Mooks in spaaaaccce!

You must remember watching the A-team as a kid or maybe you liked Bluethunder, Airwolf or MacGyver. Or maybe one of the Bond films where they break in to the villain's hidden lair was your thing. Maybe you watched all the action movies from the last 30 years. There is a poorly neglected group of characters in all of these visceral vats of visual entertainment. The Mook.

The burly bully armed with a semi-automatic of some design. His primary function is to spray projectiles at our heroes as they carry out the world saving mission they have been contracted into. They may be terrible shots and have all the charisma of an armed potato but without the Mook to make the stars look so good we'd never have been glued to our TV's watching the worn out pirate copies of Rambo 2.

So when you are GM'ing a multiplayer game of RT at a convention you're going to have to give some serious consideration to the quality of the Mookage on the table. These guys needs to look like they can do our Heroes harm. They need to be able to menace at a distance and have the ability to throw a serious spanner in the works. They need to chuck out some serious firepower while avoiding anything that could be construed as forward planning or high strategy. And most important of all, they need to look good somersaulting out of an explosion. 

As the director of this thrill fest, to be entitled 'The Dorty Double Dozen', I need to recruit a bunch of space-based ne'er-do-wells that'll look cool and try vainly to kick ass. Luckily for me a far-sighted bunch of sculptors foresaw my need many years ago and put together a collection of figures ideal for my specific tastes. (Thanks for link Crooksie!)
An obscure little company called 'Citadel Miniatures' produced several ranges in the late '80's that fit my needs precisely. I'm amazed that there aren't more people trying to collect these figures!  (Note from JB : Like we need more competition...)

Thankfully I already have a load of these guys painted. As you can see:

I need to go back and get their friends done. A lot of them have been started at some point and will be getting some attention in the coming weeks; expect them to appear randomly between now and the end of April, like Pokemon, but with guns and oiled pectorals.

"Oh yeah baby, how do you like my juice ?!"

The game is to be fairly fun and fast. I'll be dealing with a dozen players and they will have two figures each. One will be their main character and they will have a comedy sidekick/ extra ablative wound along for the ride, hence the 'Dorty Double Dozen'. The general idea is that our heroes are looking to break into the compound of a group mercenaries/revolutionaries and make use of the communication system. There are two target buildings and in between the start point and the buildings lies some deathworld jungle that will hold plenty of comedic opportunities (nothing says 'barrel of laughs' more than having a limb amputated by a semi-sentient plant).

The mooks will be patrolling and guarding and getting in our heroes' way and will hopefully take a couple of them down before the inevitable boss fight at the end of the level.

The hardest part of the game will be organising the players (note from JB : more herding than organising really). As you can imagine, keeping a dozen players focused on what's going on during the game while at the same time ensuring the game gets time done in time for lunch and stopping Cheetor's head from exploding will be a real challenge.

I have a plan however.

Random turns.

Each players turn will be represented by a card. These will be shuffled and dealt two at a time. Also in the deck will be some cards representing the mooks (and later the boss and his gaurds). I haven't quite decided to go with 2 or 3 cards yet. I'll probably start off with 3 and reduce it down to 2 when a couple of heroes have been killed off.

The two players whose cards are dealt will have a fixed amount of time to make their move, shoot or anything else they might want to do. 

If a Mook card gets played then the Mooks get to do their thing but only the ones in a set radius (15") of the Hero who's card got dealt at the same time. Pay attention to the cards boys.

More as and when I think of it......