Issue 7 - The Trouble with Space Marines (Part 2)

More on space marine RPGs -- addressing some feedback and a quick look at Stay Frosty.

Jul 20, 2024

Greetings and welcome back. My summer schedule has been a bit rough with work, vacations, teen fender benders and such, so it’s taken me a little longer than expected to return to the blog.

To get back into the groove, I’ll set my sights on two quick things today: The other trouble with space marines games, and a quick look at Stay Frosty.

THE OTHER TROUBLE WITH SPACE MARINES

When I titled the first post in this series (The Trouble With Spaces Marines), I was referring to the fact that I wanted to take some time and run a proper space marines game — I wanted to do it right. (Whatever that is!)

The problem came in the form of my owning a lot of RPGs that are aimed at this subject matter, so how to choose among them?

Well, a couple of readers reached out in different ways with questions that made me realize some folks see these kinds of games as problematic for other reasons. Let’s look at those one at a time.

The Chain of Command

My great gaming pal and all-around good guy

Wayne Peacock

wrote a comment that simply asked, “Will your game include a chain of command?”

The answer is yes. Whether I roll with a full-on military sim or some kind of private military company or mercenary outfit, there will be roles, specializations, ranks, and indeed a chain of command. That’s how these units work, after all, in present day analogs and in the fiction I’ll be emulating. Easy enough question to answer, right?

But why was Wayne asking it?

He didn’t elucidate, but I have a strong suspicion I might know what he was getting at. In many traditional RPG structures, the player characters are peers, equals, compadres. They are free to do as they will, they don’t report to one another, they aren’t giving each another straight-up orders. Since the days of USENET (and I’m sure before), these command structures in RPGs have been a hotly debated, contentious thing.

What if your commanding officer is a douchebag with bad ideas? What if they are inexperienced? What if they are cruel, angry about being passed over for their hoped-for promotion. What if they are just a terrible tactician, or they crack under pressure? The way I see it, these are all opportunities for rich roleplay, and they emulate both real world scenarios, and some of the very best fiction in the genre.

Ahem:

Lieutenant Scott Gorman, Colonial Marine (Played by William ... — Lt. Scott Gorman, Colonial Marine from *Aliens*

I think what Wayne’s getting at is that it’s one thing to have to follow a difficult order you might not agree with that comes from on high (e.g. the GM, playing some high ranking NPC), it’s another when it comes from the player next to you if they get power-trippy, are generally out of step with the setting or the group, or just happen to be an asshole.

I’ve done a good bit of gaming that’s steered into the teeth of those risks (e.g. various Star Trek RPGs, Star Wars if you play upstanding members of the Rebellion, Twilight 2000, Operation White Box), and I’ve only ever seen it go really wrong once: in a Jovian Chronicles play-by-email game in the 1990s where the captain of our ship indeed turned out to be, well, all of those things I listed above. In fact, his roleplay / decisions / commands eventually ended the game entirely if I’m remembering accurately… the other players just checked out and stopped posting because of the douchery.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear about the experiences others have had with these kinds of structures in military RPGs, and what advice they might have for keeping things on the straight and narrow, or at least from getting shitty for the low-ranking PCs.

Fascism, Space Marines, and You

My old pal Marx, a fellow lover of Fate who I first met on the Tavern Keeper play-by-post RPG site, also reached out regarding a different and much more problematic angle that’s often attached to space marines: fascism. And colonialism. The whole, “see the world, go interesting places, meet interesting people, and kill them,” angle. Jack-booted thugs who murder everything you put in front of them with extreme prejudice. This stuff is embodied by the ultra marines in Warhammer 40,000, where it was originally intended to be farcical, a ludicrous take on the subject and one not to be taken too seriously.1

I’ll say two things here — Warhammer 40,000 marines and the Imperium aren’t really what I’m after, despite the Helldivers games being chock full of schlocky propaganda and satirical overtones throughout. I’m looking for space marines to save innocents from dire threats, to band together against terrible foes and odds, to be a wrecking crew who can get the job done when no one else can. So, my space marines won’t be fascists.

However!

Point two is that there’s an exception… which I’ll cover in more detail when I eventually talk about 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. That game, by Scotsman Gregor Hutton is all about being a nasty, fascist space marine… but then realizing what you’ve done… feeling bad about it, and going back to Earth to make things right.2

Anyway. Onto the first game I’m looking at.

STAY FROSTY

Published in 2017, authored by Casey Garske and edited by Matthew Nelson, Stay Frosty comes to us from Garske Games. It’s a zine-sized game, 32 pages in length and full of lovingly indie art and text. There’s kind of an 8-bit Aliens vibe going on throughout, and Garske’s terse and sometimes crabby tone is pretty charming.3 The inspiration from and connection to Aliens is strong and unashamed — which should be no surprise given that movie is the source of the RPG’s title, basically just meaning, “shit’s gettin’ real, keep your cool.”

Along with Aliens, Garske names Starship Troopers, Predator, and the Terminator films as his inspiration. The games he points to are The Black Hack (for the core mechanics), Perdition (which inspired the Tension / Frostiness stuff), and The Hill Cantons (for the point-crawl rules).

So with the specifics of what is this? out of the way, let’s take a quick look at how it all comes together.

Overview

This is a d20-powered roll-high game, kind an inverted take on The Black Hack (TBH), which uses a roll-under d20 mechanic. That is, in TBH if you have a Strength of 12, you try to roll 11 or lower on a d20 to succeed. Garske says Stay Frosty started off as a hack of that famous small-press game, but he eventually “re-wrote” his game almost entirely. That included the flipping of the core mechanic to roll above a given rating to succeed… and also bolting on, as we’ll see, a lot of cool and sometimes pretty fiddly bits.

The core DNA of TBH — and therefore 70s D&D — is still pretty visible, I think. To wit:

There’s a d20!
Attributes exist, though not the standard six. Here we find Brains, Brawn, Dexterity, and Willpower. To generate your scores, roll 3d6 four times in order — no swapping, no 4d6 drop lowest, etc. Pretty OSR in its mentality4, but bear in mind one thing — you want to roll low when you generate these attribute scores. More on that in a bit.
There are classes, called “MOS” in the game. Garske doesn’t explain what those are, but it’s pretty clear given the military bent of the game that he’s talking about Military Occupational Specialties. These include Armor, Cyber, Engineer, Infantry, Intelligence, Medical, Psi Ops, and Spec. Ops. Most of these have an attribute requirement, another nod to that old-school play that lies at the heart of the game. These work well overall, I think — usually offering better odds of success in specific situations and some unique gear, ability, or piece of kit.
There are hit points, levels, and ranks (Private, Sergeant, Lieutenant). Advantage and Disadvantage are in play, as are Usage Dice for some things (like ammo counting and general supply). Range bands are used and there’s a lightweight encumbrance system. Armor soaks damage, and TBH-style initiative is used, where a DEX test result determines whether you act before or after your foes. There’s a neat cover system, morale, and suppression from firearms is modeled.
There are vehicles, psi-powers, rules for Powerful Foes, ‘FUBAR’ and ‘SNAFU’ tables for critical hits and misses in and out of combat, and TBH-style leveling where you can improve your ability scores over time. There’s a whole system that models Tension and Frostiness in the game that’s pretty well-done, point-crawl rules, a random mission generator, settlement and alien generators… and a great GOING APESHIT TABLE that ties in to the tension mechanics.

hen you get right down to it, there’s a lot in these 32 small pages, and most of it is really pretty good.

What I Liked

The spirit and overall tone of the game is spot-on for what I want, with section headings like GAME OVER MAN, LISTEN UP, ABSOLUTE BADASSES, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, and COMBAT & CLUSTERFUCKS. It’s an indie product through and through… charmingly low production values and tons of creative ideas.
The DIY art!

It’s not *all* great, but Garske produced some pretty neat art for the book. Also, I’ve always been a sucker for sweet APCs with big-ass wheels, so…

I essentially always like the simplicity of TBH’s chassis, and the speed at which those games play once the action starts heating up. The game will play fast.
The HOSTILES section is short, but filled with good ideas regarding things like Amoeboids, Cephalopods, Bugs, Demons, Humanoids, Robot Assassins and Zombies. And if you want more, in a system like this they are easy to make — or even import from other TBH-based games with just a little tuning.
The “Heavy Weapon” and “Heavy Armor” tags work really well to model tanks, walkers, giant bugs and the like. If something has Heavy Armor, you need a Heavy Weapon to damage it. Simple as that.
The section on PSI-POWERS is pretty damned sweet for just being two pages long. Love the pushing of abilities / Brain Bleed. Here, check it out:

Great little very workable set of Psi rules. Dig ‘em.

What Needs Work

So, no game is perfect, right? Here are a couple of things I think I’d tune if I ran Stay Frosty…

The weapons are a little uninspired — pretty standard Aliens fare, from pistols and knives to flamers and grenades, to rifles and squad automatic weapons. There are no experimental weapons, no smart or gyroc guns, no energy weapons, no drones, nothing of that sort. Armor, too, is a bit boring… there’s no powersuit, no personal-use heavy armor that’s rated for vacuum or boarding actions, no jump pack, no modeling of an O2 supply… you get the idea. If you’re a marine, you’ve got a helmet and a flak vest. And you’ll like it, soldier! HOORAH!
The core mechanic, for me, is a step in completely the wrong direction. It’s nicely dialed in TBH games; here it just feels upside down. Having a Brawn rating of 4+ be superior to a 10+ doesn’t feel right to me. It’s not intuitive, and while I’m sure it wouldn’t take long to get used to, it just doesn’t bring anything to the table that makes it better or easier to grok than a standard roll-under d20 setup. That jank is amplified by the fact that the GM tries to roll below that target number with enemies, while the player tries to roll over it. What’s that you say, why is the GM rolling in a game that game from TBH? Aren’t most of those rolls player-facing? Well yes they are, but this is another thing that the author changed… that I don’t believe adds anything to the game.
As cool as the ideas are around the Danger Die, Tension, Frostiness, and Going Apeshit — it feels like it would be a little much in play. There’s a lot of interconnectivity, and while I’m sure it’s not that hard to get down it’s just not as elegant as the modern stress systems we see in systems like Tuesday Knight Games’ Mothership 1e and Free League’s Alien.

Final Thoughts

Great little game, highly recommended. I have a few quibbles, but in the end accounting I really like what Garske is doing and the changes I’d make are fairly minor ones.

We’ll see how this stacks up in the end after I’ve looked at a few more games aimed at space marinery, but I’d have no qualms about running one-shots or short campaigns with Stay Frosty.

Thanks for following along if you’ve gotten this far, kind readers. Catch you on the rebound!