Generic Creatures

[Dreddnought]

It would be nice to have a little more meat for some generic encounters as you travel about. Yao guai, radstags, Brahmin and other beasties. I know this sort of thing might come out in the (distant) future but these could just be very generic creature and AI cards. For instance the AI cards could be as simple as three cards that show passive animals, intermediate and aggressive. This would still leave room for later, fuller development. I am sure there are other more generic cards that would also be useful.

Anyway, I know it is early days yet but I am hoping that there are plans for ongoing support. Stuff like this can be used to support both versions of the game.

[Alaiteir]

I know there are still more creatures to come out this year, and there are various versions of each of the current ones (ie, Deathclaw and young deathclaw, radroach and glowing radrough, ghoul, weak ghoul, glowing and bloated ghouls, etc), so the amount of variety is definitely increasing. Like you I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more miniatures though

[Bishop]

I think the next release includes Mole Rats so there’s a first wave and means we have a few more creatures for random encounters!

[Banquo]

The RPG rulebook contains the unit cards for a blood bug and a radstag, though it says that they are not compatible with Wasteland Warfare (the cards also show no models).

But it’s nice to see that Modiphius has made a lot of plans already and it’s just a matter of time and success of the system as whole, till we will see those creatures.

[HumanHamster]

Well, nobody says you can’t make your own based on already existing creatures…

[Jakesy]

I’d like to see a few more “random wandering monsters”. In some of my games we’ve thrown the odd robot or creature in as a hostile AI just to mix things up a bit. Only problem really is that unless it’s the sentry or deathclaw they tend to be fodder for both teams.

[GateKeeper]

Consider how often you want a critter to appear. Then either use the creature roll chart or create your own?

Alternately, build yourself a force about half (Give or take) the size of your original forces and roll a d6 to determine which round they appear? Once they arrive, just run the new group on an AI.

[robhistory]

I agree… A big part of the video games was the “wandering monster” type encounter. I’d like to see more of these creatures in the game, and opportunities for them to appear - such as via event cards

[GateKeeper]

@robhistory
Maybe we should dabble in that a bit the next time we play? Should be pretty simple to throw together a set of guidelines and see how it plays out.

I’m thinking along the lines of setting up a hand full of 100-500 point groups (Something fairly generic. Group of molerats, couple radscorpions, radroach swarms, a single deathclaw, those kinds of things) Then roll to for which group appears (Can even set up a quick and dirty random enemy group generator I think.) Then since the game effectively plays on a 3x3 board, one could roll a D10, for deployment zone (Center spot gets 1 and 10) with players alternating who places a model, starting with whoever didn’t roll the enemy group.

I’ll roll it around in my head a bit, see if I can’t come up with something. Right now, we’ve got Deathclaws, Ghouls, Radroaches, Radscorions, Molerats, Mongrels (Use just the dogs at the moment.), robots, and the RPG book even has stats for a stingwings and Radstags. I think that would give a good range of critters to play around with, and as new content for the game is released it would be easy to expand things.

I have one more major thing on my personal to-do list, but I’ll see what I can cobble together tonight if time permits.

[robhistory]

Sounds great. I am working on Molrats and Radroaches now.

I have figures that could sub for other types which aren’t in the game yet. Bloatfly is even painted.

[AlxRaven]

I like this idea a lot.

You could even add a small chance for a group from another faction showing up too. The battle between the Super Mutants and the Survivors drawing the attention of a BoS patrol, for example.

[Jakesy]

@AlxRaven

another faction showing up too

That is a great idea. I think that would have to tka either a luck test or a game activation. Eg radio call ,smoke signal or something.
One thing I’ve done in the past is set a terminal linked to a protectron and the first person to active it gets a protectron on their side.

[GateKeeper]

That’s a pretty good idea. I was debating already about whether or not to add Raiders to the list. I didn’t get to work on this last night like I’d hoped, but should have some time tomorrow afternoon if not sooner.

I expect that the Ghoul portion of the list will be the hardest to put together as they have the most options. The rest should be fairly simple in comparison

I’m thinking something along the lines of:

Ghouls:

1d10:
1-5 Add 1d5 Weak Feral Ghouls
6-8 Add 1d5 Feral Ghouls
9 Add 1d5 Weak Feral Ghouls AND 1d5 Feral Ghouls
10 Roll again and double the die rolled (1d5 would become 2d5, 2d5 would become 4d5 if unlucky enough to roll 10 twice, etc).
NOTEL 1d5 would be rolled on a 1d10 with the result halved, rounded up.

For every 5 ghouls added from the table above:
1d10
1-5 Bloated Glowing One
6-10 Putrid Glowing One

Something like that would generate a pretty small group MOST of the time, merely an annoyance, but an unlucky roll could create complete chaos on the table.

[GateKeeper]

Ok, spent a few minutes putting together a really quick list. Still need to do factions, but thought I’d share what I’ve got so people can give feedback if they want to. (And before people ask, Robots will be handled as part of the “Factions” grouping.)

Thoughts? Comments? Opinions? Certain monster groupings appearing too often? Not often enough? Did I miss something that should be on the list? Anyone have better ideas for stat adjustments for the two Molerat variants I threw in to mix things up?

Mob Encounter Table:
1 Deathclaws
2-4 Molerats
5-7 Mongrels
8-10Ghouls
11-13 Radroaches
14 Radscorpion
15-16 Faction Force
17-18 Stingwing
19-20 Radstag

Deathclaws: (10)
1-6 Young Deathclaws
7-9 Deathclaw
10 Roll two creatures from the Deathclaw list

Molerats: (6)
1-3 Add 1d6 Molerats
4-5 Add 2d4 Molerats and one Molerat Broodmother
6 Reroll and add 1 Glowing Molerat for every 3 Molerats in this force.

Glowing Molerat:
+1 Physical and Energy resistance.
+2 Strength
+2 Endurance

Molerat Broodmother:
+2 Physical and Energy resistance.
+3 Strength
+3 Endurance

Mongrels: (6)
1-4 Add 1d3 Dogs
5-6 Add 1d6 Dogs
NOTE: Roll 1d6, halve and round up.

Ghouls:
1d10:
1-5 Add 1d5 Weak Feral Ghouls
6-8 Add 1d5 Feral Ghouls
9 Add 1d5 Weak Feral Ghouls AND 1d5 Feral Ghouls
10 Roll again and double the die rolled (1d5 would become 2d5, 2d5 would become 4d5 if unlucky enough to roll 10 twice, etc).
NOTEL 1d5 would be rolled on a 1d10 with the result halved, rounded up.

For every 5 ghouls added from the table above:
1d10
1-3 Bloated Glowing One
3-6 Putrid Glowing One
7-10 Nothing

Radroaches: (10)
1-6 Add 2d4 Radroaches
7-10 Add 2d4 Radroaches. Add one Glowing Radroach for every 3 normal Radroaches in your force.

Radscorpions: (10)
1-7 Radscorpion
8-10 Radscorion x 2

Stingwing:
1d4 Stingwings. (RPG Book p115)

Radstag:
1d4 Radstags (RPG Book p119)

Final Note:
What you’d roll to trigger a group could be done a lot of different ways. And what’s right for one group of players isn’t going to be right for the next. I’m thinking rolling a 1d6 at the end of each round, on a 1 the group you rolled arrives.

Alternately, you could roll 1d8 before the game arrives to determine what round they appear during. Or you could roll a d4, d10, or something else depending on how often you’d like such encounters to appear.

Additionally, group size would likely be affected by the point value of your game. I’m thinking this would likely work best if the average encounter group ranged somewhere between 20-50% of the original build value for each player’s group.

[TheOldBadger]

How about a table where there is a chance to find two groups of creatures fighting one another

[GateKeeper]

I think something like that would work better as a scenario. Something along the lines of a group of settlers fighting a group of raiders for the AI, then have a group of Super Mutants and Minutemen as your player forces. The goal of the scenario being that the Minutemen are trying to get to the settlers to rescue them before they’re wiped out while the Super Mutants are looking for fresh meat.

That said, I suppose you could do something similar to that using the above?

I started dabbling with the faction tables last night. all I managed to get done was the BoS.

What I was working on:
Faction Forces:
NOTE1 : I’m operating on the assumption that there will be two opposing forces on the table from differing factions and that players will want an unrelated faction to join the table. As such, there will be two more factions than the roll table shows. If one of the factions being used is already on the list, simply replace it with an alternate from the factions not currently assigned a slot.

NOTE2: Even assuming for a 1000 point game, some of these groupings will be rather potent. I’m trying to put together small groups that would make sense to encounter more than once. If they’re too potent because you’re running a smaller game, or your forces have taken quite a beating, consider halving the HP of some or all of the models in the force, or in the case of BoS even damaging any Power Armor as needed. I would make a goal of having the new force be no more than 25% of the value of all models still remaining on the table. After all, you want to make things interesting, not crush the models already on the table.

Faction Table: (20)
1-5 Brotherhood of Steel
6-10 Raiders
11-15 Robots
16-20 Super Mutants

Institute
Survivors

Brotherhood of Steel:
1 Group One
2-3 Group Two
4-5 Group Three
6-7 Group Four
8 Group Five
9-10 Group Six

Group One:
Eyebot
Lancer
2 x Knight Patrol

Group Two:
2x Knight Patrol
Knight

Group Three:
2x Knight Patrol (Blade)
Knight

Group Four:
3x Knight

Group Five:
2x Knight
Paladin

Group Six:
Lancer
2x Scribe
Knight

[GateKeeper]

@robhistory and myself made use of the above list when we played a couple of days ago. It was a riot

We opted to play the game a bit differently than usual. We stacked the searchables markers with an abnormally large number of of the danger cards and each time we flipped one of those we’d roll a creature group from the above tables, to be placed at the closest location that makes sense. (We had things swarm out of buildings, come in from the tide of the table, and come up through the ground as appropriate.) At one point in time, we had a swarm of ghouls, a massive radroach group, molerats, mongrel dogs (And in hindsight, using the official dog stats make them TOUGH. Might need to throw together some custom stats for them next time.), and even a small group of stingwings darting about. We’d barely started getting that in check when another swarm of ghouls crawled out of some rubble.

Because we wanted to use so many of the larger enemy groups, we each built a 750 point force and decided to work cooperatively. We also started the game with only a single Putrid Glowing One on the table for enemies (Had painted up the hotdog costumed zombicide model as a glowing one and wanted to play it.) on the logic that the challenge would be born from the monster roll table. We let monsters attack one another so long as it made sense to do so (For example: Dogs were attacking molerats and radroaches, but the various ghoul groups were friendly to one another.)

We also made use of the items roll tables I put together a while back and the draws all felt very natural.

It was a really fun game, unfortunately we didn’t have time to finish it as there was simply too much going on around the table. @robhistory had a force that included more than a dozen settlers and similar (I want to say there were 14 models in total, but can’t remember for sure.) and I built a four man team around Paladin Danse. By the time we were done, we’d killed off between 30 and 40 creatures, some of them fairly potent, and there were still enemies left on the table with nearly half the table still to explore

When we decided to wrap things up, we discussed the above chart for a little bit. We decided we needed to change two things:

1. The Dog cards are simply too potent to act as Mongrels. In the future we’re going to try using a nerfed version of them. Probably change the Agility rating from 7 to 5 (Both their attack and hit points are based off of this stat.) and lower their armor rating from 2 to 1 for both physical and energy damage.
2. We added too many danger markers to the table OR we shouldn’t have been rolling off of the above chart. In hindsight, if we use the table above the same way again, we’ll likely drop the danger markers to about 2/3 as many as we had this time. And as for rolling a group during a normal game, I’d say to roll a 1d6 each round and add one group per the chart any time you roll a 1.

Overall, no single enemy group felt overwhelming or particularly dangerous. Sure, they were distracting, they did do a bit of damage to a few of our models, even killed a couple of settlers, but it was their numbers, placement, and timing of their arrival that made them dangerous.

We had a lot of fun playing. Can hardly wait to try something similar again.

[robhistory]

I had a great time! That game felt like much of my experience during the video game. Explore an area, trigger creatures, find loot, repeat.

I really need to change things up, though. I tend to play setter horde, with several hunting rifles and the rest with assault rifles, combat rifles or shotguns and a baseball bat or machete but no other equipment. In part that is because the figures I have painted are equipped that way.

Finding loot that actually helps gives incentive to really search it out.

[TheSableRose]

I ran a solo/AI game this weekend using the above list and have to say it works nicely.
I ran the Benny’s Request scenario Minutemen vs. Mutants bumped up to 500 cap.

After setting up a 4 X 4 table and placing both the Mutants & Minutemen as well as Benny & his brahmin (yes that’s a tyrant guard standing in for the brahmin), dice were thrown for random creatures.

A d6 for which round they would show up (for future fights I think 1d3+1 would be better). 1d20 for creature type (rerolled twice as I don’t currently have stats for stingwings). 1d10 on the ghoul table and we’ve got weak & feral ghouls inbound. 3d6 gives us which 1x1 section they are showing up in. Lastly two 1d5 for number of ghouls, 4 weak & 2 feral. As for model placement, I just dropped the AI tokens from about a foot above the table.

Thoughts: As stated above getting the creatures on the table a little earlier would have been better. By turn 4 the two “player” teams had nearly wiped each other out. The ghouls did take out the last super mutant and tie up the last two minutemen, but Benny & his brahmin were 3/4 of the way across table and out of harms way. I will definitely use this more in the future and definitely want to try the danger token method in the above post. Thanks a ton for this fun enhanced mode of play.

[GateKeeper]

Thank you for the rundown! Very happy that it worked out for you.

You’re probably right about the timing of an appearance. First round is too soon as it doesn’t give you time to really engage the enemy before having a surprise, and the 1d3+1 resolves that nicely while ensuring that they’d show up early enough to add some chaos without hammering one weakened side into oblivion.