And We're Back

I have returned from a week working very intensively on another project to update you on the developments in Ten Years on Terra.  I was expecting to have two sessions worth of updates (Sessions 10 and 11), but Session 11 was canceled due to unseasonably early snow in our neck of the woods, so we'll just focus on Session 10.

Session 10 was the Galveston Shipyard visit that introduced the party to the Wyrm.  The effect was carried off just as I had hoped, and the party was truly impressed by the size of the vessel and its combat attributes.  David and Shin took it upon themselves to dress up as dockworkers and infiltrate the yard while Alexander and Clark joined the tour group using credentials planted in the system by Simon.  It was a great group effort.  The party gathered a great deal of information on the Wyrm, and was incensed with the need for them to neutralize it before ComStar could re-invade Terra.

Mid-session the bombing attack went off as planned, and none of the PC's ended up in the blast of the bomber attack.  Both Alexander and Clark fled off the port side of the Wyrm while the bomb attack scattered starboard.  In the ensuing chaos, David and Shin we able to steal a number of blueprints for the Wyrm, although not the comprehensive set they had hoped for.

The party exfiltrated just fine, and made it back to Clark's ranch in Denver.

They're Talking!

I have no idea what I did differently this time, but we have an active email thread and a developing plan for Session 10.  This is very exciting, and very useful for my planning purposes.  Now I just need to draft up the adventure itself.

In a bit of bookkeeping, I'm on vacation next week, and I have been remiss in giving myself an adequate buffer to keep blog entries coming, so I'm afraid that I'll be offline for a week.  I hope to have something interesting to show you when I get back.  Regularly scheduled posts will resume on 1 November 2011.

Offline Interactions

One thing that I've been trying to do for Session 10 that I haven't accomplished so far on previous sessions is to get the party to pre-plan a bit over email before the session starts.  Unfortunately, thus far no leader has managed to emerge in the group to lead the conversation, and I feel like I'm steering them, consciously or otherwise, if I try to lead the discussion.  So this week I'm trying again to  prod them into action.

I am admittedly much better at GMing in person than over an electronic connection, especially one with latency as high as email, so I'm straining to entice my players (all extremely busy people) to take time out of their days to think and talk about the game.  I'm a bit cautious about taking game talk out of the allocated time slot, but we burn a great deal of time with everybody looking at each other during the "planning" phase of each session.  I hope take advantage of incidental downtime to slowly get the conversation going, but historically this has been a bad plan.  I'm trying to consider what benefits I can off them above and beyond simply having more playtime every session that might encourage them to preload some of their planning.

An Ear to the Sky

I sometimes forget that Ten Years on Terra is taking place during a turbulent time for the Inner Sphere in general, so I thought it might be useful to take a quick survey of what's been happening in the rest of the Sphere while our party has been on Terra.  Most of this is from the timeline in Jihad Hot Spots: 3070.

March 3068 - The Blakist hit a number of Lyran Industrial worlds, including Hesperus II.  Skye and the Bolan Province of the Lyran Alliance actively begin attacks across the Free Worlds League Border.  Clan Wolf-in-Exile sends a taskforce to rescue survivors from Outreach.

April 3068 - Hohiro Kurita leads a DCMS force to counter the Blakists on Dieron.

June 3068 - Blakists take Solaris VII.  Hohiro Kurita is captured by the Word on Dieron.  Kai Allard-Liao vanishes, and Duke George Hasek of the Capellan March launches an unauthorized invasion of the Capellan Confederation.

August 3068 - The ComStar WarShip Bordeaux rescues Primus Mori off of besieged Tukkayid.

October 3068 - Orbital strike on Sian.  Chancellor Sun-Tzu Liao reported missing.  New Earth (site of Clark's contact) falls to the Word of Blake.  Contact with Canopus is lost.  Knights of the Inner Sphere killed in a chemical weapons attack on Atreus as massive naval engagement breaks out in-system as Word of Blake asserts control over FWL.  HPG network jammed with "white noise."  Primus Mori assassinated.  Anastasius Focht goes into hiding.  Gavin Dow ascends to the Primacy.

November 3068 - Orestes (ComStar's de facto headquarters) are attacked by the Word of Blake.  Bordeaux is badly damaged.  Northwind falls silent.

December 3068 - Columbus falls to the Word of Blake, with the 151st Eridani Light Horse.  Sun-Tzu Liao is rescued from the rubble of the Forbidden City.

January 3069 - Hohiro Kurita is liberated on Dieron.

That just about brings us up the Session 10. About this time, extrasolar communications will be restored, so the party should get a briefing on what's been happening in the Inner Sphere while they've been under effective interdiction.

Combat Focus

Writing focus sessions in a technique I've found that helps keep my players engaged and give me a more direct narrative vehicle to tell a story.  By giving the player an opportunity to play their character exactly as they want to, I greatly increase engagement and enjoyment in the session.  Session 9 was just such a session for Clark.  I'm looking at increasing focus on some of the ComStar party, as they have been a bit neglected by the plot as of late.

One of my big problems is with David Cho.  His character was built as a special forces operative.  He's exceedingly good at hand-to-hand combat.  The problem is he is really designed for independent operations; trying to cater to him either involves separating him from the rest of the party, or placing several characters in mortal danger they are ill-equipped to handle.  So now I'm looking at ways to spotlight this character, without running the risk of a party wipe.

I'm hoping I can run parallel adventures during Session 10, so that the party is split, but both sides are working to accomplish their goals in different places.  The trick, I feel, is going to be not spending too much time on one side at the expense of the other group.  I feel like there is plenty of opportunity for part of the party to be with the main tour group while a subset sneaks around collecting information that the Word might not want them to have.  I have to crystallize this vision soon.  Session 10 is scheduled for Sunday.

Session 9

On Sunday we ran Session 9, the investigation of a Word of Blake nuclear blast site in Montana.  The party spent a long time discussing what the site might represent and planned for their operation there, then went to the site and successfully sneaked past the cordon and made it into the site, where WoB NBC operations were working.   They investigated a number of flavor sites (break rooms, bunks, food storage), and finally entered an office trailer where they were able to get a number of plot documents regarding the biological pathogen outbreak that precipitated the nuclear strike.  They rendered on office worker unconscious and escaped with two hard disks taken from the computers on-site.

Returning to the ranch, the party broke the encryption on the drives to find details about two different pathogens.  They were able to determine that Candidate 17, the less deadly of the two, was the released virus at the Montana site.  That revelation was fortunate in that starting three days after their visit to the site, Clark began exhibiting symptoms of Candidate 17.  The Ranch had been kept under quarantine while the disease ran its course, and fortunately it did not kill Clark.  After his rapid recovery, the party was able to isolate and find a treatment for Candidate 17.

This session was particularly remarkable in that the party members rolled exceptionally well; we had several Stunning Successes.  It also ran very well in that it became something of a spotlight episode for Clark, while still allowing each of the present members of the team to contribute in a meaningful way (Simon was absent for this session.)

I now need to start focusing on other characters.  Notably, David has gotten very little exposure in this game, and I want to make sure he gets a chance to showcase his character, who has been somewhat frustrated by the lack of direct action by the party.  I may need to reconfigure Session 10 to feature martial arts more prominently.

Timing

This weekend will be Session 9 of what was originally supposed to be a 15-session campaign.   We'll be in October of 3068,  less than a year  into Ten Years on Terra.  I need to start thinking about the speed at which I'll be advancing sessions.

I'm going to aim for returning to the roughly-one-session-a-year rate I originally planned.  So I'm going to outline about which plots I want to be dealing with in which years:

Session 10 - 3069 - Wyrm inspection tour (Wyrm Plotline)
Session 11 - 3070 - A Lead on Alexei (Sarna Plotline)
Session 12 - 3071 -  A New Branth sighting; Reveal on Clark's Role (Bioweapons Plotline)
Session 13 - 3072 - Weaponized HPG Test (Sarna Plotline)
Session 14 - 3073 -  Bioweapons facility found (Bioweapons Plotline)
Session 15 - 3074 - TerraSec visits ranch (Party Plotline)
Session 16 - 3075 - Re-establish Contact with ComStar (ComStar Plotline)
Session 17 - 3076 - Wyrm launched  (Wyrm Plotline/ComStar Plotline)
Session 18 - 3077 - Destroy weaponized HPG Station (Sarna/ComStar plotline)
Session 19/20 - 3078 - Invasion of Terra/Destruction of Denver (Multi-Part Finale)

To make this work, it means that the Wyrm won't be completed until  3076 -- possibly due to damage suffered in the bombing attack.

On the plus side, having written this down, I really feel like I have direction again.  We'll see if I can stick to this timeline and only let this campaign slip by 5 sessions.

An Aura of Invincibility

One of the elements I want do make sure gets across during the Galveston visit is the sheer endurance possessed of a Wyrm SDS system.  I can certainly have the tour guide do that, talking about how any single section of the ship could be entirely destroyed and the ship would remain combat-capable, or about how the internal bulkheads are capable to containing any non-nuclear explosion with ease, but that would only be talk.  I  would like to create a scene demonstrating just how tough a nut to crack this ship will be.

My immediate thought is a yard accident -- an explosion of some description  that would vaporize a lesser ship goes almost unnoticed aboard  the Wyrm.  Doing so during fitting out might be awkward, however -- fuel bunkers and magazines, the primary causes of BattleTech explosions, would be almost empty.

Better, I can leverage the Terran Resistance again, making a move against the ship.  Possibly even have an encounter with the St. Louis chapter that's being confused with the party.  A major attack with BattleTech-scale assets, perhaps aerial bombers, that does minimal damage to the still-under-construction hulk.

The Wyrm has 150 armor and 150CF per hex, so a bomb load dropped by an aircraft (maximum of 20 10-point bombs), strip the armor but not destroy the hex.  If we're looking at an altitude-bombing attack, the bombers could do at most 20 damage to each hex, meaning that it would take 8 aircraft in a line to break the armor.   Given the ship is being fitted out, I think we can presume there is less than full armor applied.

In the midst of the tour, then, I'll have a flight of three atmospheric aircraft overfly the Wyrm's berth and drop payload on it.  There will be minimal warning to the characters -- this is a surprise attack designed to take advantage of the number of TerraSec personnel present.  The Wyrm will be minimally damaged by  the attack, but there may be significant causalities among the workers.

This scene will drive home the external invulnerability of the ship, and hopefully convince the party that they need to find a way to stop this vessel from launching if at all possible.

Justifying the Expense

The exact reason TerraSec wants this Wyrm is shrouded in mystery.

The exact mission that TerraSec intends to use the vessel for is confused -- in fact, nobody at the tour actually knows.  The TerraSec personnel understand that people above them are expecting these unit to help in law enforcement but are skeptical of its actual use.  They're wary that this is an extension of the same thinking that put BattleMechs on patrol in city streets.   The builders are simply proud of this remarkable platform they've built.  The Word of Blake Militia represented at the tour are extremely skeptical of TerraSec's need for the ship, and do no wish to release it to their care.

As mentioned yesterday, it will quickly become obvious that the Wyrm is a warship, not particularly suited to law enforcement.  The base justification for this profile is that during planetary lockdowns, such as the one during Case White, TerraSec is charged with enforcing the no-fly zone covering the planet, but their atmospheric fighters could not stop an orbit-bound DropShip from escaping the planet unless those fighters happened to be very fortuitously placed during its launch.

This mission profile holds very little water and could much more effectively and economically be accomplished with aerospace fighters, but for the moment that is the comeback argument when TerraSec is prodded about this ship.  Despite not knowing the true motivation, the interaction between the WoBM  and TerraSec members will make the TerraSec personnel compelled to defend the decision, despite not agreeing with it.  These arguments will actually do more to solidify the middle-management layer of TerraSec that acquiring the ship is a good idea -- without really consciously doing so, they'll want to have the ship just because the WoBM doesn't want them to have it.  This interaction is perhaps the most important story point of the session -- it will give insight not only into intra-Terran relations between the two organizations, but will help explain why the lower ranks of TerraSec are slowly getting on board with this plan.

Revealing The Wyrm's Mission

So you're a Terran Resistance fighter standing on a pier in Texas, looking at a half-constructed, enormous submarine being fitted out.  What gives away it primary purpose?

My first thought is that you notice the four enormous NL55's waiting to be delivered by crane into their turrets. As opposed to the few tons that a 'Mech-scale laser would weigh, these weapons would be 1,100-ton monstrosities, and as large as many of the small boats running around yard.  The capital missile launchers would be modest by comparison -- about the size of a large BattleMech, accompanied by a host of missiles the size of small to medium BattleMechs.   Among all the weapon systems being loaded onto the ship, these would stand out as being obviously the primary armament.

It would also  be obvious that the ship has a pressure hull rather than a displacement hull, and is designed to completely submerge.  The enormous turrets full of weapons scattered about the ship would seem to suggest an air defense system, while the numerous torpedo tubes would make it clear this vessel is capable of dealing with threats of all types.  It will be immediately obvious to anybody acquainted with the difference between law enforcement and military duties that this is a warship, not an interception and inspection cutter.

Finally, as the tour winds inside, the space tracking RADAR and independent engagement systems separate from the ground-based search systems will confirm that this vessel is built to repel a major orbital action in Terran orbit.  Hopefully by this point the ComStar members of the party at least will recognize that this ship and its sisters could serious compromise ComStar's next attempt to retake Terra.

Thinking Ahead

I'm comfortable with the amount of prep work I've done for Session 9 now, so now I'm thinking ahead to Session 10 -- the Wyrm infiltration.  The party is looking at infiltrating an inspection tour of a partially-completed Wyrm SDS ship.  I'm not sure exactly how they're going to try to get aboard -- impersonate a TerraSec officer, try to get in as press members, or disguise themselves as workcrew.  No matter how they get aboard, I need to communicate a number of items to them.

First, they don't know what the purpose of this ship is (except Morgan, who out-of-character knows exactly what the Wyrm is.)  For this session, I need to show them what the vessel's purpose is.  That's the first item I need to make sure shows up aboard.

Second, they don't know why TerraSec is trying to obtain a ship like this, and when they find out the purpose of the vessel, it will likely become even more confusing.  This is not a question I want to answer, but one I want to lampshade -- make it clear that even in-universe, this makes little sense.

Third, I want to be sure that the party interprets this as an extremely difficult target to destroy, even by sabotage.  The ship's damage control and redundancy systems would make it outstandingly difficult to disable from any one point on-board.  Although they may have immediate thoughts of attempting to destroy the ship, they can't immediately act on them.

Finally, I want to give them some idea of when the ship will be completed.  They'll likely need to wait until it is no longer in a construction yard to realistically damage it, so they'll want to know when it begins trials so that they might take action then.

That's the outline for Session 10.  This week will be filling in some of those details.

Tiny Bombs

Another thought that came to me after reviewing the Historical: Reunification War WMD rules was to look at how the Word's first attempt at containing the outbreak would've played out from a game mechanics point of view.

The mission the Word's commanders would be attempt to fulfill would be to destroy every living creature within about 2 km.  The Word would have on its side the advantage that everything would be soft targets; nothing military-grade to resist its weapons.  So what would the astute Word of Blake commander choose to accomplish this mission?

Now, H:RW gives us five classes of nuclear ordnance to play with: Type Ia, Type Ib, Type II, Type III, and Type IV.  The blast radii of Type II is 1.3km, while the blast radius of Type III is about 2.7km.  For our purposes, nothing within these areas will survive the blast; hardened vehicles stand a chance, but this is a sleepy mountain hamlet.  Everyone within twice that range has a 41.7% chance of being killed outright by the secondary effects.

Let's presume for the moment that the Word commander was more concerned with containment than subtlety; he has the Type III 50-kiloton bomb dropped on the town.  The entire valley is wiped out.  The airburst leaves no crater, but it is clear that a horrible explosion has occurred here.  What are they going to tell everybody?

Now, a 5-kiloton blast could conceivably be covered up  as an industrial accident; such explosions have occurred before in our time.  50 kilotons, however, either means natural disaster a la Tunguska, or a weapon of mass destruction.  ROM's immediate spin on this would be to pin the explosion on a group of Terran Resistance members.  I suppose a fabricated message taking credit for the incident could easily be created, whipping popular opinion against the Resistance.

The practical upshot is that it is reasonable to assume that Word force on Terra had access to these weapons, and deployed them to stop a Class V bioweapons outbreak on the Homeworld, and now I have better information to describe the scene as the characters find it.

Weaponizing Pestilence

Frequent commentor ChinookHK was good enough to point out the WMD rules I had been searching for for Monday's post but couldn't find because I was expecting them to be in one of the Jihad Rules Annexes, and had completely forgotten to check Historical: Reunification War.  The rules for Biological and Chemical agents start on page 296.

Simply put, all BC threats are broken down into five classes with differing mechanical effects.  Class I is at worst 3D6+6 turns of penalties and possible morale checks, whereas Class V is a make-this-check-or-die-in-1D6-days affair, without possibility of cure.

I imagine that the actual disease I'm looking to deploy here would be a Class V, although I really don't want to expose my players to the possibility of catching that, so I think a Class IV (an "unfinished" version) will work just as well for my purposes.  Under the current rules, here's how the disease will manifest.

From the moment of contact, the disease has a latency of 3-8 days (1D6+2).  Symptoms will last 1-6 days (1D6), and the target zone will be "hot" for 2-12 days (2D6).  If a target is fully susceptible to the disease, they will take a +1 penalty to all skill checks, a -1 penalty to all initiative rolls for each full day of the infection, so that at the start of Day 6 of symptoms (if they have 6 days of symptoms), all skill checks are at +5 and initiative is at -5.  In addition, if the character suffers the full six days of symptoms, one final check is made at the end of the sixth day to determine if they recover or die.

A character who is only partially susceptible to the disease takes penalties every 48 hours rather than every 24, and never has to make a check to avoid dying.  Both types of infection regenerate their penalties at +1/24 hours once symptoms have passed.

So these effects are fairly scary, but hopefully the players not expose themselves to the disease at all.  To help give them hope in case they do, though, I'll make sure the Word has documents on two different diseases this might be (they're here to find out which), that has statistics and information on each.  The alternate disease it could be would be the Class V virus that Word is throwing around shipyard worlds about this point in the timeline.

For an average human (3 BOD/3 WIL), you'd be nearly guaranteed to be infected (a Stunning Success [A Time of War, p. 41 could save you) by a Class V virus, which gives it very close to a 100% kill rate among civilian populations.  The news is only marginally better for the Class IV virus.  For the characters in this campaign, Clark, Simon and David are the most susceptible to the disease; they require a on their check to avoid the full effects of the disease (about 97% chance of infection), and need a Stunning Success of 16+ total to avoid the partial effects.  Alex is only marginally better off (92% chance of full infection.)  Shin is by far the most resilient to disease in the party, with only a 66% chance of full infection.

Now, in each case of infection, there is a 16.67% chance of it going the full six days, and opening up the possibility of the disease killing the patient.  The check against dying is the same as the infection check, meaning that if you need to make that roll, the odds for you are pretty grim.  Total probability of death from an untreated infection ranges from 7.41% for Shin to 15.75% for most of the party.  Not high, but not something I want to be making my save-or-die check against.

Typing Ever On and On

I have to say, I'm starting to worry about my ability to keep making daily posts here as our game sessions keep drifting farther and farther apart; the story is wearing thin by now, I'm sure, and my read statistics are bearing out that I'm getting less and less interesting as I start writing about less choice topics.  Still, at least until I finish the campaign I'll keep updating, but consider this a warning that update frequency may start dropping.

At this stage I'm seriously thinking about how I can use the extra time between sessions to benefit my players, besides just the regular game prep I already do.  Running scenes via email seems like a very open-ended proposition, not one I'm immediately inclined to add to my current workload.  How else can I improve player experience for an hour or two a day?

I've considered setting up a campaign website several times, a place to compile all the information the players have available, to serve as a repository for things like character sheet PDF's and in-game documents the characters would have ready access to.  This seems like the most bang-for-my-buck I could hope to get, since it doesn't require making new game materials, but gives the players an opportunity to look back at the game when we're not in session.

I understand there are a variety of sites out there that provide services to do  just what I'm proposing, so reinventing the wheel might not be the way I want to go here; I'll take a survey of those sites and follow up with what I find.

Pestilence

Given all this work on germ warfare, I thought it was high time I read the new Disease rules in A Time of War. The rules are on page 245, and are not long by any stretch of the imagination. They are, however, laced with warnings about the use of the rules, and that most players will not take kindly to being killed by a random germ in a game about giant fighting robots.

Page 247 has a few random tables for symptoms, frequency, and level of effect.  The highest level effects will easily kill a person with average attributes, making it very dangerous to actually use the random disease rules.  The rules also have no sense of transmission or vector; you might just kind of get a disease fiated upon you by the GM.

As such, the rules listed in the book are useful guidelines as to how to mechanically represent germs and germ warfare in the BattleTech universe, but I think a more complete set of rules is needed to make that part of the game interesting.  A Medical Research subarc might be fun for Clark, but I'd have to think that through very closely.

A Brief Interlude

Rather than more prattling on, today I thought I'd share one of my favorite BattleTech jokes.

The intelligence agencies for all five of the major houses got together and decided to show who was the best. The decided to go to a forest just down the road to find and find a pair of rabbits.

The SAFE agents got lost on the way and staked out a mall instead. No one noticed.
MIIO and the LIC hit the forest running. They spent millions of C-Bills in setting up complicated electronic listening stations, putting in thousands of man hours. In the end, they knew exactly what the other side was doing and what they were doing wrong. They all looked confused when anyone asked about the rabbits.
A single ISF agent walked into the forest. A few moments later he came out dragging a pair of massive grizzly bears who were crying and screaming, “Sure, we're rabbits, we're rabbits! Just don't hurt us anymore!”
The Maskirovka burned the forest to the ground. All the animals were either rabbits or partook in rabbit-like activities.

So, dear reader, I ask you for the last punchline -- what does ROM do?  Feel free to answer for ComStar, the Word of Blake, or both.