I love FIST – its themes, its vibes, its systems, and the type of ideas and creativity it allows for. So when FIST: JAM OPS V was announced, I saw that as a great motivator to dive into FIST and make something for it. It took quite a few swerves to land on a submission I actually liked – with the final thing being something that suddenly emerged and was created in basically 24 hours. So, for both FIST Referees and fellow creators in general, I figured it might be interesting to share a bit about the process.
With its theme of FORBIDDEN ZONES, a few places came to mind immediately:
Svalbard Seed Vault
A really cool real-life location, with an airstrip, abandoned mine, village and satellite dish array right around the corner. In my research, I also discovered there’s two former Soviet mining towns on the island as well, and that since the start of the Ukraine war, contact has ceased and tours there have stopped.
So yeah, cool idea, but it didn’t really ‘take root’, so I just made some notes and it didn’t really go anywhere.
Diego Garcia
Another real-life location, this one with a history of colonialism, displacement of native population, and a US military base. I figured it might be interesting to zoom in on this island, also as a means of bringing it to the attention of people.
This evolved into a fictionalized version of the island named COSTA MEDUSA. The coral network here has achieved intelligence and is able to predict/infer the location of any ship in any connected body of water due to a butterfly-effect-on-steroids. The stationed US military forces have conducted experiments on the coral, but now an infection has leaped to human hosts.
Still, this didn’t come together – its isolation meant transport being an issue, and the scope was perhaps still too big, being an entire island.
I have (way) more experience writing fantasy adventures, and there, Fatigue, supplies, hunger etc. are ‘levers’ you can pull as a designer. However, FIST is generally not about survival like that – it’s about punchy scenes, jumping into the action, feeling like a serialized action-adventure-conspiracy-bizarre tv-show, not an epic fantasy movie series. Sure, I could let the party loose on an atoll, but then what? How do I provide proper pacing?
Helldivers 2
I’ve often said that I really like thinking about/trying to capture certain feelings and vibes in TTRPG mechanics. How do you make players feel tension, scared, exhausted, powerful etc., how do you capture that in rules and dice and terms in a way that makes sense at a glance and is still fun to play?
I returned to Helldivers 2, and I figured, “Wait, the vibe this gives, that might be an interesting fit for FIST”, and thus started my third main attempt at JAM OPS V.
THORAX
So, Helldivers 2: I wanted both Terminids and Automatons in this experience, so I figured “Mutated Ants” and “CYCLOPS robots” could fill those roles. It’d be set in a quarantined US nuclear test site, somewhere in the desert, with a few ‘layers of history’ – the original test infrastructure from the 50’s, ant testing in the 80’s, and then an outbreak and abandonment/quarantine.
I went for a hex map, which was WAY TOO BIG. Then I figured it might better work as a Flux Space – because I don’t really know how to inconvenience/put pressure on the party while hexploring (besides damaging HP). My (really quite big!) document has notes on both approaches.
Then I figured, “Hmm, CYCLOPS robots are not very fun to fight, and I have like, 3 sites where they come from” and etc. etc. and I lost sight of SCOPE again.
So, I decided to take inspiration from Metal Gear Solid, which is always a good idea in my opinion, and replace the bots with THORAX – an ant-enhanced-CYCLOPS-sent-special forces unit.
Each would have an ant-related codename (“Queen”, “Soldier”) but also a nickname based on real people, because that sounds cooler than just “Worker” or “Drone”. That led to:
- Queen: ‘Victoria’
- Soldier: ‘Patton’
- Worker: ‘Marx’
- Drone: ‘Pavlov’
- Scout: ‘Vespucci’
This is also where the Make A Stand mechanics came from, and I was really happy with that: the idea of making a stand with numerous enemies from all sides waiting for evac to arrive.
THORAX LITE
So, I made a whole bunch (21 pages!) but it wasn’t really going anywhere, so I decided to open an new document and slim things down (I see now that the Slimmed Down file has 1000 words more than my original file).
I came up with a pretty solid timeline for events:
- [1951] – Nuclear tests commence in the Red Sands Test Range in the American desert.
- [1952] – Ants mutate to become as large and intelligent as dogs deep under the Red Sands test range.
- [1958] – Nuclear tests at Red Sands are discontinued.
- [1979] – Research in ant pheromones starts in the Red Sands Test Range.
- CYCLOPS was behind it, through US Army subsidiaries.
- [1979] – A portable nuclear weapon is stored at an old test site, in case of emergencies.
- [1981] – Human experimentation leads to the creation of the THORAX unit.
- [1982] – THORAX Special Forces Unit is deployed on multiple highly classified operation.
- [1984 – Two Weeks Ago] – Accidental release of ant pheromones causes the giant Red Sands ants to surface. The site is quarantined.
- CYCLOPS was behind this sabotage.
- [1984 – One Week Ago] – THORAX, along with a CYCLOPS handler, is deployed in Red Sands to obtain the nuke and detonate it in the Queen’s nest.
- The CYCLOPS handler’s goal is to meddle with the timer and thus erase THORAX at the same time, but is found out. He manages to escape.
- THORAX is now seeking to obtain both nuclear access codes in order to obtain the nuke for leverage.
And I scaled down the hex map quite a bit:
I created a pretty cool ‘network of connections’ between all the relevant hexes, through one core new element: This test site contains a forgotten, backpack-sized nuclear bomb.
A portable, experimental-and-highly-potent SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) lays dormant in the depts of SLEEPER SITE. This backpack nuke needs 2 keycodes to be accessed, which were given to PROJECT MANDIBLE staff in case of emergencies. When the emergency came, the nuke was out of reach.
The nuke requires 2 HAND PRINTS to be accessed. The vault is attuned to 2 individuals, codenamed TURNKEY and FORAGER, both originally staff at the RESEARCH LAB. They are both unaware of each other’s identities. This knowledge can be obtained at the SLEEPER SITE and CRASHED HELO.
TURNKEY and FORAGER fled the laboratory after the initial outbreak, and briefly stayed at the GHOST TOWN. Hearing of survivors banding together at the SURVIVOR CAMP, TURNKEY tagged along with a convoy, which got ambushed by THORAX (B.4 AMBUSHED CONVOY). FORAGER proceeded on foot, together with other survivors.
TURNKEY is now a captive of THORAX at D.3 RESEARCH LAB. THORAX is still pursuing FORAGER.
FORAGER is hidden in the SURVIVOR CAMP.
THORAX is aware that hand prints are required, and is thus highly invested in keeping both FORAGER and TURNKEY alive.
The CYCLOPS operative at the Weather Station knows the identity and location of both FORAGER and TURNKEY.
Cool, now we got reasons to roam around, and a system that, theoretically, ‘creates’ its own incentives wherever the players drop in.
But still…
But still it didn’t quite come together. I didn’t really like “ants” as opponents, and the work left to do was flesh out the various more complex locations (Research Lab, Sleeper Site) with smaller maps. But I wasn’t feeling it.
2:12am… going back for more Helldivers 2
So, I went back to Helldivers 2 with all of this still simmering in the back of my mind, and this time, the “pick a landing location” sparked something in my mind. You can drop right on a target (or wait, I actually think you can’t, but work with me here) but that’d mean being under heavy fire right away, or you can approach from a distance and try to be quiet as you do.
Wait, that sounds awfully lot like a mechanic that can be game-ified in TTRPG systems!
What if I make something that isn’t just about infiltrating a FORBIDDEN ZONE – but about infiltrating any FORBIDDEN ZONE?
DEAD ZONE
I keep pen & paper in front of me at my computer, for quick note-taking. Within the hour, I had the basics:
The core idea started as
You can pick your starting location: 1-2-3-4-5. Picking a location has a X-in-6 odds of being detected upon landing, and facing Xd6 troops when you do.
Cool! And then, moving closer triggers an encounter roll, so you take the odds that you have, and the encounter table can also scale and…
Well, the end result is here:
and I liked it so much, I fleshed it out in a sample mission here:
I’ve rambled long enough, and I hope these scattered notes can still be useful or interesting. Thanks for reading!
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