/tg/, how do I do a primarily urban campaign based on a banana republic having a civil war?
One of my player want me to do it after he play the Jagged Alliance 2 Urban Chaos mod.
I know what ruleset to use (either Savage Worlds, 13th Age or 4th DnD), but how do I do the setting and the general plot?
My current idea currently is making it based on a combination of both Games of Throne style of politics while basing the some of the general events on parody and exaggeration of what's happening in Ukraine.
Thoughts? Reading materials are very much welcomed.
>>44074562
bump
You could try and get a copy of this:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Chrome-Berets-Official-Cyberpunk/dp/1887801375
"The PCs are hired to be mercenary commanders in a full-blown Third World conflict. At stake are the interests of entrenched oligarchs, military strongmen, revolutionary zealots, and big corporations."
Need some work to be really fun but sounds like what you're after.
>>44075042
does not seem to have any good reviews in that page, but I will check it out.
>>44074562
Tropico
To add another rules set to the pot, you should look at the Five Core rules by nordic weasel games. It does miniature based fire team combat with rpg character progression.
Depending on how operator you want your inspiration to be I'd recommend reading Generation Kill.
>>44074562
Give more information about the civil war. How gruesome do you want it? Are players gonna be simple soldiers or do they have to do strategy as well? Also which side are they on, the government or the insurgents?
>>44075340
> How gruesome do you want it?
No idea for now, but my players have strong stomach and we have play pretty gruesome horror campaigns before (SW Rippers + booze + Nihon horror music) .
> Are players gonna be simple soldiers or do they have to do strategy as well?
From what I can get from the player, he want to play as a mercenary and like Rambo. I will probably try to make them act as highly trained tactical response team and less like commanders to keep the action flowing and stop the campaign for being bogged down by inane political details.
> Also which side are they on, the government or the insurgents?
Probably insurgents. Because knowing the taste of my group, they love being the underdogs.
>>44074562
The initial second I saw this image, I imagined it to be a shoot-em-up mod for the sims.... and I was very okay with that.
>>44075085
Yeah, it has its flaws, but also some interesting rule ideas, and the PCs will need to balance both economy (no one likes to pay their mercs) and international politics (go full war criminal and you'll get embargoed).
What I remember most from when I ran it was the time the PCs managed to pressure some extra money for equipment from their employers and bought some surplus russian power armors.
They ran around believing themselves invincible until finally the rebels lured them into an encounter with the surplus rocket launcher they had bought from the same seller as the power armors.
After that they were much more careful.
>>44075461
Making your players mercenaries open up few cool options:
1) Insurgents have some sort of outside support and funding so they don't need to rely on civilian population as much. Bring on interrogations, torture to obtain information.
2) You can make it so that the party who has hired / supplied the players has competing goals with the insurgency. So they have to balance their stuff. Making their bosses happy and keeping the allegiance of the rest of insurgency.
Maybe as campaign drags on they will come to rely less on outside funding and be more integrated into local forces. Or the other way around.
>>44075552
Sound better than those reviews, I will give it a look over.
>>44075573
Pretty solid ideas all around, keep them coming.
>>44074562
Civil conflicts in developing nations are almost always exactly the same:
A) Underlying long-term animosity between several different (usually ethnical) groups: clans, religious groups, tribes, something like that.
B) Lack of well established non-militarized infrastructure, particularly education and civil debate: people form their identities on older and more "primitive" basis of aformentioned clan or religion adherence.
C) A political interest of at least one, but usually two or more external powers: usually highly developed nations willing to invest money or military equipment because they have an interest in some kind of local (yet properly unexploited) natural resource.
D) One or more usually well educated, west-raised opportunist what will exploit the pre-existing local animosities and conflicts and in the process creates a military driven government.
The opportunist will establish some form of rather unstable government based on military rule (which he usually gains with the aid of the invested foreign nation) and takes advantage of the inherently unstable society, often fuels the local clan/religious conflicts intentionally (to either destabilize, or to gain support of one of the parties). The country goes through cycles where the military oppression temporarly stabilizes the country (at the expense of civil rights), and unstable periods where the clan/tribe/religion-based conflicts re-surface erupting to a civil war.
Untill somebody else once again takes control with a new military-based government, and the cycle repeats.
Keep in mind, developing regions are extremely unstable, so assuming the tribes are similar to those in Game of Thrones would be rather misleading. The identity of the different groups is usually far more nebulous and vague, and the identities themselves usually don't have complex hierarchies, such as you would expect from an established and stabilized feudal society.
>>44075701
Now we are talking, this is pretty good stuff.
I think I can create quite a lot of plot hooks and establish quite some interesting conflicts in the campaign.
>>44075766
Toss in a lot of weapon smuggling and local warlords who gain their power by hogging key resources (water, food, weapons, meds) and you are pretty much set.
>>44075701
>Usually west
I would like to point to all the shit Russians did in the Cold War. It's really the two playing pull the rope in 3rd world countries.
>>44074562
I've run games like that in GURPS before. Since you won't be using it, then the only advice I can offer is this.
Be ruthless. You must learn warfare, you must punish your players for not learning warfare. By the end of this campaign your group should have a mastery of small unit tactics and fighting, or acting as, an insurgency.
If the players are going to be specifically insurgents/underdogs its probably a good idea for them to have several characters. The casualty rates between locals and occupying forces are usually fairly strongly weighted against the locals. They typically just make it shitty and expensive enough that the occupying forces leave.
Alternatively they could be mercs hired by an outside power to train the locals as military consultants. You'd get to have a lot of neat roleplay where they watch motivated idealistic angry young men blow themselves up for the player's paycheck.
You should browse /k/. There are often gorilla warfare / insurgency threads.
Reading "Total Resistance" from Major H. Von Dach should also be mandatory. He explains in details how to build up a resistance movement and how to run guerrilla type operations. This book got used by many terrorist organizations as reference. U.S. field manuals are also a good source of inspiration.
