Father Fletch
SOC-12
I am running a T20 campaign using the Linkworlds and have come to a point in my plot where the characters are going up against a Big Plot. (Solomani Agents, Disgruntled Nobles out to Embarrass their Peers, Characters in Underinsured Fat Merchants Belonging to Someone Else, etc. etc.)
To date the characters have come out ahead in most of the combats they have been involved in, though there have been a few weeks in hospital and one PC death.
I think that they are feeling cocky, and the PC captain of the ship/Ex-Military player, (Elected by a landslide by the PCs/Players) is a former Imp. Marine.
I want to remind them of how dangerous T20 combat can really be.
To that end I am setting them up in a situation where, if they are smart, work as a team, and use appropriate firepower, they will survive. That is it, survival.
Being a rat bastid referee (bow to the master) I have given them a Fat Merch with only a Sandcaster. While sand can act as a big ass canister round, the ship is going to be grounded in the middle of what will rapidly become a refugee camp. (They are tasked with providing tech support to an overenthusiastic and under informed relief mission/religious mission with a set of high tech gear that is being field tested by wide eyed engineering, chemistry, and medical students from the University of Dukh at Sentry)
The tactical question from the bad guy NPC is how do you disable the ship (it is not your main prize in the raid) while keeping the expensive cargo mostly intact?
Your Mission:
Embarrass the Noble sponsor of this mission (The Marquis of Hallentine at Sentry) by disrupting the mission, stealing or destroying the high tech equipment and hurting, capturing, and kidnapping the precious children of Sentry.
Your Personal Mission:
This high tech gear and it’s support personnel are potentially useful to you in the local power struggles as they would allow you to control water and food resources out of proportion to your number of troops and resources. It will make you rich and powerful if you can capture about 20%-50% of the gear intact. You do not care about the starship or her crew; you do not want to go a-pirate on the space lanes.
Your Combat Assets:
About 5 really reliable men, experienced, loyal and trained. Equipped with TL 10 gear supplied by your patron. (Think Solomani Colonial Troops/Aliens Colonial Marines with medium armor and ACR/GL weapons. Night vision, radios, HUD displays, clamshell cuirass) They also have about 50 kg of Semtex and the caps and cord to use it.
About 10 men who have rallied to your banner, they will stay loyal as long as you keep them busy, fed, equipped and not too many casualties. Equipped with TL 7 light infantry gear, captured, stolen and borrowed. (Think Somalia warlord/Bosnia Bullyboys with light armor and Assault rifles, with some hand grenades. Some handheld radios, flashlights, flak vests)
About 20 opportunist local tribesmen who are along for the ride and want to grab all the booty (of both kinds) and then will fade into the background once the raid is over. Equipped with TL 6 surplus, third hand gear that you have given them in the past to help you on similar raids. (Think Laurence of Vietnam, or The Little Cossack that Could. Jack armor, no helmets, carbines, smg's, rifles, auto pistols, shotguns, revolvers, and auto rifles. other gear consists of torches and knives) They will arrive on their own desert animal mounts.
Mobility:
You have a collection of hover trucks and hover jeeps, enough to get you and your men to the AO. No air support, no heavy artillery.
You do have 2 jeeps with Recoilless Rifles and 1 Jeep with a pintle mounted Plasma Recoilless Rifle (like the kind the RCES used to issue to friendlies in the AO)
Your Non-Combat assets:
10 Tractor-flatbed rigs with drivers and 2 forklifts. Estimate that the Imperial shipping containers the gear is stored in will take 15 minutes per container, per forklift to load. This means that you need at least 2.5 hours to load everything.
Your Intel Assets:
You can get men into and out of the refugee camp easily, as long as they only move in groups of no more than 3 and are armed only with local traditional bladed and blunt weapons. There are no real security sensors and the ship is manned on a skeleton basis. You can also get one very motivated 13 year old who hates offworlders (an offworld merc killed his mother in front of him) willing to go in and make “friends” with the missionaries. He will be able to get a lot of intel on layout, location, attitude, and ability on the mission, the security troops and the ships crew.
Your other prizes:
If you can capture a lot of refugees they have access to buried wealth they hid when they ran, you can sell them to Rape Camp bosses, Forced Labor Factories, or feed them into the food processors and water reclamation vats. They transport themselves and you only have to feed the ones you are keeping.
Climate, Terrain, Meteorology:
The planet and particularly this section are dry and arid. The terrain is Wadi like, badlands, with lots of areas of shifting sand. The camp is laid out in a small hollow/v shaped valley with a well dug at the low point that is supplying water to the refugee camp. The Ship is parked in such a way that the sand turret can only come to bear on one valley wall and slightly less than half of the camp. The weather is clear with high winds. This means occasional dust storms may ground the Ships Launch and Air Raft. You can move in the dust but risk loosing vehicles and men if you do so. NO Rain at all.
The Opposition:
A company of 50 underpaid, overworked former policemen, prison guards and bullyboys. They have billy clubs and rattan canes for keeping the refugees in line. Revolvers, auto pistols, shotguns and a few carbines and no armor. They keep only a cursory patrol on the perimeter at night (10 men covering a camp with a diameter of half a kilometer) they sleep in a small tent compound uphill of the ship and the camp, which has it’s own thorn fence. They are there to protect the missionaries, protect the equipment, keep order in the 3 times daily food and water handouts and run the line for sick call. You suspect that they can be either pinned down in the tents or taken out with an attack on their compound.
The missionaries are not armed nor do you expect them to offer any resistance.
The PCs/Ships crew are the wild card.
The nearest support is a local army that you have done "work" for in the past. They will likely show up to clean up the mess you leave, but their ready reaction troops would not be on site for at least 8 hours. They would arrive in VTOLs and be equipped as well as your best men.
The Imperial interdiction forces have Battledress Equipped Meteoric Assault Troops on standby, but will only intervene on two conditions:
1. if they feel Imperial interests are at risk. The only way they would know this is if someone is able to radio them and convince them that this is the case. No radio, no marines.
2. if they feel the interdiction is at risk of being violated. The gear coming on planet is of a non-military nature and has been specially permitted to pass through the interdiction. The ship is lightly armed for self defence only and has the same special permission. This is all information that you can get off the news feeds within the first week of the ship landing.
Your patron has assured you that the Marines will not intervene. (you kind of believe him, he has come through in the past)
What else do you want to know?
To date the characters have come out ahead in most of the combats they have been involved in, though there have been a few weeks in hospital and one PC death.
I think that they are feeling cocky, and the PC captain of the ship/Ex-Military player, (Elected by a landslide by the PCs/Players) is a former Imp. Marine.
I want to remind them of how dangerous T20 combat can really be.
To that end I am setting them up in a situation where, if they are smart, work as a team, and use appropriate firepower, they will survive. That is it, survival.
Being a rat bastid referee (bow to the master) I have given them a Fat Merch with only a Sandcaster. While sand can act as a big ass canister round, the ship is going to be grounded in the middle of what will rapidly become a refugee camp. (They are tasked with providing tech support to an overenthusiastic and under informed relief mission/religious mission with a set of high tech gear that is being field tested by wide eyed engineering, chemistry, and medical students from the University of Dukh at Sentry)
The tactical question from the bad guy NPC is how do you disable the ship (it is not your main prize in the raid) while keeping the expensive cargo mostly intact?
Your Mission:
Embarrass the Noble sponsor of this mission (The Marquis of Hallentine at Sentry) by disrupting the mission, stealing or destroying the high tech equipment and hurting, capturing, and kidnapping the precious children of Sentry.
Your Personal Mission:
This high tech gear and it’s support personnel are potentially useful to you in the local power struggles as they would allow you to control water and food resources out of proportion to your number of troops and resources. It will make you rich and powerful if you can capture about 20%-50% of the gear intact. You do not care about the starship or her crew; you do not want to go a-pirate on the space lanes.
Your Combat Assets:
About 5 really reliable men, experienced, loyal and trained. Equipped with TL 10 gear supplied by your patron. (Think Solomani Colonial Troops/Aliens Colonial Marines with medium armor and ACR/GL weapons. Night vision, radios, HUD displays, clamshell cuirass) They also have about 50 kg of Semtex and the caps and cord to use it.
About 10 men who have rallied to your banner, they will stay loyal as long as you keep them busy, fed, equipped and not too many casualties. Equipped with TL 7 light infantry gear, captured, stolen and borrowed. (Think Somalia warlord/Bosnia Bullyboys with light armor and Assault rifles, with some hand grenades. Some handheld radios, flashlights, flak vests)
About 20 opportunist local tribesmen who are along for the ride and want to grab all the booty (of both kinds) and then will fade into the background once the raid is over. Equipped with TL 6 surplus, third hand gear that you have given them in the past to help you on similar raids. (Think Laurence of Vietnam, or The Little Cossack that Could. Jack armor, no helmets, carbines, smg's, rifles, auto pistols, shotguns, revolvers, and auto rifles. other gear consists of torches and knives) They will arrive on their own desert animal mounts.
Mobility:
You have a collection of hover trucks and hover jeeps, enough to get you and your men to the AO. No air support, no heavy artillery.
You do have 2 jeeps with Recoilless Rifles and 1 Jeep with a pintle mounted Plasma Recoilless Rifle (like the kind the RCES used to issue to friendlies in the AO)
Your Non-Combat assets:
10 Tractor-flatbed rigs with drivers and 2 forklifts. Estimate that the Imperial shipping containers the gear is stored in will take 15 minutes per container, per forklift to load. This means that you need at least 2.5 hours to load everything.
Your Intel Assets:
You can get men into and out of the refugee camp easily, as long as they only move in groups of no more than 3 and are armed only with local traditional bladed and blunt weapons. There are no real security sensors and the ship is manned on a skeleton basis. You can also get one very motivated 13 year old who hates offworlders (an offworld merc killed his mother in front of him) willing to go in and make “friends” with the missionaries. He will be able to get a lot of intel on layout, location, attitude, and ability on the mission, the security troops and the ships crew.
Your other prizes:
If you can capture a lot of refugees they have access to buried wealth they hid when they ran, you can sell them to Rape Camp bosses, Forced Labor Factories, or feed them into the food processors and water reclamation vats. They transport themselves and you only have to feed the ones you are keeping.
Climate, Terrain, Meteorology:
The planet and particularly this section are dry and arid. The terrain is Wadi like, badlands, with lots of areas of shifting sand. The camp is laid out in a small hollow/v shaped valley with a well dug at the low point that is supplying water to the refugee camp. The Ship is parked in such a way that the sand turret can only come to bear on one valley wall and slightly less than half of the camp. The weather is clear with high winds. This means occasional dust storms may ground the Ships Launch and Air Raft. You can move in the dust but risk loosing vehicles and men if you do so. NO Rain at all.
The Opposition:
A company of 50 underpaid, overworked former policemen, prison guards and bullyboys. They have billy clubs and rattan canes for keeping the refugees in line. Revolvers, auto pistols, shotguns and a few carbines and no armor. They keep only a cursory patrol on the perimeter at night (10 men covering a camp with a diameter of half a kilometer) they sleep in a small tent compound uphill of the ship and the camp, which has it’s own thorn fence. They are there to protect the missionaries, protect the equipment, keep order in the 3 times daily food and water handouts and run the line for sick call. You suspect that they can be either pinned down in the tents or taken out with an attack on their compound.
The missionaries are not armed nor do you expect them to offer any resistance.
The PCs/Ships crew are the wild card.
The nearest support is a local army that you have done "work" for in the past. They will likely show up to clean up the mess you leave, but their ready reaction troops would not be on site for at least 8 hours. They would arrive in VTOLs and be equipped as well as your best men.
The Imperial interdiction forces have Battledress Equipped Meteoric Assault Troops on standby, but will only intervene on two conditions:
1. if they feel Imperial interests are at risk. The only way they would know this is if someone is able to radio them and convince them that this is the case. No radio, no marines.
2. if they feel the interdiction is at risk of being violated. The gear coming on planet is of a non-military nature and has been specially permitted to pass through the interdiction. The ship is lightly armed for self defence only and has the same special permission. This is all information that you can get off the news feeds within the first week of the ship landing.
Your patron has assured you that the Marines will not intervene. (you kind of believe him, he has come through in the past)
What else do you want to know?
