Sci-fi Skirmish Scenarios: Small-unit Missions For Use With Your Favourite Wargaming Rules

Introduction

The Rise of Skirmish Games

Recent years have seen a significant rise in both science fiction (SF) and skirmish games, the term ‘SF’ being used here in the widest possible sense. Indeed, part of the attraction of SF as a setting is the limitless scope for backgrounds, stories and technology; it ain’t necessarily all about rocket ships and ray guns, although space opera definitely has its place.

A real bonus is that the unreal worlds of SF allow the use of ‘modern’ weaponry while avoiding any controversy around gaming based on recent or current conflict. Like it or not, mass communication has given us (i) a world of sensitivity where the easily offended become connected to pastimes of which they intrinsically are going to disapprove and (ii) the means to express said disapproval quickly and widely.

Skirmish-scale gaming, once seen as a minority wargaming subgenre that was often linked to role playing systems, is now mainstream. The reasons for this are complex and no doubt simple fashion is part of the explanation. Nevertheless, there are also good rational reasons for its popularity. One of the most important involves space.

Wargaming, back in the day, tended to be the pursuit of the well-heeled, middle classes living in substantial houses with commodious spare rooms that could be devoted to their pastimes. The rest of us met in clubs that could hire halls already supplied with such things as table tennis tables. In the modern world, most wargamers live in rather more modest dwellings where space is at a premium (this is especially true of southern England where we occupy ever smaller boxes ‘made out of ticky-tacky’). Hiring suitable venues has also become more difficult as land prices and modern legal obligations over such matters as insurance and ‘health and safety’ tend to price out wargaming clubs – once again the South being especially problematic.

Related to space considerations, another wargaming trend is that the models are getting bigger … and bigger … and bigger. A quick flip around the internet reveals that many (most?) models designed for historical wargaming are sized at a nominal 28mm and SF and fantasy models are often even larger. Models in 15mm scale were the norm when I started gaming and those of 25mm were considered self-indulgent luxuries.

The reasons for such ‘scale-creep’ are difficult to pin down. One explanation is possibly due to the greater focus on model-painting skills in modern wargaming; standards are constantly improving. By making models just a little bit bigger than their competitors, a manufacturer can make a range more detailed so that it is easier to create complex paint jobs and hence look far more impressive on the internet sales sites. The snag is that bigger models have bigger bases and tend to take up more space.

What this all boils down to is that skirmish games can be played on kitchen tables whereas 28mm battle-line games need at least a 6 x 4 foot playing area. At the risk of going off at a tangent, I have noted a new enthusiasm for 15mm models especially for battle-line, army games. The quality of these playing pieces is far removed from those figures of yesteryear and new polymer plastic materials have considerably reduced cost and weight.

Skirmish game systems are attractive to manufacturers because they can produce an entire ‘game in a box’ at a keen price that will tempt customers to try something new. The ‘game in a box’ concept also fits modern consumerism, which tends to be driven by people who are money-rich but time-impoverished.

One of the other trends in wargaming is an insatiable appetite for novelty and hence new products. When I converted to miniatures from board wargaming in the early 1980s, we had just a couple of rulebooks from the redoubtable Mr Barker of WRG available. We played them endlessly until they were replaced by a new edition and then we played those. Nowadays, a new game coming into the club that I use commonly has a shelf life of only one to two months before it is displaced by the next new, bright, shiny thing. In this, wargamers are merely following modern consumer trends.

From both manufacturers’ and players’ perspectives, skirmish games can act as useful ‘tasters’. A customer may baulk at the prospect of spending a few hundred pounds on a new range, to say nothing of the time taken to paint them, but a skirmish game with perhaps a dozen models at a reasonable price has less ‘customer resistance’ when it comes to impulse buys. And who knows, the purchaser might like the figures so much that they are tempted to further expand their collection, perhaps with new factions set in the same playing ‘universe’.

This ties in with the endless churn of wargaming model designs. Once upon a time, an army such as 15mm Republican Romans had an infinite lifespan and might go through several owners across the heaving bring-and-buy tables at shows. Now, one of the biggest manufacturers has a policy of turning over an army range every three years or so, each new army list rendering its predecessors obsolete and uncompetitive.

I speak here as someone who, like Oscar Wilde, ‘can resist anything but temptation’, at least when it comes to miniatures. I can give up buying figures any time, honest, I just don’t want to.

Why a Book of Scenarios?

SF skirmish games are far more dependent on scenario construction and narrative backstory than other genres of wargaming. For example, in ancient battle-line games choosing forces from an available army list and then deciding how to line them up in the context of the battleplan decided upon is enough in itself to provide enjoyable games. One’s opponent is doing the same thing and, because of a limited ability to redeploy units, the interaction between set-ups and battle-plans as the game evolves is fascinating in itself. The objective to simply destroy the opposing army is endlessly absorbing as every game is different

In skirmish games, this approach tends to lead to a giant ratfight in the middle of the table with games rapidly becoming very ‘samey’ and hence boring. A skirmish scenario generally works best when players are forced to spread out their forces to deal with conflicting objectives. As one’s opponent has to make similar choices and compromises, interaction with the enemy makes the same scenario different every time it is played.

Players often do not have the time to create scenarios. Modern lifestyles deprive wargamers of time as well as space. Back in the day (I know, I overuse that phrase but at my age I am entitled to a few idiosyncrasies), I was a member of a club that devoted a whole Sunday to a game as, after all, nothing much else happened on a Sunday. Nowadays, on Sunday people may be working or doing the weekly run to the out-of-town supermarket or…..whatever.

The idea of this book is that players with busy lives can choose an oven-ready scenario and just get on with the gaming. While most skirmish rules these days do include a few scenarios, inevitably at some point their gaming possibilities will become exhausted.

The scenarios in this book are generic, that is they are designed to be useful for a wide variety of genres and rules, including: hard SF, Victorian SF, steam punk, Babbage engines, mad scientists with inventions of their own devising, intrepid explorers, lost worlds, pulp stories of square-jawed heroes and resolute heroines with concealed stilettoes, as well as the dystopian future used here.

Think in terms of:-

30s World – adventurous archaeologists, religious cults, Nazis, forbidden temples, sorcerous powers, ancient artefacts, dinosaurs, prohibition gangsters, Vril energy and strange World War weapons.

50s SF – Earth-invasion, flying saucers, robots and ray guns.

Post Apocalypse – wastelands, scavenged technology, mutants, ruins, megacities.

High Technology – weird weapons and armour, psi-powers, techno-sorcery, strange landscapes, space stations, aliens.

And so on.

Your Very Own Dystopian World

There is nothing more satisfying than creating one’s own world and fighting battles within it. The trick is not to get too carried away and become obsessed with unnecessary detail at an early stage. Just add in places, people and events as the need arises to keep the creative juices flowing.

I’m going to try a little bit of dystopian city world-making here as an example. The aim is to provide a backstory around dystopian gang warfare in a lawless urban environment.

So, we start with a basic world picture of a run-down urban wasteland that is technologically in the near future. It doesn’t have to be our future, or on Earth at all. Where and when this city is to be found is unnecessary detail. Let’s give it a name, or better two names, an official one of Civitas Cavernum and the name by which it is better known to its inhabitants: The Sprawl.

The first thing to fill in is basic geography as this will serve as an anchor for internal consistency. So The Sprawl lies at the southern foot of a mostly extinct volcanic range. It straddles a gulley that flash floods every time a seismic shudder breaks open a natural lake. Other than that, just enough glacier run-off flows down the gulley to supply drinking water piped along aqueducts. Reservoirs exist to capture floodwater from the spring melts but many are non-functional and most are heavily contaminated by old industrial groundwater pollutants. A heavy-metal-contaminated, toxic, radioactive desert called The Badlands surrounds the city so the only way in or out is via a wilderness-capable off-road vehicle or by air-shuttle.

Cities do not just spring up at random. There is always a reason for where they are built. Some cities are permanently important because of their strategic geographic location. London has nearly always been the most important city in the British Isles for 2,000 years irrespective of whether the ruling culture was Roman, Saxon, Medieval, Renaissance or modern. The reason is geography: London was at the