October 2024 Missions

In contrast to previous months, we’ve decided to remove the mission matrix mechanic. It was causing confusion, creating a lot of work for the GMs (myself and YueFei), and most importantly, limiting player choice impacting fun.

Instead, we’re just going to release a short list of recommended missions along with their intended narrative role in the campaign.

Players may choose any of the following missions to play this month:

If you have a mission that fits your narrative better, feel free to play it instead (I included an “Other”) option in the submission form.

Bonus Mission Points

If you’d like to try and guess what the bonus point mission is, have a look at John’s story and if you like what you see, buy his book!

Reminders

It’s worth pointing out that these missions have some mechanics that are perhaps unfamiliar to you especially if you’ve been playing predominantly ITS missions only. Here’s a few things to keep a look out for to make sure you’re playing the mission as intended:

• End of Turn Scoring – Instead of scoring at the end the game round, i.e. after both players have had a turn, we score at the end of every player turn. This gives us the ability to help balance first/second player turn advantages/disadvantages. This mechanic has been explored by many mission designers, and we use it here!
• Entire Order (Long Skill) Objective Interactions – Instead of short skill + WIP, many objective interactions have been changed to require base contact (as before) but now are a long skill without a WIP roll. This prevents the non-interaction where a specialist just dies on the objective to make an unopposed WIP roll and also addresses the “well I would have won that game but my WIP 15 specialist rolled 17, 18, 18, 19, 17 on the objective over five orders” problem. This mechanic comes from BlessedBe and the IGL team. Huge thank you to them!
• Specialist Bonus is now Short Skill + WIP – In the missions where the objective interaction is a long skill, typically we’ve changed the specialist bonus from +3 WIP and +1 Burst to being able to do the objective interaction skill as a short skill, with the return of the WIP check. For example, this would represent a Hacker being able to “cut corners” when hacking an objective but maybe failing under pressure. In contrast, an Engineer will follow the full procedure and have a guaranteed success, but it will inherently take longer. Thanks to TheDiceAbide for this idea.
• Dominate and Subjugate – Dominate is more points in a zone, Subjugate is be the only one with models (not markers) in a zone. Subjugate is a Corvus Belli invention and comes from Resilience Ops, we just borrowed the mechanic.

Remember, the above mechanics are just reminders that some of the missions have these mechanics. They are not overriding rules for missions. Whatever the missions say takes precedence.

October 2024 Faction Lore and Objectives

The global “secret” objective this month comes courtesy of Uncle Pentium and the ALEPH players. All factions have this objective for the month:

With respect to the faction specific lore summaries, just keeping ahead of everything going on for the monthly summary is becoming too much. I’m going to focus on the summary, as that highlights player submissions, which is is the point of this thing. To drive the monthly narrative, I’ve included some lore backgrounds for the missions instead (see above).

NA-2 Employment Permits

If you’re playing a Non-Aligned Army (NA-2), you can play a game as any of the major factions above, assuming you have an authorized permit (green check mark). Some NA-2 factions simply won’t work for particular major factions or major factions won’t hire particular mercenary companies, so it’s not a free-for-all of playing whatever you like for whatever faction you like. There have to be some rules.

The Japanese Secessionist Army (JSA) is a little different in that it’s technically not a mercenary faction, but it’s still subject to influence and coercion by some major factions to align military goals. We model this as “working with/for” those factions here.

There are also mercenary contracts available at the Ducktail Pub to give you the opportunity to earn some BitCred, so if you’re interested in that, have a look here!