Quote:
Originally Posted by HorseSoldier
The first couple T2K campaigns I ran were kind of cut and dried on questions of good guys versus bad guys -- NATO in the white hats, marauders (who were always Soviet deserters anyway) and WP in the black hats.
The last time I ran Kalisz/Black Madonna/Krakow, though, I tried to make things more nuanced and complicated. One way I did this was have another group of the survivors from 5th ID (one of several actually) on the same basic line of march as the PCs. This particular group was under the leadership of a talented officer who'd gone all Colonel Kurtz about things and were somewhere between marauders and "Aguirre, Wrath of God."
The PCs initially didn't really know how to react when they'd find burned out farms with 5.56mm brass and MRE wrappers on the ground and raped, robbed and murdered locals, since they had the expectation that US/NATO were the good guys. There were pragmatic dimensions to it too -- locals who wouldn't do business with them and informed on them to local Polish and even Soviet troops, heavy enemy patrolling trying to run down the 5th ID marauders, etc. It eventually built up to the PCs deciding they had to do something, if only to get the heat off their backs as well.
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I've used an encounter (not a whole adventure) like this on several player groups -- the US troops that had gone marauder vs. Soviet Spetsnaz troops that have gone over to NATO. The player group happens upon them in the middle of a firefight between each other, and I drop subtle little hints that things may not be what they seem.