Land Cruisers:
The Lithuanian Campaign
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2022

Long ago, we sold downloadable content: books, expansion sets and even a complete game every now and then. But then a few years ago, the European Union changed its rules on taxing paid downloads, and we couldn’t do that anymore (well, we could have, at way more expense and effort thgan it would have been worth).

That shift opened up some unexpected opportunities to create unusual (that is, kind of weird) and fun games and expansions. Games are supposed to be fun, and I like playing with history. We can’t sell the downloads, but we can give them away, so we give them to our Gold Club. And since we give these away, I don’t feel much of a need to make them particularly marketable. But they do need to be weird, and fun.

Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign is a Panzer Grenadier expansion for our Land Cruisers book. The Land Cruisers are gigantic, barely mobile machines that rumble along, crushing all opposition beneath their mighty treads and shooting up opposition with their heavy guns. Until that opposition swarms and destroys them. Unless their on-board Land Cruiser Marines can sortie to drive them away.

The Land Cruisers story takes place against the framework of our Second Great War alternative history. Imperial Germany, under attack from east and west by rapacious neighbors, deploys its top-secret Land Cruisers to blunt the French armored offensive in Lorraine. The giant machines eventually do slow down the enemy, but it takes them 10 scenarios to do it.

Land Cruisers, the book, includes a whole raft of new special rules for Land Cruisers, the machines. The Land Cruisers take up two hexes instead of just one, so that means they move in a kind of strange fashion. And they have all of those different kinds of armaments. So they needed some extra rules.

Every 1 April, we run a special news item that’s not exactly true. Some years back, it was a gigantic Eastern Front game, from the Second Great War alternative history setting. As part of that, I drew a Land Cruiser; this drew the attention one of our greatest fans, the late Larry Marak, and I designed the Land Cruisers expansion mostly for his amusement.

The Second Great War is our dieselpunk alternative history, one where some technological paths have been explored more deeply than was the case in our actual history (airships, helicopters) and others saw less development (fixed-wing aircraft). I didn’t want to create alternative-history products that were pretty much the same as our historical games, just with different-colored pieces. That doesn’t add much fun, to my mind, and there are in practical terms an endless supply of potential Panzer Grenadier scenarios based on historical actions. If we’re going to take the game system to an alternative world, then there needs to be a good reason – to play with strange machines that never actually existed, like the Land Cruisers.

The fight against the French is a tough one, but I always meant for the Land Cruisers to fight the Russians – in this alternative history, they’re Imperial Russians. Land Cruisers, the book, is a printed product so the French are limited to what they have in 1940: The Fall of France, but that’s not true for a Golden download. I do try to limit that to one sheet of new pieces, because I don’t want players put off by an excess of cutting and pasting.

In our Second Great War story, the Russians begin an unprovoked war of aggression in August 1940 (it was closer to fiction when I first wrote the background story). Their initial targets are Poland and the Baltic States, all of them part of the Central Powers alliance which means the immediate involvement of Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The campaign from Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign takes place, as you might have guessed, in Lithuania. The initial defenders are the Lithuanian Army, as seen in Lithuania’s Iron Wolves. It’s an infantry-based army, and in our expansion set they do receive a few extra modern light artillery pieces (with anti-tank capability) plus a helicopter.

The invaders are also mostly infantry, but they are far better-equipped infantry than are the defenders. The Russians have rockets for direct support (as well as anti-tank defense); the rocket infantry are formidable units but can easily run out of rockets, after which they become much less formidable. The infantry are well-armed, with the backing of powerful machine-gun platoons, mortars, engineers and artillery. Lots of artillery.

They also have tank support. This being an infantry corps on the attack, their attached tank brigade has the standard Russian breakthrough tank, the T-35B, and an older light tank, the T-19. Any excuse to include a brigade’s worth of T-35 land battleships is one that must be taken (this improved model of the original T-35 was proposed for the Red Army, but never manufactured – we included it in Golden Journal No. 25). Plus, I wanted the Land Cruisers to fight the Land Battleship.

The T-19 was an actual light tank design from the early 1930’s that introduced the concept of sloped armor to Soviet practice; it proved difficult to produce and was replaced on the assembly lines by the much simpler T-26 after only two had been completed. But the Tsar’s factories are far more advanced than those of New Soviet Man, and the T-19 is the standard light tank of infantry-support brigades.

And like the Lithuanians, the Russians also get a helicopter.

The Lithuanians have no hope of holding back all of that Russian firepower by themselves, though they are like their latter-day neighbors deeply determined to defend their country and very crafty. The Germans arrive to bolster their ally, but even they can’t really stem the tide. They need something more. A secret weapon. They need the Land Cruisers.

The Germans (the Imperial Germans from the Land Cruisers book) arrive to help, first with conventional troops (infantry, cavalry and artillery, plus some less than excellent panzers) and then with the top-secret Land Cruisers. The Russians have plenty of tanks, but the Land Cruisers are . . . well, they’re huge and they have guns better suited to a cruiser than a tank.

Land Cruisers: The Lithuanian Campaign is a download, with 88 new pieces and 10 new scenarios. You’ll need Land Cruisers (obviously), plus Fire in the Steppe (for the maps) and Lithuania’s Iron Wolves (for the Lithuanian Iron Wolves) to play the scenarios. It’s free, but it’s exclusively for the Gold Club. It won’t be for everyone – it’s meant to be a little strange and a little different.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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