RPG's (Pen and Paper)

The master scenario I've got going is that the faction - the Armed Forces of New Nauvoo - inadvertently winds up being a total game-changer.

New Nauvoo was first created shortly after Caph was founded by a variety of religious groups seeking to make a new start. Between how remote it was from the main population centers and the ring of mountains surrounding it, few people dared to assault it when taking the planet, and those who did were repulsed and humiliated due to the mountains being natural fortifications.

As a result, virtually nobody outside of the region knew that they were sitting on several Star League weapons caches; several mountains had been hollowed out to become bases and weapons bunkers.

The region's engineers and technicians have traditionally had a rather considerable talent for reverse-engineering, and so in time they were able to dismantle, examine, and duplicate the mechs, vehicles, and aerospace fighters in their care. They then converted several of these bases and bunkers into hidden factories, and those components that couldn't be made in the factories they convinced actual local manufacturers within the region to produce in secret. And thanks to their being the planet's last remaining breadbasket, they had a solid source of income to finance everything.

The end result is that, while the population numbers are limited, the AFNN is armed with a mix of top-of-the-line Star League-era tech, brand-new designs cranked out by the engineers & technicians, and items salvaged from those foolish enough to come against them.

In order to multiply their available forces, not only has the AFNN been welcoming all comers Foreign Legion-style, they've also been sending agents out undercover to recover other Lostech, spy on potential threats, and/or make alliances and treaties.

The first campaign that I was running back in 07 / 08 involved the party working as subcontractors to Lindon's Battalion. The WoB had been hiring bandits and failed mercenaries to swarm the planet and cause problems so that the Blakists could justify landing on the planet as a peacekeeping force, thereby taking it over and putting a buffer between Terra and the rest of the Inner Sphere. Instead, due in large part to the actions of the players, the AFNN intelligence services figured out what was going on; not only did they convince all of the various factions to unite to repulse them, they also sprang several traps on the Blakists that led to the WoBblies suffering an incredibly humiliating defeat. The key turning point came when all 22 AFNN Nemesis aerospace fighters then in existence (55 tons, 3 PPCs, "stealth" capabilities) swarmed the warship that the Blakist task force had as an escort and utterly destroyed it, giving the AFNN space superiority and bringing them to the attention of Comstar and several other groups (like the Northwind Highlanders and Wolf's Dragoons), who they rapidly formed treaties with. They also succeeded in getting the WoB black-listed with the MRBC over the matter, helping to cut off the flow of mercenaries to the organization.

Had the campaign continued (one of the players was murdered in a home invasion gone wrong, and the party disbanded thereafter), they would have retaken a pair of worlds from the Jade Falcons on behalf of Rasalhague. Not only would this have confounded the Falcon invasion of the Lyran Alliance, it would have left the Falcons open to assault from the Wolves. What's more, the FRR would turn one of the liberated planets into a factory world, helping both them and Comstar by boosting their militaries.

A fiction series that I'm doing link takes place on Solaris, and represents another aspect of the master campaign. Originally, the series focused on the character I role-play over on Mordel, an arena jock who - along with the stable he inherited - went to work for Heimdall after getting messed over coming and going by the Lyran Alliance high command despite being a legitimate war hero. One of his allies is a stable that is actually the cover for the local AFNN cell, and so when not fighting in the arena or waging the FedCom Civil War by proxy both stables are helping to cripple the Blakist presence on the planet.

This campaign will help curb the population of bandits and Blakists still on the planet. Not only will this give the AFNN one less thing to worry about, depending upon whether or not the party meets certain goals they'll put the entire planet in a far better defensive position against external attacks.


The way I have it, the Jihad will take place circa 3065 or so, not long after the end of the Civil War. Due to the campaigns, and other intervening factors, it does not go off as planned. Caph, Solaris VII, Outreach, Northwind, Carver V, Errai, Klondike (fiction-only), the entire Terracap Confederation, and Robinson never fall, Ingress puts up a heck of a fight, and a Periphery world known as San Corazon (which the Blakists had just built a mech factory on) is actually liberated. The end result is that several waves of Blakist invasion forces are shredded, disrupting the invasion plans and leaving several worlds with under-stength garrisons as the relief forces had to be diverted.

With the Blakist forces exhausted, the AFNN organizes a number of forces from the Chaos March under the banner of the New Terran Hegemony and launches a suicide strike meant at retaking Terra.

It succeeds.

The loss of Terra not only deprives the Blakists of the cradle of humanity, it also deprives them of its factories and results in several key leaders being killed or captured. The Word of Blake is forced to relocate its headquarters facilities and remaining manufacturing capacity to Sirius, giving the New Terran Hegemony enough time to formulate a proper counter-offensive. This counter-offensive, known as "Operation Sucker Punch", consists of using aerospace fighters to distract the space forces around a planet while AFNN LAMs (yes, they have several LAM factories) survey the planets and hit targets of opportunity; planets with weak garrisons get a visit by a proper liberation force, while the LAMs and fighters can rapidly retreat from planets with strong garrisons. While the NTH forces start on opening the Draconis Combine and Chaos March back up, the Rasalhague / Comstar forces begin working on the Lyran Alliance.

Unrelated to these efforts are a series of task forces from Solaris (which liberate a series of factory worlds close to Solaris, thus creating the Solaris Protectorate) and a task force from Klondike (which also helps to liberate the Lyran Alliance.

Within 10 years, the Blakists are forced back to a cordon made from a mix of Chaos March and Free Worlds League worlds and a series of FWL planets that they succeeded in subverting some time back. The Hell's Horses now control a swath of Wolf space, and the Fire Mandrills now control a swath of former Falcon space (the Falcons came dangerously close to being obliterated, but - like the Wolves and Bears - fended off the worst of the Blakist efforts), but otherwise the Inner Sphere is free... albeit with shifted borders.

Thus, Devlin Stone never has a chance to become anything beyond a regional hero, and so never has the chance to create the Republic of the Sphere. And with the Blakists pushed back over a mere decade, the damage was largely contained. The bulk of the fighting now consists of the remaining Blakists making probing efforts onto neighboring worlds while the remaining factions scrape up what they can afford to send in order to retaliate. This leaves plenty of room for further adventures (the old hostilities still largely remain, but the various nations are exhausted and so are now focusing on small-scale engagements) while still preventing the Dark Ages from ever taking place.

Thing is, they'd have had 200+ years to figure it out. I think it reasonable that they'd have at least figured out how to do some of it by now, especially if they made a Manhattan Project out of it.



In real life, a number of military bases have artificial mountains or other constructs that look absolutely convincing unless one is familiar with the way the landscape looked prior to their sudden appearance.

And we're also talking several lots of individual stores, not a Castle Brian or anything so dramatic. Couple this with some paperwork shenanigans and a disinformation campaign (such as a concerted effort to make the digs look like routine mining operations), and it's entirely plausible IMHO that the local commanders - with one or two high officials helping out - could have done this on their own, with minimal knowledge or interference from the rest of the SLDF or Comstar.



The way I have it, the AFNN were quick to recognize the dominant position of the Highlanders in the Chaos March, and so made them a peace offering in the form of three designs that were derived from the Crab: the Crabcake (a 25-ton force recon machine), the Crab LAM, and the Fiddler Crab (a 75-ton ranged fire support mech with an AC/2 and a PPC). This opened up negotiations, which ultimately led to a treaty.

In fact, this was also how they got Errai, Carver V, the Terracap Confederation, and Outreach on their sides: gifts of technology and/or new designs as an ice-breaker towards further negotiations. In fact, the AFNN actually produced several of the components needed to restart the Bandersnatch factory, such as LRM 5s.

With Comstar, it was them pointing out the fact that they now had a mutual enemy in regards to the Word of Blake *and* their sharing intelligence data from several Blakist prototypes captured in the fighting, including a prototype Initiate, an early prototype Red Shift, and a prototype Toyama. Turns out that the Blakist commander in charge of the operation was so sure of an easy victory that he converted a forgotten technical college he rediscovered into a weapons test lab, and as such got permission to bring the prototypes with him for testing. Instead, the test lab and a nearby farming community were ceded to the party from the first campaign as a land holding after they helped liberate them both; the test facility has been converted back into a technical college, and a small automobile & tractor manufacturer in the community has been expanded so as to produce machine gun-armed combat jeeps.



I have the first campaign as having taken place around 3062, meaning that the AFNN *would* have had early knowledge concerning Blakist efforts to capture worlds within the Chaos March.

Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier the AFNN tipped off the MRBC concerning the Blakist use of down-on-their-luck mercenary units as cannon fodder; this would have gotten the Blakists a severe reprimand, if not a blacklist, and so they'd have had a much harder time recruiting mercenaries to do their dirty work. In other words, Waco's Rangers wouldn't have been in position to assist with the invasion of Outreach.

Thus, rather than secure a barrier around Terra, all the Blakists did was give the AFNN and their allies early warning about a possible invasion. WoB High Command realized this, which is why they ultimately chose to launch the invasion so early and why the AFNN- affiliated worlds were waiting for them.

**

Solaris VII - The current story line has us blundering into the Blakist presence on the planet; originally the AFNN stable was just aware of a small presence, but as things have gone along we've both come to realize how badly we underestimated things, and so we're now working to ferret them out before they can do anything.

Furthermore, Mount Olympus - the hollowed-out mountain my stable is using as a headquarters - is actually a former Star League fire base; hidden inside the main peak is a turreted anti-shipping laser (if you've played Mechwarrior 4 Black Knights or Mech Commander 2, you'll know what I'm getting at; otherwise, imagine the ion cannon from Empire Strikes Back). When the Blakists do finally try to invade the planet, the laser will take down a number of their dropships before they can even land, and so will play a large part in the first invasion attempt failing.

Klondike - The Klondike School of Tactics is ultimately Blackjack 2.0; cadets, instructors, and planetary garrison alike will fight so dirty and use such unconventional tactics that the Blakists won't know what hit them, and without any reserves due to the fighting elsewhere the WoB will be forced to withdraw in order to minimize losses.

All I can suggest is try typing the title into Amazon and see what the prices for it are like there, it might give you some idea, if anyone else knows something else please try.

The e-book in question:

gumroad.com/l/3LineNPCs

The price for the download is a donation of anywhere from $0 to $5, the money raised being used to help pay for upgrades to the main Roleplaying Tips Weekly site.

that seems to me to be awfully slim in the protein department. particularly when you have the option of making various other freeze-dried protein sources available. I would definitely throw beans into the mix, as well as bouillon for flavoring. I'd skip the fruit drink in favor of a nutritional drink powder (fruit flavored) I'd also lay in a large stock of hermetically sealed Jerky. they can gnaw on jerky all day, and she can be stuck carrying a pressure cooker full of beans in her engine compartment all day softening them up for dinner. I'd have whoever is the chief techie in the troop figure out how to mock up a still in his or her mech, as well. no military expedition should ever be without a means of making hooch.

soy protein and TVP (textured vegetable protein) are also good options for dry protein sources.

of course, what is more likely for a military expeditionary force is the equivalent of MRE packs; so pulling together these things to supplement them could be a story component.

the reason for suggesting the alternate drink was as a protein supplement, and because they are a bit worse than regular powdered drink mixes.

you could add more freeze dried vegetables to the mix; but I was thinking to replace them with vitamins, and have them conspicuously absent from the diet. this can be a source of either joy or annoyance to your crew depending on their personalities.


but can he bullseye womp rats in beggar's canyon?

the only mechwarrior gaming I did was mech skirmishes, but I've played other games with similar character creation matrices.

to me that's a sign that the game is shifting from character driven to combat driven. (I was once accused of producing "another TLW combat monster" due to a character's incipient phychosis and damage oriented combat suit.)

it WAS mentioned that a characteristic of the equipment was that it could maintain a usable water supply.