion’s engineering recon team. This meant they were the guys who got sent to assess the maneuver brigades’ requests for engineer support and determine what was feasible and what resources were needed. In practice, this let me give them a series of assignments that had them present at or near most of the major story beats in the run-up to the 5th Infantry Division’s last stand.

This enabled me to start them off with a good supply situation and strong support – available fuel, sufficient medical supplies, occasional mortars on call. Then I ramped up the pressure with each major contact, adding additional hostile unit markers to the world map as the encirclement took shape. They got to watch the 5th ID crumble from the inside.

It took about twelve sessions to get to the breakout. For that, we shifted focus off the PCs. Every player got one or two combat vehicles, most of whom were already low on ammo and carrying some non-disabling damage. This gave us a chance to use the vehicle combat rules to their fullest as the players fought their way through the Soviet encirclement. To raise the stakes, they were escorting five trucks, which the Soviets were trying to kill. Each truck that made it off the map added to the resources (fuel, ammo, food, attached NPCs) that the PCs had after the breakout.

I’ve always wanted to raise the stakes on this by finding an appropriate wargaming system (something tuned for micro armor, perhaps) and actually playing out part of the 5th ID’s last stand. Battalion, perhaps even brigade, level. The Soviets’ objective would be to kill American units. The Americans’ objective would be to get as many units as possible off the map. This would all be the setup for a subsequent RPG campaign whose starting parameters would be determined by the American players’ success in the battle.

Villains by Necessity

A number of years ago – musta been while I was in college, to judge by the publication date – I happened to read Eve Forward’s Villains by Necessity. Someday, I’ll track down a copy that isn’t going for $40+ for a mass-market paperback… but today does not seem to be that day.

I’ve always wanted to run a fantasy campaign with the novel’s basic premise. Good won the war against Evil – a little too completely. The world is now tilting toward a pole of absolute Goodness. If not stopped, the entire morally-imbalanced universe will implode in a flash of floral-scented bunny sunshine. The PCs are the last unredeemed villains. They must save the world by releasing Evil from its prison.

It would probably degenerate into degeneracy within a half-dozen sessions, but there you are.

J. Edgar Hoover Is Off His Meds

Campaign pitch for… something. Spycraft, probably.

It is the late 1960s.  Oleg Kalugin, KGB chief of station for Washington, D.C., has somehow managed to convince the State Department and the KGB to allow him to take a vacation in the United States.  He and his wife and daughter will be driving to Florida, discreetly tailed escorted by FBI counter-intelligence agents.

Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover has decided this is the perfect opportunity to abduct and interrogate a senior KGB officer.

You are CIA operatives.  Your superiors are aware of Hoover’s intentions and are terrified of the covert war that such an act would assuredly ignite.  Your mission is to protect Kalugin without his knowledge, ensuring that his vacation is uninterrupted and he returns safely to Washington.  Good luck!

OPFOR of the Five Pillars: The Salvage Dragons

I originally posted this to the CGL Battletech forum in November 2024.

The year was 2991 and Hauptmann Reinhard Yamazaki was incandescent with long-suppressed rage.  Despite continuing a family history of unflinchingly loyal service to the Lyran Commonwealth, and demonstrating superior tactical acumen in the cockpit of his family’s salvaged Panther, the New Kyoto native had been subject to the full spectrum of prejudice during his time in the LCAF.  Upon being posted to the 3rd Lyran Regulars, Yamazaki was informed that the unit had no company command slots – but the regiment would graciously allow him to prove himself at the head of a recon lance.

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Shield Wall: Smart Meat Weapon Systems

Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forums in 2018.

SOLARIS CITY, Solaris VII, April 10, 3062 – Even though I know the attack is imminent, it’s a shock when it comes.  I have no warning.  One moment, I’m anonymous in a crowd of revelers on Montenegro’s Amethyst Strip; the next, the crowd is scattering as a wiry man in red leather lunges for me with a knife.  I’m paralyzed by shock, seeing only the glow of neon on the blade as it plunges toward my heart.

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Hot Extraction

This one’s for MechWarrior:

It’s December 2766. All of the PCs, for whatever reason and whatever their origins, are on Terra over the traditional holiday season. On the morning of the 27th, they’re all at a diplomatic function (or on duty, or waking up hung over…) in Unity City. That’s when the shooting starts… and they find themselves the only protagonists standing between Stefan Amaris’ coup and Helena Cameron.

This campaign would be heavy on action-espionage and outright military action as the PCs try to get a Cameron heir off world, out of the Sol system, and to something resembling safety. Depending on the mix of PCs, both character-scale and wargame-scale conflict could be feasible.

Binary Crossover

This one’s a campaign concept for VSCA’s Diaspora:

In Diaspora, interstellar travel relies on direct jump routes between stars. Each star system’s zenith and nadir points have slipknots, points of odd physics that link to one or more other star systems via slipstream connections. The catch is that, because of a (presumed) galaxy-wide catastrophe of unknown origin, connected star systems are isolated in archipelagos of four to eight. Travel is only possible within these clusters. (As part of Session Zero, each player gets to design one of those star systems, which is a lovely collaborative setting creation element.)

In the cluster in which the game takes place, one of the star systems is one star of a binary. The highest-tech world in the cluster has just developed a ship capable of crossing the (relatively) short interstellar space to the binary’s partner. What’s there? Does the binary partner have slipknot connections to another cluster?

(Obviously, yes, there is a slipknot whose connections are part of another cluster, and this would be an interstellar exploration/first [re]contact game.)

I love it when a coterie comes together.

In 1872, a crack team of archons was sentenced to destruction by the Ventrue Justicar for a crime they didn’t commit. These Kindred promptly escaped from a maximum-security conclave to the Anarch Free State. Today, still wanted by the Camarilla, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem… if no one else can help… and if you can find them… maybe you can hire… The V-Team.

Yo ho, yo ho…

So today, I found out about H.R. 6869 from 2022’s legislative circus. I’m certain it’s pure coincidence that it was introduced four days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began…

A BILL

To authorize the President of the United States to issue letters of marque and reprisal for the purpose of seizing the assets of certain Russian citizens, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. Issuance of letters of marque and reprisal for purpose of seizing assets of certain Russian citizens.

(a) Authority of President.—The President of the United States is authorized and requested to commission, under officially issued letters of marque and reprisal, so many of privately armed and equipped persons and entities as, in the judgment of the President, the service may require, with suitable instructions to the leaders thereof, to employ all means reasonably necessary to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories any yacht, plane, or other asset of any Russian citizen who is on the List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury.

Kinda makes me want to run “you are a team of privateers in the business of stealing Russian kleptocrats’ high-value toys” as a Spycraft campaign.

What’s Russian for “heave to and prepare to be boarded?”

Cold Iron, Tire Iron

Back when my then-roommate and I were watching NASCAR, he casually dropped the factoid (which I’ve never verified because I prefer to believe it’s true) that every NASCAR track has a chapel in the infield.

This means that every NASCAR track has a small piece of holy ground on it.

Ever since then, one of my campaign concept slush file entries has been a monster-hunting NASCAR pit crew. Race on Sunday, slay on Monday, be gone on Tuesday and leave the evidence for the local cops to figure out.

The only other rational option is to hit up B.J. Zanzibar for the old WoD Highlander homebrew rules…