Doomsday Hazard

Joshua posted an article on Xenoglyph a couple of months ago about expanding the rules for Hazardous Terrain.  I had an idea the other morning about expanding that even further and using Hazardous Terrain as and/or tying it into the Doomsday Clock.

The basic idea I had was for every tick of the Doomsday Clock one square foot of the battlefield is covered by the Hazardous Terrain.  Looking at battlefield size, a general estimate is that they will be somewhere between 9.26 and 13.47 square feet.  So that means you could cover all or most of the battlefield with Hazardous Terrain by the end of the game by following the 1 Sq. Ft. per Tick method, depending on the size of the table and how much of the battlefield starts out as Hazardous Terrain.

As to what kind of Hazardous Terrain, fire comes to mind immediately.  A Trans-Orange Castle Dragon Flame, a Trans-Red Round Brick, and a Red 2x2 Round Plate combine to make a cheap and simple marker for "fire".  Also, if you want to keep the parts expenditure low, you only need to build enough to cover the leading edge of the fire and maybe a couple of spots behind it.  Or you could go with scrapbooking paper like this and just slide it under the terrain to represent an area like "The Shimmer" from the movie "Annihilation".  These are just two examples of ways to represent this type of Hazardous Terrain in both the physical and story sense.

Baseplates aren't one square foot, but using them to illustrate the advance of the Hazardous Terrain is easier than putting a grid on another battlefield.  The second one to come up in my search was Airfield Ambush 5 -- the first one was Asian Antenna Farm but the plates aren't even in that game -- so we'll use that grid and the clock count from that game as an example of how this might work out in play.

Start of the game.  We'll outline three baseplates to start.

DDC 11

DDC 8

End of Round 1.

End of Round 2.

DDC 3

DDC 0

End of Round 3.

As you can see, by the end of the game the fire would cover 14 out of 15 full size baseplates.

This rule modification is probably the closest MFZ: Rapid Attack will come to an "advanced" version as it covers a number of variables that have to be analyzed before and during gameplay.  One, do you equip all, some, or none of your Frames with Environmental Systems to deal with the Hazardous Terrain.  Two, the choice of the number of Frames and Systems.  Three, aiming for Initiative position.  Four, set up in relation to Initiative position and the Hazardous Terrain.  Five, gameplay in relation to events of the game and the Hazardous Terrain.

I'd really like to put this idea into play some day and see how it works.