Fria Ligans forum

Hey, y'all,

I have this perverse desire to run a Colonial Marines scenario/mini-campaign where the players take on the roll of EVAC fighter pilots. Sounds fun, right? There're even some ship combat rules in the game to support this; yay!

The only problem is... I don't have a clue about fighter craft operations or dogfights or planes or anything of that sort, so I don't know where to start, here.

Have anyone else run fighter jet scenarios, in Alien or other RPG games? How do you go about it? What would scenarios be about? (All I have thus far is that one need to include SEAD and DEAD operations at various points, and dogfights of course, 'cause they're cool). Contra-intuitively, I don't actually want to run that much combat stuff (=boring), so I'm more interested in the drama and suspence and horror story beats; (also, combat is pretty easy so I can figure that stuff out on my own, more or less).

And finally, where should one fit in some xenos, I wonder? (Again, I don't want a major combat thing, so fighter jets vs. dragon-xeno is not my cup of tea. I'm looking for Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan type stories rather than Rambo/300, if that makes sense?).

Any thoughts?

Followup...

At presten, I'm toying with a mini-campaign structure something like this:

Act 1 - Fighter Jet Extravaganza
1-2 scenarios that cover all the fighter jet bases. Basically, I want to front load the campaign with aerospace military stuff to get the Tog Gun out of the way. I need the most help here...

Act 2 - Horror in Space
1-2 scenarios where the fighter wing must deal with a mystery that increasingly edges towards horror. Perhaps the pilots have to operate a forward/backwater jetfighter space base more or less on their own, as the mother ship blew up, or whatever. In any case, they should be isolated and beyond commes reach at this point. I see the PCs dividing their time between patrolling a system and investigating/maintaining an understaffed base, or something.

Act 3 - Stranded
1-3 scenarios where the PCs get stranded somewhere (jungle planet maybe?), and must investigate & fight to survive. Hm... Predator might be s good source of inspiration here, actually.

Thoughts? Comments? Ideas?

I would go for a "search & rescue" mission ....

A marine team is MIA (missing in action). It's on a planet. Lots of rocky cliffs and hills. We have pin-point a "possible location" with a PDT signal not too strong. WE NEED THE BEST PILOT TO GET THERE. Any volonteers ... there's a group we know (the PCs) ... It's a 3 dropship squad with 3 best pilots and their team 1 field medic + 1 synthetic + 1 marine gunman ... the zone is watch by UPP ... they are looking for something ... there's a confrontation in the mountains with the UPP jets and the PCs dropship squad ... both groups are reaching the site ... Now pilots have to take there guns and save the marines in this underground compound ....

Arthur.

Excellent stuff, Arthur Dallas! Very rich ideas, there!

We're specifically doing fighter jets (i.e. EVAC crafts), but that doesn't change a whole lot; we can always have the jets escort/make way for a rescue dropship!

I'm also playing around with an idea to have the PC "mavericks" stationed at a small fighter craft base close to an important civilian colony (just to have some stakes). Would it make sense for the UA to set up a fighter jet base to protect a colony? Is that too silly? (Obviously, the colony would need to be pretty important and there would have to be resources/logistics locally to warrant such an installation).

It's a great idea Angelman ... following your idea ...

They could be on a moon-A in a system unknown and there is a moon-B not too far controlled by UPP and a secret base there ... the mission comes ... they (PCs Maverick's Pilots) need to destroy this secret UPP base cause they are building a secret weapon (xenomorphs of some kind) ... but fighting UPP jets are waiting on any enemies coming ... a great fight like the one in the last "Maverick" movie to destroy the secret UPP base ...