Battle Moon is a 24XX combat rules primer disguised as a patently ridiculous (but still quite usable!) one-shot scenario. Create a black-belt vidcast celebrity with a bandolier of plasma grenades, a robot chessboxer with a glitchy force-field generator, or a cephalopoid master of disguise with a sentient Rigelian worm-whip, and see how they fare at hoverboard jousting over lava for the amusement of the galaxy’s hyper-rich! Or just read it if you’ve ever wondered…

• How do you run combat without a strict turn order or hit points?
  
• How do you specify what’s a “risk” in combat?
• How do you avoid killing characters on practically every roll?
• What happens if a character “misses” on an attack?
• How do you “stat out” enemeies?

I had hoped that giving away Emergency Rules free and writing a blog post on combat in 24XX would clarify how to run 2400, but I still get questions like these a lot. It’s possible those write-ups still leave too much ambiguity for many GMs, but I also know that many people just don’t even realize they exist. And so, I made Battle Moon as a thinly-veiled rules primer — just 3 columns devoted to character creation and scenario prompts, with the other 3 columns of text devoted to explaining how I run this game, especially in combat. 

(As an aside, I knew even as I wrote it that there was a risk Emergency Rules wouldn’t be read very much. I think one of the main reasons 2400 has “worked” is that it’s not just a series of rules modules you tack onto a central document, as I first considered making. When each module is a self-contained game with stuff you can take or leave, signaled by a colorful cover that sparks the imagination, but still only a few pages long, people are a lot more likely to actually read the thing.)

I actively resisted making explicit “combat rules” for 2400 for a long time. This hobby’s wargaming roots, and the continued dominance of D&D in the market, mean that a lot of players expect combat is the primary activity in RPGs, and that’s not how I wanted to run 2400. The rules are meant to encourage players to come up with interesting, out-of-the-box approaches to deal with risky situations without pre-planned solutions. And so combat in 2400 is handled the same way as any other risk — as a thing that could go in a lot of different directions, without predictable outcomes, possibly surmountable by a single roll. By explicitly spelling out the unpalatable consequences of violence, rather than abstracting them as hit points, my hope was that players would find solutions other than combat the vast majority of the time. And from what I hear from GMs running 24XX games, that’s generally what happens. 

All of that said, combat does come up in 2400 — in my games, and in others — even if only as a worst-case scenario. And because so many of us come to new RPGs with preconceived notions about how combat works from other games, I hear from GMs who struggle to set expectations for players, or get derailed by falling into patterns learned elsewhere. 

I like that 2400 is a game that’s not “about” combat, by and large, but I decided that I would be sticking my head in the sand if I denied the reality of how people are trying to play it. I figured the best way to handle this would be to address it directly — not by changing the rules of 2400, but by offering a scenario where combat is practically unavoidable, and advising on how you might handle it. Data Loss and Legends also offer some expanded guidance for combat, given that they’re designed to emulate games from combat-oriented genres, but Battle Moon goes a step further to really dig into the nitty gritty of how I mean for fights to run. Even if you don’t plan to run an over-the-top mishmash of Beyond Thunderdome, Battle Royale, and The Hunger Games — in spaaaace — you should find something in here to help run and play other 2400 games.

If this doesn’t match how you play, please don’t worry about whether you’re running 2400 “right.” If you and your friends feel safe talking through things, and aren’t feeling frustrated or confused, you’re doing great. This is for the people who are pretty sure their game could be going even better. I sure hope it works! But even if it doesn’t, at least I finally found an excuse to use the most amazingly absurd public-domain pulp cover I found from many hours of sifting through ComicBookPlus.