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?

[Fusilier]

Rae's game online game which is set to the Pirates of The Vistula, shadows Apoc Now themes very close I'd say. When he gets back from vacation, he'd be the guy to talk to.

[TicToc]

Originally Posted by Fusilier

Rae's game online game which is set to the Pirates of The Vistula, shadows Apoc Now themes very close I'd say. When he gets back from vacation, he'd be the guy to talk to.

Great thanks

[simonmark6]

Sounds like a good idea that should work. From my research into navigable rivers of Europe I believe you can get from the Oder river to the Warta and from the Warta to the Vistula via the Notec river and the Bysydoszc (SP?) canal.

Some of it would be dangerous as they run through cities and nuked areas but that should all add to the fun. Fuel would be interesting as boats tend to drink it but there are ways around, even a small landing craft can carry its own still.

[95th Rifleman]

Bears and wolves, can't go wrong with bears and wolves. Eastern Europe is still home to native bear and wolf populations and under T2k conditions the enviroment would make food easier for them to find and may make them bolder.

I guarantee you that some young grunt who comes face to face with a pissed off bear or wolf on the riverbank would be a ong time forgetting the experience.

[TicToc]

Wow so an eventful first session and not entirely in a good way.

First Ill call myself out on a few of the things that I messed up. Overall the story was good, lots of emotional scenes to strike the PCs with the dark setting. Our female player told me that by the end of the game it was the lowest she had ever felt about a character she had played (I was rather impressed by that). Some things I needed to work on, my set up on a couple of things was not what I had originally intended which led to less dramatic situations. In addition I allowed the the cycle of the game to get very disjointed which led to some misunderstandings and difficulties in general.

The PCs did a good job over all but these were some of the things that I brought up to them. They all played abrasive characters with little humanity. There was a lot of chest thumping and an unrealistic amount of lacking humanity. At the end of the last scene there were civilians under fire trying to get their children on the boat that the PC's had, (very much last chopper off of the embassy at Saigon feeling) when the boat pulled away from its mooring there were children hanging to the side of the boat. Nearly all the characters were all about leaving them behind, the Leader told them to pull the ones they could aboard and one of the characters then buttstroked the kids fingers to drop it into the water. I told them that I didn't want to GM for a group of sociopaths, and they received the critique well.

The only other issue was lots of talking and indecisiveness bogged the game down greatly.

[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by TicToc

The only other issue was lots of talking and indecisiveness bogged the game down greatly.

I find that this is more of an issue when you have players who are unfamiliar with the setting and the things their characters could reasonably be expected to know. It should settle out in a few sessions.

- C.

[TicToc]

That was my assessment as well. I think it will be fine. It an interesting group. Two people with no military background, one of whom is a female, two older vets who served mostly in the 80's, and two additional vets who served recently. Reconciling those with no perspective, with antiquated perspectives, to a modern perspective is a challenge. Everything stated means something slightly different to one of the three groups.

I'm looking forward to future sessions.

[Raellus]

Hi TicToc. I've been running a Pirates of the Vistula PbP campaign for going on 5 years now and quite a lot of it has been set on the Vistula. Here are a list of the more colorful encounters I've used.

• Marauder-held locks.
• A river pimp and his "Floating Emporium of Carnal Pleasures"
• A ghost town showing signs of a plague infection (yellow flags and graffitti with intended destination of survivors)
• A brutally anticommunist Polish militia led by a rogue SF team (fairly Apocalypse Now)- they're primary waterborne asset was a captured KvP-92 hovercraft (from the v1.0 Soviet Army Vehicle Guide)
• A village where the impoverished inhabitants appeared to have been practicing cannibalism
• A rebuilt bridge guarded by a platoon of Polish conscripts and a T-55 turned stationary bunker
• A town controlled by a Soviet deserter who actively sought slaves to work in the nearby sulfur mine
• And, of course, the requisite battle with the Black Baron Czarny's river corsairs

The PCs didn't always respond the way that I anticipated that they would. There were also several PC and NPC casualties along the way. All in all, it was great fun. For the last year (RT) we've been stuck in Warsaw. I hope to get the party back on the river soon.

[headquarters]

Kill of one of the sociopaths next time.

Originally Posted by TicToc

Wow so an eventful first session and not entirely in a good way.

First Ill call myself out on a few of the things that I messed up. Overall the story was good, lots of emotional scenes to strike the PCs with the dark setting. Our female player told me that by the end of the game it was the lowest she had ever felt about a character she had played (I was rather impressed by that). Some things I needed to work on, my set up on a couple of things was not what I had originally intended which led to less dramatic situations. In addition I allowed the the cycle of the game to get very disjointed which led to some misunderstandings and difficulties in general.

The PCs did a good job over all but these were some of the things that I brought up to them. They all played abrasive characters with little humanity. There was a lot of chest thumping and an unrealistic amount of lacking humanity. At the end of the last scene there were civilians under fire trying to get their children on the boat that the PC's had, (very much last chopper off of the embassy at Saigon feeling) when the boat pulled away from its mooring there were children hanging to the side of the boat. Nearly all the characters were all about leaving them behind, the Leader told them to pull the ones they could aboard and one of the characters then buttstroked the kids fingers to drop it into the water. I told them that I didn't want to GM for a group of sociopaths, and they received the critique well.

The only other issue was lots of talking and indecisiveness bogged the game down greatly.

[Adm.Lee]

Originally Posted by TicToc

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. ... 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).

So any input or similar experiences?

Did they infiltrate by means of the Warta River? If they keep their boat and charts, you could just run "Pirates" as their exfiltration back downriver. Things may have changed on the trip.

My group, when I ran "PotV", made very good use of their vehicles, emplaced on the barge. They had an M1A1 (no main-gun ammo), which was certainly an attention-getter!