The great GDPR scandal - Skirmish game scenario

++ALERT++

The Great GDPR Scandal

++ALERT++

BOT DOWN….EXTRACTION PROTOCOL COMMENCE

++EXTEND CONNECTION++

++INITIATE CONTACT SEQUECE++

It’s mid-afternoon on a rainy Tuesday downtown when the compliance and research division of Digital Taxidermy CoRp^TM were rampaging through the streets in their usually brusk and thorough manner. I guess a new product is on its way and they are force feeding it to the poor scum on the street….Well today they turned up on the wrong street corner and this one bot was surprised to find a safe falling from the top of the nearest block and onto whatever counts as a head for those tin cans. ‘Well that does it, that’s today ruined’.

++BEEP BEEP++

‘That was them!’

‘We have been engaged’.

‘Well, get the sluggers then this day is not going to get any better!’

The great GDPR scandal is the potential result of losing customers personal data…not because of their privacy but because it’s valuable. Company policy is to ensure that the data is recovered by any means. Like any good gang a top notch corporation is built in layers and full of secret operatives, many so secret they don’t know that they work for the corporation. 

You are one of those agents, a bot is down and you must assemble your gang to go and retrieve this most precious of data, but there is a catch. You are not the only agent woken.

Setup

This scenario is designed to fit into any popular table top skirmish game. Examples would be Judge Dredd, Infinity, Fallout Wasteland warfare, kill team and Necromunda. The scenario works with 2-10 models per ‘gang’. Please use all rules you are familiar with from your chosen game systems for the dynamics of the world and the characters in it. Suggested game systems would be Judge Dredd, Necromunda and fallout wasteland. If you know of any other game systems that would fit this objective please leave them in the comments,

This is a mad dash to get the data and get it out safe; you may have to use all your cunning a guile to get the prize before anyone else does.

This scenario should be setup on a 4x4 board in a dense urban environment, there should be a crossroad or public square in the middle of the board. Place plenty of cover and things to hide behind too. We recommend not just having all roads straight but make some twisty streets and paths.

The Drone was downed in the centre of the map. Place the objective maker right in the middle of the table.

There will be 6 points on the board marked 1-6 as entrance points (use dice to mark them); they could be roads or alley ways. These will be the areas models will enter the combat zone from.

Players

Option 1

3-6 players.

Each player gets 1-3 models and points balanced basic weaponry for your rule set, this a low point dash not a straight up gunfight. Move light travel fast.

Option 2

2 players

Each player takes a small gang of 5-10 models depending on your rules system and points balance the weaponry. These are not elite teams they are low level agents and street punks.

Deployment

Each player chooses an entrance point to the board and deploys each of their gangers within 4 inches of the board edge.

Game Play

Players choose who goes first, we suggest the one last involved in a hostile takeover be the first…if neither player has been involved in a hostile takeover then rock, paper, scissors will do.

From here your game plays out in the way you are used too.

When a model ends its turn in base contact with the downed drone you may place the HDD on your models base, to signify its capture.

You must be the first to have a model leave the table with the dead drones CPU to win. Easy…..

++ALERT++

++GDPR BREACH CONTROL ACTIVE++

Not so easy, the twist is that each consumer research drone has a homing chip. It has been activated on the trashed droid. They are the failsafe, in the event of a potential GDPR breach their only purpose from that moment is to make sure the data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

At the end of turn 2 you roll a D6, This selects the droid that will enter the combat zone. Then roll another D6 this selects the entrance point.  The droid deploys within 2 inches of the board edge at the entrance selected by the dice and activates.

This drone is now an NPC and takes part in this battle. The droids job is to secure the data and will do it single-mindedly as it is programmed to.

At the end of turn three roll 2 D6 to select 2 new droids and their respective entry points.

At the end of turn 4 roll 3 dice. All the drones are on the field now.

The Drones will activate in their numerical order.

The robots all have different personalities and weaponry to suite.

The winner is the gang that gets away with the HDD the spoils, bounty and maybe silencing in a dark alley by the corporate master.

Designer’s Notes

This scenario was designed to fit with any game systems, we could have chosen to just release the marker and say here you go have fun. Instead this little story came to us and thought it would help set the scene for how things can be in our little dystopian future.

The problem with not designing for a specific game system is the lack of specific stats for the robots and with the current lockdown it’s made it impossible to get to the game store and bounce ideas around.

The robots are supposed to make this into a zombie shoot not really to be a solo player AI. Thus the other players are recommended to add the spice to the game.

They are supposed to be lightly armoured cheaply made robots with basic programming. So they will have a low armour stat for your game, something that everyone can damage at range or in close combat. Something that gives around a 50/50 chance to wound would work so a 4+ roll, some robots have modifiers to this such as the shield.

The idea of hit points should be easy to translate to most games and means the number of armour penetrating hits they can take before they die. The idea is that if there are between 10-15 player models on the table they would be able to spread enough hits around to fight off these robots but not so much that the robots would just stomp the table. To alter the difficulty level of the scenario consider raising or lowering the hit points on some or all of the bots.

Their weapon skill is not great and thus again they should have about an average to hit roll of a 3+ or 4+ (some have modifiers to account for their behaviour). CRD01 is very keen on following his orders so always checks his list, he doesn’t pay attention to where he sprays the bullets, he has a targeting system but it’s cheap, so he would suffer a penalty to his ‘to hit’ rolls. The riot foam has a scatter element to it, this can be done with a scatter dice, many game systems have these but we have one here.

All of these rules are just a guide and they are open to interpretation. To save time within game if you encounter something you are unsure of take the first option that comes to mind and run with it.

These are not meant to make a solo game but maybe in the hands of someone more experience it may get ported to effective solo play. We would love to hear about how you ported it to your chosen games system. Firstly there is the Digital Taxidermists group on Facebook. You could also Email us at Sales@digitaltaxidermy.co.uk

So if you have any questions we will be around to answer them or any feedback about this scenario and I can look into applying it to the next one, who knows maybe one day we will have our own ruleset. Finally I hope to see you in our little oddball world further down the road.