Idea for a D&D campaign that occurred to me after reading Vietnam war memoirs, 1st edition style nihilsm, but with potential for a big body count... Options

[Wounded Ronin]

So, I've been thinking a lot about the Vietnam war lately. I recently read a lot of Vietnam War memoirs. I work with a guy who fled from Vietnam after the communists took over who still talks about "commie bastards". I've been spending a lot of time involved with one aspect of the care of a Vietnam vet at work as well. All this stuff isn't necessarily directly inter-related, but the Vietnam War has been on my mind.

Another thing I often think about is table top RPGs, although it seems like I don't play those anymore. Most recently, I've been thinking about the old hardcore Gygaxian dungeons that killed you (eg., save vs. death ray or die, or "is forever destroyed", no saving throw...) and were filled with booby traps and monsters. I've been thinking about what a sweet and beautiful experience it was to play the old SSI D&D 2nd edition strategy games, where if you didn't play a particular battle smart, you could just hit a brick wall and go from casually winning random encounters to being completely steamrolled due to bad tactics. Those SSI games also strictly used generic random wilderness encounters so there was always a chance your first level party was about to get cremed by a posse of hill giants and you just had to deal with that.

So, today, I though it would be great for a game it would be if it were possible to combine certain aspects of the Vietnam war with certain aspects of old school Dungeons and Dragons. In my mind, the setting of the campaign would be such that it would be able to incorporate certain aspects of the Vietnam War into a D&D game where each player has a lot of level 1 characters as opposed to only 1 and where it is therefore "okay" to have a very high body count.

The basis of the setting would be a big empire of "good guys" (mostly human I guess, the player characters) which has gotten militarily involved in a jungle area inhabited by orcs. The old Rules Cyclopedia kept encouraging the DM to have some orcs who always kept their word and were therefore able to be negotiated with, so the idea is that within this jungle there's two orc states, as well as quite a lot of rural villages with unclear political alliegance. One orc state is a kingdom (the "good" kingdom from the players' perspective, basically) has a history of successful negotiation with the human empire, and they share the official state religion of the human empire. The other orc state (the "bad" state) is a despotic proto-tribal system with a certain degree of belief in communal rather than private property, and it is being propped up by yet another political entity, some powerful evil empire which is in opposition to the "good" empire.

My idea of the campaign really isn't to be some kind of political or philosophical debate, so in order to keep things fun, dramatic, and less serious in an obnoxious and stuffy way, the "bad" orc state and the "evil" empire are also characterized by evil magic and military infrastructure (eg. the ability to deploy zombies as support, worship of some evil diety, etc.) whereas the "good" empire is characterized by veneration of a "good" diety, has clerics who won't use undead, etc.

The key thing about the campaign is 1.) lots of jungle wilderness encounters that may or may not be "at level" where the player characters could have a chance to evade or escape rather than engage; rather than just random monsters all the time a lot of the encounters would be orc military formations or patrols and support, 2.) emphasis on tactical combat when that does happen, 3.) structures in the jungle to explore/conquer complete with Gygaxian booby traps, and 4.) emphasis on ambiguous loyalty of the villages.

From my reading the Vietnam memoirs, I believe that the reason in the Vietnam War that a lot of rural Vietnamese people seemingly exhibited loyal behavior to both North and South Vietnam at the same time was twofold: 1.) they knew that South Vietnam probably couldn't protect them against terrorism from the Vietcong, so they tried to keep both sides appeased just enough so that neither side would try and kill them (this strategy, stemming from the inherent subtleties and intricacies of a very old society, had historically been explicitly employed by various office holders at the village level in Vietnam even preceeding the war whenever there was political conflict between two or more sides), and 2.) by the time of the Vietnam War many of those rural people had seen so much tragedy, bloodshed, and horrific demeted cruelty that some of them might have already been a little bit "crazy" and erratic, if that makes sense. I might be wrong but that is my take on it from my reading. So the point is that all the rural villagers the PCs interact with could be slightly erratic, and are always playing both sides towards the goal of self-preservation.

And then, instead of everyone making 1 level 1 character and playing with fingers crossed, each player rolls 3d6 a bunch of times and creates, say, 10 characters, with the ability scores determined strictly by this random generation process. (If everyone makes a lot of characters it reduces the odds someone will be screwed by having all characters with abnormally low scores). This entire huge roster of characters represents people from the good empire who have been drafted to serve in a the same unit, which is deploying to the orc jungle. At this point, in order to make the characters a little more interesting while not forcing people to make up a million character backgrounds, I would have a Twilight 2000 type randomly generated career system. So each character would gain various bonuses or skills or crafts or maybe a bonus ability point or hitpoint or two based on their randomly generated military career which in turn would be influenced by the starting ability scores and character class. The character class of the characters would be up for the players to decide, but they'd have a parameter that the infantry unit would have a certain number of thieves (recon), a certain number of fighters (grunts), a certain number of clerics (medics), and a certain number of magic users (support). Since the character class training that makes you into a level 1 character is provided by the imperial military, and to keep things simple, there would be no fancy classes like monks or druids or what have you.

The setting the campaign would have most draftees being level 1 characters (these guys make up the bulk of the military), hardened survivors would be level 2 or level 3, and Sgt. Rock or Major Hardass would be level 5. The emperor himself might be level 10. That way, while resurrection magic perhaps shouldn't be literally against the rules, almost nobody would be high level enough to cast it, and PC death would mostly be permament.

The encounters wouldn't be "at level", but would rather be generic. Most level 1 characters would die, and the few survivors who managed to level up would be the ones gradually emerging as heroes. The DM would announce various military style missions, or missions to recon or explore certain old ruins, or recon certain villages, and the players would choose which character from among their roster to bring. So they could try and bring their favored characters into situations where they think they can gain EXP and grow more powerful, and might send the scrubs if they think something is a suicide mission.

As long as you're using D20 mechanics, if you wanted to you could even tack on Call of Cthulu Sanity mechanics if you wanted to add a PTSD element or somesuch.

Finally, the missions shouldn't just be totally generic as that would get boring. There should be an actual military campaign like a single player campaign in a FPS, but I just haven't thought of the details at this time. The campaign should be paced so that there's at least some kind of story to tell, but at the same time there should be enough violence/really scary opposition/really hardcore forbidden ruins so that there is enough EXP flowing to level at least some characters up to level 2 or 3 given the big player character roster.