A side discussion during last night’s Kaserne on the Borderlands session got me curious about something, so I installed a WordPress plug-in to collect some data. Since I began blogging the campaign in January 2023, the total word count for those posts – not the entire blog – is 158,326.
When I wonder where the majority of my creative energy has been lately, that’s one answer.
Janek Woźniak has been on the run for… a while. Things have been a bit muddled since the ambush outside Warsaw that claimed the rest of his uncle’s merchant convoy. The Polish teenager isn’t really thinking of much beyond his next meal and a safe place to sleep when he stumbles across a bridge and into a small town on the south bank of a big river.
The place is under the protection of foreign soldiers. It takes Janek a day or two to parse that it really is protection, not “protection.” The troops are East Germans, and enough of them speak functional Polish to smooth their integration into the local population.
It’s Janek’s third or fourth day in the town when something clouding his brain burns away. He’s sitting in the one local roadhouse, enjoying the sensations of being clean, well-fed, and warm. There’s an excited stir as people start crowding into the dining room. Then four of the East Germans push their way in, carrying a couple of car batteries, a couple of rolls of wire, and a few prewar electronic devices of some sort. There’s a flurry of setup activity. One of the soldiers looks at something strapped to his wrist, then kneels almost reverently before the central contraption and does some things to it.
From everywhere in the room, there’s a crackle. A hiss. The crowd stills expectantly.
Then – music.
Continue reading →Plot hook: the PCs are hired by a wizard to capture and deliver an ever-weirder list of wildlife and magical constructs. Over time, they learn what he’s using all of these critters for. They’re parts sources. The wizard is a fleshcrafter, taking contracts from other wizards or eccentric wealthy nobles to create the hybrid pets and guardians of their dreams.
He calls his business Build-an-Owlbear.
(Alternate title for extra horror if the PCs are being asked to abduct goblinoids: Build-a-Bugbear.)
Another in-setting fiction piece from the player behind Magda (and Betsy), in which Magda shares a decision.
Magda’s sling lies on a table in the hostel’s common room, discarded in favor of mobility.
Her left arm is wrapped in bandages from her wrist to her elbow, but she can still hold an apple steady and work the knife with the other hand. Or hold a slice steady while she pierces it with the blunt needle and pulls the twine through.
She drapes the string of slices across a pan, picks up the knife again, and reaches for another apple.
Under the bandages, her arm twinges oddly. Part pain, part electricity, part heat. She drops the apple on the cutting board with a muttered “kurwa mać.”
From behind her, Red’s voice says, “You know, the point of the sling is to keep that from happening.”
Continue reading →(Lost? Find campaign startup notes and PC profiles here.)
[ I’m going to attempt the writing convention of referring to our PCs by their given names during narrative play and their callsigns while mounted. Let’s see how well that works. ]
Glen and Ilias find themselves back in their usual morning routines, still reeling from the effects of the fight they just experienced. There’s little time for recovery and investigation, though – their dataplates’ comm systems are lighting up with a priority alert from Ambassador Storch, the chief of the Union diplomatic mission on Tu’rosa.
One of Union’s initiatives was to establish a Schedule II printing station in Wake, the capital city. Tu’rosans want more control over Union tech that’s being brought on-world, and that was not a thing that was going to happen immediately, but Storch wanted to start some uplift work here. This project had numerous security concerns for obvious reasons.
Glen and Ilias were involved in the process of security evaluations for the installation site. The timeline was supposed to be six months out. From the briefing’s context, and supported by other indications like time/date stamps on files, the present day is now a month after the install. The PCs realize they’ve slipped seven to eight months in objective time. No one else seems to notice this, or the timeline was edited out from under them.
The immediate problem, though, is direct action by parties unknown. Three days ago, the printing station went online at Wake’s spaceport. It was under local administrative control, but a small Union presence remained on site to handle operations, maintenance, scheduling, and ongoing infrastructure build-out. A small security detail from the 501st Exploratory Guards was also stationed there.
One hour ago, unknown attackers (potentially Ashfall, the primary decentralized political movement opposing Union membership, or Ax, the collective pseudonym used by organizers of Ashfall’s militant arm) hit the site. They were using highly effective weapons, not obviously of local manufacture, alongside previously-unseen EW capabilities.
The spaceport is on a high activity cycle due to the operational tempo of industrial traffic from the system’s belt. This is complicating any attempt to establish orbital surveillance or top cover. Hostile frames have secured areas of the spaceport; they bear significant similarities to the PCs’ recent (subjective time) opponents, though not as advanced (Mk. I vs. Mk. VI, relatively speaking). They’re smaller, less sophisticated, without signs of radiation or spacetime distortions or annihilation engine power plants.
Something is now operating the printer. Union techs are not cooperating and no locals should have access to license files. From remote telemetry and data leakage, some of the items being fabbed are armament and frames that shouldn’t even be possible.
A local propagandist is livestreaming this incident. They’re claiming that the heads of several cooperatives – the key unit of social cohesion on Tu’rosa – have banded together to appropriate Union technology for the betterment of the community.
There is video confirming several friendly KIAs. The surviving Union personnel have been relocated into the city. One of the techs, Ikke Zek, managed to position his NHP partner to punch out some recordings which provided the prisoners’ current location. The spaceport is on the western edge of Wake next to an inland sea, while the hostages are being held on the eastern edge of town in the residential sprawl. Local buildings tend to be fairly low, but reinforced – the city is heavily industrialized.
Ambassador Storch’s top priority is the recovery of Union personnel. One of his key deputies, Envoy Su Yan, is advocating for neutralization of the hostile forces at the spaceport. We spend a little bit of time deliberating, but at the end of the day, we’re going with the boss’ priorities first.
Continue reading →Today’s game prep work for my next Kaserne on the Borderlands session includes a couple of relationship maps for the factions around Ponikla. Not APP-6e-compliant.
(Sorry about the scaling. Right-click and select “open image in new tab” to slightly embiggen.)
Allies and neutrals:
Hostiles:
(Lost? Find campaign startup notes and PC profiles here.)
reactor online
Glen comes back into his head with a screaming headache. Thousands of echoes of his own voice are bouncing around inside his skull. His awareness resolves – he’s in Dyrnwyn’s cockpit, rising up out of a sandy wasteland. The damage control board is showing severe damage, with everything but his basic config wrecked. The surrounding battlefield is littered with burnt-out wrecks of combat equipment, all bearing the green-and-white shield of the 501st Exploratory Guards.
sensors online
Dyrnwyn tags three frames as sensor contacts. One is Echo’s Mobius; the other two are hostiles. The nearer one is of similar size to the Everests. It’s sprinting toward Dyrnwyn and Mobius, clutching a mech-scale sledgehammer. The other is farther out, an enormous Size 3 quadruped mounting a fuckoff-huge rifle. Its vents are open; it’s glowing white-hot on thermal, and Dyrnwyn is painting it with radiation warnings. Both hostile contacts also read as heavily damaged – though the EW environment is so saturated it’s impossible to be sure of anything.
weapons onlineContinue reading →
After an 11-month drought, I’m finally getting TTRPG player time again. Paladin, one of my old gaming crew from Lexington, is running a Lancer campaign for me and NLP. I haven’t gotten to play a Paladin campaign in well over a decade, and he and NLP are both fantastic storytellers, so this is a rare treat. With their permission, I’m opening another campaign log for this story.
(If you’re not familiar with Lancer, the fan wiki is good for general orientation. Start at https://lancer.wiki.gg/wiki/LANCER before shifting focus to the subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/)
The setting is Tu’rosa, a system outside Union-controlled space on the fringe of the Orion Arm. It’s been settled for several centuries, though much of its original settling empire has been lost to history. It was never intended to be a garden world – just a planetary strip mine. When the empire’s interstellar trade imploded, so too did the polity. Tu’rosa has been clawing its way back up ever since.
Tu’rosa is currently a candidate for Union integration. A diplomatic mission and a cultural contact team are on-planet – but there’s some concern about memetic contamination. The world is under UIB-run interdiction, with nothing allowed off planet except data that’s been vetted by an oversight NHP. The mission is receiving periodic one-way supply drops, routed through the closest Union station, Lai Leng, about four years’ nearlight travel away.
Most of Tu’rosa’s populace supports Union integration, but the minority that does not is both vocal and fractious. It’s not quite to the level of insurgency, but it’s moved beyond political agitation.
Into this mix are dropped the PCs. Unofficially, they’re deployed as mech support for the 501st Exploratory Guards, the mechanized infantry unit that provides security for the on-planet Union presence. Their actual chain of command is UIB’s interdiction enforcement mission. But… allegedly, they were deployed to relieve a previous UIB team. Everyone on planet believes this was accomplished, but the PCs have no memory of that. Their mission briefing/sealed orders packet also has a missing section, despite still passing all data validation tests.
So who are our PCs?
I’m running Glyndwr “Glen” Shaw, callsign Editor.
Glen is a first-generation native of Annwn, a colony world settled in 4953U by the revived cryosleep passengers of a millennium-old slowboat. Annwn was rediscovered in 4984U, when Glen was four years old, by a Harrison Armory-affiliated scout ship. Corporate exploitation quickly followed, and in 4988U, HA attempted to claim the world via gunboat diplomacy. The subsequent occupation and insurgency burned for a decade.
Glen was 18 when Union lifted HA’s boot off his homeworld’s neck by way of a DOJ/HR intervention in 4998U. Legally a minor until the last months of the occupation, he was one of several thousand youthful Annwn freedom fighters who presented a thorny problem for ThirdComm policymakers. Technically, he and his fellow “Tomshones” were child soldiers, but Union investigators encountered unsurprising difficulties in finding any planetary authorities upon whom to pin the blame. DOJ/HR’s eventual solution was to offer assimilation-focused psychotherapy as a pathway toward subsidized off-world secondary schooling, with the intent that the Tomshones thus educated would return to Annwn to raise its social harmony indices and technology gradients.
Glen’s original intent was to return to his family’s terraforming collective, and he majored in planetology (and minored in agribusiness and culinary arts) at the University of Tharsis. However, he felt a certain obligation – not uncommon among the Tomshones – toward ThirdComm, particularly the DOJ/HR and Navy forces that were Union’s face during the Liberation. It’s possible that the assimilation therapy didn’t entirely take (or perhaps took at precisely the intended level, a cynic would say), because Glen was just one of the statistically-improbable number of Tomshones who enlisted in the UN within a few years of leaving Annwn.
Initially trained as a marine infantry scout, Glen cross-branched to mechanized chassis after three years of service. After completing pilot training, he spent the following half-decade in the marine detachment supporting DOJ/HR Liberator Team Yubari. His last promotion and completion of the NCO course (and his second degree in conflict science) came with a reassignment to the 501st Exploratory Guards – a convenient cover for his actual UIB mission.
Glen is a competent enough shooter both in and out of the cockpit. His insurgent childhood and his recon experience predispose him toward asymmetrical warfare. When mounted, he prefers to operate in the classic cavalry model of highly mobile reconnaissance and raiding. However, UIB has no shortage of shooters. Glen’s real value to the organization lies in his ability to not look or act like a soldier and his intuitive ability to connect his operator-level picture with the Bureau’s policy-level needs.
At LL0, Glen rides Dyrnwyn, an Everest chassis mounting an assault rifle, paired light nexuses, and a heavy charged blade. My build intent is a mobile, stealthy striker.
NLP is playing Ilias Vale, callsign Echo.
Ilias is an NHP specialist who got his start in the grey-market tech exchanges. He was recruited (or “recruited”) into Union’s NHP research programs. Whether through trauma, infosec training, or algorithm influence, Ilias maintains a mental trust ladder for systems, sources, and people, assuming deception as a matter of course. If he were foolish enough to have an identifying tattoo, it would read, “trust but verify.”
Ilias is accompanied by Janus, an electronic warfare support NHP that Ilias instantiated himself. At LL0, Ilias and Janus ride Mobius, an Everest chassis carrying a heavy nexus, an assault rifle, and paired thermal pistols. NLP’s build intent is hacking with secondary striker capability.
Campaign pitch for… something. Spycraft, probably.
It is the late 1960s. Oleg Kalugin, KGB chief of station for Washington, D.C., has somehow managed to convince the State Department and the KGB to allow him to take a vacation in the United States. He and his wife and daughter will be driving to Florida, discreetly tailed escorted by FBI counter-intelligence agents.
Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover has decided this is the perfect opportunity to abduct and interrogate a senior KGB officer.
You are CIA operatives. Your superiors are aware of Hoover’s intentions and are terrified of the covert war that such an act would assuredly ignite. Your mission is to protect Kalugin without his knowledge, ensuring that his vacation is uninterrupted and he returns safely to Washington. Good luck!
Explaining a screen shot I included in yesterday’s post:
A few months and sessions ago, I decided to steal a page from Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. With the Challenge Tracker module for Forge, I’ve added PbtA-style progress clocks to some of the party’s major infrastructure projects in Ponikla:
Every 10 shifts of work from a project leader (i.e., a PC with some general competence in the appropriate skill or the Logistician specialty) generates one skill check. Each success fills one segment of the outer (green) ring. Each 1, however, whether natural or pushed, fills one segment of the inner (red) ring, representing breakage, wasted materials, and other problems.
When the outer ring fills, the project is complete. When the inner ring fills, the project fails and must be restarted from scratch.
Generally, inner segments are equal to 1/2 the number of outer segments. I determine the number of outer segments by GM fiat and discussion with the table, as warranted.