(Got home utterly exhausted last night, needed to get some housework done and just crash. Sorry for the delay! Chime in with any additional thoughts!)
AFTER-ACTION REPORT, 8/18
Well... that all happened. ;)
A few things first, for people not at the event. Zombies were starting near the rescue dropship, so players had to fight through them to get to safety- they had to kill at least one zombie before boarding the ship, so bum-rushing the boat wouldn't work. Player Mechs ran as-normal, zombies couldn't use run movement (walking and jumping only), but to compensate they didn't track heat (because they're undead!). And of course, any player Mechs that went down would get back up a couple of turns later on the zombie side of things- subject to those above rules.
The biggest surprise to the day, from a GM standpoint, was the makeup of the survivor's starting units. I don't know how many people looked at the random charts i brewed up, but for those not there, players rolled a D20 first to see which chart (Clan or Inner Sphere) they'd roll on (odd or even), then again to determine the Mech on that chart. While there were light and medium options on both, they were skewed in the heavy and assault range. And we got NONE of that for a long time- even the sole heavy that made the field early, a Thunderbolt, was the 6/9 version with the LPPCs. Based on my test runs at home to make sure things worked, that was VERY unexpected- rather than the zombies having time to get away from the ship a bit and roam the field before intercepting 4/6 and 3/5 units, they were getting run down by things like a Vixen and a Grendel- few Urbies got far from the ship before getting bogged down, and as time went on it was pretty much 'play goalie' for lack of another option for some of them, as well as their big boss (more on that later, that was a mistake on my part)- which was fun in its own way, forcing the speedy players to find a way around the mass of zombies, but it played out very different from the expectations.
The curve of the game though was exactly what I found in tests- early on, with a few scattered zombie Urbies, it was a shooting gallery- even in smaller, less-armed Mechs, the players and their excellent pilots (G2, P3 for all) were carving up the undead. Yes, they get up again if you don't kill them permanently with head hits or un-CASEed ammo explosions, but... well, to my surprise, several zombies- three total!- died via ammo crits regardless! Stupid Urbies! As time went on though, the trickle of added zombies wandering on, the arrival of the boss, and the first couple of player Mechs turning (the Thunderbolt in particular was a game-changer) started to turn the tide from 'this is easy' to '...we may have a problem here'. We called it before the Black Knight (the Clanbuster version) got back up, but that thing, with no heat tracking anymore... that was going to get interesting. So that was exactly how I saw it going- easy early, increasingly ugly as the day went on, nightmarish by the end.
The 'boss' was envisioned as a Resident Evil-style thing, a king of the zombies that would get player attention, make for a last hurdle to clear before reaching safety, and generallly just be terrifying. This was an ANH-2A Annihilator, because (as one player put it) that's just four Urbanmechs in a trench coat, so why not? It was... I mean, it did what I wanted it to do (I ran it myself), it was scary and big, and it did a lot of damage to a couple of victims (the Wolverine in particular), but... I started it on a hill. That was an unforgivable foul-up on my part- because without run movement, it almost literally had no way to move off that spot. It never actuallly moved during the game, at all. (It also lost an LB-10X on each of the first two turns on the field, soo THAT sucked!) I'm not saying I wouldn't do a 'boss' in the future in this event, but maybe something that had the ability to move around a little next time.
The Arrow IV Urbie though, regret it. On-board artillery is fun, but it was a little much, and won't be in future iterations of the event- I brought one for this in case we had players who spent the day hiding behind a hill or something as a way to encourage them out of their hiding spot. We didn't really have much of that in this game, though, so it was just kind of messy. (And no, it didn't have nukes- where would an undead-Battlemech get a nuclear weapon at? BE LOGICAL, people!)
Six mapsheets was too much for the larger units to be able to participate, and we eventually deleted two of them- in the future, I'd probably leave it at four maps, unless it's a truly epic turnout for the event. I noted at the game that the original draft used city maps, but tracking building CF and rubble and all that was more than I wanted to deal withg on top of already running several zombies- when I switched to the more open Rolling Hills terrain, I didn't really compensate for the increased options in moving, so that's a change I'll happily make. (If I can run this someday as a GM-only and not have too many things going on at once, I'd love to take charge of that urban environment and deal with building damage though!)
We eventually had our four survivors board the ship, and at that point... well, it's a Leopard, no room for anyone else, byeeeeee! Luckily I had prize support for five people, and we had five awesome players at the end (four survivors and one helpful zombie volunteer), so that all went out to them. Longtime Battletech veteran and dear friend Redshirt was also a huge help throughout the day running the undead masses, and deserves a special shout-out as well for helping keep things going. (As much as I'd liked to have had all players on the survivor side, you can see how easily I'd have been overwhelmed by running a dozen or so zombies of assorted Urbie configs and turned player Mechs!)
Anyway. Feeback is appreciated, there's a significant chance this will get run again (a Halloween-adjacent event at Huzzah Hobbies is being investigated, depending on whether my wife has things planned or not at that point), and I should have another event at Your Hobby Place in late September (nothing concrete yet, keep an eye out here for announcements!)
And one more time, thank you to all who participated on both sides of the game for a great day of gaming, it was a pleasure to join you all at the table!
Brian Bunch / JadeHellbringer
