The "Scavvy Attack" Project

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...

Fate Points

Reading the latest White Dwarf I saw a comment about the upcoming 40K version of Mighty Empires, which is apparently not far from release, something a campaign player at heart like me can only rejoice for.

But I think that, before GW issues their 40k map campaign system, it is time for me to post about a system we've used with my group for years now when playing map-based campaigns: Fate Points.

Basically, Fate Points are there to represent the fact that our generals are special individuals who must survive the campaign. When the system was first devised, it only allowed for "Sir! Beware!" types of bonus, but over time we've added other bonuses to make the "burning" of Fate Points something which at the same time plays a role in the campaign as a whole and may be risky... For burning Fate Points to re-roll for Reserves may at the end of the game cost his life to your general because you haven't got enough left to save him from an untimely death!

++ FATE POINTS ++

You may elect up to 3 characters in your army to be marked by fate.
These characters start the campaign with 3 Fate Points (FP).

Burning 1FP allows to:
- re-roll any failed roll by the character, even if it has already been re-rolled. This means you can burn multiple FP on a single action if you wish. Reserve rolls can also be re-rolled in this fashion.
- allocate a hit to a friendly model within 2" of the character, during the shooting phase.

Burning 2FP allows to:
- allocate a wound to a friendly model within 2" of the character, during the CC phase.
- cancel the effects of an Instant Death, the character survives with 1 remaining PV. You can use this only once per game.
- move a detachment twice during a campaign turn as long as the first move doesn't take it through an area conquered or occupied by enemy troops. The area which has been moved through is not conquered, it doesn't grant its eventual bonus and cannot be fortified. To conquer the area afterwards, the player must move one of his detachments to the area and leave it there for the duration of a campaign turn.

Burning 5FP allows to:
- take up to 250pts of any 2 troop choices in the army list (even if all the Troops FOC slots are already filled) in addition to the normal points value of the game (2250pts for a 2000pts game for example). [This used to cost only 3FP but with the importance of Troops in 5th ed, its cost has been increased.]
- transform a "dead" result into a "wounded" one on the post-battle recovery table (see below).

The characters can win additional FP during the course of the campaign for each of the following situations which occured (without using FP) during a battle in which he was engaged:
- if he survives the game without suffering a single wound.
- if he kills at least 25 wounds worth of enemies in CC in a single game.
- if he made at least 10 successful armour saves in a single game.
- if the result of the game is a victory.(*)
- if the player forced his opponent to use all his FP during the game.(*)
(* - if several characters marked by fate participated in the game, then the FP from these situations must be allocated to only one of them, of the player's choice.)

After a game, characters marked by fate which have been "killed" in battle must roll 1d6 upon the post battle recovery table to know if they are really "dead" or wounded or even simply knocked unconscious...

Post-Battle Recovery Table
d6	Result:
1-2	The character is dead. All his unused FP are lost and all the Ld based tests for the next game will be made at -1.
3-5	The character was badly wounded. He will be unavailable for the next d3 campaign turns.
6	The character was simply unconscious. He recovers immediately.