Five Parsecs from Home: Tactics

As my Birthday present, back in the Summer, I received Five Parsecs from Home: Tactics, to give me some extra options when running games for the crews of the Millennium Chicken and the Power Cruiser.  Here are my first thoughts:

Obligatory cover photo.

 Firstly, I did notice that there are quite a few issues with the editing and proofreading.  There are numerous typos and spelling mistakes, brackets start in the wrong place, a target selection diagram is labelled incorrectly, (B1 and B2 switched so that it no longer makes sense).  I don't know whether there was a rush to get it finished, I certainly didn't spot the same sort of problems in the original Five Parsecs or the Compendium expansion.  Apart from this issue though, the quality is what you'd usually expect from Modiphius, i.e. excellent.  High quality glossy paper, crisp printing, atmospheric artwork from Christian Quinot all adds up to something that feels like a classy product in your hands.

Example artwork.

 

Ivan Sorensen obviously has a real soft spot for the original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, his Rogue Hammer and Renegade Scout game systems being a very direct and obvious homage to it.  This also carries through to Five Parsecs Tactics.  Ivan has coined the term "Directed Scenario Gaming" to describe the 40K:RT style of Game-Master run player vs player game, something which has rather faded away from the 1990s onwards.  Nowadays it just tends to be the 2 players, and modern 40K certainly seems to encourage the mentality that everything has to be exactly as per the rule book, even down to the size and amount of terrain used in a game.  This is Ivan's attempt to hark back to that earlier style of gaming and to give it a name.  It's something I really miss in a lot of games that I've watched people playing at clubs, where it is often just an unimaginative "line up the armies and let them shoot each other".  It's a reason why I prefer the more asymmetric style of something like Tomorrow's War, where there is a specific objective to accomplish other than just killing all of the enemy.  [One of the most disappointing games I witnessed was a big club game whene everyone brought in as much as they could.  There were superheavy tanks, a Reaver Titan, hordes of tanks and Space Marines.  I thought it was an excellent opportunity for a really unusual game such as trying to stop the Titan walking the length of the table, but it just ended up the usual situation of lining up the 2 opposing armies about 3 feet apart along the 18 foot long run of tables and pounding each other to pieces.  Such a missed opportunity - but I digress...]

Contents 1.

 

Contents 2.

The rules are fairly similar to standard Five Parsecs, but with adjustments as required for the larger scale of the games.  The addition of vehicles and heavier weapons is one of the most obvious examples.  There are also more rules for morale on both sides, which makes sense when you're dealing with multiple units and lots of troops instead of just a small crew of 4-6.  While there are still solo options, the possibility of a live opponent is built in from the start with this rule set.  One interesting addition is "Tactical Options", with rules for skulking (i.e. hiding), fall back and overwatch.  The overwatch rule (p43) does seem slightly odd though, in that you can’t fire partway through enemy move, only before they start or after they finish.  In other words, it's impossible to shoot at someone as they dash between from cover to cover across a street, which to me takes away one of the main functions of overwatch.

The campaigns section offers 4 types of battle.  Starting small with skirmish, graduating to battle, finshing with grand battle.  An additional option is the "evolving objective battle" where the objectives are revealed as the game unfolds.  There are 100 scenario seeds (reminiscent of the original Rogue Trader with its 10 x 10 tables of plot generator plus 20 additinoal sub-plots), story events that take place between battles, primary and secondary objectives that can be incorporated.  Characters and squads can grow and improve, each battle can influence what happens in the next, and to the campaign as a whole.  The campaign section is a really important part of the game if you're playing solo, so this is a particularly useful part of the book.

100 scenario ideas.

Possible inspiration? The original 40K: Rogue Trader

plot generator (plus proper Dark Angels in BLACK armour!) 

  Game mastering: this involves a useful discussion of Active vs Passive GM, how to use tests to allow troops to accomlish tasks, adding tasks / actions, how to arrange the battlefield, side plots, deployment options, assembling scenarios, additional rules on construction, demolition, dangerous terrain, gas/smoke, using items and lots more.

The Army Builder covers a range of options for army leaders, various squad types (infantry, recon, storm), weapon teams, specialists (techs, medical, communications etc), alternative squad types (enforcer, pirate, militia, cavalry). There is also the option of an armoured platoons of vehicles.

The vehicles section of the army builder includes 3 bikes (2 of which are grav/speeder type); 2 trikes; armoured car; tracked & grav versions of APCs, IFVs, light & medium tanks; tracked heavy tanks; light & heavy walkers; 2 sizes of combat robot. Optional weapon upgrades are available for several, but there are no construction rules.  Although you could invent other vehicles eg. jeep, transport truck, police car or scout robot, you'd have to take a guess at their points cost.  This is an example of the artwork (which is excellent throughout) not matching the content.  There are a couple of different pictures of wheeled APCs in the book, but there isn't one in the example vehicles, only tracked or grav.  The Field Commander's Guide expansion does offer extra rules for modifications and upgrades to your vehicles, but it would have been nice to have a few extra options in the main book.

Vehicle rules (featuring vehicle not included in rules)

  Veterans includes special skills, with differing sets for squads, sergeants, gun crews, vehicles.

15 races are listed, along with their variations in characteristics and special abilities.  Each race includes stats for military, civilian (eg. GM run characters), sergeants/minor characters, major characters, and epic characters.  This is the sort of game where most races use fairly equivalent weapons.  No 40K style armies where each has unique weapons with lots of special rules, in Five Parsecs everyone has access to weapons which fall into certain basic categories.  A rifle may fire projectiles using gunpowder, compressed air or magnetic coils, but if all of them have the same chance of armour penetration and damage, they all use the same profile.  Certain races may be more likely to be predisposed to certain weapon types, but most weapons are available to most races.

 There are a further 5 pages of creatures which the GM might like to spring on unsuspecting players at the dramatically appropriate moment...

The army builder ends with 7 pages of points costs to help you assemble your army.

At the end of the book, we have the appendices, which start with 2 pages of conversion rules to use 5PH characters in Tactics: the first on how to convert stats both ways between games, fairly minimal because much is already very similar; the second page on combining the games so that crews can take part in a Tactics battle instead of a normal campaign turn scenario.

The rest of the appendices include an 8 page timeline for background fluff, a couple of pages each on how to start collecting figures, inspirations (film/TV/games/music/books), designers notes.

At the very back are 2 pages of game markers & units cards (obviously easier printed from a pdf than trying to copy from the book), plus a detailed 6-page index.

This book will be a good addition to our games, providing extra options for including vehicles and bigger weapons.  One of the campaigns may end in a full scale rebellion, and having the option for large scale battles will be really useful.  There are also loads of great campaign ideas and mechanisms that you could use for all sorts of games, not just Five Parsecs.

Despite the poor editing noted at the start of this review, I'm very glad I got this book.  It was quite pricey at £31.50 from Wayland Games (with free postage), and would have been even more so direct from Modiphius at £40 plus £6.31 postage.  Modiphius do thrown in the pdf free (usually £20 on its own), but that's a lot of money compared to what I'd usually expect to pay for a set of rules*, and paying almost 50% more for a game when you get it direct from the publisher seems a substantial uplift.  Apart from the dodgy editing in places, it is otherwise a very good quality product, 205 glossy pages, packed with content, the vast majority of which is rules with fairly minimal fluff, hardback in the same slightly smaller size as used for the previous Five Parsecs books.

*Looking at pricing again, the cheapskate in me is perhaps being a little harsh.  According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, my copy of Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader (286 pages) was £9.99 in 1990, which would be around £25.55 today.  This is the softback 2nd imprint.  The original 1987 hardback at £14.99 would be the equivalent of £44.80 today.  The current 11th edition of 40K is £15.00 for an A5 softback (though you can download the basic rules free).  Xenos Rampant is £25 direct from Osprey Publishing for a 190 page hardback.  Battletech core rules seem to be from £30-£45 depending on edition and where you have to order from [though it has the advantage that the core of the rules is pretty much the same as when I started playing it back in the early 1990's].  So on balance, I suppose Five Parsecs:Tactics is only slightly above the average sort of price for games like this.  It's the high delivery cost from Modiphius that bumps it up as much as anything.