A big source of inspiration for DANGER CLOSE is Five Parsecs From Home. I love the loop of that game: show up somewhere, take jobs, make enemies, leave before it gets too hot (I wasn’t in love with the miniature skirmish battles, though; I mostly felt it broke the fantasy of scale, which was a reason for me to write DANGER CLOSE as a theatre-of-the-mind solo tactical military skirmish TTRPG. Anyway.) I wrote my own version of that loop for DANGER CLOSE, and I think it turned out pretty slick.
Cover image: What Do You Need? by Darwin Cellis
It’s written for DANGER CLOSE, but it basically stands on its own. If you have a game with missions and a squad (or a party), you can lift this straight into it. FIST, Stars Without Number, Traveller, a wargame campaign, heck, even your classic elfgame fantasy fare.
The full PDF can be found under the Download demo files on itch.io – DANGER CLOSE as a freelancer.pdf.
Each of the flavor sheets there is about how to run DANGER CLOSE in a certain setting, yes, but in doing so, boils down a setting to its core parts, which I think can be interesting for… any type of system you want to use, really.
Here’s the short version of how it works.
The Loop
A Freelancer Campaign starts by dropping the Squad into a new Location. You define its Factions, set up a Hideout and roll for Arrival. From there, Factions offer Contracts. Contracts pay Funds and shift your Standing with each Faction. Every Mission can also raise Attention and leave behind Loose Ends.
Eventually, somebody turns Hostile. That starts a Crisis, and from that point on the Location is actively trying to kill you. Sooner or later, the Squad has to Move On and start somewhere new.
Show up, get paid, burn bridges, leave.
Locations and Factions
A Location can be anything from a city district to a whole star system. You roll two quick d6 tables: what the place is like (Hive of Scum, Company Town, Occupied Ground…) and what drives it (a criminal war, a valuable resource, old grudges…). Then you answer one question: what makes staying here worthwhile? Cheap weapons, a smuggler with a fast ship, a door to somebody important.
A Location usually has three Factions, and each one is defined in a single line:
[Faction] wants [Want]. Its methods are [Modus Operandi] and [Modus Operandi].
The Modus Operandi is not a description of everything a Faction does, it’s how it usually gets what it wants. And each one maps directly onto three mission Objectives from the core rules. A Faction that works through Enforcement offers Neutralize, Recover and Hold jobs. A Faction that works through Subversion offers Disrupt, Extract and Neutralize.
So the Faction’s personality is its job board. You never have to invent why a Contract exists; the Faction already tells you. Extract can be a rescue, an arrest or an abduction, depending on who’s paying.
Contracts and Funds
Contracts have a Deadline (take it now, or it holds for a turn or two) and Pay (1 to 3 Funds). Funds are abstract. There’s no price list, just a rough scale: 1 Fund is routine (a bribe, a room, repairs), 2 is significant (a special weapon, forged identities), 3 is major (a new Hideout, rare military hardware).
Money does not make things appear. If nobody on this planet stocks the part for your ship’s drive, finding it is a Contract, not a purchase.
Every round of downtime and recovery also costs 1 Fund in Upkeep. If you can’t pay, you don’t get a penalty, you get a problem: unpaid wages, dry magazines, work you’d normally refuse.
Standing and Attention
The heart of the system.
Each Faction has a Standing track:
- Hostile
- Cold
- Neutral
- Friendly
- Trusted
Friendly Factions offer more Contracts. Trusted Factions let you call in a Favor (and might ask for one back at a bad moment). Cold Factions stop offering work. Hostile Factions actively work against you.
Completing a Contract has a good chance (4-in-6) of improving Standing. Working against a Faction can worsen it, and how likely that is depends on Attention: how easily the Location can pin things on you. Attention is like a multiplier for your notoriety.
| Squad… | Low | Watched | Known |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interferes with Faction | 2-in-6 | 3-in-6 | 4-in-6 |
| Targets Faction | 4-in-6 | 5-in-6 | Automatic |
Interfering means blocking a Faction’s move: fouling its deal, hitting its supply lines. That’s part of the game. Targeting means going after the Faction itself: its people, its leadership, its home ground.
Attention never drops while you stay in the Location. Early on, at Low Attention, you can plausibly work every side. Once you’re Known, everybody knows exactly who did it, and the system naturally shifts from “clever mercenaries playing both sides” to “everybody has an opinion about you”.
Crisis
The moment any Faction turns Hostile, set Crisis to 1.
From then on, every time the Squad does anything outside a Mission (a Downtime Task, trading, meeting a Contact), roll a d12. Equal to or under Crisis, it triggers. Otherwise, Crisis goes up by 1.
When it triggers, the Crisis finds you. A Trooper gets jumped on the way back to the Hideout. A friendly Faction sells you out and a contract meeting turns into a firefight. The Hideout gets surrounded. Don’t ask how it happened. It happened.
A spare Hideout lets you relocate and reset Crisis to 1, which buys some time. But the real message is simple: it’s time to go. Even leaving is one last roll.
Loose Ends
A Loose End is a crew you beat but didn’t finish: hired guns, bounty hunters, other freelancers. They work for whoever pays, and they remember. They can get hired against you on future Contracts, they all show up during a Crisis, and they might follow you when you leave. It’s a lightweight version of a Nemesis system, sorta.
How It Plays Out
In the rules I included an example on Vardos Minor, an Outer Rim mining world under Imperial occupation. Three Factions: the Imperial Prefecture, a mining corp called Korda Extraction, and the Vardos Liberation Front.
The Squad starts by doing jobs for Korda, which is fine until one of those jobs hits a Liberation Front transmitter. The Front goes Cold. Then the Empire hires them to find a missing officer, who turns out to be held in a Korda warehouse. They go in anyway, and Korda figures out who did it. A Trooper patches things up with the Front over drinks in a cantina, and suddenly the Squad is ambushing Imperial prisoner convoys.
Five Contracts in, the Empire is Cold, Korda is Neutral, the Liberation Front is Trusted, and Attention is Known. One more job against the Empire and Crisis begins.
None of that was planned. It just falls out of the Standing and Attention rolls, which is exactly what I wanted.
Conclusion
I think this is one of the (many) parts of DANGER CLOSE that’s useful outside of DANGER CLOSE itself. It only really needs a way to resolve Missions, and everything else (Factions, Contracts, Standing, Crisis) runs on a handful of d6 and d12 rolls.
DANGER CLOSE is available on itch.io, and there’s a free SRD available.
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