Your Favorite Scenario Packs
Scenario Packs and their ilk have been with us for almost as long as we’ve had the game. From the first campaigns to the latest Turning Point, we have seen a ton of scenario packs released down through the ages.
Sure, a handful of scenarios like Unbound, Living Legends and Necromo Nightmare might strike some fans as problematic from a variety of angles. Sales of modules, adventures, and scenarios are almost always going to be among your worst sellers. And it’s no surprise that we’ve seen a variety of different takes of the Scenario pack, whether it’s replaying a major battle or campaign (Luthien, Tukkayid, Twycross) or whether it’s running the battles of a famous unit (Northwind Highlanders, Tales of the Black Widow Company), many scenario packs are repeats of famous aspects of the universe. But when they don’t sell well, you get different flavors, such as generic ones like Operation: Flashpoint, Operation: Stiletto or those that push the limits of the universe (of which Living Legends is clearly the blatant example).
With that stated, what are my three favorite scenarios?
The Best Laid Schemes…
3. The Galtor Campaign – When the Fox lays a fun trap for the Dragon, only to have it turn on him, everything becomes really problematic for both sides. The fights over the area, the Star League compound and more are quite detailed, and the Galtor Campaign is an old-school wargame module. It doesn’t have a lot of glitz and glimmer, and it doesn’t spend half of its pages talking about the history of Galtor III and its local environs as well as pages and pages on unit commanders and such. Nope! We just get some great maps, great scenarios, and then we just bash face. At the end, we don’t even get a list of what Star League tech was salvaged in the newly discovered second base. We just get a campaign that is fun and sexy in a way that only a 3025-era product can be.
The Prometheus Rises Again!
2. Unbound – Sigh. I know. I get it. A lot of fans rightfully point to Unbound as the beginning of this proliferation of crazy new technology that would continue in a lot of books to come, and really pushed the game past where it started. Where its heart was. And I get that. But taken as a module with a strong role-playing element to it, Unbound has always worked really well for me. I love the fun aspects of trying to figure out what has been going on on Solaris VII, and you know that every group invariably winds up at Solaris VII at some point in time in their gaming career, so it’s nice to have this fun adventure to grab and use, sometimes with modifications (you can exchange the to-be-tested NAIS stuff for Lost Star League tech if you set it earlier, or for clan tech, or for trying our stuff like SRM6 streaks, MRM launchers, and MMLs that will definitively come later). Unbound just hits my sweet spot.
Black Knights and Sphinxes, Oh My!
1. The Fall of Terra – There’s just something sad about this campaign. To be fair, Terra has been massively fleshed out since this printed, and if they were to do it again today, it’d probably look differently. But it still resonates with me, even when I reread it. It’s the beginning of the end. The major event that sows the seeds of the Jihad, before anyone realizes it’s happening. The Fall of the Cradle of Humanity, the Birthplace of Us All. The campaign is fun to play, and you have a lot of fronts to deal with, so you get to play a lot of different scenarios in the war. But Terra will fall. And thus the wheel turneth.
So these are my three favorite scenario packs.
What are your favorites? What has created those awesome memories for you? Do you prefer some of the newer Chaos Campaign stuff, or are you more of an old school person?