Saturday, 2 June 2012

First Look: Platoon Forward

I took advantage of the recent sale at the TooFatLardies to fill a couple of the small remaining holes in my collection of their products.  My most recent acquisition was Platoon Forward which is described as "A dynamic campaign system for tactical level games".  So what do you get?

Platoon Forward comes as a 56 page PDF which is designed to work with a variety of sets of rules, not just those produced by the Lardies.  It is geared around WW2 platoon level games (but could be adapted to other periods) and is broken into three major sections - Your Platoon (generating characters), Forward into Battles (generating scenarios) and Events (self explanatory?).

In Your Platoon you will find a series of five tables and accompanying explanations and examples which help you randomly establish the characteristics of the leaders of your platoon:

  • Personality
  • Motivation and Interest
  • Combat Temperament
  • Combat Leadership
  • Background
These can be used to provide a bit of depth to your leaders, to allocate skills or attributes (if these are supported by the rules) and to help you determine how they would react in particular scenarios when you are playing solo.

Forward into Battle takes you through a series of steps to randomly create a scenario, firstly determining whether you are attacking or defending and then providing 11 types of scenario for each with an accompanying scenario card which gives an outline briefing, the table arrangements, forces and victory conditions.  There is a section which helps you determine the terrain and how to determine your forces (particularly the enemy ones - which is the usual Lardies style will be represented by blinds) and there a several examples too.  This provides an excellent framework to put together solo games or creating a pick up and play game.

Events covers pre-game, in-game, post-game and random events along with tables to help determine character reactions.

The book is intended to be a tool kit from which you can choose as few or as many tools as you wish for your particular need and, as such, is an extremely useful resource, particularly for solo gaming.  It will be of more or less use depending on which rules you use and whether they already cover some of these areas but overall I think it's going to be a useful addition to my wargaming rule shelf.

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