Author Topic: ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era  (Read 1375 times)

hive_angel

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ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era
« on: 06 January 2014, 12:57:00 »
So far the ATOW campaign I am running is only 2 players, me the GM and the other the player and his lance of NPCs.

The era is 3028 focusing on a Marik 9th  reinforced company of mechs. We both have been pondering pushing the era forward to basically unlock better mech weapons as SSW era severely limits things somewhat.

Have you ever done this before and what are you thoughts or do and don't?
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guardiandashi

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Re: ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era
« Reply #1 on: 06 January 2014, 14:34:48 »
you don't actually have to push forward much as that is when some of the new stuff starts being deployed as "experimental (IE between ~3028 and ~3040) you just need to "justify" why they would get assigned to test some of the new prototype weapons in battle

NullVoid

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Re: ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era
« Reply #2 on: 09 January 2014, 14:42:43 »
Even minor modifications, such as making double heat sinks available, tend to make a huge difference in play style while in-universe costing relatively little as a percentage of the cost of the hardware in a battlemech.  Page TM221 tells us that DHS were recovered (that is, are back to full scale industrial production) by 3040 by the Federated Suns (thus 12 years or 3 Tour of Duty life cycles) , but the information required for the development should be available to everybody 3029ish due to the availability of the Helm Memory Core.

A good way to add lostech equipment is having your company come into contact with one of those merchant jumpships that are spreading around copies of the Core.  How tech-savvy is your support personnel?

Another alternative is having them find a good old SLDF cache, with a few lostech units and a certain amount of spare parts.  This tends to work better with mercenary commands, as regular House units will tend to be ordered pass these upstairs, but they could easily start doing tactical analysis of the various pieces of lostech equipment to inform their bosses of which of these is more useful and thus should be researched first.  Since you are playing a game, deviations from canon should be expected.

Finally, you could always give your PCs and NPCs the equivalent experience of three or four Tour of Duty life stages, representing a timeskip with relatively generic service.  Remember, though, that that represents a fair chunk of their expected career duration, and even if they don't get tangled much in the traditional Marik civil wars, odds are that the lancemates will either have been killed in action or promoted to lance or even company leader.  You'd end up having to generate new characters to represent the generic shuffle of units

Mohammed As`Zaman Bey

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Re: ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era
« Reply #3 on: 09 January 2014, 17:35:36 »
  I consider pushing the calendar forward just to get new toys as a bit of a cop-out. The caveat is that their opponents will have new toys as well and it will all even out...until you have them face the Clans.
  Unless the players are all veterans and elites, I would have them "train" on more primitive equipment and gradually introduce higher tech or have adventures based upon hunting for Losttech caches just so they can learn the benefits and drawbacks of having something that isn't available on the market.

hive_angel

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Re: ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era
« Reply #4 on: 10 January 2014, 10:19:16 »
Very interesting ideas.

@ Mohammad As `Zaman Bey

I think both the player and I are fine with SSW technology, but I think I have a great deal of battlemech models which fit either in the 3039+ or 3060+ eras, I think. The player plays mechwarrior online where all kind of advanced weapons are rampant so this might be what is fueling it. I agree stepping up and what one side has the other side has as well in moderation. I personally have never fought clans so working with them is iffy and even more iffy as the player is in FWL unit which really never saw clan combat and is sandwiched between a lot of space the clans never reached I think. However the idea of lostech hunting is fun.
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guardiandashi

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Re: ATOW - Pushing a campaign to further era
« Reply #5 on: 10 January 2014, 14:12:31 »
I always liked the "you hear rumors of a star league cache, you track them down and.....

that's actually where some really cool mechs came from in the battletechnology magazines
and the cached mech doesn't have to be great, there was one story "the useless mech" where a guy found an old 1a1 charger (the basic 3025 version) with 5 small lasers and 400 std engine in it.  what was special however is it was in "mint" or NIB equivalent condition (there was even the plastic seat covers and the "congratulations on your purchase of ... in it"