FPS Variant for Necromunda or Shadow War: Armageddon

[Brother Tyler]

How about a set of rules for turning Necromunda or Shadow War: Armageddon into a first person shooter style diversion?

 

Most of us are familiar with console and computer FPS games (I played a lot of Quake II, Half-Life, and Counterstrike way back when), and some of us may be familiar with Frag from Steve Jackson Games, which is a boardgame that emulates the computer/console FPS games. About ten years ago, we had some rules for this at a B&C-run table at Games Day Los Angeles, which was quite a bit of fun. With the release of Shadow War: Armageddon and the reincarnation of Necromunda, both of which follow the pattern of Games Workshop's squad skirmish level games, players might find this a fun little diversion.

 

I don't have anything set in stone, but here are the concepts that occurred to me:

• Each player controls either a single fighter (standard mode) or a team of fighters (when you can only get two or three players).
• Games can be every man for himself or team play; team play can be two, three, or even more teams.
• Fighter spawn points can be assigned (e.g., Fighter Bob always spawns on this point, or always on blue spawn points), or they can be random (some mechanism for spawning on a spawn point of the player's choosing).
• All fighters are Trooper options, starting with a knife and a pistol, as appropriate to the faction.
• Game play is ideal when everyone is using the same type of fighter (e.g., everyone has a Space Marine Scout); but provisions might be made for fighters from different factions.
• The board has equipment spawn points that you must run over to get the equipment. Equipment includes various types of weapons, as well as special equipment (Terminator armour, jump packs, etc.).
• There might even be "advance" spawn points that give stat or skill advancements.
• Normal turn sequence is followed (just to keep things easy), but fighter order is determined each turn (some mechanism to determine order of fighters - might be a roll of the dice or might be some other method).
• At the end of each game turn, all equipment spawn points regenerate. Equipment is identified by tokens of some sort (my plan is to use bits to decorate bases to show what is on the spawn point).
• When a fighter goes out of action, the model is removed from play. A fighter that starts the game turn down can "suicide" and be removed from play. At the start of the game turn, any fighter that has been removed from play re-spawns on its spawn point.
• If a fighter is removed from play before its turn, it may re-spawn when its turn comes up and may act normally.
• There might be some mechanism for limiting the amount of gear that a fighter can carry (e.g., you can only carry two weapons (in addition to the knife and pistol that are basic), and up to five other things such as grenades and ammunition reloads).
• There are lots of different play variations, from kill count (i.e., first fighter/team to reach a certain kill count wins) to capture the flag to kill the zombies to whatever.
• There should probably be a mechanism driving fast play, such as using a chess timer or the like to limit player turns and drive up the pressure.

Anyhoo, while this isn't something completely new, the execution will be a little different from what we've done in the past.

 

This would be a fun little diversion from normal play, and might be fun at conventions and the like.

 

If you have ideas, I'd love to hear them.