DANGER CLOSE - v0.97

DANGER CLOSE is tactical military skirmish TTRPG for one or more players. It is designed to generate tense tactical decisions, stories of heroics, bravery and camaraderie, and perseverance against overwhelming forces.

I'm running a persistent play-by-post Discord campaign of DANGER CLOSE - read more and join the fight!

DANGER CLOSE is a tactical military skirmish TTRPG about squad-based combat where five Troopers advance through hostile territory, facing firefights that test positioning, firepower, and the willingness to sacrifice for the mission.

Troopers push through enemy-held Sectors toward objectives, balancing aggression against survival: laying down fire, flanking enemies, covering teammates, and deciding when to press the attack or fall back before the bullets claim another name.

Players command their Squad through a momentum-driven combat loop, making tactical decisions each Exchange about who fires, who moves, and who provides cover, then rolling dice to see if they seize control of the battlefield or watch their plans collapse under enemy pressure.

• It is setting-agnostic, meaning you can use it to play battles, missions or entire campaigns in your setting of choice. 
• Want to fight a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Interpret your squad as genetically identical brothers, fighting against clanking robots. 
• Want a skirmish in the grim darkness of the far future? Use DANGER CLOSE as the engine for a story of scrappy humans fighting against foul heretics - or flavor your squad as enhanced super soldiers, fighting against hulking green brutes.

DANGER CLOSE was made with the aim to replicate the dramatic vignettes that might occur in tabletop war games, without all the hassle, bookkeeping, investment and duration of said games. As the commander of a squad, you're constantly balancing risk and reward, pressure and pushback, resources and damage output.

It is inspired by media such as Warhammer 40k (The Imperial Guard), Halo (ODSTs), Star Wars (Clone Troopers), XCOM and Helldivers 2.

Curious for an example of play? Check out this blogpost!

Basic Rules

The Basic Rules are available for free in the demo files. They contain everything you need to run a full mission: squad creation, advancing through sectors, managing injuries, building momentum, and fighting through enemy-held ground. The basic rules are released under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), so you're free to build on them.

Full Version

The Commander's Toolkit expands DANGER CLOSE with everything you need to build, plan, and personalize your own missions, campaigns, and wars.

Where the basic rules are lean and focused, the Toolkit goes wide. It turns DANGER CLOSE into a flexible wargame sandbox while keeping the same fast, dramatic play at its core.

Some of the things you'll find inside:

• Mission Toolkit: Trooper generation tables, terrain templates across environments, hexcrawl mission maps, weather and atmospheric conditions, enemy force modifiers (Horde, Brutal, Entrenched, Stealthy and more), expanded Hard Targets, and over twenty ready-to-run sample missions.
• Between the Bullets: Prompts and tables for the human moments between engagements. The quiet talk, the gallows humor, the promises made before the next drop.
• Support Staff & Assets: Commanding Officers, Evac Pilots, and Air Support that reinforce the sense of fighting as part of something larger.
• Zooming In & Out: Individual Combat for room breaches and duels. Platoon Combat for company-scale battles using the same core rules. Mass Combat for resolving entire fronts in a single roll.
• Campaigns: Three structures for linking missions together. Tide of War for short push-and-pull operations. Tree Campaigns for branching narrative arcs. Grand Campaigns with hex maps, shifting front lines, and strategic terrain. All tied together with a full Campaign Turn covering recovery, reinforcement, downtime, and the next briefing.

All illustrated by the amazing HodagRPG.

For more updates, check out my blog, my Bluesky or pop by my Discord!