POW game
 

Anybody ever tried playing T2K with the PC's starting as POW's? I'm doing some planning for a weekend-long scenario sometime, and this is one idea I'm thinking about.

I'm thinking about having the PC's recently captured and maybe en route to a prison camp in the USSR. Their ultimate goal of course would not only be to escape but to find a way home.

Great idea for a way to start a campaign! The players' belongings would be few and far between.

Yes!

I had the PCs meet one another in the darkness of a freezing boxcar heading east. Come feeding time one of the more sadistic of the guards would open a hatch in the top and throw their food of frozen rotting potatoes aiming for the PCs heads.

Of course the PCs did escape and made a break for it holing up in a building but it caught fire in the shootout, then they disapeared into the woods and then the hills and then farming country with their former masters hot on their heels.

Yes, although perhaps not quite the way that you intended...

Players were all Warsaw Pact characters captured by NATO and sent to a prison camp in Florida. The campaign involved them trying to make their way to Texas to link up with Soviet forces there.

I've only used a POW camp once, with Warsaw Pact characters captured during the first stages of the NATO offensive towards the Baltic Coast. It was quick-built POW camp in the German frontier, with the prisoners doing hard labour to help the NATO advance. The precarious security and the growing numbers of prisoners were used by the characters to raise a revolt and escape. Tipically, they caused a lot of NPC causalties among the Pact prisoners, but managed to escape to the woods and, finally, reach the Soviet controlled territory in Poland.

Not as POWs, but our group at CSU Fresno had an adventure where two new players (both girls, and one an AF ROTC cadet) came in, and they were POWs, and we rescued them from their captors. They had been POWs since 1997, and after the nuclear exchanges, this camp's inmates woke up to find their guards gone, so everyone took off into the countryside. They had the misfortune to get picked up by a Soviet unit, and they were kept as the battalion CO's personal prisoners, being used as servants, cooking, cleaning for the major, etc, as well as more nasty things.....They got their revenge when our SEALs raided the camp (what was a battalion now a reinforced platoon), and got them out. Their main tormentor was killed in the op, and they got to be very vicious in combat later on. Remember the two girls in Red Dawn? Same thing here. We used them as the "bad cop" in that interrogation technique. Their attitude towards prisoners? Noisy amusements for their knives..... One character was an Army AH-64 pilot, the other (the ROTC girl) played a downed F-15E WSO (which, btw, she would up becoming after getting her commission and nav wings! Pains of jealousy here...).

Wow, very cool ideas! Thanks for sharing!

By the way, I just read an excellent book about POW life called "The Last Escape." It's a true story of Allied POW's in Germany in WW2. It was a big eye-opener. While I never thought POW life was anything like what you see on "Hogan's Heroes," this book showed it was worse than most of us imagine (and worse than many people at the time imagined). It has given me a lot of inspiration for this T2K idea though.

Thanks again!

Paul

while this is a wild variation of theme bear with me.....

I used to be a scholar of American 18th century history I have always been fascinated by captivity narratives. Many people who lived in remote areas where captured by Indians and carried off to Canada many of these journals still exist and are fascinating to read. Sometimes the people would be integrated in the native society and would basically become Indians themselves. Other times they would be sold to French for bounties and then possibly thrown in prison and occasionally they would also escape and wind up getting back home. Other times they would go back home after having lived with the Indians for many years.

Now this sort of thing happens today from time to time with guerrillas. A couple people will get captured and dragged to a secluded jungle camp. Often times they end up getting ransomed. But sometimes they are just never heard of again. Often the people captured are photographers or journalists ect.

You could have a group of civilian PC's or just PC's who aren't front line troops get captured by a small band of guerrilla and carried far off into the mountains. It would be interesting if the group was not WP or NATO Allied but under there own directives. Perhaps they could be Neutral to NATO forces but Anti-WP but not inclined to return the PC's unless directly confronted by superior NATO forces. It would also be great if they PC's couldn't understand what there captors where saying. Perhaps they would get captured and then become integrated into the group learn there hit and run tactics and improvised weapons skills ect. Maybe even fight along with the guerrillas gaining some experience before getting redeemed to the NATO forces or maybe if one PC really liked it he could stay with them and his freinds could wind up being returned. Perhaps this PC could turn up later, being used as an Indigenous scout or translator or something to that effect.

Just Ideas I have rattling around in my brain.

Brother in Arms

Yep. Was in one several years ago where all the PC's were in a POW camp somewhere in Poland. It was a good game that dies due to RL issues in the life of the HoG.

Grae

Yes, it was. Pity the death of it.

Good to see ya, Graebarde!

Same to ya Grim.

Interesting thoughts. A side note, I'm familiar with those 18th Century stories as well. I live here in the Pittsburgh area so those stories you talk about happened here in the "French and Indian War" although the rest of the world calls it the "Seven Years War." Our local PBS station ran a special about it, it was very interesting to know that the real "first world war" started here between the British and their colonists vs. the French at Ft. Duquesne which is now, Pittsburgh.

Chuck M.