The Arrival - PBEM Sci Fi Kriegsspiel

I'm dreaming up a Sci Fi Kreigsspiel, PBEM. The basic premise is aliens arrive on Earth. What happens next will be up to the players...

I'm willing to run the game myself at some future point.

Question: Have any of you run a sci-fi type KS game? Any experience with unconventional themes?

-Neal

No KS's but I GM'd a couple of long-running FRPG campaigns, including one that contained battles - 25mm figures of course - a parliament, religious strife, and similar fun stuff and that last one ran for two and half years. So I have some practical experience and if it's PBEM, that's fairly easy logistically. Also have some ideas, etc for such things.

My eldest (Phil) has run a couple of off-beat games at Little Gaddesden, featuring zombie outbreaks at the local school. These worked very well, and were a real hoot too.

Players represented different cliques among the students (nerds, prefects, bullies, jocks etc), each with their own stereotypical pros and cons. A fun one was the newly-arrived Japanese exchange students. Great at combat, but their map of the school was in a script they couldn't read!

The game featured some unusual admin techniques, and combat and fatigue were tracked by a battery of laptops. I can imagine you will find some of that could be useful to you.

He's really tied up until Sunday, but I'll get him to contact you after that.

Martin (J)

There have been alien arrival megagames run by the usual crowd that hosts these things in south London. I saw a hilarious YouTube report from one team about one of these.

There's an umpire team, one of whom is a press officer who produces newspaper articles every turn (and who wanders around all the teams asking for interviews or listening in on conversations to dig up the dirt).

An aliens team.

Then teams from as many different countries as you need. In each team there is a head of state (who cannot visit any other team at all and must make the decisions), a head of the armed forces (who issues military orders and is the only team member allowed to see the umpires military world map) and a diplomat (who is allowed to go talk to other teams and who must submit each teams orders each turn). I think there might have been a 4th player in each team who was a head scientist/industrialist whose task was to gather alien tech and apply it to their own states economy or military and either gain peaceful tech prestige points or beef up their military (you had to follow one path or the other so this was a dove or hawk choice IIRC).

The game looked like a huge amount of fun and was all conducted in one day in an enormous hall or gymnasium with the umpire team up on a stage at one end and the aliens team closed off in a separate room at the other.

If I'm the aliens, what's my motivation? Not likely to be truffles or vodka or BBQ ... hmmm ... new land for my people seems most likely. Also, if the aliens have arrived, does that mean they're in orbit around the earth? If so, we lose, as they can 'throw rocks' at us and we can't stop them. That is to say, kinetic energy strikes from near earth orbit can't be intercepted and are devastating in their impact. Also, not nuclear so no radiation to spoil the landscape when the developers move in. Some other motivation or scenario?

They need our women for breeding purposes.

Seems unlikely to me.  For their version of BBQ?  More likely, I think.   Whatever their motivation and purpose, once they have control of LEO/NEO we're done.