Thalassa and Dystopian Fleets

For our session in April we did a naval double-bill, starting with Thalassa, a free set of wargame rules that came with Wargames Illustrated #421.

When I first learned about the rules I was interested because of the positive experience I had with Never Mind the Billhooks, another set of free wargame rules from WI that blew up, but the cost and effort required in painting up ships made me hesitate. At Adrian's suggestion, I looked around for cardboard models, and found some nice ones at Tiny Tin Troops. The game is designed for 1/300 scale models while the card models are at 1/600 scale, but as the templates were available in pdf form, it was a simple matter of printing them out at 50% scale. I also approximated the move distance of 3" to half the width of the ramming template, which eliminated the need for tape measures on the table. The game features custom dice, but it was easy to use normal d6s and "convert" the results.

For our first game we pit six triremes against seven, with two players on each side. I had expected the game to be over quickly, with most ships being rammed and sunk after two turns, but my players seemed more interested in boarding and capturing enemy ships. The battle lasted a while, with melees involving three ships grappled together.

We had a lot more fun with the game than I anticipated, and the lack of custom game dice was not a hindrance at all. If there is one improvement I will need to make it is to reproduce the ramming template in clear plastic, which I will do before our next game.

For our second game we played a homebrew set of rules using Dystopian Wars models. We have had models for the game for literally more than a decade, but as we could not agree on a set of rules to play with, the project had languished... until the recent purchase of the East India Company squadron re-ignited my interest in the period.

I tidied up the rules I have been working on - a blend of Majestic Twelve Games' Grand Fleets and the movement templates and rules from X-Wing - and sent the rules to the gang, set a date for the session, and in a few months models that were left unpainted for a decade finally got finished, and were bloodied.

As the rules were not designed with a points system, I will need to do some work in balancing the factions and arms, but the basic concepts seem to work.

John Wick #1

When Bruce entered the shrine at the Japanese Garden in Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, he saw the body of a man on the tatami floor, a bullet hole through his forehead. Standing over the body was a tall man. Bruce drew his weapon, as did the man, and the two got into a tussle. Bruce was able to take the man down and choke him out and disarm him, but while he went to search the body of the dead man, he heard footsteps approaching from outside.

Several armed men were advancing towards the shrine, and when they noticed Bruce they began to fire indiscriminately into the building. By now the tall man had regained consciousness, and together the two men broken through the rear wall of the shrine and fled out of the garden and across the avenue.

The two men found shelter inside a bar, where the tall man introduced himself as Joseph. He explained that he was at the shrine to repay a Blood Oath to Roger Delany, but arrived to find him dead. Bruce on the other hand had turned up at the shrine to help exfiltrate the same man, who was undercover in the Calabrian mafia under the assumed name of Giovanni Marrone.

Just then Bruce's face flashed across the TV screen as the news announced that he was being wanted for the killing of undercover police officer Delany, while Joseph received a message on his phone that he had been declared "excommunicado" for killing Marrone on consecrated ground, and that a price of $500,000 had been placed on his head.

Bruce called his captain on the payphone in the bar to protest his innocence, but was told to turn himself in.

It was not long before four men entered the bar looking for them. Bruce and Joseph made their way through the service door into the kitchen, and then to the back door, where they laid an ambush for their pursuers - when the men came through the door they were taken down, and Joseph put a bullet in each one of them.

The two men realised that to save their own lives they had to find the real killer and prove their innocence. With no place to turn to, they decided to follow the only clue they had: a library card found inside Delany's wallet.

They made their way to the public library and accessed Delany's borrowing records and found that there was a single book on the record: The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham. Tracking the book down, they found a piece of paper sandwiched inside its pages, and on it was an address.

They followed the address to third storey unit in an apartment, and attempted to enter it from the roof, but was discovered and held at gun-point by a woman. Bruce surrendered himself, as did Joseph soon afterwards, and the two explained how they arrived at her apartment.

The woman, named Alice (see PC profiles here), revealed that she was working undercover at the FBI in the Calabrian mafia too, and had known about Delany, although the two had little contact. Worried that her own identify might have been compromised, Alice decided to leave her apartment.

At the entrance to the apartment, the trio were attacked by gunmen who arrived in three black SUVs. A quick exchange of gunfire saw eight of the gunmen lying dead on the road, and the three SUVs fleeing the scene; through the tinted window of the lead car, Alice saw the face of Saiko Biichi, a assassin.

The trio sought refuge in Chinatown where, through one of Bruce's contact, they were given a hiding place in a laundromat. There, they decided that their next move should be to try to find more information at Dänk Püssy, a lesbian club ran by the Upsallamaffian. Before they could actualise their plan, however, the laundromat came under a Molotov attack, and the trio had to escape from the burning building and into a gunfight with more gunmen led by Saiko Biichi. Things were looking grim, but the arrival of armed triad gangsters caused the gunmen to flee, allowing our fugitives to disappear into the darkness too...

Prepping and Running the Game

When I started planning for this campaign, I was hoping to find a ready-made campaign that suit the the John Wick vibe, but an extensive search on Drivethru did not find any suitable product. Most of the modules had the premise that the PCs were all members of a law-enforcement or some security agency, or belonged to the same criminal organisation, and my players' choices of character backgrounds made it difficult to fit them into any of those.

I did find a one-shot module which had the PCs find a dead double-agent as the opening scene, and I decided to try to use that as a start for our campaign.

I re-watched the movies to try to get some inspiration, and realised that for the most part the plot involved John Wick moving from location to location, fighting different groups of opponents. I decided to lean into that and found a list of 1000 modern urban locations and 100 modern urban encounters off the internet, and when we started the session I had each player roll once on each table, and noted the results.

One of the locations rolled was a library, and one of the encounters had a few teenagers breaking into a library - I rolled the two together and decided to plant a clue in the library, and had an encounter with the youths help break up the monotony of the session.

Two other rolls gave rise to an abandoned coal-processing plant overlooking a waterfront, which led to the location of a Swedish-themed lesbian club, which was something that came to me watching John Wick 4.

I am still not 100% sure about the whole story behind Delany's killing, but I have another week to come up with something.