So, a few interesting things happened Friday when running my Pellucidar game.
We had only three people able to make it, so we ended up not only doubling up on characters, but did something of a squad-based system for the big combat at the end. Now, if only two people had shown up, I was prepared to fully wargame it, but as it was, we did kind of a hybrid.
The random world generation I used accidentally created some super relevant, almost plot-related content in the first hex the party explored.
Due south of the dirigible’s landing zone, I rolled for mountains. Whenever a party “explores” a hex (rather than simply move through it), I roll again on the terrain and by animal/encounter type, and plan to cook something up in my head based on what I roll. That way, the game isn’t just running around through hexes looking for random encounters; a “search” of the hex will force some sort of relevant content to be there. So, on the second roll, I got “body of water” and “Lizardmen”. When rolling how many Lizardmen there were, I rolled ridiculously high (nothing lower than a 5 or 6 or 6d6), so I figured “Okay, there is a mountain spring and small lake here in a rocky bowl, with a Lizardman village just above it on a plateau.”
Guy taking point on the way up the mountain trail critically fails his psych roll, so something bad’s going to happen. While the recon team is filling canteens in the spring, a group of Lizardmen spot them and attack from above. A handful of them charge down the slope with spears and clubs while several from above rain javelins down on the soldiers. A couple of well thrown grenades and rifle-fire are able to scatter the attacking Lizardmen, but those up on the slope throwing spears do their damage and hurt some folks pretty badly. The team beats it back to base where they are debriefed.
The Colonel fills them in on why they’re there, what the Hollow Earth is, what the Nazis may be planning there, and says that it’s imperative that they seize that hill – with high-ground and a source of fresh water, it would make an ideal spot for a base-camp that would be far more secure than the present LZ. The team is given additional men to take the plateau, including a fire-team of riflemen and a 3 man mortar team. (Yeah, I got to use the mortar!)
Team goes up the trails to the spring just below the plateau, sending one two-man fire-team around the west, a two man fire-team to cover the spring and guard the mortar team, one guy at the base of the hill with the Commu man, and the rest set to climb up the direction they’d been attacked from.
The Lizardmen fishing on the far side of the pond critically failed their Psych roll, so did not manage to spot any of the guys in the two eastern teams moving into position. Sure enough, on top of the plateau, the troops spotted an entire lizardman village. The sergeant signaled the mortar team to start laying in fire. All hell broke loose once the first shells started landing. The lizardmen scrambled and started rushing to their defenses. Plus, their chieftain hopped onto a big dinosaur. It was a damn bloody fight, and including both PCs and NPCs, the party lost around 1/3 of their men, but able to route the Lizardmen. One of the highlights was the NPC mortar team killing the chieftain’s mount with an almost point-blank mortar shell at the charging beast.
So far, combat worked out both as designed and as expected – soldiers with fire-arms will have an extreme advantage against any opponents at range. Since I’m using Star Frontier’s order of combat, anyone with a fire-arm will always have advantage over someone trying to close in without a ranged weapon, regardless of initiative. Once opponents are able to close the distance, it becomes another story – the lizardmen who were able to get into melee range (except for the few who rolled exceptionally poorly) tore into infantrymen who couldn’t go toe-to-toe with them. Suppressive fire rules worked out well in most cases. Because of the shift in scale (we used minis, but it was done a bit abstractly), it was a little trickier to adjudicate things like grenades, so I allowed 1d4 and 1d4+1 on groupings.
The soldiers took the hilltop, the medic patched up the guys who were not dead, and the commu man radioed for reinforcements to secure and hold the village. After a couple of hours, another 40 soldiers showed up, carrying light and heavy machine guns to begin fortifying the position. In the aftermath, the Colonel made the call to move everything from the LZ to the new location, setting up a permanent base-camp in the Lizardman village. The dirigible could then be sent off for additional troops and supplies.
Anyway, I have no idea what next session will bring. We might have more players, but everyone got down how things worked pretty well. Since there’s high-ground, we might have long range artillery after all! I haven’t rolled up any other hexes, but if we ended up with something that awesome on the fly, I have high hopes for how things will turn out.
Cirsova 