More Gun Cards for Serenity:HeroQuest

I’ll take you through the way I have used the cards at my last game to see if that sheds any light. Now I wanted a way to use the more unique weapons and equipment that we have seen in the Firefly setting, Mal has his special pistol, Zoë has her Mare’s Leg rifle and Jayne has his major gun fetish. Also in other Sci-Fi settings there is a focus on the ‘big guns’ that they use. Another problem I had was the weapons are listed on the character sheets but they had no further details about them. Also at points during some of the scenarios the characters are meant to hand over their guns [or try to smuggle them in]; or swap them between themselves, and with seven PCs that gets difficult to keep track of. My solution was to make Gun Cards, the size of credit cards nicely laminated, and hand them out to the players along with their character sheets. The games I run are fairly prop heavy anyway with printed money, Multipass name badges, full colour character sheets, computer screen handouts, and the like.


The M41A Pulse Rifle as seen from Aliens.


The Newtech Assault Rifle as seen from Alien:Resurrection.



As you can see the gun cards have a picture of the weapon, its mass, firing range, rate of fire, number of rounds in the weapon, power source if has one, and other types of projectile. It also has the HeroQuest keyword with rating, three extra abilities and the HP point spend for that weapon. So the players have their own gun cards, each with their own weapons that they can use at anytime. The player of Johner has these weapons or may get these weapons at some point:


Johner’s Gun-in-a-Thermos that he can sneak in anywhere. From Alien:Resurrection.
Johner’s Grenade Launcher. Not accepted at all establishments. From Alien:Resurrection.
The MP5K variant as seen from the Serenity Film.
Johner may get to use this weapon if Elgyn gives it to him in times of need.
This is the gun Johner wants Elgyn to buy him. Elgyn would be a fool to do it!

So as you can see Johner can get tooled up should he be allowed to but for a simple trip to the bar or enter legitimately a high security area he would have to hand over most of these guns. The player would hand the cards to me, the narrator, so would be unable to use any abilities off them. The chances are the player may want to take along his ‘gun-in-a-thermos’ so he would have to use it’s concealed abilities to get past any security sensors.

So Johner tries to get his ‘gun-in-a-thermos’ past the Gun Detectors at the entrance to the Deep Space Research Complex and also past the Watchful Eyes of the gate guards. A difficulty rating of 1M2 in total. Johner’s Player uses Hidden in Thermos Flask 3M2 augmented by Small & Concealable 1M for a +2 off the card and augments with Johner’s Conceal Contraband 10M for another +3 making a total of 8M2. So masteries cancel so it becomes a 8 vs. 1 contest. If Johner had tried to get his Grenade Launcher through it would just be with his Conceal Contraband 10M with a negative augment of –3 from the Grenade Launcher keyword. So it would be a 7 vs. 1M contest, a lot harder!

With Grahams example I would use the Newtech Assault Rifle’s Rapid Fire-Quite Burst 19M augmented by Newtech Targeting Sensors 5M2 for a +5 and the character’s Rifle Trait 9M for another +3. So 7M2 in total versus the three Alien Bugs Skitter Menacingly 15M. Three bugs so a +8 for a total of 3M2 making a 7 vs. 3 contest. Far better than using the 9M Rifle Trait.

Here are some more Gun Cards




As you can see Graham I have changed the 'M' for mastery on the old cards in my other post for the 'Ace of Spades' that fits in more with the Firefly setting!






More will follow!