An Aquatic Start to Things

[TicToc]

So I begin GMing for a face to face table top game this Saturday. I have 5 players, a slightly rewritten history (but only to advance the year to modern, other than that the play style will be good old T2K)

Off the bat I'm going to run with the standard Campaign "Free City of Krakow, so on and so forth" but I wanted to try something slightly different. One of my players wanted to play a salty old Coast Guardsmen. I approved it and we went through various iterations of how we were going to incorporate him. I started with the PCs being part of a larger group assisting the 5th ID by doing a Normandy style beach landing in the Baltics and having it go very poorly with the PCs now stuck well behind enemy lines and running like mad for their lives. What I ended up with is a bit different. Instead of a sea landing the PCs are part of a small riverine contingent that is infiltrating on the Warta to blow bridges and be a general nuisance in the area surrounding Konin. Again things will go poorly for them leaving few survivors and the PCs on the run, but this time they have the option to take their landing craft (if it survives and they choose to).

Has anyone run a good river scenario for players and do you have any tips or good stories that I might incorporate. Im looking for surrealism. I want things to be quiet on the river but hell for them when they debark (and Ill have plenty of reasons to make them get off the boat).

I keep thinking of the scene from "Apocolypse Now" where Martin Sheen and "Chef" get off of the boat to search for Mangos. They are then attacked by a tiger in the jungle and run for the boat the whole way Chef screaming fuck this, its a fuckin tiger man!!!". When he finally collapses on to the boat the on board .50 opens up at the jungle in general in hopes of suppressing the to them unknown enemy. It ends with Chef exasperated mumbling to himself "never get off the boat man, never get off the boat". Thats how I want my players to feel.

So any input or similar experiences?