Children Soldiers in T2K

[wolffhound79]

I find this post interesting as just yesterday I was considering having a party encounter a lone child or teenager as the only survivor of a marauder ambush.
Just to see what they would do.

Would they make him part of the group, or drop him off at the next nearby town?

or is the child a elaborate ruse to get the players to drop there guard as he leads them into an ambush?

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Originally Posted by wolffhound79

I find this post interesting as just yesterday I was considering having a party encounter a lone child or teenager as the only survivor of a marauder ambush.
Just to see what they would do.

Would they make him part of the group, or drop him off at the next nearby town?

or is the child a elaborate ruse to get the players to drop there guard as he leads them into an ambush?

This is a technique used in some horror games, a lone child apparently in need of assistance. But the child is really just a façade, something to lure the protagonists into more trouble. Sometimes it's a monster in it's own right, using the appearance of a child to more easily fool the adults into letting down their guard before the monster strikes.

Like Targan, I have no problem at all putting these sorts of things into a game. I have no problems separating what's fodder for the game and what's real life so encountering child soldiers or monsters who look like children in a game is not something that upsets me or disturbs me.
You're playing in the ashes of the apocalypse, the ruins of the world, there's cannibals, there's people suffering terrible diseases or radiation sickness, there's slavery, bandits, people willing to kill just to survive another day.
Child soldiers as a game concept is no worse than any of the above.

I see their use in game as a way to create moral quandaries for the PCs, a way to show that the game world is not the simplistic black & white morality that Hollywood movies are made of. There's many shades of grey and if the PCs defeat such a situation and do so from the moral high ground, then they will have a much more positive impact on the gameworld because of it.
They can rightly be considered not just heroes, but the "good guys".

[mpipes]

This reminds me of a situation I put my PCs in where the child in question was a really cute Russian girl (looked about 12 but was actually 15) that was 1) a complete psychopath and 2) was a KGB trained agent sent on a mission to release a genetic-engineered Ebola strain into the Vistula intended to create a "no go" hot zone separating the USSR from the rest of that part of Europe.

There were all kinds of hints dropped to clue in the team that this girl was the baddest of the bad. I even had this girl actually murder a fairly harmless NPC that had discovered the vials of virus in front of the team and they still did not get it!! They delivered their little precious, innocent orphan to the kindly priest in Cracow, and I gave them one more chance as she dropped the pouch with the vials getting out of the HMMWV. One of the PCs picked up the pouch, made the roll so he knew vials were in it, and he promptly handed the pouch right to her.

As we ended the session, I took a time out, had everyone make a roll to see if they caught the plague (everyone did) and see if anyone lived (one did).
Then told everyone that was dead that they were dead and why as the resulting Ebola plague made much of Poland uninhabitable and the Poles all but extinct as 90% of the population died!!

As tempted as I was to go ahead and end the campaign and just start over with them running new PCs, I finally decided to take mercy and do a Dallas and let everyone pretend it was just a dream, but they never took NPCs at face value again and paid attention to clues.

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by mpipes

This reminds me of a situation I put my PCs in....

Ebola's not even close to the nastiest thing the Soviets have either, just possibly the best known. The one that sticks in my mind is their weaponised Marburg hemorrhagic fever - NO cure, NO pain relief, NOTHING stops or even slows it down. Two weeks (at most) from exposure and all your soft tissues have liquified. You die in horrific pain, contagious from the first moment right up to a good 50+ years later.
90% death rate would be light for that one.

[mpipes]

That is actually what I used if memory serves me correctly.

The situation was supposed to lead to the group chasing down a secret KGB lab near Minsk and blow it up or even call in a nuke strike - it was supposed to be a BIG event in the campaign. But my clueless PCs could not take the hint(s) that this girl was "special" and instead of discovering the vials of virus that should have led to vigorous interrogation they turned her over to the priest to help her find her family in Cracow. So they helped her kill well over a million and fulfilled that KGB factions greatest goal.

Sometimes you just end up hating the players! It was kinda fun explaining why she was so HAPPY to get to Cracow, because she had gotten an armed escort to the place she wanted to be and helped her become the greatest mass murderer ever.

[Olefin]

In East Africa there are multiple forces using child soldiers so characters may very well encounter them there. How they are used and if the GM wishes to use them is up to the individual GM so whether or not they are encountered would be up to the GM and the nature of their game.

The PARA and the LRA and many of the splinter forces in the Congo use child soldiers as do some of the Somali Islamist groups. The LRA is the most prolific user of child soldiers, having recruited nearly 4000 of them since the coup in Uganda. They make up a big part of the manpower of several brigades, with 500 in the Joshua Brigade, a 1000 in the Joseph Brigade (out of 2800 total), and 300 in the Adam Brigade. In the PARA and the Somali Islamists they exist but there has been no large scale recruiting of them as there has been for the LRA.

[ChalkLine]

I started roughing out an East African mercenaries game but when I started looking into material on child soldiers and their "training" I decided that it was too awful to be a useful game, especially for players with children of their own. As child soldiers are inextricable from the setting I simply gave up on it and went back to Poland. Ivan and Ski aren't monsters.

If anyone wants the small amount of stuff I wrote apart from the child soldiers bit I didn't bother to write down I can post them.