Scribbles and Horrors

This post is a summary of one unusual mechanic in Avalon Hill’s Starship Troopers (1976), which addresses noncombatant deaths.

Starship Troopers presents seven scenarios, with each scenario adding increasingly complex mechanics. This can be a little frustrating–there’s no way to play the whole game at once–but if you think about it as seven closely-related games it’s not too bad. The scenarios carefully reproduce the battles described in the novel Starship Troopers.

In Scenario One, the terran marines overrun a humanoid colony. The humanoids are allies of the arachnids in this scenario, but later on in the story, after many sound defeats, they are forced into allying with the terrans. As a faction, the humanoids are squeezed between two overwhelming imperial powers, and struggle to find their own way of survival within them.

Here’s the information for Scenario One:

The alien player controls 12 Warrior and 6 Worker units, and has freedom to place Strong Points, Vital Installations, and Decoys. The terran player controls 9 marines and must navigate to and destroy Critical Installations within a set number of turns.

As you can see, most of the victory points for the terran player are in destroying infrastructure: Water, Power, Communications. Token VPs are granted for killing enemy Warriors (1 each), and negative VPs for killing enemy Workers (-1 each). As it states, “SPECIAL RULE: Noncombatant casualties are to be avoided.”

I have played this scenario as the humanoids, and the negative VP mechanic incentivized me to intentionally move worker units into Critical Installations in order to slow down and dissuade the terran player from destroying them. The rules encourage the alien player to use workers as shields to delay the inevitable: force the marines to suffer VP loss to win objectives.

It models a horrifying desperation on the part of the humanoid side. On the terran side, it simulates a callous “rules of engagement” style positioning: It’s a shame, but if we want to destroy the water supply it must be done! Rather than disincentivize the war crimes committed by the terrans in this scenario, the negative VP mechanic includes those crimes as part of an acceptable calculus. The cost of murdering civilians is diplomatic inconvenience, a PR problem.

The inconvenience is juxtaposed against the goal of the scenario, which is the wholesale destruction of infrastructure. How many more civilians are affected by the elimination of those power and water installations? How many further deaths and displacements do the terrans cause in this scenario for their operational feint, after they leave? The terrans lose no victory points for those noncombatant deaths. They play no part in the calculus.

I’m not sure if this was the intent as designed, but this little mechanic strengthens my understanding of the profound (American) evil that the terrans represent in Starship Troopers. The futility of the gesture towards humanity underscores its horrific context.

I put this up about 2 weeks ago and took it down after a couple of hours. I wasn’t embarrassed about the product–this is a good and funny table and I stand by it–but I worried that, without context, a post like this could be misconstrued as LotFP boyish fuckery.

I regret taking it down, and have decided to get over myself about it. And by now I guess the Sex Bandwagon has probably picked up sufficient steam to give me the cover of micro-subcultural zeitgeist. I just didn’t want the readers of my blog to think I was into dick jokes.

Very few of these entries are sexual, and none of them feature sexual violence. I don’t like sex in my games.

A PDF of this session report is available here: escape-from-special-operations-complex-903.pdf

Players: Shy Owl (Ref), Jenx, xaoseed, Oldhawkeyes, Jay_zer0
5/31/2026 7:00 AM - 8:40 AM PST
Discord voice chat

Deep within the complex, lights flicker on. Cryosleep pods open in unison, waking from indefinite slumber 5 new adventurers eager to escape out into open air…

Diorama Jones, Fool ; Ostiana Mulch, Footman ; Quern Zadoki, Fool ; Garamond Micron, Fool | Later joining the party was: Shunt Organman, Assistant

The party began with a poster map of the complex plastered to the wall, and set to work finding where they were on it.

The party climbed through a vent and went westward, revealing a room which seemed to contain an immaculate red car. The party descended into the room to take a closer look, and the car was revealed to be a shimmering illusion put up by an Omegacron, armed with submachine guns and a phaser.

The omegacron warned against intruders and asked for authoritative identification, but did not engage immediately, enabling the party to slip down the western passage.

The beeping sounds of the omegacron drew a group of 3 heavily armored True Ones, however, who immediately challenged the party to a one-on-one unarmed combat, loser to be eaten.

Quern Zadoki rose to the challenge and put up a good fight, but, lacking the necessary training and chivalric military prowess, could not stand up to the muscular foe.

Moving south as the True Ones feasted, the party went up another vent in hopes of reaching a room from which to mount their escape. Within the room were 6 Galics, horrifying and smiling creatures which rolled a “friendly” on the react roll.

Upon descent, the Galics were quite happy to meet the party, and gave somewhat unhelpful-seeming advice about rafts and boats to make their escape. The galics were eager to shake hands. When shaking the hand of Garamond, a galic named Nine refused to let go and shook so hard that Garamond’s arm fell off. At this point the galics broke into uproarious laughter the arm started twitching, lurching towards its owner aggressively, and the party simply made a break for it eastwards. The new member of the party, Shunt, grabbed the arm in the midst of the flight in case it might be useful later. Honestly the galics didn’t mean much harm, and did not pursue.

At length it was discovered that a slightly ambiguous part of the map did not correspond to navigation in their favor, and the party was puzzled at how to proceed to one of the exits. No path seemed to take them where they needed to go!

They continued northwards and met some mole-like Snets, who ordered them to disarm themselves in fealty to the metaphysical lord Diss. The party simply turned around and went back.

The party re-checked the map and finally found another, secret path out, through the galic room. As a joke, they tied Garamond’s severed arm to him for the Galic to shake. The galics found this ruse delightful, and did not harass them further as the party scrambled up to the vent, which wound around for a long way.

At length the party found themselves in a used car lot run by a solitary Regik. He offered to sell them a low-end model for 6000r. When the party balked at this, he offered an installment plan at 1000r/month over 6 months, but tempers were not running well and Diorama hit it with their nun-chuks. One the second round of combat Ostiana shot him dead outright.

The party found only rusty cars there, but noticed bank deposit boxes in an adjacent room, from which they recovered 300 Chromis, 400 Galiks, 300 Rupniks, 3 Gems (worth 2500r, 1000r, and 250r), and a suit of -5 mech armor.

Knowing they were close to the exit, the party quickly made their way past a treasury room, deftly evading some Gamblers, and stumbled straight into a conference of Politicians who immediately began haranguing them with all kinds of aggressive nonsense. Eventually kerosene splashed around and lit by Shunt Organman caused enough of a ruckus that the party could escape to the exit and into the open air with their treasure. Their first adventure was a success.

Referee notes:

This game was several firsts for me: The Realm of Yolmi was new, the map was untested, and I’d also never run an online game before. I was a little anxious about how it’d turn out. It went great!

The map worked well. Because of the complexity and difficulty of the map, it proved to be a substantive (but not insurmountable) effort to navigate to the exit. The party made some wrong turns, and were able to make informed decisions and gambles.

My idea of having some passageways be vents, accessible near the ceiling, worked okay, though it got sort of muddled. I might try some other approaches to adding variety to the map.

The Realm of Yolmi is an odd duck, in part because it seems to insist on giving characters very little to work with. In practice, I’m finding that the treasure tables aren’t too bad and the combat is usable and exciting.

Fights are slightly more crunchy than my usual taste–I’m a big group initiative kinda guy–but the ability of firearms/tech devices to completely reshape the combat landscape makes for a cool system. Each weapon has its own little system, which is overwhelming at first but works well in play. We didn’t have a big combat with lots of participants, so this will need to be tested further.

I took the reaction results very seriously, which meant that most creatures didn’t attack. Even creatures which had preprogrammed behavior, like the galics with handshaking, were subject to strict reaction rolls. For the most part reactions were positive. What ended up happening is that each creature they encountered would let the party pass peaceably if they are willing to pay a cost: the True Ones demand one-on-one combat, the Galics take arms, the Snets only wish to see you disarmed, the Regik wants money, the Politicians want one of the party to be taken in as one of their own. It was a neat dynamic.

All in all my crazy idea–The Realm of Yolmi on my Zeta III map–worked really well! It was neat to see that something which I’d assumed would only really work as a wilderness adventure can work pretty well as a dungeon game.

I definitely am interested in others’ implementations of Yolmi. There’s great wealth here.

Here are more illustrations, following my first post.

Taekic

Small flying creatures armed with micro-lasers.

Dalek

Giant creatures that open their mouths and let food walk in. Unfortunately for them, their size gives them away every time. Even the most naive of Adventurer could see that it is not a cave since a large body wearing a fluorescent green tunic is attached to it.

H4 234

The last of the servorobots. It mounts two heavy machine guns on its sides and has delusions of being another “Machine Gun Kelly”

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Gamblers

Gaudily dressed, they invite Adventurers to play with them in obviously crooked games for high stakes. If refused, they will attack 45% of the time. They are also quite adept at passing phony rupniks, etc.

Suu

Stony creatures with three long rubbery necks with a head attached to each. They lash these around with tremendous force and speed, causing utter damage.

Completines

5′ monsters that generate electricity. They throw their eyes when hit in the stomach.

Here is a new class for The Realm of Yolmi. Usually I like my games to have very few classes, but this was fun to make and I think it fits with the vibe. Like Soldiers and Scientists, this class also appears in the creature encounter lists.

Politicians

Politicians have a +20% for all initial creature reaction rolls (though not subsequent ones). This stacks with Personality modifiers, but parties with more than one politician only get the 20% once.

They can employ rhetoric to convince any moderately attentive listeners of any policy position, which succeeds 10% of the time and takes 1 day.

They can use no weapons and wear no armor.

Presidents above 13th level are re-elected with -70%, 14th with -90%, etc.

Politicians use d6-1 for hit dice, maximum level 10. +2 hp beyond level 10.

Politicians do not achieve higher levels automatically: they must be elected. A politician may attempt to be elected to any higher position if they have the required experience. Elections are modified by the prime requisite % bonus or penalty for the politician’s Personality. If a politician fails to win an election for a particular position, they may try again at a -10% penalty for each previous attempt.

There is a 10% chance each month that a politician’s term is ending, and they must choose to either be elected to a higher position or be re-elected at their current position. Otherwise their political life will be over and they must retire.

Each time a politician is re-elected, the chance of being re-elected again in that position is modified by -10%.

In addition to Personality, election success can be modified by the following activities:

Lobbyists with deep pockets will of course be happy to assist politicians with any of these expenses.

Various political offices will have benefits by virtue of their station: Presidents will be the Commander in Chief of any military encountered 60% of the time; Vice Presidents become Presidents if one dies, Mayors can bestow keys to population centers, Representatives can introduce legislation, etc.