Re: DS/FT/SG: Tuffleyverse Cannon & Personal Stratrgy/Tactics/Design Philosophies

> How many people out there ever stray from the official "Tuffleyverse"
and 
> come up with their own political/military powers to scrap it out?  It
was 
> this possibility that first drew me to the game (Having been
introduced to 
> sci fi wargaming via Battletech, I had grown weary of the
"House/Clan/Merc 
> strictures of that game.  I wanted to be able to have my friends and I
come 
> up with our own countries/powers to fight, since the DS rulebook
really 
> pushes the "generic" quality of the game).  Yet as I observe
discussions of 
> the game, I notice that the political entities of the "canon" are
almost as 
> integral to the discussions as are the rules themselves, though I
admit this 
> is least rampant in discussions of DS II (eg Hammer's Slammers
discussions, 
> etc.).

I’ve designed a couple of minor powers -- the Hanseatic League and the
Pantropist Society
-- and one major power (actually, the Iluminati is THE major power, even
if no one else
knows it) that fit into the Tuffleverse, but I’ve done it more as an
intellectual exercise
than out of any real desire to conform.  I prefer gaming in universes of
my own creation;
that way I don’t have to deal with anyone else’s arbitrary limits.  Only
my OWN arbitrary
limits hold me back!

The only exception to this rule is the less-than-serious world of the
ShockForce game.  I
like less-than-serious; that’s why I came up with the Illuminati for the
Tuffleyverse in
the first place.  I just can’t take gaming that seriously...as witness
the FMA game that I
ran last night.  Inbred hicks, marines, a gang of punk kids, a unit of
Grey aliens, and a
S.W.A.T. team in power armor, trying to recover a mad professor from a
town filled with
zombies.  If we’d had two more players, the mutants and Elvis would have
appeared as well.
 It’s a shame...Elvis would have kicked some serious ass.  No one messes
with the King. 
No one.

I also tend to enjoy designing sub-optimal forces; they can be a lot of
fun to play.  One
of my DSII armies is composed of plastic Renegade Legion tanks, for
instance: I designed
them to have vritually no armor, but enough Stealth to reduce their
signature to that of a
class one vehicle.  Frankly, it’s not a very cost-effective design.  Not
at all.  But it
was fun to run the Steel Ghosts, no matter how brief the resulting
battles were.

Right now, I have a variety of SGII and FT figures painted up, but I
call them whatever I
want for a particular scenario.  I usually call my NSL troops something
reasonably
generic, like Stellar Federation Marines, and pit them against some
Denizen figures
painted up as corporate troops.

John Crimmins
johncrim@voicenet.com
http://www.voicenet.com/~johncrim

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