Fire Zone

Fire Zone: 1998: Front Cover Design

20th Century Military Roleplaying & Miniatures
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.

What Alien Swarm Means To Me

A Gritty Kind Of Sci-Fi

When I was young, years ago, I used to design and gamemaster science-fiction tabletop roleplaying missions and campaigns. This was where I cut my teeth on mission design, game design - even screenwriting and filmmaking to some extent, as many of my campaigns and missions were delivered in a cinematic way.

The first "bug mission" I did, in my homebrew version of Traveller (the RPG), was even before Aliens came out. (It felt more like Alien than (read more)...