[Rim Patrol] Texans and hookers in space. Vodka, too.

So we have been asked to post about German game designs in development. Ron, you�re gonna like this one.

The game is called �Randpatrouille� (Rim Patrol) and you can download the German test version here. It was first runner-up in GroFaFo Challenge Here�s what it�s about: The universe is a globular cave with a diameter of 272 lightyears. Surrounding it is the RIM, composed of mostly silicates, supposedly stretching eternally. Humans are the only intelligent species in space as far as they know, though there have been some predecessor cultures. Tech-level is Alien-style space travel, railguns and torpedos instead of turbolasers and ion cannons, heavy plating instead of blast shields.

In the center of the universe, where most solar systems are, we have the two blocks of �Council of Councils� and �Holy Alliance�, locked in a truce after 40 years of open war. It�s a perfect mockery of the cold war in space, only that the Americans are led by the Pope. Since the truce prohibits the two blocks to fly armed spacecraft outside their own territory, the RIM is in anarchy. Therefore, the United Planets man the ships of the Rim Patrol. The crews are always composed of members of both blocks.

Now, each player plays two characters. One member of the bridge crew. One member of the landing party. One member of the Council. One member of the Alliance. Conspiracy guaranteed. Fun also. (In case you didn�t notice, this means that whether the landing party is fighting some menace, the bridge crew is making some decisions, the Council is conspiring against the Alliance or vice versa, each player always has one, and only one, character involved.)

We played a quick playtest of 2� hours on GroFaFo Summer Rally last weekend. The game always starts with the group generating the patrol vessel. We agreed on a vessel of the Council. It was a large out-of-service battle cruiser from the first half of the war, flown with a skeleton crew. We imagined submarine style interior and large sections utterly deserted, a lot of malfunctions and the like. The ship has one trait, which in our case was �legendary�, and it was named UNAVOIDABLE.

We had four players (plus me, the GM), thus eight characters. For the bridge crew, there were the captain and the psychological counselor, both of the Council, and the weapons officer and engineer, both of the Alliance. For the landing party, we had two grunts from the Alliance, the pilot and the doctor from the Council. Each character has a function, a special ability, a hobby ability, a strenght and a weakness, which left us with details like an oblivious psychologist who burned his own vodka, or a weapons officer that was a trigger-happy cowboy.

Ship and character generation already had us in a fun mood, turning the whole thing into one large parody with loads of laughs. But you could also play it more serious, I guess.

Chasing a bunch of terrorists, the UNAVOIDABLE ended up at Site 482, the major site of findings of remnants from the 2nd predecessor culture, a crab-like species that dwelled on the RIM millions of years ago. The status of international law for this site was totally unsettled, so nobody was allowed to do any research there at the moment. The terrorists gone for the moment, the crew noticed a settlement in the middle of the site. This was �Pleasure 482�, a smuggler�s nest with hookers and blackjack and all.

The landing party went down and caused some confusion, which mostly happened in free play, only once tossing the dice as the doc tried to use his underworld prestige to gather some information. The pilot then negotiated with the administrator of Pleasure 482, an attractive lady of course, conditions for the crew of UNAVOIDABLE to get some free lodging and service at Pleasure 482 in return for sparing them, also finding out in the process where the terrorists were hiding. Quote: "Captain, the locals are persistently cooperating!" In the meantime, the Alliance grunts were approached by an Alliance secret service agent who told them Alliance was conducting secret research at the site and Pleasure 482 had to be maintained as a base. Moreover, a data bloc with his results had so be smuggled to Langley, er, the headquarters.

When the landing party got back and UNAVOIDABLE chased the terrorists out, we finally got to the dice some more. The game uses a simple and open conflict resolution. I would have liked something a little more precise, but I take it that will be the next step in development. Anyway, there were several �conflicts inside the conflict� with different player characters involved before the terrorists� ship was finally rendered clump by the LARGE railgun (�Babushka�), after a risky antimatter injection into the main reactor.

We left some open ends as we quit for lunch. But the game was great, especially riding all those clich�s about Russians, Americans (Texans?) and Catholics as well. I�m afraid the Russians turned out to be the cool guys...

- Frank