I realized not all of my post tags were showing in the tag cloud, so I replaced the default WordPress widget with a free custom one. Hopefully, this will show all the tags, even the ones I’ve only used once or twice. It’s a bit more colorful, too – my apologies if it looks like ass to my readers with restricted color perception.
Let me know if y’all can’t see anything, or if what you can see is blatantly unreadable.
Game: The Star Wars Roleplaying Game (Second Edition, Revised and Expanded) (West End Games, 1996)
My Experience: Back in the early 2000s, I was fortunate enough to play in the last year or so of Tracker7’s decade-long Far Orbit campaign. I’ve also played and run the FFG edition of the game a time or two.
Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness (Palladium Books, 1985)
My Experience: This was the first true RPG I played, back around 1986ish (I may be shaving hairs with this versus Toon, but the precise details have been memory-holed).
There I was, minding my own business, when a random Redditor on /r/rpg/ made me aware of the Character Creation Challenge. The TL;DR is that it’s a gamer take on the “New Year, New You” bullshit, wherein one creates and posts a new player character for every day of January.
Those of you who’ve known me for a while can probably see where this is going.
While I have maintained that level of output for a single system before (typically prepping pre-gens for convention LARPs), I think that for my first time out of the gate with this challenge, I’m going for a little more variance. Here are my self-imposed rules, which I reserve the right to violate at any time:
Let’s see what happens.
Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forum as a fanfic story seed.
Michi Noketsuna was the first to give voice to the truth. Warlord Grieg Samsonov and Coordinator Takashi Kurita had betrayed the Dragon’s most loyal servant. True, the life of each samurai belongs to his lord – but this was dishonor beyond the bounds of the Dictum Honorium. The Ryuken had proven that honor was in right thought and right action, not merely right appearances, and this was their reward? It was unconscionable. A samurai from their ranks who sank to such treachery would be fortunate if death were his reward.
Michi Noketsuna was the first to repudiate the covenant that his lord had broken. Free of his oaths to House Kurita, he pledged his loyalty to the man who had forged the Dragon Sword. Where he led, those who remained followed. And if their new master could only cleanse his own honor in death, they would follow there as well.
A single wakizashi was now poised to spill the blood of every surviving samurai of the Ryuken. Michi Noketsuna had found the one point of leverage that could forestall his mentor’s seppuku: responsibility. Unable to condemn loyal men and women to death under the weight of his own karma, Minobu Tetsuhara reluctantly declared himself ronin.
Under a white banner, the Ryuken boarded white ships and lifted from a white world.
On the morning of 15 October, the team breaks camp and crosses the Warta over Betsy’s newly-repaired bridge. There are a few scrapes and shudders, but all three vehicles pass without incident. The convoy shakes out into its usual order of march and rolls southwest toward Czestochowa.
The sun is climbing toward what passes for noon in autumn when the point vehicle’s crew spots a village coming up on the side of the road. It’s apparently abandoned. Stopping a few hundred meters out, the lookouts glass the area. The graveyard has a number of fresh graves. A brief conference reveals no particular inclination to stop and check it out. The team goes overland to skirt the deserted community, picking up the crumbling road again on the other side.
Midafternoon brings another noteworthy sight, this one of greater interest. As the team is approaching an intersection, Erick and Betsy sight two armored vehicles a few hundred meters back along the side road, half-hidden in a copse of trees. The team halts, reverses to break line of sight, and dismounts. Pettimore, Ellis, Erick, and Betsy creep in for a close recon.
As is so often the case in the Poland of 2000, the vegetation tells the story. Although brown and withered with frost, it’s had a couple of years to overgrow the vehicles. The team IDs them as British: an FV434 armored recovery vehicle towing an FV432 APC. The APC bears the marks of an RPG hit to the engine compartment and a subsequent fuel fire. The ARV is halted where it hit an antitank mine.
“Freeze,” Pettimore hisses. “Nobody sets out just one mine.”
Continue reading →The team encamps on the north bank of the Warta. Betsy takes charge of the bridge repair efforts. It’s a case of “must have the tools to make the tools” – she and the team’s other technical specialists need to repair the abandoned heavy equipment at the job site before they can get much work done. Worse, all of the machinery has been sitting inactive since ’97 – which means the engines are still set up to run on diesel, so the mechanics also need to convert them to alcohol fuel.
Those not directly involved in repairs find other things to do – hunting and foraging to reduce the net rate of food consumption, brewing fuel to keep the construction equipment going, and, of course, maintaining security while the team is immobile. It’s a few days of hard work for all hands, with much cursing and a good number of minor injuries for Erick and Octavia to tend. But when the reconstruction crew breaks for lunch on October 14, Betsy declares herself satisfied with the bridge’s stability.
The team decides to remain encamped overnight, building their fuel reserves and doing a little more hunting and foraging. As the morning of October 15 dawns clear and crisp, they break camp and, with Betsy ground-guiding each vehicle in turn, cross the Warta.
Bridge repair was an extended Tech roll for Betsy, predicated on the team repairing the abandoned crane. Each roll took one shift and restored one ton of load rating to the bridge deck. On a pushed roll, each 1 reduced the crane’s Reliability by 1, raising the possibility of breaking it and needing to take extra repair time. Industrial Light and Mayhem is the team’s heaviest vehicle, an 8×8 MAN KAT1 that weighs in around 10 tons unladen, and between 15 and 18 tons with its current load. Betsy accumulated 16 successes, which was enough – with some careful driving.
The team spends a couple of days in Kamiensk – resting, healing, repairing their gear, brewing fuel, helping out with the local harvest, and analyzing the take from their raid on Shotkin’s headquarters. They can’t stay indefinitely, though. Winter is closing in and they’re only halfway to the expedition’s destination.
The sky is low and sullen as the team loads up. Most of the village turns out to see them off. Father Miroslav leads a prayer for those who still hold faith and blesses the team’s vehicles. With a last round of farewells, they mount up and roll south.
Their first destination isn’t far away. During their route planning discussions, someone suggested a quick stop at Radomsko’s airport to see what else might be salvageable – particularly in the control tower, which seemed to have somehow resisted the decay that’s otherwise widespread in the ruined city.
Continue reading →
Luis Hernandez grew up in New Hampshire in the shadow of Mount Washington. Being able to see the peak with the reputed worst weather in the country spurred what would become a lifelong interest in meteorology. After completing his undergraduate studies at CU Boulder, he spent a couple of years working for the National Weather Service, but desk-bound work was eating his soul. When a co-worker mentioned that the Air Force had its own meteorologists, Luis skipped lunch to visit the local recruiter’s office. A line on a list of job options leaped out at him: “Special Operations Weather Technician.” It sounded pretty badass…
Hernandez was one of the few AFSOC personnel still operating in the European theatre by mid-2000. When Task Force Cobalt was being assembled, someone with stars on his collar decided the team might be able to use a shooter with some geek credentials. When things came apart in the days after the raid on Lodz, Hernandez found himself in a HMMWV with Cat Mitchell and two other survivors…
Strength C: Stamina D
Agility B: Mobility C (Paratrooper), Ranged Combat C (Rifleman)
Intelligence A: Recon C, Survival B (Meteorologist), Tech D (Communications)
Empathy C
Key Gear: comms and signals kit, M4A1
Languages: Russian (basic), Spanish (basic), Polish (fragmentary)
Before the war, Henry was a saxophonist in the U.S. Army Band, in it for the G.I. Bill benefits. No one was more surprised than he when he was deployed to perform his original MOS as a signals intelligence voice intercept linguist. He spent most of the war in a SIGINT truck behind the lines, trying to pluck Soviet transmissions out of the air.
Bell was captured after the Battle of Kalisz when 5th ID’s headquarters was overrun. He spent several weeks as a Soviet POW before seizing a chance to escape, which was when he encountered the team. Since then, he’s been filling in on a variety of support tasks for Ellis. He’s currently assigned as the driver for Comms, the team’s BTR-70K, though he’s both more adept and happier as a linguist and radio operator.
Strength C
Agility C: Driving D, Ranged Combat D
Intelligence A: Recon C, Survival D, Tech C
Empathy B: Persuasion B (Linguist, Musician)
Key Gear: radio; an AKM he’d rather not have to use
Languages: Russian (native), Korean (fluent), Polish (fluent), German (pidgin)