The Zar Ross Invasion or the Five Day War.

 The Zar Ross Invasion or the Five Day War.

Recently I started listening to the (potentially) final five books in Richard Fox’s Ember Wars series and was inspired to roughly copy a scenario of planetary defense much like the first three books of his series, with drones in overwhelming numbers descending on a mostly unready humanity. It is a very compelling series (or technically a group of series in semi-sequentially placed in a shared universe) that has my general recommendation.

The other major source for this project was the recent Jeffro Johnson article where he gives an alternative BROSR view of prep as opposed to their older ’no prep’ viewpoint. This article encouraged me to push for a much more thorough background for this setting, but for space reasons I will only show you the maps and not the timelines.

Basic Setting.

One player took the League (later renamed through in game events to the Theocracy) and the other player got the Sultanate.

The world is meant to be one much like our own with masses of people diverged from earth unwillingly three hundred years ago. The initial colonies were placed and then I used a series of generators to abduct what had happened in those three hundred years, with the rise and decline of various nations. This led to wildly asymmetric civilizations, ranging from single town city states to coalitions representing the might of empire. This lore also was able to somewhat direct the players in making their choices for how the countries that were not picked by players were to be treated. The players then had two sessions representing the time between the countries learning of the specific threat of the drones (from randomized aliens) and how the other civilizations reacted to this information. 

On the Aliens and their Offers. (I did not attempt to put unique aliens in, for speed sake.)

1. Erysian Mentorship — Requires Full use of a 50% to 100% of University Usage.

2. Thoth Overlordship — Requires 1 Pop every decade (from the planet) for entertainment roles in the Thoth home-world.

3. Dotari Alliance — Requires an expedition of 5 military units to rescue 3 of their pops from the Zar Ross, or at least attempt it.

4. Rigellian Support — Requires +9 trade to achieve full support. 

5. Darhel Indentureship — Requires 10 human military units to be leant to the cause of Galactic Union.

6. Chiss Support — Requires an oath to not look for them. 

7. Grey Fate — Requires a single population chip for medical experimentation. 

8. Eldar Enthrallment — Requires the repression of religion and human unity and the abolishment of universities. 

9. Covenant with the Alendata — Requires the desecration or destruction of all places of worship on the world. 

10. Red Martian Alliance — Requires successful officers to marry into the Red Martian Ruling Class.

11. Vulcan Upliftment — Requires a pledge of the world to Reason and the Federation’s final control.  

12. Viltrumite Tyranny — Requires total control of any group that wants any aid. 

(More advanced campaigners should consider having one or two players playing as the aliens. This would vastly change the dynamic and really ramp up the 'earthbound' player's resentment to any concessions extracted.)

This was generally well received by the players, but in retrospect I should have implemented more rigid systems that had more consistent outcomesl for success or failure, especially with the university system. The players enjoyed running into their plagiarized aliens and making secret treaties and failing to get a single patron for the world.  

Once the pre-combat phases were completed we had two sessions of combat (making this a 4 session minimal downtime event) over the course of two days. Combat was based on a D10 system stolen from Twilight Imperium, with modifiers based on communications security, command and control, and ACKs styled surprise. There was also a separate phase for Anti-Landing fire which was stolen from Axis & Allies combat. I established a fixed force of 100 two hit point drones with a fixed target priority system, accuracy against different unit types for the drone side, while the players were able to bootstrap their armies and navies in different ways. Communications security was meant to inherently favor the drones, with both sides rolling dice and the higher number winning, with the humans having a basic 2D6 or 3D6 as a usual defense, while the drones got to roll a D100. This mattered as the damage from human forces was halved if their communications were compromised. 

I did not try to work out the odds before the campaign once the player units and npc power units were placed, but I did have a moment of guilt feeling that I had set up too brutal a scenario for them. My players held fast though and then we began rolling where the drones would attack.  

The Gray circles represent the hostile drone deployments. These were generated randomly, which was consistent with the lore being copied.

And the results of the first day's conflict.

Results by the last day of combat.

The as noted by the maps above, the drone casualties from the first day of combat were surprisingly heavy. A lot of this was due to both players succeeding on their communication rolls despite not having optimized their comms security and winning higher number rolls with 2D6 or 3D6 vs. the drones D100. This firmed the player’s morale up and they fought out the rest of the campaign, confident of victory. 

Given the scale of the map (each hex represents hundreds of miles) and each turn represented one day, the armies could not really maneuver effectively. This was not exactly a design flaw, but I would not recommend it for future design. The players were basically rewarded for fatalistically accepting the maneuvers of the drones and watching the other factions getting toasted up until the last turn. One player did then decisively assist the other in a final battle, with his entire Air Force committing to guaranteeing victory, just as we were running out of time giving a cinematic ending. 

The scoring system used for the previous defense of a world style campaign was not appropriate here, on account of scope drift, but the players managed their defenses very credibly, preserving close to two thirds of the civilians on the planet and utterly destroying the enemy invasion force.

Memes

The Roman player got a Viltrumite Alliance roll (only resource support), but we made or shared a lot of memes like this.

A somewhat stylistic interpretation of the final battle.

Given the importance of hacking throughout the campaign there was a lot of software protection related joking.

(This article originally included a day by day breakdown of the invasion and the losses sustained on both sides, but I made the mistake of not saving that article and lost the whole thing over the weekend. Important lesson, do not write articles in BlogSpot.)