UFO: The Invisible Struggle

While the UFO campaign was running, as a seperate project I was developing my Science Fiction miniatures skirmish rules, called "Eat Hot Laser You Disgusting Alien Slime", or EHLYDAS for short.  When I took these rules to my local wargame club, I needed a background for a couple of battles so I used the XCom campaign.  These battles were incorporated into the main RPG background as 'side actions', but the game caught the imagination of several players.  I was asked to look into the possibility of running an XCom game at the club.  So I went away and wrote "UFO: The Invisible Struggle"

The premise for UFO:IS was the same, alien invasion countered by covert Earth forces using hi tech gear.  It was designed for five players plus one umpire, with the five players taking the roles of Head of Science, Military Commander, Chief of Intelligence, Public Relations Officer and XCom Commander in Chief.  Alien activity would be determined randomly, if XCom was in a position to intercept then a tabletop skirmish game would result.  Depending on what was at stake in the battle, and how well XCom did, XCom would be awarded a number of resource points, to be allocated between his four subcommanders at the CinC's discretion.  This was where the bulk of the player interaction would take place.  Although all on the same side, each player had differing victory conditions which basically meant that to win they had to convince the CinC to allocate them more resources than their comrades.  Meanwhile, the CinC was primarily concerned with winning the war against the aliens, and didn't have to give the other players all the resources, but could spend them on stategic initiatives like new bases and.  Different players could do different things with their resources, depending on what their role was, I.E. Military commanders could buy troop upgrades, Scientists would buy research, PR Officers would carry out diplomacy and Intelligence Officers would invest points in trying to track down alien bases on Earth.

If, on the other hand, the aliens were successful, XCom would find that the funding nations were going over to the aliens' side.

The campaign was never played, for much the same reason as the main RPG came to an end, but if anyone is interested in the rules, drop me an Email (address cpjohnston@aol.com) and I'll either mail them or, if there's enough interest,  polish them up and publish them on this page