Campaign Idea: Last Train To Clarksville

This is another game I’ve been wanting to run. It’s basically a military hexcrawl with time-pressure. It would probably work with something like Traveller or Lancer.

The basic idea is, the PCs are deposited on some backwater planet, with a mission to investigate some McGuffin - an unexpected power spike, meet with some local, recon some area, whatever, it doesn’t really matter.

The “turn” comes when some terribly bad guy appears; something like, an enemy battle fleet jumps in-system. The players need to race against time to meet their extraction.

You’d do a kind of turn-based wargame thing. “Turns” would be broken into 2 12-hour phases, day and night. The PCs would do things like route-plan, and events happen randomly (the bad guys had people on the ground, too) or as part of their route (meeting with the locals to barter for help, or maybe whatever the McGuffin mystery is needs more investigation).

You could do fun things like make them ration food and water and especially ammo, injuries slowing the group down, stuff like that.

The problem here is: do you kill them? A TPK isn’t very fun. Also, a lot of bookkeeping is needed. Still, I think it might be fun.