shaneivey
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Godlike: "Hell for Breakfast" Revisions
🕑 Added 2020-10-07 17:13:53 +0000 UTCLate last year I posted "Hell for Breakfast," a scenario about a Talent team in the wrong part of Normandy the night before D-Day. I just wrapped up another run of "Hell for Breakfast" and found some useful improvements to make. You can find a new PDF version ("V5") at that post.
SPOILER ALERT. If you expect to be a player, send this link to your GM and quit reading.
The biggest set piece in "Hell for Breakfast" is big indeed. The Talents have the chance to assault on an infamous Widerstandsnest or resistance nest, a huge complex of trenches and bunkers packed with machine guns, mortars, and artillery. And unless the Talents hide or surrender, that's just a prelude for the "Ten Minutes of Hell." Hundreds of American and German Talents clash over Omaha Beach, destroying themselves and possibly the players' TOG team.
MOVE IT! MOVE IT!
The battle for WN-62 is not just one combat but a dozen combat scenes to grind the Talents down. The challenge is keeping it from grinding their players down. You have to keep things moving. To that end...
- I removed a few (but not many) of the Übermenschen from the waves that counterattack WN-62.
- I added Command scores for all Übermenschen since defeating them is a crucial source of Will for the TOG team.
- I added guidelines for how much Will the Übermenschen are likely to spend in Contests of Will.
- I added notes on running things two rounds at a time to allow for the long distances that runners must cover.
- I added an explicit suggestion to use the squad combat rules from Godlike Appendix D to resolve enemy actions groups at a time.
- I reorganized the "Ten Minutes of Hell" section to make it easier for the GM to follow it and run it in stages.
AS A ONE-SHOT
This run of "Hell for Breakfast" took about 12 hours of play over Roll20. It would be shorter in person, whenever we can safely do that again. Half that time was the assault on WN-62. For a one-shot, I recommend leaving WN-62 out and focusing on the battle for the Houtteville battery instead. The Houtteville battery has even more NPCs but it is a much more constrained space. If they avoid getting dragged into a pitched battle, the Talents can tackle it much more quickly.
CASUALTIES
Another thing. The battle for WN-62 is deliberately written to be a meatgrinder. The players' only hope to keep their Talents in one piece is tightly disciplined tactics. In my run-through that ended last night, the Talents wound up spread too thin. They neutralized WN-62, killed or captured 15 Übermenschen and 36 regular German soldiers, and saved hundreds of American lives, but they paid a heavy price. Only one of the 9 men was still combat-ready at the end.
The players each ran two or three Talents using the "Troop Play" guidelines.
- Capt. Wayne "Bazooka" Thompson: Wounded in action and lost to hospital. Leg and throat nearly severed by an Übermenschen. Survived only by seemingly miraculous luck and surgery. Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross.
- Warrant Officer Robert "Blue Baron" Anderson: Wounded in action and lost to hospital. Left femoral artery ruptured by Übermensch submachinegun fire. Survived only because the last teammate standing was near enough to apply a tourniquet. Destroyed an armored car packed with Übermenschen with an incredibly lucky mortar shot. Purple Heart, silver star.
- Cpl. Edward "RTD" Chapman: The only member of the team still standing at the end of the battle, and that thanks only to his powers of regeneration after multiple severe injuries. Fired a lucky rocket grenade to destroy an Übermensch-powered tank with four enemy Talents inside. Silver star.
- Cpl. Juan "Fender" Sanders: Killed in action. Invulnerable to small arms fire and most heavy weapons but hurled out to sea by the Übermensch der weite Wurf, the Long Throw. Drowned in the Atlantic. Posthumous Purple Heart, bronze star.
- PFC Aaron "Rooster" Bolton: Killed in action. Drowned on dry land under the power of an Übermensch attack. A teammate tried to revive him but failed. Posthumous Purple Heart, bronze star.
- PFC Richard "Motorola" Hoffman: Wounded in action and lost to hospital. Left elbow shattered and permanently disabled by a machine-gun bullet. Purple Heart, bronze star.
- Pvt. Donald "Brimstone" Gregg: Killed in action. Hit by enemy machine-gun fire while trying to teleport a wounded teammate to safety. Posthumous Purple Heart, bronze star.
- Pvt. Randy "Muscle Beach" Wells: Wounded in action and lost to hospital. Kept five enemy machine gun nests suppressed despite multiple injuries. Left foot blown off by an Übermensch-powered tank's 20 mm cannon. Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross, Medal of Honor.
Comments
Pretty well, I think everyone had a good time and there was a good mix of encounters. We RP'd a bit with the SOE agent and I had her statted up as a potential replacement PC. I made a point to emphasize the resistance members in the background as there set up charges on the bridge and take care of their wounded. Having an NPC shout "Run, we are blowing the bridge! Allez, allez, allez!" Is a really good pacing tool to get them onto the next scene. One other modification I made was to shrink down the maps a bit to make movement more manageable.
Arc Dream Publishing
That sounds great. How'd the players take to it?
FYI, I ran this at GenCon 2021 in a modified format to fit into a 4-hour slot. Per your suggestions on the original draft, I cut out WN-62 completely. We just ran the railroad encounter with the French Resistance, the capture of the Chateau, and then the assault on the Houteville battery. Those encounters fit nicely in a 4 hour slot. I dropped three enemy talents into the Houteville battery, Der Weite Wurf, Etrunkener, and Bodenabtrag. Etrunkener and Bodenabtrag could attack pretty much unseen from the farmhouse overlooking the battery, focusing their attacks to suffocate obvious talents and destroy heavy weapons respectively. I had two squads of ten men counter-attack the talents as they disabled the battery with Der Weite Wurf, who would throw random objects as needed (a bicycle, a cast iron stove, and dead soldiers). Once they wrapped up at the battery, they could hear the "ten minutes of hell" taking place at the beach and see the effects of super-powered battles from a distance. A nice, tight convention scenario.
