Earth Resists: Skirmish map

 

A test map for Earth Resists (ignore the text on the bottom left)

(I believe this may be mappy enough to count for Prismatic Wasteland's map bandwagon.)

I first mentioned my X-COM inspired game here. This post collects some ideas about how I intend to handle the skirmish missions in the game. As I said before I want to lean into feelings of tension and drama rather than simulation.

The map above shows 6 locations in a North American city. This is the GM-facing version. The player-facing one would show the layout but the labels and numbers would not be present at the start (details are added to adjacent locations when they move around).

At each location there are two numbers – the top is Threat and the bottom is Cover. The Subway Station, for example, has Threat 0 and Cover 5. These numbers are known to the players (added to the player-facing map) for the location they are at, and for adjacent locations. It's information that helps them make meaningful decisions.

Cover

If a PC is at the Subway Station and wants to take cover, they roll a d6. If the result is less than or equal to the Cover number for the Subway Station (5) then they are in cover. Players can glance at the map and have a good sense of what the opportunities for cover are. But it's also not guaranteed, so there is an element of risk to balance. I'm hoping to create meaningful tactical decisions without needing a grid or defining a bunch of terrain detail in advance. There may be some ways to increase your odds of getting into cover (dedicate more time to it, have a relevant skill).

Threat

The world sheet mentioned in my first post also uses a number for Threat. I'd be tempted to use a different name for this idea in the skirmish map, but I kind of like the mirroring of things at the big scale and little scale.

If the PCs are at the Subway Station they can see the Threat is 0. This essentially means the Subway Station is safe. They won't be attacked there. Why include a safe location in a skirmish map? There are plenty of other things that could happen there – they may find civilians who need to be escorted out of the area, or interviewed for intelligence, or they may find some discarded alien technology that could be collected for research.

At the Subway Tunnel the Threat is 2. My current thinking is that after the PCs act, the GM can then roll 2d6 (one d6 for each point of Threat) and the result determines how the GM can act. The higher they roll the harder the move. Maybe a 1 is a sound of an ET moving nearby. Maybe a 6 would see the PCs coming under fire. This is kind of an initiative system, but I think if an ET shows up and is in an ongoing firefight, they won't have to rely on a Threat roll to take a turn – it's more about the unseen threats building.

Again, I like the idea that the players can see this Threat number and know what it means. They can plan an approach that tries to manage the risk.

This is a deadly game. Walking into a dangerous place, failing to get into cover, and getting shot, will likely cause a PC to be out of action. I need to do testing to see how likely that is, and how frustrating it is. But it's also designed so that new PCs can be generated very easily, so you could quickly dispatch another character from the entry point into the map (if you have enough personnel to allow for that).

Scene Transitions

I'm not sure how this will play, but I want skirmish missions to be played in parallel with other types of missions which I'm tentatively calling Shadow War missions. The skirmishes are the open warfare part of the game, and the Shadow War stuff is more focused on investigation and espionage. In a game session the GM will lay out the details of the two scenarios, players will select or roll up their characters (players will routinely be using more than one character), and then they deploy.

In the skirmish, when the PCs move from one location to another, we put the skirmish on hold and switch our attention to the Shadow War scenario. At an appropriate moment in the Shadow War scenario, the spotlight will move back the skirmish.

Example:

Seb and June are soldiers searching for ETs in the Subway Station. They see blast marks from energy weapons on the walls, and in the tunnel ahead they can see sparks and blinking lighting from a damaged train. The players look at the Subway Tunnel on the map, and see that the Threat is increasing in that direction. They decide to proceed. The GM then lays out the scene at a power plant in Australia where several engineers have gone missing. Two investigators, Dahlia and Rickard are talking to the plant director who seems likes he's hiding something.

I can imagine some players wouldn't want to shift attention away from a scene when things are getting interesting, but my hope is that multiple things will be getting interesting alongside each other. Might be tricky to work out, but I think it could be quite neat.