Musings on Mooks and GURPS Combat Encounters

As I work my way through the session planning for Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt, I find myself pondering combat encounters, and how GURPS tends to handle them.  How exactly should I stat up my minions in GURPS? And how can I transmit that to you in a way that helps you put together interesting sessions?

I've been diving through a few books to see how best to handle encounters in GURPS, in particular the Campaign Framework books, which put the most effort to actually translating the GURPS rules into something you can use in a game, and thus actually have bad guys.  Of course, all four handle opponents in very different ways, but I also find all four surprisingly lacking.  If I could criticize GURPS for one thing, it would be its tendency to demand detail in areas that really don't matter, and to provide precious little detail in areas that do.

Imperial Security: Materiel

What sorts of soldiers, vehicles and equipment do Imperial Security generally sport?  Well, we already have a rough idea of what sorts of roles their troopers fulfill, because I wrote up security agents back in Iteration 4, and we touched on it already:

• Generic Security Troopers: generalists with blaster pistols and neurolash batons who represent the typical security trooper one might meet and who act as basic backup for the rest.
• Assault Security Troopers: elite specialists with a focus on direct attack in close environments (urban or ship-borne raids).
• Riot Control Troopers: Troopers armed with shields, neurolash batons and a bad attitude, meant to put down riots.
• Security Snipers: While the Empire of Star Wars generally isn't associated with high accuracy, the concept of a sniper fits perfectly with the oppressive atmosphere we'd like our empire to foster.
• Security Officer: An officious lieutenant who either supervises security troopers, or assists a named Security Agent.

As before, and despite claims to the contrary, the role of Security Troopers isn't it kill people, it's to enforce peace and order.  They prefer to take suspects in alive for questioning, and to intimidate the populace, rather than kill them.  Plus, many security troopers genuinely believe in protecting civilians and killing bad guys, and see the rebel conspiracies they undo as dangerous anarchists and little better than more base criminals.  Sometimes, they're even right!

Alien Warriors

Setting Psi-Wars in space gives us the opportunity to explore more than just Action elements; we can also explore the typical tropes of sci-fi, and that means aliens! But what sort of aliens? Well, Star Wars doesn’t really support the in-depth exploration of alien races that, say, Star Trek does (for example, the Twi’lek race wasn’t even named until West End Games released their RPG). Star Wars follows the space opera conventions of taking a generic pulp story (say, a wild west story) and changing the window dressing to fit the genre. So, instead of Cowboys and Indians, we have a story featuring Colonists and Alien Warriors.

The term “savage” or “barbarian” or even the euphemistic “native” are, in reality, racist and dehumanizing terms. Our ancestors comforted themselves with the fiction that the people over the hill weren’t really people, but a sort of monster. “Indians” were wild, whooping monsters; “Huns” were the devil’s footsoldiers, Gog and Magog; those Scythians don’t even speak Greek, so they don’t count as real people, etc. At the same time, as cultures began to blend, the “we” began to admire the “them” and we get stories of the noble savage. This sort of story features strongly in most pulp serials; think of Tonto and the Lone Ranger, or Robinson Crusoe and Friday or, for a more modern example, Mani from Brotherhood of the Wolf. To continue to treat humans like this is highly questionable, but the resilience of these tropes, as well as how they cross cultures (The “savages” considered “civilized” people just as savage, though usually debauched and weak) speaks to their power as tropes.

So, Star Wars definitely invokes the idea of the alien savage and neatly sidesteps the dehumanizing nature of the tropes by pointing out that aliens are inhuman. Chewbacca, with his reliance on strength and his “primitive” crossbow becomes Han Solo’s Friday. The ferocity, cleverness and durability of cultures like the Bedouin and the Apache inspired the Tusken Raiders (and the Fremen, from whom the Tusken Raiders are also clearly inspired). Even the Ewoks, somewhat weirdly, were inspired by the Viet Cong: George Lucas envisioned Star Wars as ultimately a protest of the Vietnam War, and he defended the imagery of the primitive Ewoks defeating the technological empire as inspired by the Viet Cong defeating the technologically superior Americans.

So what I’d like to do here is also to invoke the fear and respect people have for more primal cultures, at least as they tend to be portrayed in stories. I’m not looking to specifically invoke cultures so much as stories cultures tell about their boogie-men: the dangerous mountain men, the ferocious jungle warriors, spooky witches and wild berserkers. But I also want to invoke the respect these cultures earned from their “civilized” enemies after sustained contact and combat. I also want to point out that while their technology might be different, even inferior, they do not lack for sophistication. They might be wild and dangerous, but ultimately, you can sympathize with them, perhaps even join them, as might be the case of a Frontier Marshal or a Commando, joining forces with alien warriors to defeat the technological juggernaut of the empire.

Realistically, these “alien warriors” should have racial templates. They should be scaled lizard people, or beautiful and exotic blue-skinned space-elves, or adorably large-eyed fish-people with crazy spears. But in this pass, I want to keep things generic. And, of course, these sorts of stories were originally told about humans, so a generic human template should work.

Minions: Pirates

Pirates

The mooks I’ve created so far have obvious relations to the real world. Troopers, criminals and cops all actually exist, and I’ve largely just replaced real world firearms with blasters and real-world armor with ultra-tech armor. If I have one frustration with Star Wars (and thus Psi-Wars), it is this tendency to keep things “like the real world.” If we’re going to play in a sci-fi setting, I’d like to explore sci-fi concepts. Pirates are my first chance to do that, as they don’t really represent anything that actually exists in the real world. Certainly, we have our own, actual pirates, but the pirates of Psi-Wars must necessarily operate in a unique environment: space.

Minions: Security Agents

Security Agents

If we're going to have criminal thugs, and we're going to feature characters like Smugglers and Con-Artists, we should feature law enforcement as well. After all, what is it that the smuggler is slipping past, and who are the criminals on the run from other than the police?

 Star Wars is surprisingly mum on the topic. Wookiepedia has a terse couple of articles that say little more than what a law enforcement officer does and offers few examples. In the films themselves, we occasionally see storm troopers acting in a capacity similar to law enforcement, usually responding to crises and questioning random passerbys about droids. Even the Bounty Hunters of Star Wars are closer to paid hitmen than they really resemble people who collect fugitives from law enforcement.
So, in Psi-Wars, we'll be charting our own course, borrowing from generic sci-fi works that seem to fit, and doing what space opera generally does, which is take the modern world and truss it up with sci-fi gadgetry.

Minions: Criminals

The game Star Wars: Empire at War has three factions: Empire, Rebellion and Criminal. This seems logical, if watching the films. Criminals serve neither faction, only themselves, and can pose a threat to either, and criminals are a deeply central part of Star Wars, present in all three original films, from the “hive of scum and villainy” of Mos Eisley, to Lando Calrissian, to Jabba the Hutt. However, it might be a mistake to see them as on par with the Empire or the Rebellion. After all, the full might of Jabba the Hutt is a laughable fraction of that of a single Imperial dreadnought and its accompanying legions, or a full armada of Rebellion forces. Setting aside sheer numbers that either faction can bring, they also bring superior training and equipment. What is a Gamorran with a vibro-axe against a fully armed and armored storm trooper?

This mistakes the role of criminals in the setting. They are not a military faction, but a presence on the streets, in back alleys and in gloomy cantinas. They represent the corruption of the world and the slow failing of institutions in the Galaxy. They are your slavers, your drug dealers and your muscle. They live in a different world than military might, one where heavy weapons will rarely come to the fore for a variety of reasons, but weapons still matter. I discussed them at length when analyzing the tactics of Psi-Wars. Given how differently criminals will fight than military forces, I think it might be useful to examine what sort of mooks we might face were we to anger the wrong crime-boss, or meet the wrong sort of person in a dark alley.

Minions: Alliance Troopers

If the Empire and the Storm Trooper are the golden standard of soldiers from Star Wars, the brave troopers of the Rebellion are the silver standard. Of course, a typical Star Wars game doesn’t feature combat against the Rebellion, but there’s no reason for that to be true of Psi-Wars. Moreover, heroes of the Alliance may well be accompanied by Alliance Troopers. Thus, they’ll need as much detail as Imperial Troopers.

The Concept of Alliance Troopers

The soldiers of the Rebellion are defined by being in a state of rebellion. They’re the brave resistance to the great and powerful empire and stand as a contrast to it. The empire is the Leviathan, the great, tyrannical state, and the Rebellion fights against it: they’re the Minute Men, La Resistance, the Viet Kong, and the Taliban. George Lucas often described the Rebellion in these terms. If the Empire is Goliath, the Rebellion is David.

In a sense, both forces are foils to one another. Where the Empire’s soldiers are faceless, the Rebellion’s soldiers show their faces. Where the Empire is well-funded with sleek and advanced technology, the Rebellion is poorly equipped and makes use of old technology. Where the Empire has legions of soldiers at its disposal, the Rebellion has only a few desperate heroes to defeat the great military-industrial behemoth that marches on them.

While describing the Rebellion as “the Taliban” might seem harsh to modern ears, it fits tactically. Like the Rebellion, modern terrorists fight a technologically and numerically superior foe. They must make use of spoiler tactics, explosives, old and reliable weapons like jeeps and AK-47s, and cheap missile launchers to defeat their opponents. They must also make use of the land, network with the local natives, and scatter when their foe launches a serious attack.

The Rebellion differs from the terrorists on two key points, though. First, terrorists lack professionalism. They generally draw their ranks from disenfranchised and disposable youths. The Rebellion, though, shows signs of full military training and also have access to military hardware. If we look at the Rebellion as a splintering of the Empire, then that seems appropriate, and closer to the Revolutionary war, where a portion of the military broke with the Empire and joined forces with the Rebellion. Second, terrorists are villainous. They sow discord for the sake of discord and often have no real plan, other than nebulous idealism, for what will come if they achieve victory. The Rebellion, thanks to its superior professionalism and leadership, is heroic, and has a real plan in place, a restoration to the Golden Age that came before. To evoke this, the Rebellion should represent something from our past, from our own golden age of war.

Thus, I propose that the Rebellion be professional soldiers with a focus on spoiler tactics, explosives and agile hit-and-run tactics. Thematically, they should evoke Americans of WW2 or possibly the revolutionary war crossed with the French resistance movement.

Minions: Imperial Troopers

We already discussed Imperial Troopers in some detail when we talked about building mooks, but let’s go from theory into concrete detail. I want to start with Imperial troopers because they represent the most obvious element from Star Wars that we’d want to port into Psi-Wars. We already know what Storm Troopers look like and how they fight: They’re terrifying, they’re highly inaccurate, and they’re impressively armed. In Psi-Wars, Imperial Troopers will have the same vibe, but I want to dig a little deeper into the reasoning behind the decisions and the impact they’ll make on how combat plays out for our heroes.

The Concept of Imperial Troopers

When we discuss empire, especially in the context of something like Star Wars, we really mean dictatorship, the rule of a single august emperor, directly, over all of his territory (one can make the case that the big shift in Rome with the victory of Augustus Caesar was not from republic to empire, but from republic to dictatorship, since the Roman Republic had been an empire for many years, in the same way that the British Empire was also a parliamentary democracy). Typically in these sorts of dictatorships, the military is personally loyal to the dictator, and their loyalty and might keep him, directly, in power. This fact also forces him to conquer, since his conquests result in increased wealth and prestige for his military forces, which gives him more power, but also more military officers to please, which means he needs to conquer again.

The military in these cases needs to be deeply loyal and very impressive. They need to march in the square, to intimidate the populace, as much as they need to march on the enemy. Thus, as said before, they need to be about shock and awe. The empire also has vast resources that it constantly pours into its military (at the expense of its civilian populace), meaning the empire has all the coolest toys. Their deep loyalty, though, either needs some form of personal empowerment or a deep sense of belonging to the group and a willingness to sacrifice oneself for the “greater good” represented by the dictator. The former would result in heroes who could overthrow the emperor, though, so the latter is far superior. Imperial troopers need to be brainwashed and devoted to the imperial cause or, at least, made to fear those loyal to the cause enough that they’re willing to fight.

We also know what stormtroopers feel like in a film: Faceless mooks who look really frightening but prove to be rather ineffective. They might have the coolest toys, but they often prove overpriced and fragile, glass cannons easily destroyed by a focused and skilled opponent. They pour firepower into the enemy, but they’ll seldom actually hit. They are Goliath, vulnerable to a focused and skilled David.