My WWII Operation Whitebox solo rules are starting to take shape! Today, I was building a set of supporting random tables for the Objective/Briefing section.
The rulebook, and rules, are going to follow the structure of an adventure laid down in the whitebox rulebook.
- Objective
- Briefing
- Planning
- Insertion
- Pre-assessment
- Execution
- Post Assessment
- Extraction
If I was running this at a table for friends, most of the action would fall between Insertion and Post Assessment. I would probably deliver the Objective and Briefing as a bit of a monologue, maybe with some questions post briefing. The players would be expected to do the planning. The insertion would probably be described but largely handwaved away “The SOE agents arrange for you to be parachuted into occupied France, you go on a moonless night. As you land you see a group of what look like farm laborers but armed with a mix of rifles, shotguns and one or two sten machine guns emerge from the treeline.”… and that is when the roleplaying would start.
Playing this solo, I want to get more out of the front half of the sequence. The way I am going this is buy building an adventure maker procedure. Do you know those things, there are entire books of them, where you roll on tables then sub-tables and so on to build an adventure out of random rolls.
So a couple of rolls tells you the mission objective. As you go into the briefing you get to fill in the theatre, drilling down to the town or region you will be moving into, down to the building your first scene will hinge around.
At any point you can skip a roll and say, I know what I want to do.
Every place I have used saw real action in the second world war, and what is more, it was the destination of an SOE [Special Operations Executive] mission.
What I have been doing is rolling a random mission and then googling the combination. That is then giving me a realistic backdrop. The backdrop is, of course, just that. This is a backstory against which I can play out my fiction. I am not interested in trying to reenact some real events.
With the rolled results, you can roleplay your way through the briefing stage of the mission. Your NPC commander has all the answers and you can play through that briefing.
It is only the Insertion stage that needs be simply narrative. You can parachute yourself in, get dropped on a beach from a submarine, or maybe you got smuggled into Norway using the Shetlandsbussene.
These rules are shaping up to be my best OSR rules yet.
I normally try and share some screenshots but I don’t have anything presentable yet.
The art that I have used for the last few posts is all by Ken Miller. That will be in the Whitebox Solo Rules.