A little something - Baranowski Construction

[atiff]

Hi all,

Inspired by James' documents. I am not as militarily in-the-know, but can make up stuff and spin a bit of a story. I also like modular things that can be slotted in almost anywhere. So I give you: Baranowski Construction. Use or abuse as you will.

Andrew

[Adm.Lee]

This is one of things that you think, "Of course!"

Well done.

[Raellus]

Really cool idea, Andrew. Thanks for posting this.

[Rainbow Six]

Nice job...and relatively easy to adapt to other locations as well...

Well done.

[Tombot]

Your idea to create some civilian groups which a party might encounter (or even need and recruit for their own use) is great.
In my opinion we have more than a wealth of military-related articles/ideas/equipment-lists etc. - your modules fill a gap here.

Most of the time i need preparing for a session, i spent thinking about who the PC´s encounter next. Most will be civilians, and its good to have sometimes someone else than the ususal refugees to drain the characters food-stocks.

Furthermore the groups you present, show the PC´s that there is more going on around them, than fighting. We all love our shoot-outs, but one has to deviate from this from time to time, to prevent it from mutating into D&D with automatic guns.
When i presented detailed civilian groups in the past, it made my players more careful about shooting-first-asking-questions-later. They got more concerned about the villages, where they found these people. It made the places more convincing to them - which resulted in much better roleplaying.
You´ve done good work! Thanks!

[atiff]

Yeah, that was the idea... more investment in the world. I've been pottering away with mapping out parts of Poland in 2000. I've done 12 counties down to each individual village - how many people, distribution of farmland, territory type, government, main NPC. (Some very small samples attached - the map is illegible here because of the file size limit.) A lot of it I am filling in as I go; as my game's group approaches stuff, I fill in the blanks.

[Adm.Lee]

Your idea to create some civilian groups which a party might encounter (or even need and recruit for their own use) is great.
In my opinion we have more than a wealth of military-related articles/ideas/equipment-lists etc. - your modules fill a gap here.

Most of the time i need preparing for a session, i spent thinking about who the PC´s encounter next. Most will be civilians, and its good to have sometimes someone else than the usual refugees to drain the characters food-stocks.

Furthermore the groups you present, show the PC´s that there is more going on around them, than fighting. We all love our shoot-outs, but one has to deviate from this from time to time, to prevent it from mutating into D&D with automatic guns.
When i presented detailed civilian groups in the past, it made my players more careful about shooting-first-asking-questions-later. They got more concerned about the villages, where they found these people. It made the places more convincing to them - which resulted in much better roleplaying.
You´ve done good work! Thanks!

I'll echo what he said.

[Rainbow Six]

Nice job on the write up of the Lask region...

[Tombot]

Ach, thats nice! You could build a whole almanach like that!
Bah! - please post more (saliva dripping... disgusting sight!)

I do a similar thing (not as detailed, as your stuff, though:o ), using the UPP-format from Traveller. Bit changed, but a necessity; i have to "filter" each module for pure facts and story, before i get my players killed in well described localitys...

The "Universal SETTLEMENT Profile" comes from the planetary-descriptions, reduced to infrastructure, population-numbers, government-types, lawlevel and techcode.
I sometimes use some stuff from the (pretty old) "World Builders Handbook" (Digest Group) and the government-codes from TNE (leadership-corruption, -paranoia, -talent, etc.). AND of course the V.2 descriptions. All good stuff, i can advice to any GM.

Edit: Almost forgot about the Megatraveller/TNE-Module "Hard Times"; they had a part about changing the above codes by apocalyptic events (how much depletion of population, shifting of government to more opressive law, and so on), which i use for "instant recent history" of any smaller settlement. That way i come up with an explanation/background-info what exactly made a specific place a deserted ruin, or an isolated, fanatic group, etc. (Or is the place full of traces from chemical contaminants?).

I like that you implemented a little hint about the attitude of the actual leaders, too ("sociable, but somewhat greedy")!
The Krakow-Module gave me a good idea how many factions can actually be in one place, giving it much more adventure-options, than just one "unified block" of NPC´s. When i have enough time, i prepare the main NPC-Leaders and their hunchbacked followers, to have some "real" people to meet.
In most cases i make pic´s of all of them with "Heromachine", to have an "actionfigure"-playerhandout to show. But that could easily be another thread...