Influences for this sprawling genre are too numerous to list in full, but The War of the Worlds is an obvious one, as are numerous modern war films. Various types of modern military forces are covered, from professional Western-style forces through PMC’s, conscripts, warlord militias and insurgent groups, which can be fielded against each other (or forces from The Meanest Streets, I guess), but are meant to be pitched against a couple of lists for alien invaders and their human collaborators. The War on Terra – Five Minutes Into The Future: Another modern day genre, but focusing more on the military response to overt alien invasion than the secret wars of The Meanest Streets. My armies for this genre are going to be a well-funded and well-armed occult research organisation, a pack of feral, desert-dwelling ghouls, and a US militia group that fell into the worship of something they found in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Alternatively, this genre could cover the day-to-day ultraviolence of Robocop and other cyberpunk pieces. Think the ‘secret war’ style of science fiction, as seen in The X-Files , Fringe, Threshold and the like, but when things have escalated to all-out shooting. I’ve come up with separate sample detachments for British and American style police, as well as urban and rural cults (think gangbangers and militias, with added demons/aliens/undead). The Meanest Streets – Urban Fantasy: Modern-day cops and cultists, basically. I’ve already painted up a platoon of Soviets and am halfway through a Schüler force. On the other side are British magicians of the Strange Research Group, the US Operation Paperclip ( where do you think the flying saucers at Roswell came from?), and the Soviet Union’s… basic rank and file soldiers because no good communist believes in the supernatural. The idea is that the historical Werwolf organisation was subsumed in the latter stages of the war by two factions of Nazi occultists – the sorcerous Schülers and the xeno-technologist Handwerkers. Operation Werwolf – Weird War Two:The closest to a specific setting that Xenos gets, this is the style of occult fantasy-horror that you know from films like Indiana Jones, Overlord or video games like the Wolfenstein series. Handily, several of these genres lend themselves quite nicely to non-science-fiction games as well. This, conveniently, helps me organise my own hobby plans for the next couple of years, as I want to put a couple of forces together for each genre, not least for playtesting purposes. To simplify things, I’ve split that section of the game up into a couple of genres. Instead, there are sample armies to demonstrate how to compose an interesting force using the generic Xenos army list. There aren’t any firm army lists, not even ones in the fantasy trope style of Dragon Rampant. The game’s setting-neutral, so you can use any appropriate models you like, with generic unit types that can be customised to represent virtually any science fiction setting through the addition of special abilities and upgrades. This is platoon-level stuff, with roughly half a dozen units per side and only a limited number of vehicles. You know, with tank companies clashing with thirty-metre high bipedal war machines armed with enough firepower to level a city. The morale rules are being revisited, as are the shooting rules, and there are, of course, rules for vehicles. Specifically, I’m looking to shape something that replicates the broad strokes of firefights from the early twentieth century to the present day and into the hypothetical beyond. Without going into specifics (not least because anything’s subject to change before the final product), the Dragon Rampant rules have been tweaked to make them fit a style of skirmish warfare more suited to science fiction than the medieval fantasy of the original. The game’s still in the play-testing stage, with a long way to go, but I’m quite liking how it’s going. These days, it’s just Xenos, and I’m now a co-author. Well, the upshot of it is that Xenos Rampant is no more. About a year ago, I decided to email the author, Daniel Mersey, and see if he minded if I submitted it for proper publication as a standalone game. A while ago, I posted a link to Xenos Rampant, a fan-mod of the tabletop miniature wargame Dragon Rampant.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |