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How do you make use of everyone's favorite punching bag?

Personally, I like my skull-boys to be exactly the kind of terrifying military machine the setting makes them out to be. Sure, your group can burn down a squad or two when you catch them off-guard, a rifts group is often powerful enough for that, but when they take cover and call in the artillery and air strikes...things get @#$*()% ugly.

From time to time i'll have their seek and destroy units or long-range patrols out in areas that aren't CS controlled, sky cycles will do fly-overs of suspect areas and the such. Though I don't have platoons of UAR's wandering the countryside just waiting to get blindsided by the next group of murder hobos that spot them. The important part of this is that a high altitude SAMAS patrol won't automatically engage everything it sees. They'll often just spot you, report what they see and more often than not command won't order them to frag you unless you're steering toward their territory. Even then, they'll probably just warn you off over the louspeaker.

I also tend to keep them focused on their goal. They have their armies deployed in areas they want to occupy, then patrol the rest. they kill a lot of stuff, and much of it is unnecessarily tragic, but they hardly go out of their way to torch orphaned d-bees just because they're there...unless they're annexing the area.

Though there are times i'll have a comically tragic CS officer and his men take a grudge against the PC's somewhere over the rainbow...that tends to be entertaining.

I dont dumb then down in any way. Lots of Dogboys and lots of espionage. Anybody dumb enough to fight a large number of CS..... lots of missiles.
I also give the Flame Panthers, H.U.2 Supersoldier Experiment capabalities, and Anti-Monsters.
Experiments-2 side effects rolls
Flame Panthers-Treated like prize pets, very arrogant -4MA
AntiMonsters- Start at level-9 The whole Army functions around them, left out or ignored -20 Percent skills that require interaction with CS troops.
Treated as a non-combatant. Spoken to politely, left in vehicles or not given orders. But constat given commendations for mock things such as, Attendance, Cleanliness, Citizenship.

As players, we used them as "loot piñatas" (to borrow a phrase from another forum member).

--flatline

As a GM, I used them as opposition, but not so much to loot there.... demolished armor and vehicles are hard to use, and get huge discounts on reselling prices due to refurbishing being needed, and CS loot is generally "hot", meaning that unless you have a special contact or location where they have the way to resell where it's less dangerous (remember the CS destroys thieves with great prejudice), the resell price will be minuscule, maybe 5% of the Black Market resale value due to the risk in handling the merchandise.

Yeah, i know you're game, cheeky-bastard.

Did you ever run games and make use of them though?

I was usually a player rather than a GM. The games I did GM were mostly in other settings (e.g. Wormwood) so I've never actually used the CS as a GM.

--flatline

Depending on the group they certainly are. Even some of the books make a point of setting examples of situations where a CS patrol is simply going to get stomped into the ground.

Yarp. They certainly can get thrown under the bus and flat out owned. Happens to everybody, though.

I tend to not use the CS as a threat, because players are wily. I let them run into the trouble if they have it coming, though, all the time.

But if they can win the fights and claim the loots, good on them.

not sure any way i have not used the CS
ran games where the players were part of the CS, occ's that were indifferent to the CS and some actively hunting/hunted by the cs

and in all variations the CS could be nothing but positive, defending small outposts of humans in patrol area's but not enough value to have any CS presence in the area, providing vaccinations to burb residence or providing jobs

or, mostly just monster/raider killers handling things that might cause problems for others in the area , but only because it was in CS best interest to do so (may take down that dragon, but do nothing about that forest fire since it wont reach CS borders)

active genocide, taking and securing anything of value be it a resource, installation or strategic point of interest.
killing anything that get's in their way that doesn't look human or under suspicion of using magic (even turning towns into smoking rubble if they don't co-operate)

of course most times it can be a mix of everything, it just depends where and how close you look

(the reason the cs might be able to provide jobs is that the former workers are dead, maybe that vaccine is toxic to non humans, that band of raiders might have been the town militia for a point of interest to the CS, of course that small farming village the CS obliterated might have been a vampire outpost or the little old lady a patrol gunned down may have been a witch)

since the CS can mobilize vast numbers of troops and go toe-to-toe with pretty much anything (at least in north america) they can be used to mark large area's as a 'no go zone' if the CS is engaged in a large scale fight with horune pirates or splogoth slavers on the cost it could be days before the area is safe, and weeks before the CS decides it is no longer off limits ( by then most salvage might be gone and there could be a new permanent CS installation in the area)

It's a very general view, but I think it's a good one. They really are like 'murica.

Before the University life swept me up and killed my ability to game, I did get involved in a "Town Building" game where we went on adventures with the goal of expanding various aspects of a strategic frontier town. The CS in that game were one possible means to provide added technology and protection, but in the end things predictably went pro-magic and the CS ended up becoming an antagonistic force. Had a lot of combat encounters along the eastern trade routes due to the CS attempting to keep food and equipment from CS farm country from reaching the town.

The plot of many a Rifts game.

So far, the CS have only made two appearances in my game.

1. When a Death's Head Transport was caught in a massive super-charged ley line storm over Dinosaur Swamp and crashed while transporting a Power Leach (Player Character) for dissection. Those who survived the crash fought off the locals for a bit but were eventually forced to flee and "go native" when they were attacked by two undead Dinos animated by a local necromancer (another Player Character). They survived in the Swamp a few months dodging the Player Characters and fighting off Dinosaurs while waiting for airvac.

2. The second time they showed up was (ironically enough) to kill the 13,000 foot tall Power Leach who was all that was left over when Florda was destroyed. A Vallax destroyer crash-landed on Earth epochs ago and they all died. However, in recent times a cabal of necromancers had found the buried ship and using their magic learned what they had. So, they had the reanimated Vallax aliens create a bomb that harnessed the power of several nexuses to create a soul-breaker orb that would destroy the souls of everything and everyone in Florida (except the cabal of course!). The purpose was to create a massive number of dead Dinosaurs that would then be reanimated as an army under the control of the cabal by a massive ritual that harnessed the massive P.P.E. released from that much death. Although the players monumentally screwed the pooch (spending their time having sex with the wives and daughters of the local barbarians instead of searching for a way to stop the bomb), after a couple of months it was too late to stop their plan. They would've won too except the players managed to screw up the Necromancer's protection field last minute so the soul-breaker ended up taking the Necromancer's with it too. That is everyone, except of course the Power Leach; which absorbed much of the explosion and remained relatively unharmed. It didn't help that the players kept force feeding him more and more energy, often against his will. What does this have to do with the CS? Well, when they investigated Florda and found everything in it dead and rotting, except for the massive hulking power leach that now sat with a perpetual crown of ley line energy bristling above its head, the thought "**** that!" and killed him with Samas (plural). It took them a while, but as powerful as the Power Leach had become (and it was truly ludicrous) he had no projectile weapons and was FAR too large to use any he might've had. He threw some rocks (small hills/mountains) but they were easily avoided. In the end, they just took him out with Rail Gun Rounds and then chopped him up and shipped most of it to Lonestar for analysis. The current state of Florida is unknown at this time as none of my players have returned there to investigate. Approximately 6-7 years (in game) have passed since those events though, so who knows... Maybe the CS control Florida and the secret time Rift now...

I imagine being the SAMAS squadron cleaning that mess up, "Oh look, he's pickin' up another hillside...climb to 5000ft and bank." *zooming and flying* "Okay, clear...reengage." *yawn*


I used the CS to turn a mountain fortress into a pile of dirt. There was a mechanoid-demon gang war going on in the area and their suborbital surveillance caught it. So they called in a fly over with some sky cycles in the area, then moved in an RDF and flattened the whole place. Fortunately the PC's got out before the mountain collapsed.

Yup. Ironically, they were the only thing that could stop the damn monster of a thing, nothing in Dino-swamp had that kind of range. I ruled that as the Power Leach gets bigger it looks increasingly demonic and "meaner" because the idea of a giant pudgy child-critter felt "stupid" given how strong and powerful it was. So, the entity they faced was pretty terrifying. Its Horror Factor was something retarded like 97 (or thereabouts; maybe 970?) because of all the bonuses it got from feeding. So it did give everyone a moment's pause as they looked upon the nightmarish apocalypse demon that was still carrying on like a child having a temper tantrum (crying, kicking, jumping up and down on the spot). We didn't run the combat, instead we just ran average numbers and they needed to get four squads in so they could keep a constant line of fire on the thing because they kept running out of ammo and he'd just feed off the Ley Lines to get more M.D.C. and heal if they weren't shooting at him. The whole thing was a real mess. Of course, he was and will be the last Power Leach I ever allow in my game.

That said, I love how tactics can play such a large part in Rifts. In other games his AC would just be too high or his DR too great and it'd be completely unmanageable.

Why would the CS use Anti-monsters, when it's one of the things they don't like about their Columbian "allies"? TW 'borgs...

I think Say's games go for maximum kablooie, and if the CS has to use some anti-monsters to do it, then that's just the way things go.

Or we're both misunderstanding the statement.

Way back when I first started playing our GM would use them if it suited him, have them sort of pass by in the background in other games or no presence of them at all.

It may have been his GM style, or the characters that we picked to play (maybe both). I can remember only 1 campaign were we openly fought with the CS and it's because I was a Burster and I can't remember what the other two guys were but we were operating in the middle of CS territory.

Other times, not so much. I never played a magic user (until I played a Chiang Ku but then we were going against demons, can't even remember if we were in North America or not) or even a D-Bee. I guess they would have hassled my Psi Slinger because of his psychic powers, but they would necessarily KOS like they would a mage or Dbee (they have people with psionics in the CS).

Pretty much everyone in our group always played humans, sometimes they had nice bonuses like a couple psi-powers or super powers, but mostly just fighters. We stayed out of their way and they paid us no mind.

We bumped into some CS guys in the background when he ran his campaign where we were all one of the new variants of Glitterboys from Free Quebec. He set it in the time period just before they broke off so there was only rumours and some heated tempers. When we were off duty we ran into another off duty squad in a bar, they were passing through Quebec (can't remember the state they operated out of) and they made a couple of wise@$$ remarks loud enough for us to hear and we replied with a closed fist, lol.

Another GM started to run an all CS game (which is something I've always wanted to play in) but it didn't really get off the ground. I find most of the people I play with find "military type" characters boring and never want to play a game like that. Too bad because I rolled up an awesome CS Special Forces character and there were 4 or 5 of us playing (plus GM) so it would have been a cool squad.

Now that I've become GM I don't really use the CS either, my games usually take on a more supernatural kind of flair, except for the game I ran where they operated out of New West and were bounty hunters.

I've pitted them against vampires, evil magic users, lower grade demons, weirdo serial killers that seemed run of the mill until they found out it was all steps leading up to a major ritual they were preforming.

I ran an all CS game once too. It was pretty interesting. Special Forces unit, they had a mix of all sorts of classes. The core was a sniper, a commando and a ranger (the PC's), the platoon they were attached to found out about some black bag stuff with the agency that studies Rifts, they were making a "breakthrough" with the tech that could slam a rift shut, but it required so much PPE to use that the techs would sacrifice living beings. At first it was great, but as they kept testing it, the sacrifices became ritualistic and an evil god found its way into the mess.

Things went to hell with the Commando fell in love with some human-looking D-bee girl who was going to be fed to the machine, so they rescured her and destroyed it. They ended up being branded traitors, even though their actions saved thousands of lives (the scientists were going to open a rift for their new master). Good times.

That sounds pretty cool. In our unit I was Special Forces, another person was a Commando, I find that OCC kind of redundant since they are pretty much the same thing. We also had a CS Juicer (played by my wife), can't remember the other members.

I only ran in one adventure in an all CS squad. I know I ran a grunt, I think we had a SAMAS and some dog boys too. I always wanted to take a spider walker and crush some Ewok/Rebel scum with it. A shame that adventure never turned into a campaign. I always thought the CS would have a huge advantage with air power and lots of artillery, king of the battlefield. The CS has some major SP Artillery right? Come to think of it, a forward observer would be a good way for me to go if there's a next time.

Firestorm i think is some good artillery for the CS. Though I'm pretty sure the Coalition makes extensive use of missile strikes.

I've almost never used the CS in my games. The few times I do they're usually pulling strings on the back-end or colorful scenery during a merc mission.

This is because I know how deadly they can be, and I'd almost certainly end-up killing at least one member of the character group every other encounter with the CS (assuming the players did not make an attempt to escape).

I can have a single, mid-level, elite squad of CS soldiers take-down a group of Mages, Psychics, and Supernatural creatures if necessary. Not fair for my players to face such opposition.

Yeah, guys like the CS or Larsen's Brigade, Crow's Commandos etc...trained professionals that are in it to win it...I don't like fighting those guys personally. They focus fire. You pretty much die unless you're immune.

I don't either. When PCs encounter the CS, they watch their step.

Hard to pull punches when they got kill on sight orders for half the planet.

I don't dumb them down, but I don't play them up either.

I have used them since the beginning (meaning 1990) as kind of my main antagonist and usually a villain. While I don't dumb them down I have never portrayed them as super human either. I treat them very much like a military force of an evil dictator. They range from heroic like a Paladin to so evil Ahriman would refuse to deal with them, from military genius to so dumb he could only have gotten his job from a relative, and from super patriotic to frightened of his nation to self-centered and doesn't care.

Truthfully, when I was just using the main book they were largely "loot piñatas" (God I love that term) when encountered in small numbers, and in large numbers they were great road blocks to force the PCs to go somewhere else (it's not railroading if the CS makes them go there).

I didn't really start giving them brains until after the War Campaign & CS Navy Books came out. The stuff in Rifters 18, 19, 23, & 42 help with that too.

I prefer to run CS Campaigns but when I don't, I use them smartly. If the PC's go into CS Controlled territory, they are the law in the outlands and the ISS runs the cities. In the Burbs, assuming the PC's are against the CS, I treat it similar to Northern Ireland during the Troubles or Israel/Palestine during the Intafatas.
If they're outside of the CS Territory and they encounter the CS, they may come across a long range patrol, an RCSG team escorted by troops, a pair of CS Rangers, or a group of Skelebots. Aside from the Skelebots, they won't engage the PC's unless they are attacked or are doing something blatantly dangerous (or if they have equipment that the CS has a zero tolerance policy for). If they decide to attack the CS, unless they're really far out or wipe them all out in the first half of the first melee round, the CS will call for close air support or long range artillery and if the PC's win or escape, they will likely be pursued, especially if they capture any weapons or equipment.

As a habitual antagonist of the CS, I absolutely love this behavior. Unless we were in a hurry, we would always make certain that the CS troops had a chance to call for reinforcements before we finished them, thus guaranteeing that more "loot piñatas" would soon arrive. If more reinforcements arrived than we could safely handle, we'd disappear with as much loot as we could carry, doing as much damage to the CS as we could.

--flatline

I tend not to mess around with ambushes. If you mess with the bull, you get the horns. The PC's are usually a squad-sized element or smaller right? You put a platoon sized element up against the PC's with more on standby. I don't treat the CS like stormtroopers. I treat the CS like US Marines or Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is, if Micky Mujahadeen wants a fight, the CS will bring the fight.

A party of PCs that intends to prey on CS forces must obviously have some means to deal with CS numerical superiority.

I suggest stealth and maneuverability.

--flatline

I treat them more like HYDRA then the US marines. The books even talk about them in these terms.

In the first Mercenaries book there is story where a city defender talks about the CS obliterating an unarmed D-bee village and calling it a battle. As we can see from the First few parts of the Tolkeen war the CS often comes up short against people that can shoot back.

The simple fact is that most CS troops lack the education and imagination of a modern US marine or soldier. I mean if there vehicles suddenly had a weakness like the Bradley's and HUMVEEs did in the beginning of the war could you imagine CS grunts messing up there shiny APCs with improvised armor, without orders to do so.

I never play them as dumb, but I also do not give them an overabundance of imagination.

Radio jamming is one tactic we use when we ambush CS troops. By the time the base figures out something's wrong, we've already gotten away with the loot/ captives.

Yeah, radio/radar jamming is great. The CS usually makes pretty extensive use of that on special operations, usually when hunting down those who do it to them.

Though, i don't believe the CS should be invincible or always super tough and skilled. Sometimes they really are the world's punching bag. Fortunately for them they have the numbers to take the beating, and the resources to come at it from a more subtle angle later.

One thing about a great bad guy is his persistence.

That's why you sell to the black market.... they're a lot less likely to sell out their suppliers, so the CS doesn't find out it's your player group. Unless your GM allows them to be omniscient, in which case you need a different GM.

Or you could simply take the party beyond the reach of the CS. Then it doesn't matter if they're omniscient or not.

--flatline

Yeah, bring able teleport and dimension hop are great ways to escape uncle skull head.

Though if you you hit and run forever, you're really not accomplishing that much. I'm curious what end goal a group with the ability to escape retribution and power to take on a CS platoon or more in a fight would actually be.

We were using the CS to fund our efforts to defeat the Unholy in Wormwood. We sent CS weapons, armor, and supplies to wormwood to equip our allies and once we figured out how, we started kidnapping CS troops and sending them to Wormwood to fight for us.

As we gained access to other markets like the Three Galaxies, we used CS weapons, armor, and equipment to trade for items that we wanted to bring into Wormwood.

--flatline

That's pretty funny. But hey, still helping humans.

If they're omniscient, they're also omnipresent and omnipotent as well, judging by some of the major fanboys I've had to deal with.

I'm a fan boy, but if you beat'm, they lose. the skullheads got limits, just like everything else.

Well my group usually plays the individual cs people as possibly good (usually roll the dice before encounters as a gm) but the overall ruling class and upper leadership as evil. The fundamental CS ideals are that all d-bees, magic users, people who disagree, and everyone else that thinks for themselves are bad but psionics, creating genetic mutations, keeping their own people illiterate and dumb, and forcing their ideals on others is perfectly fine. These are the ideals of the insane or at the very least non rational and hypocritical and therefore we play the cs leadership as insane, irrational, and hypocritical. Generally throughout history these kinds of people were very obsessive, militaristic, possessive, and could be defined as zealots. So that is how we play them.

The tricky part as a gm is trying to find a way for the characters that have an education and see through the CS propaganda to tell if when they do encounter coalition forces whether or not they are dealing with zealots, brainwashed citizens, or those that can be reached. Of course the less intelligent characters that know of the evil deeds done by the CS tend to just kill or attempt to kill any CS they meet.

Crazy doesn't mean stupid and so when actually fighting the CS we play them as a competent military unit in the field akin to the Germans of WW2 or the British royal navy during the time of the American revolution. More often we use guerrilla warfare if we think there is a high chance of success. Most of the time however, we are forced to leave as the CS simply outnumbers most other forces.

So... the CS can build crazy tons of rail guns or whatever, but have no idea how to make a radio frequency hop? An emission source powerful enough to actually jam a FH military radio would be powerful enough for the fire support base to triangulate and shoot at. Just saying.


One could easily imagine a scene such as this playing out in the CS command center:

Duty officer: "Bravo team, we're reading a huge radio disturbance in your vicinity, report, over."

Radio: "..."

Duty officer: "Bravo team, come in, over"

Radio: "..."

Technician: "Sir, we've analyzed the signal and triangulated its source. It appears to be a jamming signal covering our entire FH band, and it is located at the last known location of bravo team."

Duty officer: "Launch Ze Missiles!"

If only the CS were actually that careless...

...The mage sets the timer on the RF screamer, concentrates for a bit while mumbling an incantation, and teleports it to the roof of the APC parked on the horizon. Eight minutes later, it turns on. Six minutes after that the CS encampment is a crater.

--flatline

Yeah, without satellite use, other confirmation is necessary before you bombard an area. It would make life easier if they were that careless, I agree.

One of my favorite NPC bad guys is an old, broken down CS Military Specialist. He's fat, out of shape, has a bad mustache and talks like the bad guy from Silence of the Lambs. His name is Guss. My players love to hate him. The reason is he's not a full-on genocidal maniac. My CS bad guys seldom are. He's always in some position where the characters need him for something, and good old Guss is happy to use the PCs to further whatever he's up to. The best is, even though most of the group could stomp him flat (He's 80 years old but still ticking like a 45 year old with bionics) they never can take him out because he's always a key to SOMETHING. One of my favorite moments was Guss telling the groups Temporal Wizard after a rude remark. "You fellas could probably kill me. That's okay, nobody would miss old Guss. But either me or somebody just like me will feed you and you're whole dang kind into the gas chamber one day anyway. You're too dumb and uneducated to know what a holocaust is, but buddy someday we're gonna teach ya."

Same NPC when objecting to another magic using PC speaking to him while he was conversing with a hatching Dragon.

"What do you mean I can't talk to you, you're talking to a dragon!?"

"Sure, he's not a scum bag like you. He's an invading monster, and yes he's on this planet to subjugate good, honest humans like the demon plague he is. I don't care what he says, I know what it is. But you... you're a human. You're a human who uses that magic crap. That crap that ruined this planet and has me out here messing around having to smell your stench. He's a monster. He is what he is. You should know better. I'd rather talk to a monster than a dang traitor."

I've used the CS (way back when I was GMing) mainly as a mid-level threat, I never let the players have it easy but didn't throw whole divisions at them. I gave them enough numbers that, when appropriate, the players had to "run away". A low power group (basic adventurer types and a PA or 2) running in to a Skelebot patrol of 20 bots plus 2 handlers should make a party think twice if you're only 6 people, even with 2 PAs.
Thankfully in a recent game session (as a player) the GM was nice and made the CS come in dumb during a big combat, otherwise my 'bot was the biggest target and should have had the most fire directed at it, instead they concentrated fire on an armored door we were defending.

So, yeah, the point was the unbelievably ridiculous amount of power it requires to actually jam a frequency hopping radio would make a portable instillation verge on impossible (unless you manage to break the encryption) (or use magic or something to disable the radios) (but that isn't really jamming so it is a different issue).

We may be in a RL vs RP type debate though. Do we know how jamming works in game? If it's "you have gear, you make roll, success!" then it's not tough. If there is specialized gear that lists the difficulties and amount of juice you'll need, then that's different.