RPGPundit Reviews: In Harm's Way: Wild Blue

This is a review of the print edition of the game Wild Blue, by Flying Mice Games; written by Clash Bowley and Michael Scott. As a disclaimer, I'll note that Flying Mice games is the publisher of the Forward... to Adventure! RPG and the upcoming Forward... to Adventure! Gamemaster's Notebook! (FtA!GN!), which I wrote.  I think you'll find this fact doesn't particularly affect my critical faculties in reviewing the game, however.

Wild Blue is the latest version of the In Harm's Way series, a set of games, all full-blown RPGs in their own right, playable without needing to get any other book.  The original IHW dealt with napoleonic naval life in the early 19th century.  Subsequent ones dealt with WWI and WWII; and Wild Blue deals with modern mercenary companies for present-day military (or rather, quasi-military) roleplaying.

My own predilections put me pretty far from the fanbase for this game in particular, and I have to wonder if this isn't a case of straining the premise a bit too far.  Wild Blue essentially tries to keep the same format, that of playing one (or more) characters in a military unit, working one's way up the organization and dealing with adventure and danger in the context of the setting.  But its telling that for this game, Bowley chose to make the game about mercenary companies rather than regular modern-day armed forces.  The fact is, playing a grunt, or even a pilot, in the modern military just doesn't have very much roleplaying potential.  I can see how mercenary companies allow for more flexibility and interesting scenarios in this sense, but it still feels like this kind of game would have very little appeal outside of hardcore "Soldier of Fortune" fanboys.

The basic system is the same as that of the other In Harm's Way books, you distribute points among your basic attributes, and for determining a social status or background for the character. Depending on your character's place of origin or social class, you get a number of basic skills.  Available places of origins include American, ex-warsaw-pact, 3rd world, or european. The character then gets extra skills from his education, his prior service in the military (divided by branch and specialist schools), and then gets extra skills through aging the character, though after a certain age penalties creep in.

Skills are checked on a percentage, based on your attribute plus skill bonuses. Characters with sufficient skill ranks in a particular skill will be allowed rerolls on failed skill checks. Combat essentially works the same way, though characters with sufficient skill ranks get extra attacks. Your hit points are called "constitution" and are determined by the sum of a number of attributes; damage to the character will give him progressive penalties to skill checks.  Rules are provided for a variety of special circumstances in modern combat, like grenades and burst fire.

Characters all have a rank within the company, and require notice (the closest thing to XP in the game) to advance in rank.  Notice is gained by completing missions, and by doing exemplary deeds that garner the attention of your superiors in the company.  A rise in rank means a rise in your lifestyle, and your personal wealth.

Like most of the IHW series of games, troupe style play is encouraged, where players can choose to create less sophisticated secondary PCs in support type positions for playing in scenes or situations that their main PC would be out of the action.  In any military-style game where the PCs are likely to be highly specialized and not always "in the scene", this type of mechanic is a fairly clever way of ensuring that players don't stay bored for too long.  

Quick-roll rules are provided for generating NPCs, complete with motivations and missions of their own. This section is basically a repeat of the same rules in the other entries in the IHW series, or many other Flying Mice games, for that matter. Still, they're pretty good.

One interesting addition to the rules is the mechanics for creating your mercenary company. A series of choices or random rolls lets you determine the wealth level of your company, the nature of their home base (is it an old aircraft carrier, an army base, a landing strip, etc?), the types of planes they have access to, their helicopters, ships, infantry, ordnance, medical, intelligence, etc.  Initial wealth determines the purchasing power of the mercenary company for the subsequent materials.
You also have a list/random-table for determining the type of contracts that are available to the company, which will play a big part in determining the type of adventuring that will be going on. You roll for/choose your customer (the U.N., the U.S., the E.U., china, some middle eastern oil-potentate, some 3rd world shithole dictator, etc) and then the type of task (peace keeping, insurgency, counter-insurgency, civil war, etc).  There's also an optional roll to determine the place where the task takes place, though that may be inherently determined by the nature of the customer.  Different tasks will have different profit levels, which will allow you to replenish or enhance the company's resources.  All of this is a rather clever part of the game.

 
As to be expected in a high-detail militaristic RPG, the game includes very complete equiptment lists, for everything from a swiss army knife to SCUBA gear.  Like the last few entries in the IHW series, Wild Blue places considerable emphasis on Air-battle, with extensive "modern air combat rules", including things like radar acquisition, missle combat damage, aircraft attributes, AWACS, etc. Aerial combat, like in the WWI/WWII versions of IHW, include a number of dogfighting maneuvers, which provide different penalties to your checks and expenditure of fuel. The system is not overcomplicated, but it is thorough.  Rules are given, of course, for ejecting when your plane blows up.
The aerial combat rules include a number of very neat little diagrams that are clearly made for photocopying and cutting out into little markers, which simplify the system greatly, and add a wargamey sort of feel to the mechanics.

Next, you get a ridiculous 50 pages of sample aircraft and helicopters, stats for (I would imagine) pretty much everything you need to be covered as far as modern aeronautics is concerned. Lots of precise tables of different kinds of munitions too, all real-world with real-world names, the sort of thing any military fanboy would cream over. You get a shorter 15 pages or so of other vehicles, including your boats, tanks, motorcycles and jeeps.

In the appendices, you get an extensive bibliography, and glossary, and then a glossary of special ops slang.  Then, just because, you get 20 fucking pages of aircraft!  You even get some more cutouts, this time of specific airplane chits with their correct diagrams and names. The book ends with a sample adventure, "Operation Kaboodle" which is a pretty standard introductory adventure.  It includes some nice images and tactical maps.

In the end, there's nothing particularly wrong about this game.  The system is the proven tried and true IHW system.  If you got the drift of the other IHW games, you'll get this one.  That said, the book's layout does hop around a bit, character creation for example is interspersed with the Mercenary Company generation rules, and some things are hard to find. You get details on notice in the section on rank, but don't find out how notice works until later, for example.

The bigger problem, to me, is the question of just how much you can really do to create an enjoyable emulation of mercenary activities in the modern setting.  Is there really that much adventure to be had at this level of play?  If you're a hardcore Recon-fan who reads a lot of military literature, I suppose there could well be.
For me, it doesn't really appeal at all.

RPGPundit

Thanks for the excellent, thorough review, Pundit! I know you aren't in the target audience for this game, but this review is just as well prepared and written as those for games you really liked.

The only fuzzy bit in your review is the troupe bit. For the elucidation of those reading this comment - all two of you - troupe play is somewhat different in Wild Blue than in the other IHW games. Instead of a main character with a couple secondary characters of different rank, you play a Staff Character - who runs the company itself, and a variety of combat-level characters - like SpecOps, Armored, Infantry, Fighter Pilot, etc. - depending on the missions the Staff Characters design. If you have a multi-pronged mission - say SpecOps coming in to prep for Mechanized Infantry, with Helo Gunships in support - you would play a character from each of these types - a SpecOps guy, an Armored or Infantry guy, and a Helo pilot.

Aside from that, you were spot on. And the scads of aircraft available were a compromise between myself and my co-author Michael Scott, who wanted more.

-clash

Ah, I should have elaborated on that, sorry.  Thanks for your clarification, Clash.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;251077Ah, I should have elaborated on that, sorry.  Thanks for your clarification, Clash.

RPGPundit

No problem. What you wrote wasn't wrong, just unclear.

-clash