[Webstral]

I was thinking about this concept a bit more today in regards to hunting rifle and shotgun militias (HRSM).* These security forces almost certainly will be based on the local police department. As trainers, as the arm of the local civil authorities, and the owners of a stock of military-grade weapons, the police naturally form a high-quality force-within-a-force for the HRSM. Naturally, wherever and whenever former military personnel (especially the infantry) join a HRSM they will tend to move towards this cadre. The same can be said of seasoned hunters—at least to some degree. Military-grade weapons also will come from outside the cadre; these too will tend to migrate towards the kernel of high quality, with or without their original owners.

Thus at the inception of an HRSM, the idea of a distinct body of higher-quality men within the corpus is present. There may be an additional layer of quality in the form of SWAT teams or their equivalent in a sufficiently large municipal police force or in sheriff’s departments and state police regiments. It isn’t much of a leap to create a stormtrooper unit within an HRSM. This small force generally would have the best gear and best personnel available. They would spend little time at the checkpoints or on sentry duty and a lot of time patrolling, responding, and ambushing in whatever combination local circumstances dictated.

Now I’m off on a tangent.

This would be an interesting way to build a party for use in a specific locale or in a region. Characters could be police, former military, or military stragglers who never managed to rejoin their units but who are not deserters per se. The need for local missions of all types would be great. Such smaller missions might be wrapped into bigger picture items like the usual Twilight: 2000 modules. The party could come into being serving the interests of a legitimate government, a warlord, or something in between. Once on the move, though, the PCs who have to make up their minds whom they serve, if anyone. Game play probably would have a different feel than a game with all military characters who are comparatively footloose and fancy free in the modules.

Does anyone know of a character generation concept for the police?

*Hunting rifle and shotgun militia, or HRSM, is a term I coined to describe many of the militias of surviving cantonments across the US. Although we Twilight: 2000 players like to focus on the personnel of regular (full-time) units who have access to military equipment, the overwhelming majority of men [and women] under arms in 2000-2001 in the US will be part-timers using hunting rifles and shotguns.