A little something - Baranowski Construction
 

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

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

Well done.

Really cool idea, Andrew. Thanks for posting this.

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

Well done.

Thank you!
 

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!

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.

I'll echo what he said.

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

USP
 

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...