Space Crusade RPG

[Mezillious]

I've been running a role playing club at school with about 8-12 students who are in to that kind of thing and we have been playing dungeon squad. I've been looking for a bit of a change of pace and thought "what if we played Space Crusade, only each player played the role of one marine within a squad?" so this week I'm going to try it out. Squads must have a commander, an apothecary and between 1 to 3 heavy weapons. Each player will have 3 health points and each class will have 2 variants. Once a squad has been formed, classes will be determined by rolling a die with commander first, then apothecary, then heavy weapons as required. I've converted the combat system to use regular dice, so I may need to tweak those. I'm hoping that by removing some of the role playing elements we'll be able to get more people having a turn in a game that lasts for around 30 mins. It's a smaller map with less bad guys. Commanders will have the option of 2 order cards to use with their entire squad. Apothecaries have the option of using their attack to heal an adjacent marine.

Variants:

Commander - jump pack: +3 to movement, bionic Implant: re-roll one die when firing or in hand to hand
Apothecary - defibrillator: revive fallen marines to 2 health, extended range: heal up to 4 squares away
Heavy weapons: targeter: re-roll one die when firing, bolt pistols: +1 dice in hand to hand.

I'll also allow players to keep track of their kill count, and when they reach 10 kills, they will be able to play the next game as a terminator with either heavy flamer or lightning claws.

I'm hoping to start this week, I'll let you know how it goes but I'm keen to hear of people who have done similar things or have any ideas to share.

Mez

[messyart]

Indirect nod to Mortis;

Alien Bread.


Relevent; Good luck trying it out!

[Tony1978]

Uh, you make me remember that, years ago, with a group of fanatics of Space Crusade, we had tried to create an RPG very similar to yours. There was an Apothecary too!!
But the work was too heavy for us and the project was abandoned.
Then I discovered something similar to our idea: an RPG called Deathwatch. Do you know it? The rules are very very detailed!

Good work!

[Billiam Babble]

I like the sound of this.  

I thought about adapting Necromunda to be an RPG a while back.  
Like the previous poster says, there are a few RPGs by Fantasy Flight Games set in the 40K universe but they're probably pretty dense rules-wise - not great in terms of being pick-up-and-play.  The trick is single blow survivability - in fact one of the main differences between old wargames and RPGs is the hit point - recovery - and skills gain - so you're heroic level of 3 hp/wounds sounds good.  I was surprised to discover years ago that figures in mass battles or skirmishers were not always instantly killed - they were merely "incapacitated".  With that in mind a Marine could be down for the encounter and treatment will allow them to continue (maybe with a limit of the number of times this can occur, like 3)

 Necromunda encouraged the growth of a gang's abilities - a gang is effectively a squad.  Wounds/HP are fairly low-but significantly more than troops in WH40K - but the combat rules seemed similar (at least in my archaic edition).  In games like Warhammer Quest or WFRPG the whole damage and hit point system is totally escalated but there's a fair amount of record keeping, but this allows for weapon variety.  I believe Mordheim works in a similar way to Necromunda, but I fell out with Mordheim playing friend when he insisted that the weapons on the model's belt had to be the same as those in his inventory... as a role-player I'm used to stuff on the table being fairly abstract (blu-tack lump=troll) and the character sheet was where all the real information was.

I love the idea of one figure per player and a simple increase in wounds, especially for quick games and young players.
 (Nobody mention Inquisitor! - which is clearly just a scam to sell large figures) ;)

Space Crusade seems to be having a major revision and comeback on this forum alone. ;)

[Mezillious]

Thanks for the replies, guys. It has gone over quite well so far. We played 3 games this week, each of about 30mins. It was enough time for 2 squads of 5 marines to mostly get through one of the maps shown here.

http://the-lost-and-the-damned.664610.n2.nabble.com/Dungeon-Resource-td6080618.html

I'll get a few pictures next week and I'll upload the character sheet I've made incase anyone's keen to give it a whirl. I've kept the movement the same as in SC and it's very interesting to see the students catching on that the Commander has a very important job to do. He's essentially the only one that can take on the big guys in hand-to-hand, however some students like to run down the hallways opening up doors and activating monsters and leaving their squad mates to clean up. It's very close quarters on these maps which means missile launchers and plasma cannons can sometimes get a bit trigger happy. We've had a few occasions of friendly fire and one of all out hostility between Space Marine squads.

More info soon, I'll upload some pics next week.

Mez