I want to elaborate here further, but I’ve been thinking about a D&D 5e campaign patterned after XCOM 2 - the conquest of your world has happened, and you are part of a scrappy resistance trying to fight back. I would love to steal some game mechanics from XCOM 2, like centering the game around a flying ship, having a cast of squaddies that can be swapped in to the party in case of casualties, and having minigames with resources - research and buildings that can boost the characters.
I have a doc with some notes to share, but has anyone else thought about this? How would you go about this?
My current concept is that powerful fey invade from the Feywild to take back the world they once considered theirs. They’ve long seeded the world with changelings in preparation for their return.
I have thought about this so much, because I am a huge fan of X-COM; UFO Defense (DOS version).
My thoughts were more geared towards patterning off of that game. It’s the very beginning of an invasion, and it’s a slow burn, you know?
Your “base” would have scout parties (instead of radar/sensors) that would occasionally report if they detected strange creatures in your lands. You’ve got squaddies you can swap out, transport to incursion point via team of horses, and later (after research) magic teleport, etc.
I could talk about this concept for hours. I think it’s an excellent adventure generator, and a perfect ‘mission’ based kind of thing for a game.
It’s on my list to one day maybe make a game out of this, like a computer game. I am all about squad-based strategy + a research and base management.
Yeah, I read Absolute Tabletop’s Copper Jackals recently and since it’s a small-squad mission oriented game that takes place in a world where the villain has already won, it strongly reminded me of XCOM 2.
I mentioned D&D 5e because that’s what I was thinking about, since it’s mostly what I play now and I was having fun thinking about how to transmute XCOM to a fantasy setting.
And yeah, I think part of what’s fun for me about this idea is dropping an XCOM overlay over a D&D campaign, which could foreground a particular play style for D&D:
the chance to play very tactical self-contained missions - the tactical aspect of D&D can be pretty fun, even if 5e is a little lighter on it than 3e or 4e
the chance to have a larger cast of characters for the players. More soldiers could be a resource to pursue (a mission to rescue a cornered squad!), and the more soldiers you add to your roster, maybe those are other characters/classes a player can swap into the party for a change of pace, or replacements if your primary character snuffs it
the chance to build a base or commit resources to projects that give you game benefits.
Tim, I think original XCOM is very much like the recent XCOM: Enemy Unknown in structure, right? I picked XCOM 2 because riding around in a flying ship fighting in a scrappy resistance band sounds fun to me, but it could easily be a “fight off the imminent invasion” scenario too.
I guess one thing I was hoping for was ideas or input in designing the building/research “minigame” part of a campaign like this. Probably would want to narrow down the types of resources from XCOM - maybe just “supplies” and “soldiers” rather than the other varieties in the game (talking about Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 here, I don’t know how the DOS version treated resources). Rescuing or hiring on “mages and scholars” could help with research projects and building better weapons and armor for the soldiers. “Artificers and engineers” could help with building out the base or ship.
Played a Powered by the Apocalypse game recently, and I was thinking that if the strategy minigame aspect of a “fantasy XCOM” game is well designed, perhaps it could easily be dropped onto other systems.
