Though I originally planned to ship Monkeys With Guns with a sample campaign, I ultimately decided that was an awful lot of work playtesting and fine-tuning for a game that no one was really asking for. Considering how many unfinished projects I have left to get to, it’s pretty hard to justify spending so much time on this one, especially since many of the others (Project Soul Stone, Project Blood God, Project Erinyes) are more likely to be things that people will actually want. Monkeys With Guns is a complete and playable war game and that certainly meets the minimum project requirements, so I’m calling it finished. You can view the Google Doc here.
Category: Monkeys With Guns
Monkeys With Guns: Campaign Rules
This is it for the Monkeys With Guns first draft. All that’s left after this is the outline for the Macaca Expanse campaign, which I don’t want to commit to filling in until I’ve got some more playtesting in (although I may just get impatient, make the campaign with my initial balance estimates, then hope for the best).
Monkeys With Guns: Scenarios
Thank God we’re back to paragraphs. WordPress doesn’t copy line breaks correctly, reformatting lists is a pain, paragraphs are much faster. All this reformatting has taken about 40-ish minutes. That’s not bad considering I’m queueing up over a week’s worth of posts at once, but it’s still about four times as long as it would’ve taken to format a similar wordcount in paragraphs.
Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: Vehicles
I have pretty serious balance concerns about the tank, but until we get deep into playtesting, I won’t have any idea if there’s any real grounding to them. I can’t figure out a way to mathhammer it on paper.
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Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: The Command Squad
Each platoon has a command squad consisting of the CO, the XO, 1-4 specialist fireteams of two primates each, and 0-2 vehicles. Command squad primates are bought and (optionally) equipped just like standard squad primates, however they may additionally buy special talents. Different talents are available to the CO, XO, and to various types of specialist fireteams, and each group is mutually exclusive. A veteran fireteam can’t buy talents for a grenadier or tankbuster fireteam, nor can any of the three buy CO or XO talents, nor vice-versa.
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Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: Armor And Accessories
Armor
Armor increases the Armor stat, naturally. Its weight is not measured in absolute size, but rather in the relative terms of half, full, or double weight. A capuchin’s kevlar vest is much smaller and lighter for the same protection as compared to a gorilla’s. A half weight armor always takes up half an equipment slot, a full weight armor takes up a full equipment slot, and a double weight armor takes up two equipment slots.
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Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: Ammo
Ammo
Ammo can be loaded onto any weapon that can be reloaded unless otherwise specified (such as by the Explosive or Incendiary features). It provides a bonus or special feature to the weapon, which affects any attacks made with that weapon or damage dealt to primates or vehicles by that weapon. Only primates targeted by the RoF provided by a weapon with special ammo are affected by its special features (unless its special features just generally increase damage). Replacing the standard ammo of a weapon (by default, FMJ) with a new type does not weigh anything extra, however if the weapon ever runs out of ammo and is reloaded, it loses the special ammo feature unless spare ammo is brought along to reload it with. The spare ammo is gear of one size category less than the weapon it is loading, and can be used to reload the weapon with special ammo once, whereupon it is consumed. You can bring spare ammo of a different type from the ammo a weapon is actually loaded with, for example bringing incendiary ammo to reload a weapon after it runs out of high explosive ammo.
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Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: Weapons
Gear
By default, primates are equipped only with the weapons they come with, however additional weapons, armor, and other equipment can be purchased for them. All primates have two equipment slots and rarely get more. Gear of their same size takes up one equipment slot, gear of one size bigger takes up both equipment slots, and gear of two sizes bigger cannot be carried at all, but can be manned if it is braced against a terrain feature. Gear of one size category smaller takes up only half an equipment slot, while gear of two or more size categories smaller take up no equipment slots at all.
Weapons
Antipersonnel Cannon
Damage: 5
Rate of Fire: 2
Range: Long
Size: Huge
Cost: 12
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Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: Prosimian Stats And Monkey Genetics
Today’s post contains my first balance concern: Is there any army that even wants lemurs? Old and New Monkeys both have comparable primates available to them. I’m thinking maybe I should scale them back to something cost 8, that way they can be a bit more like the tarsiers, low cost options that free up scrap for use elsewhere.
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Creating A Troop In Monkeys With Guns: Monkey Stats
The Old Monkey Clans (Catarrhini)
Primate lore holds that before the precursors disappeared, they grouped some clans together as Catarrhini, or “Old World monkeys.” It’s a matter of much debate as to exactly what this means. The Old Monkey clans contain all of the larger monkey types, but also some of the small ones. The official party line of most of the Catarrhini Clans is that the precursors came from another world, an old world, and brought the Old Monkeys with them. The New Monkeys came from the current world, which is the new one, and when the precursors vanished, it was to return to the old world. Whether the precursors left to punish the monkeys, old and new alike, for their wickedness, or because they thought the monkeys had grown enough not to need precursor guidance any longer remains a matter of much theological debate. What all the Catarrhini Clans agree on, however, is that older is definitely better. Since the New Monkey theology requires the precursors to be creators (the New Monkeys believe that they are newer, upgraded versions of the Old Monkeys) and the Catarrhini theology does not, most Old Monkeys believe that the precursors didn’t create the other primates at all.
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