Some new rules for KURGAN

In case it still needs to be said, I stand with Ukraine and desperately hope that peace, a full withdrawal of Russian forces and payment of reparations and the repatriation of captured soldiers and kidnapped civilians comes soon.

However, from a wargaming perspect - both for the purposes of recreational and professional wargaming - the evolution of the ground war in Ukraine has been fascinating and it has been instructional to see old assumptions about things like the role of new media, traditional media and crowdsourcing have influenced the operation on both sides. To some extent, the narrative of Operation KURGAN anticipated this (given that I started writing it over three years ago!), but one thing that caught me by surprise was the rise of the lethal drone.

We were used to traditional, long-range drone aircraft, like the Predator, carrying lethal munitions to strike at targets. But the rapid acceleration of the drone as not merely a reconnaissance device but as not just the delivery mechanism for a payload, but as the actual payload, lethal to infantry soldiers and even armoured vehicles, caught me, at least, by surprise.

In retrospect, like all such things, it seems obvious. But the absence of an explosive remote from Horizon Wars: Zero Dark now seems painfully naive. Fortunately, I can fix that!

Remote Upgrade (Killer)

The killer remote upgrade gives the remote the Explosive weapon upgrade. To use the upgrade is an automatic action. The effect is centred on the location of the remote and the remote is destroyed immediately.

For when you absolutely, positively have to kill that Boss.

Remotes absolutely don't have to be quadcopters, though. Imagine being hugged to death by this cute little guy!

Meanwhile, for the PvP game:

Pulse Rifle

A handheld weapon that causes damage only to remotes and synthetic bogeys and characters.

The drone rifle is used like any other weapon upgrade with the following exceptions:

For each successful hit on a target, the player may do one of the following:

• Put a gadget upgrade into the 0 state.

• Put a synthetic bogey or character into the sleeping state.

Using the drone rifle does not cause bogeys that are not synthetic to become alert. A drone rifle counts as an LLM (see previous post) for the purposes of missions that are restricted to such weapons.

The pulse rifle joins the fazer (new name for the shocker after Stefan reminded me of the Urban Dictionary definition) as a Less Lethal Munition (LLM) for missions involved CIVPOP or just where you want to look good in front of the press.

Oh, and the sleeping state is as follows:

Sleeping

A character in the sleeping state becomes prone and cannot be activated until another character who is engaged with the sleeping character performs either an automatic action or a successful Medic action.

The rules for the fazer originally had the weapon cause characters who are hit to suffer wounded(+1) in addition to all other effects, but prevented them from becoming dead. Now, the fazer imposes the sleeping state instead. I'm still mulling over whether to remove making characters dead, because I do like to emphasise the fact that LLMs are not, in fact non-lethal and can (and do) kill people. As the fazer is basically a catch-all for anything from a cattle prod to a Taser, I feel like it should certainly be able to kill folks, even if that's not the player's intention. Accidentally killing your objective is both funny and an important moral lesson.