in the begining...

[Draq]

so ladies and gentlemen, presuming you are starting a new v1 campaign right after kalisz, how do you set everything up # of players, characters per player, amount and quality of gear, vehicles/mounts, and supplies, geographical position, soldier nationality, branch/job/specialty per soldier, etc... im trying to compile a range of data within which to make my own campaign. I want input from actual players/GMs.

[LT. Ox]

Same Boat er place

Great questions. I am in the very same boat as my son in-law wants to have me DM a game for him, his sister and my Grand Kids (4). Sister wants to play a Medical type i.e. A surgeon or such from a mash. Son in-law would like to be a special ops Officer. The Kids just want to play with grandpas miniatures and on the big game table (4 by 8 sand table)
Hmmmm! Soooo why is that group together near the rally point of Kalisz and how much equipment to have them try to use and keep track of. Me, I am retired and have all the time in the world to make lists and various problems for them to solve. The thing is they have no military experience other than their father being in the Army and a CIA analyst and cop. Well that may count for my daughter marring into their clan.
So we will let them start with pretty much whatever they want (notice the royal we, in DM mode already)
They will be here in an hour or so, I will let you know what the plan is then and you can have a laugh.

[LT. Ox]

Alittle large for a first Go

Ok here is a list;
Two Lav one recovery type and one refitted C and C( them can swim)
Two HMMWV, one weapon mount ( M-19) and one medical conversion.
Two Bradley M-2
One M-113 or the mortar ammo carrier convert
One Five tone Truck, one 5,000 liter tanker
One M-60 and One M-1
Perhaps a few horses and tack
This brings us in around fifty to sixty personnel of various types.
Main group is an A-team, With the Doc and three medical people then the two squads of Ranger Infantry. Six or so mortar trained Joes the two tank crews and some transport personnel oh yeah the recovery and repair people that is another six.
We may have to do some negotiations
He calls the group oethe Four Captains
A-team leader, the Doc, one of the Tankers and the Infantry Captain.
He started with the A-team and picked the rest up while resupplying in anticipation of the breakout.

[Twilight2000v3MM]

My favorite campaign that I ran with the original modules I had the bulk of the players be from the 256th Brigade. They were a recce section.

The C.O. was in a VBL M-11 with a PC scout and a PC Driver/RTO. The second vehicle was a German Wiesel MK I with a 20mm AC. Gunner/Commander was my youngest player (GREAT player!) and another PC (he was just a crazy driver!)

A lot of fun and meyham. The PCs could get just about any equipemnt they wanted but it had to fit in the vehicles and because they had to have amphibious capability... no trailers. So they opted for a lot of alcohol fuel and food and went with the minimum ammo for the 20mm for the Wiesel (200 rounds). They also mounted a M249 as a co-ax bore sighted with a 500 round ammo bin. The VBL had an MAG MMG I think they only had 1250 rounds for it.

They lost the Wiesel in the Black Madonna module. When they came out of the tomb one of their nemesis caught up to them an a large firefight started. The Wiesel got hit with multiple 14.5mm rounds.

After that they made it to Krakow where they traded a bunch of loot for a very beat up Spahpanzer Kurtz. They picked up to more PCs, one a German and the other an American.

I think that campaign lasted about 6 months.

I believe if you ave 50% of the PCs as Americans its more viable since it is a US unit.

My other very succsessful campaig was run with only 4 PCs in Maine. The PCs crossed the Atlantic on a 2 masted schooner. There were 5 NPCs only 1 was military. The PCs were an ex USMC Force Recon team and when they got to Maine/Nova Scotia they pretty much ran a guerilla war against New America. It was a great combo of politics, combat, and survival with ship to ship combat, spec ops missions, espionage recce missions. That lasted about a year off and on. That one had the players scrounging for just about everything and they liked it. Lots of wheeling and dealing. I would have to say that was my fav game I ran and would love to run it again.

[Draq]

Thanx, that's pretty helpful, gents. I was thinking of starting out with just 2-5 characters in one vehicle(HMMWV, m113, Bradley or nato equivalents) a few days after the breakthrough. Low on most everything, lost, maybe have a few mild to moderate wounds and vehicles damage/problems, kinda set up a tutorial, for both me and my players as this will be our first time playing. Give everyone a chance to get used to the non-combat aspects and develop character personalities. Then run into red scouts/recon patrol or something difficult but still do-able. Then when they finally regroup with the main forces, grab up more men supplies and vehicles

[Draq]

Maybe end up with a pow and some captured gear. Maybe a btr, bmp, or scout car.

[Tegyrius]

One thing I've been wanting to try is setting up the Kalisz breakout as a wargaming scenario, using some rules set like Force on Force. Put a decent array of hardware and support units on the table, including at least half soft-skinned transports. Start with a Pact recon force on the table and add Pact reinforcements every turn via another random table. Also roll randomly for the side on which the Pact units enter, reflecting the encirclement. End the game when all NATO forces are destroyed or have moved off the board.

Then tally up everything that exited the board before the end of the game. Those vehicles and personnel are the players' starting force for the campaign, including any damage they were carrying when they exited the board. Every recovered transport provides a random roll for bulk supplies (fuel, food, ammo). All PCs are built so they plausibly would have been among the surviving troops/crews.

- C.

[Raellus]

That sounds hella fun, Tegyrius.

[ArmySGT.]

No one wants to do it from the other side A shattered collection of Warsaw Pact troops

[Tegyrius]

I cite Force on Force simply because it's one of the few modern wargaming systems with which I'm familiar, but I think the core book and the Cold War Gone Hot supplement have rules and stats for just about everything you might want to put on the table. All my figures are in 28mm, though, and it would be a heck of an investment in miniatures and vehicles. If I had a local group for this sort of shenanigan, I'd either proxy a whole bunch of stuff with my Battlefield Evolution plastic figures or find a source for cheap 1:285 micro armor.

- C.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Thanx, that's pretty helpful, gents. I was thinking of starting out with just 2-5 characters in one vehicle(HMMWV, m113, Bradley or nato equivalents) a few days after the breakthrough. Low on most everything, lost, maybe have a few mild to moderate wounds and vehicles damage/problems, kinda set up a tutorial, for both me and my players as this will be our first time playing. Give everyone a chance to get used to the non-combat aspects and develop character personalities. Then run into red scouts/recon patrol or something difficult but still do-able. Then when they finally regroup with the main forces, grab up more men supplies and vehicles

I think this is the ideal way to start out when you have a group of players new to the rules - start out simple and work your way up to the more involved stuff when people are used to the basics.

My take on the Kalisz scenario was also of the low key approach - pretty much just the PCs (and maybe a helpful NPC if the players didn't have much military knowledge) and what they could carry and possibly a vehicle if they got lucky with the dice roll. But I might give them a small bonus as well.
For example, I had a group that included a defecting Czech junior officer so I added another defecting Czech junior officer as an NPC. The group decided that they wanted to pool their dice and get a BTR-80 so I allowed that and as their bonus, the NPC Czech officer knew of a small cache of 44 gallon drums full of diesel (and so I then decided to have the BTR still fitted to run on diesel). This gave them a total (on-road) travel range of about 1500 kilometres before they'd have to convert the engine to alcohol (however, they didn't start with any ammo for the 14.5mm KPVT and only had about 700 rounds for the co-ax PKT).

[Olefin]

Have done Kalisz three different times as a player - first time was with an M1A1 in college along with several very interesting player characters including a gentleman playing an infantry scout who was an Apache (since he was one in real life) and was deadly with a bow and a knife as well as NPC's who had a Bradley - we managed to blow our way thru the Russians at the bridge, liberate the POW camp and take out a couple of HQ's (my GM was a "we like explosions" GM) and eventually got thru the Madonna, Krakow and Warsaw and then back to Germany

- played for two years at college - ended up back home and doing Last Submarine trilogy - we spent a lot of time on various adventures looking for fuel (including one player making what my GM called the two luckiest rolls he had ever seen that led to us finding an underground tank full of fuel at USCIE SOLNE (i.e that one that the Krakow module says is almost certainly false - my GM assigned a very small chance to find the supposed fuel and he made the rolls)

other two times were recent - one with a broken down LAV-25 that we exchanged for a BMP that the crew was too busy taking a leak to see us - and then got it taken out by an anti-tank mine - got to the Madonna

the last time we had a Bradley and a HEMTT - was a very fun game - again we liberated the POW's but then the game ran out of juice and it ended before we cleared the area and went anywhere

[Draq]

More excellent info gents. I was considering injecting a Polish ex-pact soldier turned rebel-scout/interpreter, as an NPC, which will help players with little knowledge of poland. I believe i read some where the 5th division meets up with some Polish free legion() Forces before Kalisz. Also considering injecting an encounter witha modified version of the lieutenant's 4th brigade from final blackout as a fourth wall reference. Really want to take that book, update it to fit in t2k, and run it as a campaign.

[Draq]

And yes, since I first discovered t2k I've thought about campaigns on both sides, using various references, like metro 2033/2034, for a sov-pact campaign.

[Draq]

I like the idea of wargaming the encirclement of Kalisz, but as much as I'd love too, I could never do minis.