On Apple TV Plus, the series, Masters of the Air has just started. Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, it’s widely considered to be part of a trilogy with Band of Brothers and Pacific two well received HBO dramas. So I foolishly set myself a challenge: if War Stories is inspired by Band of Brothers, and Dave’s Rendezvous with Destiny campaign broadly follows a similar post D-Day arc, and if the company is also working on a Pacific campaign, could I imagine how a Masters of the Air style campaign might work, using the same ruleset?
I say it was a foolish challenge because the potential problems might be might be all too readily apparent. The first of these is the problematic nature of the subject. Masters of the Air looks from the trailers to be telling two different stories – the tale of a bomber squadron based in East Anglia in the first half and the Tuskagee Red Tails flying out of Italy in the later on. At least one of our patrons, whose grandmother died in an air-raid, wasn’t sure “if the bombing crew on raids to German workers suburbs is making a good game.” And that is a very good point. The player characters in Rendevous with Destiny are professional (even if drafted) soldiers, aiming at (and killing) other soldiers. On the other hand, to quote from the memoir of a British bomb aimer: “Until recently, we were told, Dresden had been comparatively unimportant but since the recent advance of Russian troops the population of Dresden had been swollen by a million refugees. Conditions there were chaotic and ours was to be a panic raid adding confusion and disrupting communications.” So not soldiers, not a military target at all, not even a factory – but civilians, refugees. The author, Miles Tripp, describes “The quiver of outrage at the briefing … and dropping the bombs clear of the periphery in the hope they would fall harmlessly in the fields” as “a last gesture to an ideal of common humanity.”
Now many RPGs deal with the loss of humanity, not least Vampire: The Masquerade, but (for better or worse) they are generally more visceral, more intimate experience. In that game, you must role-play the hunt, overpower or seduce the victim before draining their blood. A bomber crew, who never get to look their victims in the eye at the moment of death might as well be taking a Bus to Clapham. Only once does Tripp seem to express a sense of achievement on a mission: on a daylight raid to destroy gun emplacements near West Kappelle on the Dutch Coast.
“For a moment I thought the dark cluster was going to fall short, and curl in to the sea, but the bombs cleared the water and seemed to race up the beach before exploding directly on the emplacements. This was the bomb-aimer’s ideal target; a military objective with no danger to civilians and everything staked on a direct hit because anything less would have been a complete waste of time and money. When the bombs exploded I felt the elation of a darts player who has scored a double top to win and the satisfaction of a craftsman who has done a good job well.”
Tripp, M. The Eighth Passenger London, 1969
But experiences like this are rare in the book and almost entirely obliterated by G H navigation technology, an early triangulation system where the bomb aimer is told to release the payload when the plane reaches a particular point. Not actually using the bomb sight at all.
So we come to the old problem of many a spaceship based RPG. There is very little for everyone to do in a ship combat. Often people say only the pilot gets to do fun stuff in a space ship combat. I would argue in a bomber, not ever the pilot gets to have fun. There go where the Navigator, Wireless Operator and then Bomb Aimer tell them. Only a few times in the book do they deviate from their course, few enough times for the author here to think is worth mentioning when it happens, for example weaving from side to side when a fighter is on their tail, or making a sudden correction when it seems they are about to fly straight into a bomb dropped by another crew. There is very little chance, even for the pilot, to react to the movements of the enemy.
There is a meme in RPG culture “Rocks fall, Everyone Dies” which is shorthand for the unfairness of a capricious GM killing the whole party because of some slight or other (or because they are running the old D&D module, Tomb of Horrors). But in fact it accurately describess the fate of most lost bomber crews. Tripp describes, on an early minion to Solingen, “the Lancasters were bunched so close that at least three were bombed out of the sky by their fellows flying directly above.” And he reports on “a Lancaster blown to bits by flak” another which “went down in a cartwheel of flame” and another, a crew he knew – Q-Queenie “blown up over the target. There was no hope of any survivors.”
There is little chance for personal action to save the day. Tripp recounts a daylight sortie on Gelsenkirchen where the plane is hit by flack which short circuits an early radar device called Fishpond. The panel burst into flame (which makes me think of the frequenty exploding bridge consoles in Star Trek). Every crewman is issued with a fire extinguisher. But every crewman apparently tucks it out of the way somewhere for the flight. In the acrid smoke, the wireless operator (who looks after Fishpond and GH) couldn’t find his. Neither could the flight engineer or the navigator. Eventually one was found and the fire put out. But that is the only incident in 40 missions (bar a couple of violent course corrections by the pilot) where the actions of the crew saved the plane.
So quite apart from the frightening prospect of flying in straight line while antiaircraft gunners and fighters try to kill you, there is also a challenge in making missions “playable.” (That’s assuming after you have heard this that you even want to try.) And I am going to suggest that you can’t – at least not in the same way that core War Stories makes ground combat a bit like a skirmish war-game. You will never create the fear that the crews experienced, while you sit safe round the table, and you won’t be satisfied with the routine nature of the missions.
If you want a game where you can take more personal action in a plane I point you towards Night Witches, where crews of two fly slow and fragile bi-planes towards the target. Even in that game, where the scale and the almost whites-of their-eyes intimacy of the sorties is naturally more playable, lot of the roleplaying in that game though happens on the ground, not in the air. And that is the secret to running an air war game in War Stories. Indeed, it’s an opportunity to expand War Stories into the arena of the “War at Home.” Miles Tripp writes frequently of his courting a WAAF meteorologist called Audrey. I knew Audrey as his wife when I was growing up, so that is really the story of his war. The sorties themselves should be like inconvenient punctuation points in a game set in one or more bases, the surrounding villages, and trips to experience London’s nightlife.
Indeed, you could punctuate a single session of play with two or more sorties, because they might simply involve every player rolling a particular skill once for the whole mission and then narrating the mission depending on the number successes and the FUBARs generated. So, the gunners would roll heavy weapons, the bomb aimer Operate, the Flight Engineer and Wireless operator Tech, the Navigator Survival and the pilot Command. Obviously, the crew would new specialisation (Air Gunner I and II; Pilot I and II etc to flavour the skills a bit more towards air crew. Thos specialisations are like to be simple poll modifiers though, not more more contextual mechanics, given the simple just roll once each mission resolution).
If anyone fails their roll, the mission is not a success, but they get home. If two rolls fail the crew might not get home, three or more means their plane was blown out of the sky. If everyone rolls a success, the crew get home, mission accomplished, though the number of FUBARs generated will add complications. It’s worth says that Lucky Strikes can be used and earned in the usual way. The complications might be as inconsequential as an argument over who has the task of emptying the pilot’s piss-pot to one or more of the crew getting injured or frostbitten. Indeed the complication might (or should?) extend into the roleplaying at home. I imagine a table of example complications, but the group might be more imaginative. The crew and GM together narrate what happened on the mission only after all the rolls are made and FUBARs counted.
But what form does the homebase role playing take? Well that depends on your group. Brilliant drama can come out of romance with locals (or WAAFs), rivalry with other squadrons or indeed other forces. Internal politics in the officers mess, sneaking off base without leave for all sorts of reasons, and even perceived unfairness in disciplinary proceedings. Tripp’s best friend in the crew Harry, the rear gunner and oldest crewmember (at 25) was Jamaican and he would stand up for West Indian ground crew who he perceived were being treated unfairly. The situation was complicated by his intuition. He always had a gut instinct about whether there would be a mission that day and often correctly guessed where it might be. He was right so often that some on the rest of the squadron feared he might be a spy of some sort. Somehow I feel it would be even easier to come up with entertaining homebase storylines in the relatively rich (if rationed) background of the UK, well away from the front lines than it was in Night Witches.
But if your group wants more procedural role-playing you could have a Nazi plot on home soil, for them to discover. Something like oh I don’t know … a group of Polish Paratroopers are not what they seem. In reality they are Germans, here to kill Churchill. (An Eagle just landed to give me that idea…) Or if the sortie rolls don’t go well you could have them downed behind enemy lines, working their way back to Blighty. Though that might actually work better as a solo game. . .
I should finish by saying that my research for this article, such as it was, was only re-reading my “Uncle” Miles Tripp’s book The Eighth Passenger as well as watching the first three episodes of Masters of the Air, and it worth noting that there are some differences between the USAAF and the RAF missions (though not, as is implied in Masters of the Air that the RAF exclusively flew night missions). Flying fortresses, for example, had ten crew compared to the Lancaster’s seven. The technologies of the two air forces were different. The advanced US bomb sight was as closely guarded a secret as the atom bomb. Some British bomber were equipped with them, but they would be carried to those places in a locked box before each mission and taken away afterwards. Bomb Aimers are called Bombardiers in the USAAF, and of course the ranks are different – most British aircrew were non-commisioned, made up to only to the rank of Sergeant if flying.
I am not sure, after writing this, if I even want a bomber supplement to exist for War Stories, but if it did there would be a wealth of material to work into it.
fictionsuit.org 