PA Operations Manual Excerpt: Donning

Note: The procedures for readying the Tactical Augmentation exoSkeleton Carapace Model 79 (TASC-79 Eisenhower "Powered Armor") is similar - but not identical to - those for the TASC-80 (EVANS/Donovan PA) and TASC-83 (Colin Powell). Failure to mind these differences may result in injury! See also FM-3.0.4-92-SM for use of Special Maneuver Augmentation Carapace (SMAC) 90 (MacArthur).

1.0 Overview

A unit ready for use will seem like a rigid set of armored mechanics overalls. A pilot steps into the lower leg portions, locks in, and adjusts. The front armor plate is then folded up from its waist hinge to cover the upper and lower torso. Once secured, the pilots arms are lowered into those of the suit, the gauntlets are ratcheted up, and the pauldrons fold over to lock the shoulders and front in place. The helmet then drops down and twists to lock on. Provided no major adjustments are to be made, the solder can be fully equipped in less than sixty seconds.

1.1 Feet

Approach open TASC unit, using ingress stairs to find correct level. Turn to face forward, as determined by suit. Side step to place feet into Sabatons and open Greaves [*Boot/lower leg armor*], careful to keep feet oriented at a 30 degree inward angle. Fit them snugly into the provided stirrups and adjust for fit. Turning feet forward will will lock them into place so that moving of the TASC and the pilots feet are linked.

WARNING: Once locked in, do not move feet until remainder of  start-up procedure is complete!

WARNING: Do Not lean on open forward plate unit may tip!

1.2 Lower Body

Once the feet are locked into place, the Poleyn and Cuisses (Knee and thigh protection) will move into place automatically. Small thumb switches will allow the user to inflate/deflate air bladders used to adjust comfort of the armor - be sure the fit is firm and comfortable - overly loose or tight fit may result in long term discomfort or injury.

1.3 Gauntlets and Arm Protection...

Rethinking Vehicles

I've been working out how many different types of vehicles must be included to give a fair cross section of  what is in the zone. I've come up with a rather lengthily list:

• Intercity District Type Electric Car
• Long range Touring Type Car
• Semi Truck
• Bus
• Pickup Truck/ Technical
• Armored Personnel Carrier/Fast Attack Vehicle
• Tank
• Power Armor (Utility, Standard, Anti-Tank, Stealth)
• Helicopter
• Drone
• Ultralight
• Motorcycle

This has started to pose a bit of a problem, because as I work out the numbers, the current system begins to seem a bit too inaccurate. Thinking of vehicles in personal terms does make bookkeeping simple, and limits the number of new rules needed. Furthermore, this isn't supposed to be a vehicle combat war game or a recreation of movies like Mad Max and Deathrace 2000.

Yet, I am beginning to feel that perhaps acceleration is a good stat to have in situation where you need to know if a vehicle can outrun a rampaging monster. How do you determine towing or animus points?  In the case of people Wits/Technique affects carrying capacity because knowing what to pack and how to balance the load affects how much you can stuff in the pack yet still access quickly - but the technical sophistication of truck's on-board computer does not determine its trunk space.

For the time being, I'm thinking of introducing some sort of scale multiplier - rather than attributes added together. It will probably be on a scale of one to five, or perhaps up to seven to match the current scale. Powered armor would probably be only one or two (there aren't Iron Man suits after all)

Of course I could just make up numbers - but I feel a system would be better. I've seen several games where the scale of armor or number of hit points gets out of hand, and would like to avoid that. I don't see a player oriented vehicle construction system in the future, but a concept of one will make my life easier.

Possible new Attributes:
Acceleration, Cargo, breaking distance, ground-clearance/off-road rating, highway rating, passenger safety/critical threshold (if more than X damage - people or things inside get hurt)

Dr. Joeseph Conrad Kurtz

Background

If you're going to ask - yes, I am a doctor - just not that kind of doctor. Specifically, I was an anthropologist and museum curator. Its not some false honorific I gave myself after coming to a position of strength. Who do you think I am - Idi Amin? Yes, yes - well before your time.

I am also not some low-born hard drinking thug. Not that there isn't some truth to that stereotype of raiders, but you won't find them in my group. Or most places these days - after the first six or twelve months, raiders tended to either get smart or get killed. We had the advantage of starting smart, and getting better from there. If fact, I have a college education and came from a quite well to do family, as do a number of my comrades.

You would not be the first person to tell me that the Event was a truly unexpected time, and I should not blame the government for what happened. I respect that you can hold such people in high regard, but must respectfully call that sort of thinking a load of s---.

I've spent years studying people. I knew what sort of problems would arise in a scenario like this, and that the government had to be there to avoid it. But government on all levels - local, federal - even even things as small as members of chess clubs looking out for one another failed. In an insane time, men must do insane things.

At some point, my group will be obsolete, or we'll settle down to our own little state the same way Genghis Khan found it more profitable to levy taxes than level cities. Now is still not that time however.

Statistics
Strength: 3
Quick: 4
Tech: 4
Wits: 5
Close Combat: 2
Ranged: 4

Secondary Attributes
Animus: 9
Deadening: 8
Lucidity: 9
Pack: 9 (18kg)
Up-Rise: 7 (42 kg)

Skills
Negotiating
Repair
Wilderness Survival
Investigation


Appearance
Despite rumors to the contrary, Kurtz is not particularly large or imposing. In fact, he is more of the very mundane and balding visage an artful director would cast as a Nazi accountant to demonstrate the banality of evil. His clothing choice is based on comfort and utility, often reminiscent of an African game warden. Most people are quite surprised to learn he is nearly seventy years old, but the abilities of nano-vaccine and a healthy lifestyle means even a septuagenarian is capable of leading the attack from the back of a bouncing light armored vehicle with little discomfort.

Equipment
The "Tower Reversed" is one of the largest bands of raiders in the USA anarchy zone - and the most heavily armed outside of a few rouge military units. It is not as vicious as some of the smaller groups, however, confident in both its power, and lead by the calm and collected Dr. J.C. Kurtz. Most other bandits know not to mess with the band named for the tarot arcana - unless they want to learn the card heralds destruction.

The group is known to have at least a dozen APCs and light armored vehicles - though these are rarely used due to their poor fuel economy. Instead, standard pick-up trucks modified into technical with boom-tubes or heavy machine-guns are the preferred means of transit.

Kurtz personally prefers a dune buggy equipped with a heavy machine-guns and a forty-millimeter boom-tube grenade launcher as his personal mount. Outside a vehicle, he shows a preference for several antique but well maintained weapons - a Gwher-98 bolt action rifle and a Colt .45 M1911A3, though he is pragmatic about others as necessary, and is rarely far from an M-32 PDW.
 
In Game
Kurtz is in no small way a nod to the character in "The Heart of Darkness" (Or its redressed version - "Apocalypse Now") Although raider well known for firepower and ruthlessness in taking convoys or robbing settlements, he is also charismatic, educated, a connoisseur of fine drink, and quite personable when not holding a gun.

Players might run into his raiders as recurring enemies, a source of employment, or even a sort of anti-hero, depending on the tone of the game.

The man has all but memorized Machiavelli's "The Prince", Sun Tzu's "Art of War"  and a number of other classics. It would not be wholly wrong to portray him a bit like a Bond Villain, minus the rampant megalomania and with a fairly Libertarian bent. He is quite willing to dine and converse with captives - explaining his motivations and offering them deals if he is suitably impressed.

A Few Ideas about Mexico

If stories in the American Anarchy Zone follow stories of travel like Huckleberry Finn, ones in Mexico are tales of chivalry and the knight errant.

Currently, Mexico has seen a return to the semi-feudal Hacienda system that predates the 1910 revolution. Some of these areas are simply run by rich individuals that garnered loyalty, others by police or army units that pacified an area. More than a few are run by former criminals - indeed the closest thing to a nation-like city-state is a group of outposts under control of Manuel DeZufingia - notorious drug cartel leader and father of a certain radio personality.

As to why Mexico has become more like 13th century France than Hellenistic Greece - its a matter of unfulfilled promise. Despite desire for reform from the 1910 revolution, each successive government generally only paid lip-service to the ideals, occasional a single leader creating a dynasty through puppet presidents.

None of this was improved by the masses of money and loyal - if informal - armies amassed by drug runners and other smugglers passing through the country.

However, one of the bigger points of contention was the drying up of Mexico's oil wealth, combined with the turmoil of the South Americas. Nuclear programs in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela presented not only technical competition of economics, but changed the past eighty years of strategic thinking, that always looked east and west for nuclear weapons - now there was a north-south element as well.  New wealth, nationalism, and a change in the old status quo of economics meant a series of small wars broke out, and Mexico became all the more a strategic nexus.

Post event, many of the largest cities - especially the capital, became murder-yards. A number of the others are known to be heavily infested. Citizen presence is fairly low, though the north-eastern part of the country is home to some of the same group that has all but quarantined the US West coast.

The Sphere Part One

Most computers in the anarchy zone future history use trinary logic - that is 0/.5/1 rather than only 0/1 binary. Many are also base around optical hardware, and some even quantum. However, very few people use computers. Those are just machines that sit in the other room, bouncing around lasers to to read data. What people use is their shirt sleeves and glasses.

The Sphere is not the internet. The Sphere is augmented reality. Through either glasses, contacts, or even optical implants, people can see Elements of the grid. By way of analogy imagine everything in the world covered with bulletin boards, and the ability of everyone to post notes as they see fit, and sort through those of friends or some select group of strangers. Directions to an unfamiliar restaurant are given by a virtual line running though the streets rather than a sequence of names and turning directions.

Buttons integrated into sleeves, armbands, or other articles of clothing mean most tasks don't require pulling out a device - just tapping on your non-dominant limb. Although there is some gesture and voice recognition - these are generally reserved for private settings where cross signals from others won't be a problem, and the user's movement won't disturb bystanders. Folding keyboards and tablets offer another input option.

Some people still use the internet as a early 20th century user might recognize it. An old binary based architecture still kept for those with nostalgia or nefarious purposes in mind.

Post Event Sphere
The Event was heralded by a massive electromagnetic pulse/solar flare phenomenon. Optical or not, computers still need electricity - so the shut down of power grinds across the planet rendered most of them non functional. Those who can get a server working have an excellent resource for storing data or providing assistance over a limited area. However, given the bandwidth of transmissions required - signals don't broadcast far without the cellular repeater network - so setting up new systems in the immediate are is necessary to get the most use out of the thing.

Comunication Links

Look at the back of almost any electronic device, and it will have a message to the effect of :

This Device complies with part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) This device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.

An electromagnetic pulse, and the resulting resistance heating of energized components - can be interpreted as a rather massive form of interference. And since things with antennas are designed to collect and amplify incoming EM signals - well most communications equipment was devastated by the Electromagnetic Pulse of the event - both alien generated an human nuclear weapons. Orbital communication satellites were also damaged by either pulses or deliberately shot down to deny humans military cohesion (it cannot be said often enough - Citizens are a lot smarter than the average movie invader).

However, the blackout was not total. Technologies like cellular communication and distributed computing meant no one element would take down the entire com grid. Furthermore, there were plenty of radios built to either military shielded standards, or by luck were stored in a place with enough shielding to be unaffected. Micro-facs have succeeded in producing new equipment as well, though it will take some time until phones are as ubiquitous as they once were.

Long distance communication is unlikely. With no maintenance on much of the cable network - tremors, flooding, animals, and other such natural phenomenon have rendered most hard-lines. As stated previously, the satellites needed for the other form of long range transmission are gone. AM radio at night, when signals can be bounced off the ionosphere and travel several times father than their day-time range - though this still limits intentional links. Of course, even if inter-continental communication was possible, the ability to act over those distance is lacking.

Couriers have become a major network for information. Convoys will of course carry mail, and some city states maintain professional delivery services for important missives. A few small groups have even tried to start a national mail service, though they are still competing with each other than a unified whole.

This leaves a place for players as those trying to pass along messages, interfere with them, or even as civil engineers placing new cell towers and helping bring back the network. Exciting as a run through a reanimate infested factory complex might be, there is a need for the long term. Becoming the lords of a telecommunications fiefdom could end up far more enriching than raids on old factory complexes.

Town Stats Part One

An external mode Dead and Back game is an odyssey or a travelogue. Traveling the zone is fairly placid - like Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi river. Stepping off the raft, leads to complications. Of course, even if it is the journey, and not the destination that is important - there will be many stops and sites to see. Thus how to manage and create settlements can be of great importance.

The most obvious way is to base the elements on what the story needs. Wounded players will find a doctor to help keep the game moving, or wont to keep up the tension. The required resource they must return to their homes will be availible when the campaign is ready to reach a climax, and not just a random roll on a loot chart.

For those who don't mind doing a bit of research, basing towns on real life locations can be useful. A game master can chose a local city that all the player are famialr with - and thus abel to use real landmarks and lcations as points of refrence, and have a good idea of what is around. Conversely, the GM could pick an area in a diffrent part of the country - which puts the players in unfamialr teritory - services like "Google Maps" can give acurate distances or infor about what they might encounter.


A more complex way would be combining the scarcity rules with a series of metrics. In turn, these are further sub-divided into three sub categories - Required, Helpful, and Advanced. So for example - all towns will have some population, but not all of them have doctors and mechanics, and veteran soldiers are found in only a few that have properly established themselves.


Required Attributes:

• Population - Number of people available to work
• Defense -
• Location - Safety and natural resources of the area
• Resources -Goods, services, and benefits of the town
• Stability - law enforcement and government planning

Helpful:

• Skilled Labor - Doctors, Mechanics, Chemists and so forth.
• Body Armor -
• Trade Goods - valuable commodities like micro-fac goods, medicine, chemicals.
• Soldiers -
• Rifles - People can defend themselves with handguns or improvised weapons, but better equipment is nice.

Advanced:

• Transports -
• Military Vehicles or Power Armor
• Veterans - People with advanced knowledge of combat form either pre-Event or learned survival
• Infrastructure - Working electricity, pumped water, SPHERE connectivity.

I am still working on ideas of how to assign point costs or value to each of these, and what a certain level might mean in terms of numbers. But for the moment, it works like the already present scarcity system - assign a die size, and roll to test if that commodity is available or not. A one d6 rating in soldiers means about a dozen well-trained fighters live there - but rolling a five or six when the players ask for support means they're all otherwise engaged.

The required attributes are phased scarcity.A failed roll indicates something is going wrong with the basic functioning of the outpost, and the area is degrading. For example, a failed location roll means might mean they are using too much lumber or polluting the water, rendering the area a bit less liviable. Meanwhile, defenses degrade as opponents learn the layout of traps and adapt, or damage to walls reduces their integrity.

Conversly, the advanced ones are most likely binary - either they have the goods you're looking for, or they don't.