A french web-games company has recently released a 'nice' little free game called "Hordes". In that game, you find yourself stuck with 40 other players in a shanty-town lost in the desert and attacked daily by ever increasing hordes of Zombies. Cooperation is necessary if you wish to survive, at least up to a certain point... It is a very grim yet humourous game which, from the very first day I tried it, I thought could be quite easily adapted to the
Warhammer 40000 universe... Maybe as a
Necromunda campaign...
Then, I started reading
Planetkill and reached Richard Williams' excellent story
Mortal Fuel, which, without revealing too much of the story, talks about what happens to a world once it is deemed of no further worth by the Administratum.
These two things bumped into my head and I thought, why not create a game which would replicate the cooperation system of "Hordes" instead of a simple campaign?
I even found a pretty simple title for it "Scavvy Attack"... (If you've got suggestions for a better one, then I'm all ears of course.)
Here's the basis for the fluff of this game:
A few days ago, the Imperium declared your world "Orbis Cassi", of no further worth, and all the men and equipment still deemed useful have been taken offworld. The whole planet has fallen into chaos and anarchy.
If you weren't deemed worthy enough to be taken away aboard the Emperor's mighty interstellar ships, you were lucky enough to reside in a small town lost in the ash wastes and to survive the initial outrage untouched.
However, the survivors from the Hive-cities are fleeing the anarchy and are crossing the desert, each day more and more are regrouping in the ash wastes outside the town looking greedily at the small oasis of civilisation that you're calling home. They have so far been few enough that you were able to repel their attempt at looting your town, but soon there will be too much. There is only one way to ensure your survival, bolster the town defences...
But there are other threats to your life, your own neighbours. The endless talk of the last few days have revealed several factions inside the town, each with the same agenda, ensuring their own survival even at the cost of the others. Your one and only goal is to make sure you'll survive, even if that means coming to terms with those you can't help but call "the enemy within"...In game terms, it would require 4 players. Each player is the head of a 5 men "faction" within a town of 40 souls. (There is thus 20 "neutral" citizens.) The players have to cooperate to mount expeditions into the ash-wastes to gather the necessary ressources to ensure the town's survival and at the same time plan for the eventual betrayal of the other players, for there can be only one winner!
The games themselves will represent the expeditions in the ash-wastes. Each player will take his men beyond the walls to try and bring back enough ressources to gather more weight into the town's decision making process (via the use of "influence points")...
In between games, depending on the different "factions" successes and failures in their expeditions, the building of new defenses (making the city gain defense points) and other equipments (such as wells, hydroponic plants, etc...) will be made possible and the decision as to what should be built will be put to the vote, the faction with the most influence points gaining the back up of (part of) the "neutral" citizens.
At the end of each campaign turn (each night), an attack of scavvies will take place (the number of attackers decided using a random table with ever increasing numbers night after night). If the number of defense points of the town at the end of the turn exceeds the number of attackers then the town survives untouched. If it's the number of attackers that exceeds the number of defense points, then the factions get to play a special game where they defend the town's walls against the scavvies who got through their defenses.
For each scavvy which wouldn't be killed during this game a citizen would die. It could be a neutral citizen, hence dimishing the number of points that can be put into additionnal defenses on the next campaign turn, and also the "pool" of support for the leading faction; or a member of a faction... (Who would get killed would be decided randomly.) It is thus best for every faction to be able to make sure that the defenses are always strong enough to bear the strength of the scavvy attack. (But it will of course not be that easy or the game wouldn't be fun at all!)
Of course, during the expeditions, if a faction member is wounded, he'll be out for a number of games and may even die, decreasing your chances of success for your next expeditions... The players may recruit the temporary help of one or several "neutral" citizens to replace members who are not combat-able or dead but at the expense of influence points.
The campaign ends when only one faction remains.
I'll have to write rules for each aspect of the gameplay. I'll probably use the rules from
Necromunda (heavily modified) for the expeditions themselves, but for the construction and influence parts of the game, I'll have to write brand new rules from scratch.
So, now you know the basis of this new game (you know almost as much as I do in fact!)
I'd really like to have your opinions, ideas, criticisms before I really start working on the rules themselves...
