The Defence of Sador

I've been planning a sci-fi campaign to run with my partner Laura.

The campaign will be sort of inspired by the XCOM computer games. Laura will be in charge of a small police precinct in the capital city of a planet, and mostly dealing with gangs and rebellions. But the threat will grow exponentially, and an outside force will decimate the defenses of the star system, causing the plucky police precinct to pick up the pieces.

Gameplay will mostly consist of picking from a variety of mission choices, each of which will have a different reward, as well as their own objectives (i.e. steal supplies/assassinate HVT/rescue civilians). Eventually surviving members of the solar defence force will rally to her cause and the final mission will be the ragtag army taking the fight to the invading threat.

FUBAR
(https://fubarwargames.wordpress.com/)

I'll be using FUBAR for the rules, at least for the first game to try it out.

FUBAR is a free 1-page wargame system. I used it once before as a trial and actually really liked it (I do like simplicity in games design!). It's geared towards small unit skirmishes from what I can tell, which is ideal. It also has some vehicle rules, although I haven't tried those before.

The only real downside I can think of is that the rules are so cut down that different weapons don't really feel that unique to one another. An assault rifle will be 24" range and 2FP for example (FP is Fire Points - essentially how many shots that weapon has), so a soldier at Expertise 4+ would get two 4+ shots in a turn. However, his squadmate with a rocket launcher (48", 5FP), would get five 4+ shots in a turn. What this amounts to is that you roll 7 dice with your two-man fireteam. And nothing distinguishes between the assault rifle fire and the rocket, the enemy won't notice the difference!

So it would probably require a bit of customisation to the rules to make some of the weapons feel a bit different (maybe I'll just add warhammer templates for appropriate weapons and cut down their FP?).

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Here's some of the models I'll be using for the campaign:

River Pikes gangers, part of the insidious 'Echen Rebellion'. These are em4 Ganger miniatures which I painted to be as colourful as possible. I wanted them to be multi-coloured punk rebels to stand in contrast against their natural enemy - the uniformed police officer. 

The River Pikes gang will be the villains of the first 'intro' mission of the campaign. They'll have taken control of a broadcast building and planning on using it to broadcast their seditious messages. They'll have innocent hostages too in order to ensure no-one feels sympathy for them. I made minor modifications to them to add some 40k weapons so that I could use them in games of Necromunda/40k if I wanted some dirty gang types.

I painted one of the gangers to have similiar coloured armour/clothing to those of the police officers (maybe he killed one, or maybe he's a traitor?), and I gave him a baton-type weapon to add to that image.

Vigilon Police Defence Force troopers. These are em4 Trooper miniatures with the Command upgrade pack applied on some of them. I didn't like the dorky faces under the helmets, so I stuffed a bunch of greenstuff over them and attempted to cut them into vaguely visor-like shapes. I went with a simple blue & grey colour scheme to give the clear impression of them being a police or security force, rather than sci-fi marines.

These will be used for the police forces spearheading the heroic defence of the planet Sador. A small variety of these troopers will be available in the first mission, probably 3 (they'll have better stats and armour than the gangers).

The other 7 police officers will be made available from the second mission, but won't ever be replaced. If one of these police officers is KIA, that's it (although other types of units will be added to the available forces in later missions).

Police Interceptor/Patrol Car. This is from Old Crow Models. Their webstore is down but you can still get the models if you e-mail Jez and ask nicely. The models are more 25mm scale than 28mm, but they work perfectly well in my opinion. I decided this model looked like it could be an armoured patrol car of some kind, so painted it to fit in with my police trooper models.

I figure this could probably fit two officers, one behind the other (one driving, the other looking up information on the perps - I have no idea how actual police do things but I thought that sounded reasonable).

In terms of game rules, I'll probably just have it as placeable terrain for the start of the mission for the police force, at least in the first few city-based games. If there's any missions on larger maps it'll be useful for scouting/transporting important characters.

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In other news, my friend Rick has a miniatures hobby blog too and it's great. I've been reading it for a while now and he's built up quite a large LOTR army (well, two - good guys & bad guys). Impressive stuff.

Check it out here:
https://thegrumpygnome.home.blog/