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| Fire Zone: 1998: Front Cover Design |
Fire Zone is a tabletop roleplaying-slash-miniatures game I designed and wrote.
I've just uploaded it to Scribd... Get it there for free.You can see the entire 280-page game manual there. It works well as a sourcebook for a modern military RPG campaign you might be running... I'd say it even works as a read unto itself - as a reference book. So you may find it interesting, though it's probably a bit too complex to be playable.
(Pardon the low-rez scan... It took me an entire day to scan the 1998 draft.)
Fire Zone has a long story. It contains a pretty extensive Design Notes section, in the manuscript - but I want to include some context in this post.
Along the Edges of Zeitgeist
Really, it is the anchorpoint for most of my thinking and design work around modern combat subjects. It begins in 1984, when I began to gamemaster Traveller, the roleplaying game, in a serious way.
By "serious" I mean remaking the core rules. Developing my own dice-rolling / probability engine. Re-engineering the character trait and skill specs, the weapon and technology specs, et cetera.
Then I enlisted in the reserves in 86, served through until 90 (to prepare for a war against "Ivan")... And this lead to more perspective for the game: more material and rules; and a more gritty military feel.
There was something in the zeitgeist in the mid to late 80s... Some desire to finally portray combat in a realistic light. In 1986 three classic war films came out: Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and... yes... Aliens.
Why do I include Aliens? Because it draws from a longer tradition of American science fiction that is really WW2 / Korea / Vietnam disguised in sci-fi terms. An attempt in books like Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and Armor to reconcile the way Westerners fought (giving quarter, Geneva Convention) with the way Asians did (with a different code of honour: not only NOT giving quarter, but often attacking in a suicidal way, like samurai)... Hence the "Marines" versus "Aliens" paradigm. Also, in Aliens, James Cameron got the whole squad paralysis thing down right. (At the very end of my basic training, the summer of 1986, over a beer in one of the messes, my platoon leader - airborne qualified and going for the reg forces - specifically referenced the middle scenario in Aliens as we debated about improvisation versus drill. "Look at Aliens", he said. "It's true you have to improvise, but you need a basic framework to work from. That's battle drill." Well, it was something like that.
Anyway, overy my university years, from 86 to 90, while in the researves (the 48th Highlanders, tasked mechanized infantry [back then]) my sci-fi game began to take on a more-and-more military flavour. Now the players were done up in "combat armour" with "gauss rifles" or whatever... But really it was just sci-fi Vietnam. The player characters were flying about in "grav APCs" - a sci-fi combination of mech infantry stuff and the helicopter assault you see in Apocalypse Now... On strange jungle or desert planets. (Oh, my best friend Jon, just recently departed, was still recalling those tabletop RPG adventures, even as recently as a few weeks before he passed away.)
In the early 90s I even designed a wholly original sci-fi roleplaying game - called CoreFire. Never published - really 85% game system, 15% new world. Just a learning prototype. But it carried on my thinking of this.
From 90 to 95 I was in film as a writer-director of a short indie film. We got an arts grant. Shot in 35mm. It's a whole other story (to grace these pages later)...
About 95, I thought I'd pick up where I left off regarding my RPG work. Thought I'd design a squad-level game (i.e. a tabletop miniatures-style game) that had roleplaying aspects to it. I spontaneously did a quick-ass set of rules and ran a squad skirmish, with my friends Jon Kirchmeir and Ed Kodar as the players. It worked. The next day, I did up the rules in a one-sheet, two-sided "quick reference sheet", and printed and copied it out, in a single day. One day.
I called it Fire Zone.
A Distribution Deal
Soon after I got a distribution deal with a local miniatures game producer (Global Games), which had this game called "Legions of Steel", which had aspired to compete with the Warhammer 40k franchise... Hardcore tabletop gamers will know what I mean: space-fantasy tabletop miniatures and roleplaying. (By the way, Global Games sold LoS in the late 90s.)
So I had distribution... If I could just get Global Games a printed book (the president of Global recommended a printer in the US and gave good advice on production).
So I had distribution. Plus, based on this game idea, I was accepted to a funded self-employment program. So, through that, I got mentorship and some money.
Now to finish the rules.
But something happened.
Redesign & Scope
First, let me say, I had devised mission statement for the game. Something I've done in other games which has proven invailuable in maintaining perspective. (The mission statement for Code Orange, for example, was a game about patient flow management, communications, personnel management, and supply. And that, too, is a whole other story...) The mission statement for Fire Zone was "A game about the experience of the footsoldier in the twentieth century." That's it. Many times I used that line to describe it and define it.
But that's pretty massive scope, isn't it? That's been a complaint against me: that I set HUGE scope in the things I take on. That's why I understand scope now... As a professional designer, I limit scope. And it's always hard to pitch a new idea to some potential contributor or investor and then, if they like it, watch THEM start to go crazy as THEIR imagination takes over and their scope expands like a balloon... And you're bringing them back down to Earth... Whatever.
Anyway, Fire Zone contained a tabletop squad combat system based on a D20. These rules weren't the hard part. I'm talking about the rules for, say, moving a squad of infantry around on a tabletop - using miniatures for each soldier...You know: here's an area (the table) that represents terrain maybe 800 by 400 metres (I had an eight-by-four-foot table)... You move soldiers around. You take care of "squad cohesion" rules, and command-control You look at spotting (who can see what on this smoky, confusing battlefield). Then the rules for firing standard weapons (like rifles). The rules for what happens to people when they get hit.
But now come in rules for medevac. And calling in artillery. And airstrikes. And rules for special weapons - mortars, flamethrowers, demolitions... And rules for vehicles...
And in your research, you begin to become intrigued not only by the technical stories... not only by the stories of how machines worked, or how things got hit or destroyed... But you become intrigued by the stories of the men. In the heat of that moment, they could break, or get pinned. Or in the long and boring moments between the terror of combat, you learned there was a dull, hidden kind of terror of its own. So writing rules on "Battleshock" (which we'd call PTSD now). Or rules on the fun and craziness of R&R (every good war adventure needs a barroom brawl, followed by a bust-up by the MPs); or the pedantry (sometimes lethally stupid) of military bureaucracy...
Then followed two years of research, redesign and editing. The research was in both the subject matter - i.e. many many books read, drawn from, quoted (long before Medal of Honor or Call of Duty) - and in studying and adjusting probability curves - i.e. balance design. Balance design, by the way, is very intimidating. It's the weaving of the fabric of the game, mathematically, in terms of difficulty, simulation and fairness... It's very tough. Crafting that matrix of values can become an exercise in numeric self-intoxication... You can get hooked on it, like a drug. I can understand what was going through the mind of Russell Crowe's character in A Beautiful Mind: the game theorist John Nash. Not that I'm anyway near John Nash, mathematically... I just understand the obsession and the taste of the numbers in probability and outcomes.
Anyway, you can see, my thinking over the game began to spiral out of control. So in designing and writing Fire Zone I learned about scope control - which is something a lot of software developers understand. I learned it the hard way. But it paid off later.
There was also lots and lots and lots of writing and editing. I cut my teeth on just core writing. The manual includes a full game world (a large fictional island), with a sample campaign, a sample detailed adventure, and a short story to flesh it out.
A "Reference Manual"
I'm hinting at the depth of coverage this game prototype attempted. There are rules, or at least commentary, to guide gamemasters through just about any situation that might crop up in a roleplaying game around twentieth-century infantry ops. Nerve gas? Sure, we have rules for that. You're operating in the arctic? No problem... Using a guided missile?... against air or ground vehicles?... wire-guided or radio-controlled?... Command Line-of-Sight or Semi-Automatic Command Line-of-Sight?... Shooting over a body of water? (wire-guided at a heavy disadvantage there). Et cetera.
Fire Zone was passed around amongst the designers at BreakAway... Guys who had worked at Avalon Hill and Microprose. And it pretty much got me hired there (for Code Orange... another story).
The Mockup
What I've uploaded here is my 1998 graphic mockup. Complete with a cover painting I commissioned from Peter Ferguson, and graphic design by Kevin Davies. I was that close to publishing the game and tapping Global Games' distribution network. But I made this fateful decision: to rewrite the rules. I had picked up some other tabletop game that simplified some things with morale. So I decided I'd do a quick rewrite. But as I rewrote this, other parts started to become unglued, and I had to rewrite them... And those disconnected still other parts... And... Well, I think you can see what happened.
I should've just published what I had, imperfections and all. I remember my friends just wanting to read it (I guess even without actually playing it). My career probably would have been very different now. This was right before Saving Private Ryan... It was a product of its zeitgeist, really.
But... (sigh)... I chose to rewrite. This too taught me about scope control. It was the hard lesson.
Now, Fire Zone is my "yacht in the garage". It doesn't look anything, whatsoever, like the pdf document I've uploaded here. It's a sleek set of rules now. Since then, I've redesigned FZ to be a simple RPG with a boardgamish feel. A game session that, back in the 90s took me six to eight hours to run I can now do in one or two hours (including character/squad setup) - I've done so several times in playtests. Plus I'm designing a cooperative boardgame version that's way simpler (I'm at 35 pages of rules now, ultra simple character creation and loadouts, and so on ).
The Coming of the Tactical Shooter
There is another reason why I didn't publish Fire Zone back in 98: the appearance of the tactical shooter computer game genre. Basically, the realistic first person shooter (FPS) computer game automated a lot of the focus of gameplay in Fire Zone. FZ, as you see it in this mockup, is really a game of an earlier age. Games like Rainbow Six, Counter-Strike, Medal of Honor and so on offered somelike its experience.
In my current thinking around Fire Zone, I've altered it to do things that those shooters don't do very well. It's a tabletop game - giving an experience that CANNOT be replicated electronically... (Not even if you make the tabletop electronic: what is core to a boardgame is that the players have ultimate power over the rules, and must understand resolve things themselves... they are not subject to the mysterious all-powerful blackbox aspect of an electronic game; they can improvise and adapt and use the rules to do things the designers hadn't thought of at all). It has a multi-modal aspect to it (meaning a gamemaster can resolve events in small 30-seconds-at-a-time increments, or in sweeping a-day(week/month/year)-goes-by gestures... Again, electronic games fall down in that regard).
The Manuscript - As It Is
I welcome to you download and read/peruse Fire Zone. I'm uploading it as-is - as it was in 1998 in mock-up form... I'll be continuing my current design work, and hope to release an official commercially-available version later (which would be a boxed game; likely I'll do a Kickstarter for it).
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| Fire Zone: 1998: Rear Cover Design |
On the other hand, you want to learn more about the experience of the infantryman in the modern period, I think you might find it an interesting read, in an encyclopedic style.
If you like it, please comment here, or email me, and let me know...
Plus, if you're a bigshot game producer and need a new modern military setting to licence, there's a fully developed one inside these covers.
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