"Boots On The Ground" Is Out For Army Men (The Potential Start of a New Series)

It's been a few years since my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic dropped after a successful Kickstarter, and some time on BackerKit. And since it's come out there have been supplements for additional enemies (Army Men: Threat Assessments), supplements for booby traps (Ungentlemanly Warfare: A Baker's Dozen of Booby Traps), the medals system to award players for their performance in the field (Army Men: Medals of Honor), and two additional mission modules (A Night At Breckon's Beacon and Assault on Outpost 13).

However, there has been a request for a particular kind of supplement I hadn't released for the game yet; collections of iconic characters. Because while folks playing the game at home with their friends usually wanted to make their own troopers and squads, there were some folks who wanted to run the game at conventions, or at their local gaming stores. And there were some GMs who thought having premade characters would help get their players into the spirit of the game to see if they wanted to go even deeper.

So I put together what I'm hoping will be the start of a series... Boots On The Ground: Baker Team!

And if you haven't grabbed a copy of it yet, do so today!

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A Starting Squad, and An Homage

The idea behind Boots On The Ground, as a series of supplements, is to provide players and Game Masters alike with complete squads of troopers, each of which has its own history and iconography, and where the troopers themselves have motivations, broad personalities, and a bit of history with one another. In short, the supplements are meant to give you everything you need to run a quick and dirty game without everyone needing to dig through the rulebook and spend hours on character creation if they just want to get stuck in and see how the game plays.

I even talked about this a bit in Tactical Plastic Report, Episode 10: Future Expansions For Army Men, over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel.

And because I'm a sucker for a good homage (Assault on Outpost 13 is an obvious callback to the film Assault on Precinct 13, after all), I decided to draw on one of the most famous action movies out there. For folks who can't pin down the tickle in the back of their minds, Baker Team was the elite unit that John Rambo fought with in Vietnam... and the Baker Team presented for Army Men has a similar vibe. They are the ace-in-the-hole team that's sent in to do the dirty jobs nobody else will, and even if they meet their end the brass will consider it a win if they sold their lives for significant enemy numbers.

Originally I was going to put together 5 entire squads in a single book, but the size of that project would have been prohibitive in terms of both time and sheer word count. So to test the waters, I released this first installment of Boots On The Ground to feel out audience response, and to see if more supplements in this line would be something folks would respond to.

So, if this is something you'd like to see more of, pick up a copy of Boots On The Ground: Baker Team today, and leave a rating and review on it once you've given it a read! Also, feel free to tell me which nation you'd like to see a squad from next either in your review, or in the comments below... especially if there's another homage you feel would be right at home in this game of tactical plastic!

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