If you've been paying attention to RPG news (and really, who doesn't gobble up every least crumb?) you'll have noticed a lot of fuss over Combat Wheelchairs in D&D. In brief, Sara Thompson, a writer for R Talsorian, thought it would be fun to design a D&D wheelchair. Idiots objected. There was fuss.
The chair itself looks like tons of fun. Sara obviously put a great deal of thought into it. In broadest possible terms it's a Sports Wheelchair design with extra bits, and to be honest until this post came up I knew sports chairs existed, but not in such variety. If you want to know more about Sara's design the documents are posted in her Google drive and Sara can be found on Twitter over here. I follow her; I think some of you would enjoy following her too.
It made me think about wheelchairs in Pelgrane's game worlds. I'm not going to talk about Swords of the Serpentine as Sara's pretty much covered that ground already. If you wanted to use that design in Swords it would want some tweaks since it's for a different game system, but fantasy is fantasy and even if you have to rationalize some of its abilities differently there's no reason why you couldn't rationalize them.
In Trail, Esoterrorists, Fear Itself or Night's Black Agents a wheelchair-bound character is entirely plausible. Possibly a bit too plausible; after all, characters do put themselves in remarkably dangerous situations. Accidents happen.
A Trail (or for that matter Call) character lives in a world that's very wheelchair-unfriendly, but on the flip side she shares that world with a lot of people who have physical issues of one kind or another. The Great War generated a truly staggering number of permanently impaired people - over one million life-debilitating wounds, according to Yale University's research. They'd be very common in Europe, but over 2.8 million Americans served on the Front Lines overseas - that figure presumably doesn't count the Americans who served in foreign armies like Eugene Bullard - and many of them would have come back with permanent injuries of one kind or another. So the world around her is used to people like her, which may come in handy.
Sara's design presupposes a combat use but Trail, like Fear Itself, really isn't a combat system. Frankly if you get into combat in Trail you've probably made a serious mistake. This is why Fleeing is such an important ability. However as Sara notes the combat wheelchair is Swift, particularly downhill. I'd be inclined to give a character going downhill an additional 3 points to their Fleeing pool, so long as the character doesn't mind the risk of ending up in a crash at the bottom. I'd probably ignore most of the upgrades since they aren't really meant for this game world nor are they necessarily beneficial. However the armor plates (extra 2 Health) and mounted pistol look handy, and putting a permanent pack on the frame for books, cameras and scientific equipment is reasonable. As far as Tripping opponents goes, I'd make it a straight Athletics check difficulty 4, or difficulty 5 if you want to delay the target for more than one round. I see this more as delaying a chase scene opponent than a combat trick, but the player may see it differently.
Esoterrorists and Night's Black Agents both suppose a much more dangerous world. The combat aspects of the chair become increasingly important. On the other hand those spider legs look sweet, and totally in keeping with a Stakes style NBA game. Q Branch would be proud, and so would Dracula Dossier's Tinman. Besides if Douglas Bader can become an air ace after losing both his legs there's no reason why your Muscle can't be a vampire-hunting hero in a wheelchair.
Added to the chair's usual add-ons is the Conceal option. Frederick Forsythe leads the way in Day of the Jackal, where the assassin out to snipe De Gaulle hides the parts of his weapon in a disabled veteran's crutch and finagles his way into a veterans-only celebration.
It can be very useful to appear weak. People underestimate you to their detriment, particularly if you have a sniper rifle hidden away. This probably wouldn't work if your chair was being electronically scanned, but there's bound to be a way to spoof the simpler scanners out there. Besides a scan might not pick up garlic or crucifixes hidden away, and that could be more important than a mercury-tipped rifle round.
Gadgets ... anything that allows you to apply Blocks or Banes is a definite plus. Exactly what that entails depends on the vampire type, and there are so many versions it's pointless going over them all. Still, there are some all-purpose gadgets. A simple GPS function, perhaps designed to trace Surveillance targets. If Bond can follow a GPS tracer in Goldfinger (a film that's nearly 60 years old now) then surely someone can come up with a chair attachment that does the same thing. Small one-shot Flamethrower for those moments when Intimidation just doesn't cut it? Taser? Ooo! What if the entire chair was effectively a taser and the user was insulated by the seat, but anyone touching the chair got zapped?
This is beginning to sound like a Wire Rat's dream come true, and it's probably a good build for that kind of character. However any or all of the agent builds can make use of the chair option. You'd need to finagle it for your table and some of Sara's ideas are a non-starter in a modern (ish) game with no blatant magical effects. Looking at you, Beacon Stone. That said, the modern world is much more chair-friendly than the 1930s and there's really no reason why a chair-bound character shouldn't go wherever they like.
There are even adaptive chairs for skiing, and apparently there have been versions since the 1940s. Cue the Bond-style ski chase! Bonus points if Propellerheads is playing in the background.
Anyway I hope this gives the Directors, Keepers and players out there something to think about. There's all kinds of ways to play this - pick the version you like and have fun with it.
Enjoy!
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