Rules Used

The basic campaign was run using TSR's Top Secret/SI rules.  TS/SI is a nice little set of rules, nothing spectacular but so far I've yet to find any flaws with it.  It's chief advantage is that it's a percentage based system, which in my mind is the easiest and quickest for players to get the hang of.  You roll dice, if it's less than the skill% you succeed, if it's more you fail.  I've found this "no-brainer" approach works best in the free-wheeling style of game I like to run.

Aircraft and Powered Armour were built using the Mekton Zeta system.  For the aircraft I created a spreadsheet that included all the systems that I wanted incorporated in the aircraft in my campaign, and then converted the MZ stats to TS/SI.  I had to cobble together some dogfighting rules, and for vehicle damage I again raided Mekton to use the "Mekton-Zeta: The Movie" Cinematic Damage system.  When XCom obtained their own aircraft carrier, I gave up though and just winged it!

Game Mechanics

If anybody is interested in the detailed rules mechanics I used in the game, please Email me.  I no longer have much of the stuff I generated for this campaign in electronic form thanks to a couple of HD crashes, but I've got most of it on paper and am happy to discuss.  Most of the time any rules I had were used or abandoned as and when the needs of the plot dictated.

One problem I came across later in the campaign was that it was becoming increasingly hard to referee XCom operations on the grand tactical scale (i.e. with players commanding up to six squads with air support!) so I visited a set of rules called "Firefight", by Alternative Armies.  The original game was based on squads of troops moving through an SF cityscape with alien forces being partly generated by cards while still under overall command of a human player.  I quickly customised the rules and produced my own, UFO based set of cards.  The rules worked with the usual provisos (i.e. totally ignoring them whenever I felt like it!) and one player even suggested he might use the same system for city-scale action in a campaign of his own.

Props

During this time, I underwent a change of viewpoint on the matter of props.  I'd originally been a big fan of intricate floorplans and the like, but towards the end of the campaign, I was much more inclined to rely on descriptions and imagination for role-playing action.  However for the squad level and larger combats, miniatures and some sort of floorplans or maps were a must.  Figures were a mix of Games Workshop, Alternative Armies and Irregular Miniatures for the aliens, and some Grenadier, Games Workshop and Denizen for the XCom forces.  I also used 15mm figures for some fights, all of which were TableTop Games figures.  For air to air combat, UFOs were GW grav-tanks, Copeland's models UFOs, the earth aircraft were a mix of modern 1/300 miniatures and Irregular Miniatures provided both sides with advanced-tech fighters.

Other props included the booklet that came with the Testor "Area S4" Flying Saucer Model, giving Bob Lazar's story on how UFO's really work.

The one prop that I did get heavily into in this campaign was background music, even to the extent of writing & recording my own theme tune.  The following sources were used as background music during various parts of the game.

TV/MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS

Babylon 5, The Star Wars Trilogy, Aliens, Akira, Gorky Park,Who Dares Wins, Delta Force

COMPILATIONS

For one session set in Miami I used the Miami Vice compilation albums, much to the disgust of my players.

(my thanks to Neil Morris for supplying most of the above music.)