I guess it must have been early in 1991 when I called into a
local indie games store/comic shop to buy some proxy minis to use for Rogue
Trader. While I loved Citadel sculpts, my paper round money only stretched
so far… As I went to pay for my minis,
the beardy chap behind the counter asked if these were for playing 40K.
When I said yes, he thrust a copy of Stargrunt by Jon Tuffley/Ground
Zero Games into my mitts and said that I should check out this exciting NEW
ruleset. It was an A5 pamphlet, which looked to have been written on an
electric typewriter and then photocopied, with a handful of rather naive
illustrations and a few grainy photos. It certainly had none of the slick
production values of its 1996 successor Stargrunt II (which is still
available as a free download from GZG). As a young punk, though, the DIY
aesthetic really appealed to me and so I bought a copy. As it happened, I never
did manage to play the game back in the day, but while nearly all my RPGs,
wargames rulebooks and minis were sold off, given away or lost by the end of
the 1990s, my copy of Stargrunt survived squirrelled away in a stash of
punk zines.
When I was getting back into gaming a few years back, my
entry point was playing Craig Cartmell’s excellent FUBAR one-page rules
using 15mm GZG/Stargrunt minis. Basically, rules I didn’t need to invest more
than 5 minutes reading and a platoon’s worth of infantry grunts for around £20.
Magic! Needless to say, I fell back in love with miniatures and wargaming, but I
was also curious to explore a bit more of the Tuffleyverse. So, a little while
ago my buddy and I dusted off the Stargrunt rules to see how this
venerable ruleset actually played. It was also a game I appear to have lost all
the photos of. Bugger.
In his introduction to the rules, the author writes that, “Stargrunt
actually falls somewhere between a conventional wargame and a Role-playing Game.”
As we’ll see below, this is a fair description. And where a game like Rogue
Trader allows you to ‘roleplay’ the commanding officer, Stargrunt does
a good job of presenting the battlefield from the lowly infantryman’s
perspective. That said, in common with many old school roleplaying games, there
is a fair bit of bookkeeping and maths required. The pullout-and-photocopy
roster rather optimistically gives you enough slots for two 12-man squads and two vehicles. As we’re partial to a few beers with our wargames, we found one 8-man
squad each was plenty enough to keep track of!
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| Example squad roster from the rulebook |
The first order of business is to give your squad members
names. This isn’t essential, but really adds flavour to the game. These are the
guys whose story you’ll be following after all. Next, you roll a d10 for each
squad member to determine their individual level of experience – which will be either
Green, Regular or Veteran. This roll is modified by the scenario you’re
playing. For example, a militia unit on patrol will more likely contain some Green
troops with little or no combat experience, while a special forces unit
rescuing a hostage is more likely to have veterans within their ranks. Veterans
are also less prone to panic checks than other troops (they stay frosty). We decided
to play a simple scenario with two opposing regular army units on a recce (using
a table full of houseplants to represent impenetrable jungle). Both sides rolled
a good mix of experience levels, but with my buddy having a Green NCO. Think Lt.
Gorman in Aliens.
The experience mechanic is worth dwelling on a bit, as we thought
this was one of the standout element of the rules. It is also the genesis of a
core mechanic which would evolve through Stargrunt II to Tomorrow’s
War and the Ambush Alley stable of games. Essentially, experience level determines
which die a trooper will roll against a given target number. The Basic Die
Roll for each level would be d6 for Green, d8 for Regular and d10 for Veteran,
although under certain circumstances the die size can either shift up or down one.
So, a Green trooper rolling Basic Die Minus would use a d4 and for a Basic Die
Plus would roll a d8. A good example of this is testing to see if a trooper
fires their weapon effectively. The target number required is 4+ when not
engaged or 7+ when engaged with incoming fire. The trooper rolls their Basic
Die if stationary, but their Basic Die Minus if moving across open ground or their
Basic Die Plus if in position in cover. This rather nicely simulates troops becoming
pinned, ducking for cover or squirting off shots without aiming.
The other stat worth flagging is Confidence Level (CL). This deteriorates on first sighting the enemy,
first coming under fire, taking casualties etc. but can also be restored incrementally
by causing an enemy to retreat, taking an enemy position or receiving a stern talking
to from Sarge. If CL reaches 0 then the squad will decide to bug out,
withdrawing towards their table edge unless the NCO can rally them.
With the initial bookkeeping done it was time to get down to
some action. Squads are split into two fireteams, which are the basic unit in
the game. At the start of each turn orders are given to each fireteam (Fire,
Move, Observe or Rally) and the players take turns to activate a fireteam,
revealing their orders and carrying out an action. We liked this a lot as it
allowed one fireteam to dash across open ground while the second team was on
overwatch or laying down covering fire. Within a couple of turns the squads had
sighted each other through the dense jungle foliage and started to let rip. The
shooting mechanic was a huge departure to what we were used to. Once you’ve
established who has actually fired towards the enemy you tot up the Fire Rating
of all the various guns (essentially the volume of lead or lasers being poured at
the enemy) and compare it on a table to the Target Rating, which is based on
the number of targets and whether they are in cover or not. This gives you a ‘to
hit’ number to roll on a d12 against each member of the target fireteam. We
were a couple of pints in by this point in the game and the initial calculations
probably took a bit longer than they should.
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|
With laser beams and bullets ripping through the air it wasn’t
long before we started taking hits. Once you’ve scored a hit you then roll on
another table (I know! Old school, right?) against the impact value of the ammo-type
minus the value of the body armour being worn. The result will either be no
effect (the bullet just nicked an ear), stunned, wounded, incapacitated or
killed. While stunned troops will shake it off at the end of the round, wounded
or incapacitated troops are going to create a whole new series of problems to
deal with. Abandoning the injured badly effects the squad’s CL, but this can be
negated if their buddies drag them into cover and attempt to stabilise their
wounds. Obviously, the guy administering first aid is also now out of the fight
until he can stop his comrade bleeding out. We absolutely loved this rule. It felt
incredibly thematic and brought to mind films such as Platoon and Full
Metal Jacket.
By this point, things were fubar for both sides. Half the troops
were either dead, injured or attempting first aid. With all the incoming fire
it was proving near impossible to stabilise the worst casualties and the CL of
both squads was dropping rapidly. If the mission had been to capture and hold a
position, maybe I would have ordered ‘fix bayonets’ and tried out the close
assault rules (which look brutal), but as both sides were out on a recce, both
began to withdraw, laying down covering fire while carrying their injured buddies
back for evac.
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| Troops from the high-grav planet of Grudge out on patrol |
So, once the dust had settled, what did we think of Stargrunt?
Well, the rules definitely showed their age in some regards. I think game
specific tokens and coloured gems for the different experience levels would
have helped with some of the bookkeeping, but even then two squads each + beer would still have been a
stretch. There are also issues with the rules around having different ammo for
the rifles and the SAW when working out hits (we followed the author’s advice
and stuck to the same ammo to keep things simple). And, to be fair, we didn't try any of the point fire weapons, such as plasma guns, which resolve their damage separately anyway. Things we liked included the alternate
activation of fireteams. This combined with the orders gave the feel of
everything happening simultaneously. The sliding-dice system is genius and
having a fixed target number for shooting effectively was welcome. What we
really, really liked, though, was the cinematic feel to the game narrative. You
could feel the panic rising within the squad as things fell apart, as injured
comrades were dragged into cover, as plans were abandoned and orders ignored,
as soldiers basically lost their shit. The game does a wonderful job of eliciting
empathy for toy soldiers fighting a made-up war on a kitchen table, which is pretty
remarkable. So thank you Beardy man, wherever you are. That was a top
recommendation.
