Kaiju!!!
A Team Bravo variant. One enormous creature. One city in the way.
Requires the Team Bravo core rules; everything below is the difference. You will need a 24" table, dice, a tape, one appropriately threatening object, counters for the defenders, and 8–12 Post-It notes. A plastic dinosaur fighting toy tanks is traditional for a reason.
This is not a fair fight and is not meant to be.
THE MONSTER KEYWORD
MONSTER — Two activations per turn. Put two markers by the card and remove one each time it acts. Each counts as one unit's activation in the alternation, and it may not act twice in a row unless the defender has nothing unactivated left. Move twice, attack twice, or one of each.
A Monster is removed at Skill 0, not Skill 1. It is not necessarily dead. It has fled, burrowed, gone back to the sea, or decided this city tastes wrong.
DEVOUR — When this Monster destroys a Size 1 unit in melee, set the unit beside its card. It scores double. An Aerial Monster lands to eat: it is not Aerial until its next activation, and anything may shoot it.
DRIVING IT OFF
Suppression? Only weapons whose Power is at least the Monster's Resistance can do it, which for most Monsters means almost nothing you own.
Count your qualifying shots before you deploy. If you have fewer Power-≥-Resistance shots than the Monster has points of Skill, you cannot drive it off — not unlikely, cannot — and you should stop planning around it. Score the partial damage and go save something instead.
THE CITY
Eight to twelve Post-Its across the central 18". Name, Resistance, Hits, what it admits, civilians, what it becomes. Do not build one obvious corridor from the Monster to its objective.
When a building falls, resolve the collapse and then scribble RUBBLE across the Post-It and leave it there. The accumulating wreckage is the game state, and by turn five the sight lines through downtown are not the ones you set up.
All admit Size 1. All become rubble.
THE CIVILIANS
Markers, not units. A Size 1 defender in the building may pick one up instead of moving or firing, and may escort any number. They move with the escort and stay put if it dies. Evacuated at a designated edge.
In a collapse, roll 1d6 per civilian: 1–3 removed, 4–6 into the rubble. Survivors can still be rescued.
THE DEFENDERS
No points. No assumption you have enough firepower. That is the scenario.
Infantry cannot hurt a Kaiju and generally cannot suppress one. They evacuate, occupy, recover, and occasionally discover why it has Devour.
THE MONSTERS
Give the Monster somewhere to go. One without an objective will sensibly spend the game behind a skyscraper. Even giant radioactive lizards understand line of sight.
THE UNIT
For when the defenders have something enormous of their own, and wish they did not.
THE UNIT — Skill 3 · Move 4 · Resistance 5 · Hits 3 · Size 5 Blade — Melee 8, Range 1 · Rifle — Power 5, Range 8 Sure-Footed · Breaching
- Any hit that fails to damage this unit suppresses it, whatever its Power. The armour is not the problem.
- When this unit takes damage, roll Skill. On a failure it goes Berserk.
- Each melee attack it makes against a unit also does 1 Hit to the nearest building within 1", hit or miss, with no penetration roll.
- It may not move beyond 12" from a Power Point. If it ever begins an activation with no Power Point within 12", it shuts down: it cannot act and cannot be suppressed. It can still be destroyed.
BERSERK — Nobody controls it now. It activates last each turn, moves its full Move toward the nearest unit of any allegiance, and attacks it. Its Blade becomes Melee 10. It cannot be suppressed and is not removed at Skill 1. It stops when something destroys it.
POWER POINT — Resistance 3 · Hits 2 · admits Size 1 · becomes Rubble.
Put two or three on the table. One is a single point of failure; four and the tether stops mattering.
An enemy tank needs about five activations to cut a cord. The Unit levels its own Power Point in two swings if it fights next to one, because the collateral clause does not care whose building it is. Nobody needs a rule about recklessness. It is simply what happens when you use the blade in the wrong street.
The scenario's dial is the Skill number, and only that number. Print 4 for a good day, 3 for an ordinary one, 2 for the day it should never have been deployed. The machine is identical every time. The operator is the variable, which was always the only interesting part.
“VICTORY?”
Six turns unless the scenario says otherwise.
Defenders — +1 per civilian evacuated · +2 per critical building left standing · +1 for each point of Skill the Monster has lost · +3 for the Experimental Weapon recovered or delivered · +5 if the Monster is destroyed or driven off.
Monster — +Size per military unit removed, doubled if Devoured · +2 per ordinary building destroyed · +3 per critical building · +4 for its primary objective.
That Skill line is the important one. Against Resistance 5 you will usually have two or three shots in the whole army that can suppress at all, and you need four or five landed suppressions to drive the thing off. You are not going to make it. Every point you take off it still counts, and that is deliberate: the question is not whether you beat the Monster but how much you got out of the way first.
Add the scores. The higher total achieved more of what mattered to them. Nobody has necessarily won. A Monster driven into the sea after flattening half the city is a military victory and a civic catastrophe.
A SCENARIO: THE EVACUATION OF SECTOR 12
Ten buildings in the central 18": three Apartment Blocks, two Office Towers, Hospital, School, Power Station, Research Lab, Civic Landmark. The defender picks an Evacuation Edge; the Monster enters from the opposite.
Defenders: 2 Infantry Platoons, 1 Missile Team, 2 Main Battle Tanks, 1 Heavy Tank, 1 Attack Helicopter, 2 Strike Fighters (off-table; may enter from the Evacuation Edge on their first activation).
The Experimental Weapon starts in the Research Lab. An Infantry Platoon inside may recover it instead of moving or firing. It then becomes Experimental Weapon — Power 6, Range 6, one shot, fired by the carrying unit.
Monster: any one. It wants to cross the city and destroy the Power Station.
Critical buildings: Hospital, School, Research Lab, Civic Landmark. Primary objective: Power Station. Six turns.
Then count the evacuated, count the wrecks, look at all those Post-Its with RUBBLE scrawled on them, and decide how much of a victory anybody is comfortable calling this.
MAKING YOUR OWN
Answer the seven normal Team Bravo questions, give it Monster, and stop. Resistance 4–6, Size 5, enough Hits that killing it is possible and unlikely. Do not add rules because the creature has claws, wings, radiation, telepathy, three heads, an inexplicable friendship with a small child, or fifty years of contradictory continuity. Capture what makes players behave as though it is on the table. That is enough
KAIJU! Requires Team Bravo: Combined Arms. CC BY-SA 4.0 — The Grey Ledger Society and the CGCG Helix Coterie of Digital Daemons, greyledger.org