First draft. This is something I want to try using in tonight’s session if it becomes relevant. Adapted from Spectre Operations, 3rd Edition.
When the PCs are trying to do sneaky stuff around an enemy force (or just someone they don’t want to see them), the force starts at one of four levels of awareness. The starting level is dictated by the narrative.
Complacent (1): The NPCs have no reason to expect that anyone is sneaking around their neighborhood and have no particular motivation to be alert. PC Recon checks for stealth are not opposed.
Casual (2): The NPCs may be keeping watch or patrolling their perimeter, but they are not aware of any specific threat. They will investigate anomalous activity, but unless it’s obviously something dangerous or hostile, their general approach will be curious rather than confrontational. PC Recon checks for stealth are opposed normally.
Suspicious (3): The NPCs have reason to suspect hostile activity. Watchkeeping and patrol discipline are tightened up. Sentries will call for backup before investigating anomalous activity, and will move in expecting hostile contact. NPCs receive a +1 modifier when opposing PC Recon checks for stealth.
Alerted (4): The NPCs are actively looking for hostile activity. Anything that gets their attention will trigger a general alert. NPCs receive a +2 modifier when opposing PC Recon checks for stealth.
PCs make Recon checks for stealth normally (i.e., it’s a group check using the lowest base dice in the affected group). Each failure, whether through a natural roll or an opposed check, increases the NPCs’ awareness level by 1 and inflicts 1 Stress on each involved PC.
At the referee’s discretion, if the PCs eliminate all witnesses before they can communicate back to the rest of their group, they may temporarily forestall the increased awareness level. Sooner or later, though, someone is going to find a body or bloodstain or realize Igor isn’t at his post.
This is a meta post to bring my players up to speed on previously-collected intel about the situation around Kamiensk.
Kamiensk
Survivor community of about 190 people, led by Father Miroslav Kasprzak, a Polish Catholic priest. Until recently, the town was occupied by marauders – Soviet deserters/mutineers from the former 9th Tank Division. The village suffered on multiple levels during the occupation, and its problems now range from depleted food reserves to chronic malnutrition and injuries from casual beatings to an incipient baby boom.
Of significant note, Father Miroslav is the first community leader the PCs have met who is metaphorically keeping the lights on. He has preserved his church’s small library, he’s running elementary school sessions for the kids and church services for the adults, and these seem to be keeping the worst of the “brain fog” from the local population. He doesn’t have as much of a conceptual framework for the problem as the PCs do, but he’s aware that some sort of effect is suppressing knowledge and critical thought in certain areas.
Kamiensk was effectively defenseless before the PCs arrived, with only a handful of hunting weapons and two or three AKs. After dealing with the immediate marauder problem (see next), the PCs had turned over a number of captured Kalashnikovs, a PK machine gun, and an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, as well as a working PTS-M amphibious transport.
There’s been some discussion of relocating Kamiensk’s population to the Ponikla area, but that’s been strictly an internal conversation among the PCs.
Local Marauders
About six months ago, a band of about 50 marauders took over Kamiensk. In the process, they killed most of the local militia (which also drastically reduced the village’s workforce).
The marauders were a splinter group formerly aligned with a warlord named Shotkin (see next), who holds the nearby small city of Radomsko. They’d come up here because they’d become disillusioned with Shotkin’s rule – though there were undercurrents of fear and disquiet when they spoke of him.
About a month ago, they became aware that the remnants of the Soviet 124th Motor Rifle Division had moved into Piotrków Trybunalski, about 20 kilometers to the north. They had some intense internal disputes about how to handle this, which led them to splinter along ethnic lines and abandon the village for fear of discovery. The PCs subsequently tracked down those bands, eliminating two of them and convincing the third to depart eastward.
Shotkin and Radomsko
Radomsko is a larger survivor community, numbering about 4,000, which is about 10-12km south of Kamiensk. Of those, a quarter live in the remains of the city, while the rest are scattered around its surroundings in farming enclaves. The population there is heavily fogged.
The current “leader” of Radomsko is a Soviet deserter/marauder/warlord named Shotkin. He’s of Kazakh origin, and most of his 70 (estimated) remaining followers are Kazakhs or Uzbeks. He’s reported to have something which non-military sources have described as “something that looks like a tank but isn’t a tank.”
There is evidence that Shotkin’s forces have been active in the immediate vicinity of Kamiensk, successfully ambushing a patrol from the 124th MRD. There were several anomalies around that fight (see the previous post for a summary of intel collected at the scene). One 124th MRD survivor was recovered from that scene and Ellis, Miko, and Bell are now interrogating her…
As our table gears up to resume play after a lengthy hiatus, the player behind Pettimore and Alexei sent me this slice of Pettimore’s pre-campaign back-story. Posted with author permission.
I don’t recall much of what happened after Krakow, honestly. Most of it’s a blur. I remember bugging out, the team going their seperate ways. I remember Broadstreet handing me that file, looking like the Devil himself had walked on his grave, then he ducked down an alley never to be seen again.
After that, I guess I just sort of drifted. Headed north for a spell. No reason why, just kinda picked a direction. After a while, I wound up in this little town called Ponikla. Seemed like a quiet place to stop. Folks were wary, but friendly. Lot of them gave me the side eye when I spoke Russian, but nobody was outwardly hostile. Met the local padre, fella named Frankowski. Man plays a mean game of chess. He pointed me at this little cottage on the village perimeter, been abandoned since the owner never came back from the front ten years prior. Spent about a week repairing the floors, patching the roof and the like. After about two days my grub was running low, so I went hunting and brought down a buck. I’d just started dressing it out when I heard a branch snap behind me. I drop and turn, next thing I know, my sidearm is leveled on a damned kid! Boy couldn’t have been any older than 14, maybe 15, with an old varmint gun pointed at the ground. Kid was white as a sheet and shaking, probably though I was gonna end him right there. Nobody said nothing for a sec, then the kid dropped the rifle and raised his hands.
The kid’s voice shook as he said “Please, no shoot. I go!” All the time, though, his eyes were fixed on that deer.
“What’s your name, boy?” No response, so I switch to Polish.
“Jak masz na imię?”
“S-Stanislaw.”
“What were you going to do with that rifle, Stanislaw?”
“I am hungry. My friends are hungry. I was trying to find something. Maybe a squirrel, or a rabbit.”
Kid looked half starved, clothes patched up, but he was clean and that rifle was well cared for. Beat all to hell, but oiled and cleaned. Jesus, it was like looking in a mirror.
I lowered the pistol.
“Pick it up. SLOWLY. Good. Now unload it and hand me the rounds.”
The kid reluctantly followed my instructions, then slung the rifle. He only had two rounds in a 5 round mag.
“Pockets too.”
“I only have two bullets.”
“Only two?”
“Tak. One for each squirrel.”
Damn.
“What about later?” I asked.
The kid shrugged. “I make a spear. That is for then. We are hungry NOW.”
Fair enough.
“Come here, kid. You got a knife?”
He slowly pulled out an old pen knife and offered it to me handle first. Again, old but well cared for.
“Help me dress this deer. We’ve got about half an hour till sundown, and about 5 klicks to cover.” I held out the knife. He just stood there. ”You wanna eat tonight? Then get to skinning.”
To his credit, the kid wasn’t bad. Probably never handled anything bigger than a woodchuck, but he had the basics. When we were done, the kid grabbed the bones and wrapped them in an old pillowcase he pulled out of his jacket. ”For soup.”
After, he slung his load and we started off. Kid kept up, didn’t complain either. When we got back to the village, I gave him half the meat, and his rounds back. ”Fair’s fair. You helped you get half.”
He straightened up, lifted his eyes and offered me the knife.
“For the meat.”
“Keep it. Man needs a decent knife, and that’s a good one.”
“Nie. I cannot accept charity. I owe you for the meat.”
Damn. I knew that feeling, all right.
“Tell you what, kid. You know anything about the woods, the area around here?”
He puffed up a bit. “This is my home. I know everything for kilometers around.”
“Then draw me a map. Better yet, show me. I’ll need the lay of the land if I’m staying on here. Do that, and we’re square.”
These session notes are only about eight months overdue, backlogged from when we went on hiatus.
The team discusses what to do with the prisoners. Field-expedient executions aren’t off the table, but Leks is back in Ponikla and no one really has the stomach for whacking a handful of injured guys who were trying to leave. In the end, the threat of being handed over to Shotkin is enough to convince them to accept exile; they start walking northeast.
The team camps at the second marauder band’s former bivouac to heal up and finish the repairs on the PTS-M, which they intend to hand over to Kamiensk’s citizens along with its AGS-17. Combined with the small arms they’ve accumulated, that should make the village a harder target – and give it some emergency mobility. Overnight, Ellis hears a brief but intense firefight somewhere to the northwest – in the general direction of Kamiensk, but probably not involving the village itself.
There’s still one marauder splinter group to deal with, but intel gathered from prior reconnaissance and Kamiensk residents’ testimony suggests that this will be an easy sell. These are nine Georgians led by a Daniel Gelashvili. They’re currently holed up in an abandoned junkyard, trying to get a trio of Polski Fiats into working order.
Ellis dives into his ruck and pulls out an item he’s had since the start of the campaign:
Gelashvili’s crew is minding their own business, wrenching on their tiny little technicals, when their lookout starts shouting in panicked tones. A minute later, a command-variant BTR (recall that Comms is a BTR-70K, which any motor rifle veteran would recognize by the extra antennas) rolls through the gate. A well-groomed man with a commanding presence, wearing a Soviet uniform with a GRU major’s shoulder boards and collar tabs, leaps out of the commander’s hatch and begins not-quite-berating them. He’s ignoring their AKs, but perhaps the AKs are not pointed at him because the woman in the BTR’s turret looks like she’s gone to the market to find a reason and her shopping basket has room for all nine of their heads.
It takes Ellis about ten minutes to thoroughly confuse the Georgians, extract every scrap of useful intel from them (basically nothing new, only verification of what the team already knows), and convince them to finish fixing up their piecemeal cars and fuck off toward the eastern horizon at their best possible speed.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. – Sun Tzu
Betsy is the first to smell the smoke.
The team is on the way back to Kamiensk when the familiar aroma of burned-out vehicles alerts them to the evidence of the firefight Ellis overheard last night. A cautious approach reveals the aftermath of an ambush. At the crossing of two farm roads, a GAZ-66 light truck and a BRDM-2 armored car sit, both riddled with bullets and RPGs and burned to their frames. A number of dead Soviet troops are scattered around the vehicles – while a few of them made it out of the truck and got to cover in a rubble pile, they didn’t last long against whoever hit their patrol. Vehicle and uniform markings indicate these troops were from the 124th Motor Rifle Division – or what’s left of it after its run-in with the U.S. 5th Infantry Division – which is now based about 20 kilometers north in Piotrków.
There’s a pile of smashed tech: flashlights, compasses, a boombox with a collection of hair band cassettes, the scorched remnants of the BRDM’s radio. Everything of direct military value has been taken.
Pettimore starts spiraling out to see what other signs he can find. He finds one, all right – a blood trail, leading southeast through the tall grass. The rest of the team fans out behind him and moves in cautiously.
About a hundred meters away from the ambush site, the bodies of two more Soviet troops lie discarded on a rocky outcropping. Erick and Octavia try to move in to take a closer look, but Comrade does not want his human anywhere near the scene. Erick does manage to get in an examination, assisted by Octavia’s shouted-at-a-distance-over-an-agitated-working-dog questions/suggestions. Both soldiers have bullet wounds, but they appear to be survivable. They weren’t given first aid, and there are indications of rough interrogation. The cause of death, however, is… peculiar. Each one has a ragged wound, roughly circular, at the hollow of his throat and down into his torso. Erick can’t be certain without a full autopsy, but from what he can see, it appears that the heart and lungs were removed – forcefully – through that wound track. There’s a surprisingly low amount of blood splattered around, too, for what amounts to not-quite-open-heart-surgery.
Octavia blinks. “Vampiric Roto-Rooter?”
“Blood-O-Rooter?” Cat chimes in.
“I am disinclined to stay in this area,” Ellis declares, speaking for the whole team. No one objects to expending a couple of jerrycans full of fuel for field-expedient cremation.
The team is about to re-mount when Comrade takes an interest in the rubble pile. There’s another body – or, rather, a survivor. It’s a young woman, also in Soviet uniform. She’s unconscious with fragmentation and blast injuries in addition to the blunt trauma from having a stone wall fall on top of her. Octavia and Erick stabilize her and prep her for transport.
Cat gets a nav fix and realizes that this happened only about two kilometers from Kamiensk. There’s some concern that the town may have been raided by the victors – but when the team returns, they’re met with confused looks. The villagers heard the gunfight but it didn’t sound close enough to be cause for concern, and they didn’t see any fire, muzzle flashes, or headlights.
These session notes are only about eight months overdue, backlogged from when we went on hiatus.
The team decides to spend a few days in Kamiensk making the area more habitable. Pettimore and Ellis (whose players were out for this session) take Hernandez and the UAZ and head east along the team’s backtrail to look for the Soviet deserters who’d been plaguing the town. Cat and Miko head out on foot for the same purpose. The rest of the team, under Betsy’s direction, begins surveying Kamiensk’s abandoned buildings to see what construction materials can be easily stripped for use in repairs or fortifications.
Cat has been through this area before, though it was mostly dark and Task Force Cobalt didn’t have much contact with the locals. Still, she knows a few landmarks – enough to effectively guess where a small marauder band might choose to hole up to avoid attention from Soviet regulars. After all, she did some of that same thinking a month or two ago.
The scout team finds the first marauder band in a former small dairy farm. There’s not a lot of activity, so it’s hard to get an exact count, but Cat and Miko estimate roughly a dozen men. They’ve dug a fighting position to cover both road approaches to the farm and have emplaced an SPG-9 recoilless rifle there. Other than that, they appear to be poorly-equipped, with only small arms. No vehicle or mounts are in evidence.
The team regroups, confers, verifies some details with Father Miroslav, and identifies these guys as a band of Kazakhs led by one Bulat Kadyrov. Father Miroslav’s description of Kadyrov suggests that he has his eye set on becoming a petty warlord somewhere. The team decides to stage a night raid.
Cat sneaks in and opens the fight with a grenade into the SPG-9 gun pit. Miko, meanwhile, has been low-crawling up to the farmhouse’s kitchen door (west side), and is nearly overrun when a fireteam of angry, half-awake Kazakhs comes boiling out that door. He spends the rest of the fight playing bullet tag with them.
In the gun pit, Cat is putting suppressive fire on the house’s south face with her M4. It jams, so she picks up an AKM whose former owner is no longer using it. That jams, so she picks up another Kalashnikov. This one at least lasts the fight.
Betsy is maneuvering to the southeast while Erick is maneuvering to the northeast. Both of them are trying to get firing angles on the house’s front door (east side). There’s some inadvertent crossfire action, thankfully with no effects on friendlies beyond suppression.
The team ends this fight with a stack of dead marauders and, for once, no major injuries. High on success, they decide to go after another group on the following night.
The second target is Oybek Musayev’s Uzbeks (remember, these three bands used to be one group before they fractured along ethnic lines). Pettimore and Ellis have located them farther east, where they’re encamped in the ruins of a small river+crossroads town. Interestingly, they appear to be trying to salvage a derelict PTS-M amphibious transport.
Another night raid seems like the way to go. This time, the team decides to secure the PTS-M first, since it’s some distance from the main camp. Cowboy, Pettimore, Cat, Octavia, and Comrade go after the vehicle while the rest of the team moves into position to hit anyone moving toward that location from the village.
The team’s stealthy approach is blown when Octavia attempts the swim and succumbs to the weight of her gear. Comrade drags her onto the sandbar where the PTS-M is stranded, but the splashing alerts the three guards there. Cowboy shanks one, Pettimore drops a second with an arrow through the throat, and Cat, Comrade, and Octavia subdue the third. There’s no gunfire – the blocking force actually has to start making noise to alert the marauders’ main body.
In the aftermath, the team discovers that the PTS-M is almost in working order – and it’s mounting an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher.
Interrogation of the prisoners reveals that the marauders of Przedbórz (which is about twenty kilometers southeast of Kamiensk) didn’t stick together long after their Pyrrhic victory over Task Force Cobalt. The prisoners don’t know what happened, but they’ve heard that a bunch died of infighting or unspecified medical causes. Of the survivors, maybe three or four are still squatting there. The rest joined with Shotkin’s band. He doesn’t know anything about any scientists or material they may have recovered from TF Cobalt.
I’m preparing to resume running Kaserne on the Borderlands in the near future. I figured it might be useful for my three hypothetical readers to summarize the house rules my group currently uses. In no particular order:
Character creation strikes a balance between the book’s template-based player control and life path power level.
A PC starts with a C (d8) in each attribute. The player gets three increases to apply. If the player reduces one attribute to D (d6), they get a fourth increase.
The player chooses one skill at B (d10), two at C, and three at D.
The player chooses three specialties, one of which must be attached to the PC’s B skill.
The player chooses the PC’s starting Coolness Under Fire (as appropriate to the concept), then rolls that die. The die result is the PC’s starting permanent rads.
I assign starting equipment according to the situation in which the new PC enters play. As the game’s economy is largely driven by salvage and looting, this hasn’t been particularly unbalancing.
Character advancement occurs more-or-less normally (but see Coolness Under Fire changes, below). However, because we’re doing troupe play in which all but one of the players currently have two PCs each, XP is pooled at the player level and can be spent on any PC that player controls.
Coolness Under Fire changes occur at the end of each session in which combat occurred. For each PC who participated in combat, the player rolls their CUF die.
If die comes up its maximum value, CUF increases by one step.
If the die comes up a 1 and the PC took a critical hit or was incapacitated from stress, CUF decreases by one step.
Machine guns don’t suffer Reliability loss or jams from 1s on ammo dice – only base dice. We’ve found that this tweak makes belt-fed automatic weapons much more effective at laying down suppressive fire for multiple turns. They jam much less than assault rifles – but when they do, the party definitely feels their absence.
Initiative occurs each round in three phases:
Fast PCs
NPCs
Slow PCs
At the beginning of each round, each player rolls Coolness Under Fire. As usual, they add Unit Morale to this roll if their PC can see or hear at least one ally. If they succeed, the PC acts in the fast phase. If they fail, the PC acts in the slow phase.
During each PC phase, characters in that phase act in whatever order the table deems appropriate. During the NPCs phase, NPCs act in the order in which I deem appropriate.
(If friendly NPCs are in the fight, the NPC phase is split into friendly and hostile NPCs. GM fiat determines which group goes first. Usually, I give precedence to the side that has the greater in-narrative combination of volume of fire, position, numbers, morale, and effective command.)
Bullpup rifles are treated as carbines, getting a – 1 penalty (rather than -2) for attacks in the same hex and a -2 penalty (rather than -3) for one-handed attacks. However, they always reload as a slow action. This hasn’t come up much in play yet, as I don’t think any PCs have picked up the AUG I included in an early loot allocation, but it feels like a good fit for the handling advantages and disadvantages of the bullpup layout.
Patrolling is a sometimes-used downtime activity documented in this post. It’s basically wandering around an already-explored hex looking for details and trouble.
The Cook specialty has additional functionality if the PC is supervising large-scale mass feeding. Each day that the PC spends a shift on this work, the player makes a Survival check. Each success reduces the community’s total food consumption for that day by 5%. This represents increased efficiency in the communal kitchens – basically, the same effect as the specialization’s as-written function, but scaled up.
Command, as written, doesn’t do a whole lot, and neither does the vehicle commander crew position. We tinkered with making both of them a bit more relevant as discussed in this post, but we’re currently looking at a broader adaptation of the way the Aliens RPG handles it. Stay tuned.
It is late September 2000 of an alternate history in which the Cold War never ended.
In 1995, the Soviet Union and China went to war over border and resource disputes. Seeing an opportunity to weaken the Soviets by proxy, the United States and other Western nations provided military aid to China. As the tide turned against the Soviet Union, its leaders applied pressure to their Warsaw Pact clients/allies, demanding troops and material for the war effort. Tensions spiked in several Pact nations, and a covert request for aid ultimately led West Germany to cross the Inner German Border in the autumn of 1996. This attempt at German reunification triggered the broader European conflict for which NATO and the Warsaw Pact had been preparing since 1945.
The war went nuclear in 1997 – first with tactical-scale warheads on the battlefield, then strikes against rear-area targets, and finally escalating to a “limited” strategic exchange beginning in November. Governments collapsed, cities burned, industrial civilization crumbled – but the war continued in fitful, spiteful spasms.
By spring 2000, most nations and militaries were shells of their former selves. In northern Europe, the remaining NATO forces moved out of their winter cantonments in what would be the war’s last organized offensive. The objective was to clear the Baltic coast and north-central Poland of Warsaw Pact remnant forces, thereby securing a buffer zone and acquiring critical farmland, fishing grounds, and other natural resources. The U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division was tasked with a deep raid into south-central Poland, covering the offensive’s southern flank as the main group of NATO forces traveled east. Like most major units, the 5th ID had less than 20% of its prewar strength, with a sizeable majority of its troops drawn from the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, stragglers from other NATO nations’ armies, and even a scattering of former Warsaw Pact troops who’d defected to the West and proven their loyalty and utility.
Veteran Twilight: 2000 fans know how this story ends… or begins. The 5th ID ran into overwhelming Soviet and Polish forces in the vicinity of Lodz, eventually being pushed back and encircled at Kalisz. Radio transmissions from higher-echelon HQs indicated that the entire NATO offensive was encountering heavy resistance – no help was coming. Running out of ammo, fuel, and personnel, the 5th ID attempted to break out of its encirclement. It failed. Only scattered bands of survivors escaped the Kalisz pocket, finding themselves on their own in a hostile Poland collapsing ever farther into post-nuclear ruin.
But our story began a bit earlier than that, and somewhat off to the side…
In May 2000, a handful of survivors arrived at Ponikla, a small village on the south bank of central Poland’s Pilica River. Some were Poles fleeing the war’s devastation; others were NATO stragglers who’d been cut off behind enemy lines. Well away from any major travel routes and untouched by combat, Ponikla seemed to be a safe haven.
The PCs knew very little about the area around Ponikla. Even Zenobia, who’d grown up in the village, found herself having difficulty remembering the surrounding area, and some major geographic features didn’t match her recollections from childhood. After about a month of resting and healing, they began cautiously exploring the surrounding countryside. They met a couple of other survivor bands and convinced some of them to join the community, skirmished with ex-Soviet Army marauders, and identified a site or two with salvage potential.
During these initial explorations, the PCs also made contact with a couple of other survivor communities. The first was a band of former militia from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, a city on the north bank of the Pilica about 20 kilometers to the southwest of Ponikla. From this group, the PCs learned that Tomaszów was now controlled by more ex-Soviet Army marauders (a problem which the team has, to date, reconnoitered and poked but not dealt with conclusively – though Ellis and Miko did mount a covert operation to sabotage the fuel supply used by the marauders’ flagship hovercraft). The second was a loose coalition of seven large family farms north of Ponikla.
Several… anomalies… also surfaced during this initial exploration phase. As of early July, these included (list copied from an earlier post, Cracks and Breakage)
Zenobia grew up in Ponikla and remembered the forest around the village being much less dense. She also recalled the Pilica River being not nearly as wide and deep as it is now. Childhood memories tend to make things bigger than we perceive them as adults… not smaller.
The river water had (and still has) hallucinogenic properties with possible precognitive visions.
Something had been taking the village’s children… and returning them with missing time. (I eventually addressed this with an encounter that nearly went horribly wrong. More horribly than planned, even.)
The mysterious circumstances that led to that UAZ-469 being found abandoned and idled dry, with impact damage to the front end and lots of blood splatter on the ground around it.
So far, everyone they’d encountered from outside Ponikla had serious issues with long-term memory and any sort of planning or abstract thought, as well as a general inability to comprehend the concept of “map” or other recorded knowledge. Conversation that probed the latter topic induced some sort of minor seizure, after which the issues usually receded.
What’s a map? The PCs failed to find maps in at least three places they would have expected to find them (highway maintenance facility, mobile command post vehicle, railroad maintenance facility).
For that matter, other recorded knowledge was (and remains) profoundly rare, too. Ponikla only had about five books. The most blatant and recent example of this was the apparent erasure of a family library that Zenobia remembered being in a relative’s house at the village by the rail yard.
A pack of dogs with healed wounds that should have been fatal.
A couple of instances of weird howling or heavy wind noise coming from the river with no apparent weather pattern to account for this. (This was eventually discovered to be the aforementioned marauder hovercraft.)
Pettimore’s memories of living through events of June through October 2000 before finding himself in Ponikla in May 2000. (This is an artifact of Pettimore being the one PC ported from a previous iteration of this campaign and setting.)
The next phase of the campaign, beginning in mid-June 2000, saw the PCs ranging farther afield. By this time, they had a couple of small alliances, they’d accumulated a decent motor pool, and they’d started building Ponikla up into a small but robust base of operations.
Their first expedition was a follow-up on an early discovery of a derelict tractor-trailer. Said vehicle contained a Stegosaurus skeleton, some other mineral samples, and documentation indicating that these contents were part of the collection from Warsaw’s natural history museum. Apparently, the collection’s most valuable assets were being relocated to a secure location before the war reached Warsaw. With written directions to a location, the team decided to head there to see if any of the museum staff were still present. What they discovered, instead, was a former Nazi bunker complex repurposed into a secure vault for government records and museum exhibits. They also found a mildly-radioactive room containing a cistern with no apparent bottom and hints of motion in its depths. They declined to further investigate.
Immediately upon returning from this expedition, the team discovered that one of Ponikla’s kids (actually one of a group of teenagers rescued/recruited from their hideaway in an abandoned railyard) was missing. The search for her led the team to a vicious encounter with mirrorshaded and exotically-armed Soviet surplus thugs, Slavic Men in Black, and profoundly creepy doctors, none of whom had normal human anatomical or medical traits, as well as a black Volga sedan. They recovered the teenager, who was being subjected to some sort of blood treatment. Further scientific investigation by Red revealed that the MiBs and doctors had some sort of oddly-regular microscopic things in their blood… and, upon following a hunch, Red discovered that the PCs and Ponikla’s other residents did as well.
(Speculation at the time, borne out by further observations, is that these are some sort of nanites. It’s uncertain whether they have undiscovered functions, but their effect is to drastically increase healing speed [at the expense of significantly-increased caloric intake]. On a meta level, this is both a creepifying plot element and a way to explain the core rules’ unnaturally-fast healing times. I’ll note that allied NPCs who don’t have these little passengers have shown healing times much closer to what medical science dictates they should display.)
Ranging farther southwest, the PCs made contact with Opoczno, a larger survivor community located on a major east-west highway. Opoczno, despite suffering from the same brain fog and memory loss (or mental blind spots) as other survivor enclaves, turned out to be the closest thing to a nearby trade center. The team also rescued Arkadi, a former KGB Ninth Directorate operator who’d defected to NATO and had previously served alongside Pettimore. From Arkadi, the PCs learned of the recent NATO offensive and the demise of the 5th Infantry Division… and Pettimore realized that he somehow was living the summer of 2000 again from a completely different perspective.
In early August, the PCs made contact with three loosely-affiliated groups of potential allies. One was White Eagle Battalion, a unit of the pro-Western Polish Home Army that was operating out of Skarzysko-Kamienna, some distance southeast of Ponikla. The second was the Bracia Wilkow – literally “Wolf-Brothers” – a group of Polish partisans who aren’t pro-Western so much as anti-invader. The Bracia Wilkow know things they shouldn’t know, and the team’s general suspicion was (and remains) that they’re something akin to lycanthropes. Or at least really creepy.
The third group of potential allies was a band of East German troops – but East Germans who’d been on the side of reunification, and who fought on NATO’s side as part of the reunified Bundeswehr. Under the command of former Oberstleutnant Boris Von Bahr, they were holding the town of Bialobrzegi, about thirty kilometers east/downriver of Ponikla. This included both an intact road bridge… and a small hydroelectric power plant. Somewhat accidentally, the PCs figured out how to weaponize the brain fog – while removing Von Bahr and his command staff from it.
Meeting Von Bahr set some events in motion that would move the campaign into a new and deadlier phase, though none of the PCs realized it at the time…
A few days after this meeting, the PCs received an urgent summons to the North Farms. They arrived to find a rapidly-spreading grass and field fire. In the process of attempting to fight it, Minka, Pettimore, and Arkadi became aware of invisible spirit-presences within the fire, and Pettimore demonstrated that Thoughts and Prayers, his Dragunov SVD, has some measure of power beyond ordinary ballistics. Following this incident, the PCs participated in an interfaith blessing/cleansing of those fields which demonstrated that two of Ponikla’s elders, Wilhelm and Aina, were quite well-versed in Slavic Pagan rites…
Von Bahr had previously warned the PCs about a large Soviet presence in the ruined city of Radom, and the team had several escalating encounters with these troops and other forces with whom they were in contact. This included the liberation of a number of POWs from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division (some of whom were later “adopted” as secondary PCs). Intensive reconnaissance in the Radom area identified most of the Soviet garrison there and linked it to Soviet Reserve Front HQ and the puppet Polish Communist government in Lublin.
Exploring south and west, the team had another encounter with the Bracia Wilkow. This pointed them to a patch of land south of Tomaszów under the claim of another unspecified power – but one which the Wolf-Brothers treat with very cautious respect. This began a clue chain which led the team to the remains of a crashed MH-53J – and the last survivors of Task Force Cobalt, a joint special operations team which raided the campus of the Politechnika Łódzka under cover of 5th Infantry’s assault on the city. TF Cobalt, it appears, was tasked with recovering materials and researchers who were involved in some questionable physics.
This was the point at which Ellis and Pettimore began seriously contemplating the likelihood that at least some of the war, as well as much of the weirdness they’d seen over the past few months, had been deliberately orchestrated. This was stoked by the Broadstreet Dossier, a document which one of Pettimore’s teammates handed off to him in his past-that-was.
As these various explorations and revelations had been progressing, the Soviets in Radom were getting more aggressive. They were pushing Von Bahr’s people and patrolling west along the highway. There was concern that they might try to get Opoczno under their thumb, or even discover and annex Ponikla itself.
The PCs’ response was to escalate before the problem escalated itself at them. A couple of weeks of additional recon, planning, and coalition-building resulted in a joint effort between the PCs, the White Eagle Battalion, Von Bahr’s people, and the Bracia Wilkow to neutralize the Soviet presence in Radom. On September 10, the alliance moved against the Soviets. It was a confused and bloody series of skirmishes that distinctly showed the difference between planned ambushes and unplanned meeting engagements, but the PCs and their allies carried the day.
In the battle’s aftermath, the team brokered a regional security and reconstruction agreement. They also negotiated a POW exchange with the Soviet command structure… and learned that at least some of the Soviets at Lublin are as awake as they are, and were trying to stabilize the region against whatever is happening. They also received a warning that whatever that unknown force is, some kind of escalation is brewing in Warsaw.
Edited to add: here’s the current campaign map. “Foggy” hexes are those which the PCs have on their fragmentary maps but haven’t yet explored. Hexes with little lightning icons are those in which electrical power could theoretically be restored from the hydro plant at Bialobrzegi.
The PCs’ visible map as of this point in the campaign. Click to embiggen.
That brings us to the current phase of the campaign. I recommend reading the following posts, in order, for the detailed catch-up:
Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forum as a fanfic story seed.
Casual familiarity and local recruiting had diluted Wolf’s Dragoons’ exoticism by the time we as players first saw them in the 3020s, but when they burst upon the Inner Sphere in 3005, they were strange and foreign. Leaving aside their sheer strength and their equipment’s condition, the Dragoons themselves were mysterious and intriguing. Their accents and speech patterns were reminiscent of recordings of the vanished Star League (not even Clan Goliath Scorpion’s best linguists could completely prepare them to sound like Inner Sphere natives). Their attire, their hairstyles and personal grooming, their universally-superior physical condition, their foodways, their clear unfamiliarity with Inner Sphere conditions and customs… all of these factors, and more, troubled the Federated Suns’ intelligence agencies but drew the attention of the court.
For their part, the Dragoons were part spies, part disaster tourists, and part social archaeologists. The Inner Sphere was not what they’d been briefed to expect. If they were to succeed in their mission, they had to learn to integrate – quickly, and at all levels of society. To this end, Colonel Wolf’s command staff and a select few ristarsahem, rising stars became fixtures of New Avalon’s court scene when not on mission.
Young, Bloodnamed, passionate, not yet hiding heartbreak behind her Black Widow persona… Natasha Kerensky was not immune to the grandeur and spectacle of the court. And First Prince Ian Davion was not immune to her legendary allure. Events proceeded as they often do in such circumstances.
In 3009, as the mercenaries prepared to leave Federated Suns space for Capellan employ, Dragoon MedTechs implanted an anonymous embryo in an Iron Womb.
The Situation: You are one of thirteen major landholding Barons on the mid periphery planet of Foxhaven. Like most of the population, your ancestors came to this world to escape the succession wars. Unlike most of the population, your ancestors brought battlemechs with them, leading to your family's current status as landed nobility. Your noble house is free to operate and rule its lands largely with autonomy as long as you contribute to planetary defense and don't threaten the Grand Duke's Peace.
Your personal forces consist of roughly a company of infantry (foot, motorized, or wheeled mechanized, limited to portable machineguns, recoilless rifles, LAWs/VLAWs, and grenades for support weapons), a collection of repurposed civilian vehicles, a small group of Guardian-B conventional fighters, your fortified castle (complete with gun emplacements and a couple sniper pieces), and the Battlemechs that justify your claim to power.
Your mission is to select the battlemechs you want to complement this group. Your total force may not mass more than 220 tons.
To clearly define the restrictions, you are limited to introductory tech mechs (as defined by the master unit list) available during the late succession war, that appear on the Inner Sphere General faction list. For reference, this link should take you to a master unit list unit search with all of those filters already applied.
In addition to these, you may also select the following LAMs: Stinger STG-A5 and A10, Wasp WSP-100, 100A, and 105, and Phoenix Hawk PHX-HK2. HOWEVER, each LAM counts for double its mass for purposes of your mass limit.
(There's also a Shadow Hawk LAM on planet, but that's part of the Grand Duke's private collection).
My response:
The Barony of Greenfan’s territory centers on the Faith Delta, a fertile alluvial plain surrounding the Faith River’s outlet onto Adams Gulf. The barony’s capital is Nemea, a settlement of some 80,000 citizens constructed near the ancient offshore hulk of the Lion-class DropShip Nemeos Leon. Greenfan is one of Foxhaven’s breadbaskets, with Nemea and the slightly-smaller Adamsport collectively shipping 20% of the world’s fruits and grains.
The delta’s soft alluvial soil and the Faith River’s frequent floods make it difficult to maintain a road network through the barony’s agricultural heartland, so local transportation relies mainly on domestically-produced hovercraft. Nemea dominates the barge trade on the Faith River, while Adamsport, built on more solid ground at the barony’s northern reaches, boasts a robust deepwater shipping facility. A massive deposit of magnetic ore off the delta interferes with navigation and radio communications throughout the region, making Nemea somewhat isolated from greater Foxhaven society; in this, Adamsport is often the barony’s first point of contact for the outside world.
Like almost all of Foxhaven’s ruling class, Greenfan’s nobles are hereditary MechWarriors. Most claim descent from the original complement of the Nemeos Leon, though there’s little documentation to substantiate these genealogies. Through accident or design, the BattleMechs of Greenfan are well-suited to exploit the region’s challenging terrain.
Lady Sofia Antunez, Baroness Greenfan has held dominion since her father’s death in an offshore racing accident twelve years ago. Diminutive like all the Antunez family, Lady Sofia is a noted dancer and fencer. These qualities serve her well in the cockpit of Tisiphone, her family’s Wolverine WVR-6R. The baroness’ gunnery skills are unfortunately not a match for her pilotage, a situation exacerbated by the lack of a domestic ammunition source for Tisiphone‘s GM Whirlwind. She is, however, an excellent tactical commander who knows her territory like the back of her hand. Her teenaged twin heirs, Adele and Francisco, are both training to take over Tisiphone, with the self-declared intention to swap the administrative and martial sides of their baronial duties on alternating months.
Sir Alistair Mackenzie-Morse is Baroness Greenfan’s bodyguard and personal hatchetman. A grizzled duelist in his late 70s, Sir Alistair is pushing the limits of Foxhaven’s medical establishment with his extensive collection of wounds. By all rational standards, he should have retired after the second prosthetic limb, but he has no heir capable of taking up his neurohelmet. His wife carries a rare neurological disorder that triggers lethal feedback from a BattleMech’s control systems, and all five of his children and twelve grandchildren have tested positive for the condition. Until Lady Sofia can convince him to adopt or appoint an heir, he remains bound to Valravn, a Grasshopper GHR-5H that’s returned from the brink of death as often as its pilot has.
Sir Dominik Sokolsky had no intention of becoming a MechWarrior. So far down the Sokolsky line of succession that he couldn’t even see a BattleMech’s cockpit, he was a casual gentleman-farmer who dallied in militia service because certain other young Nemean gentlemen liked the look of a Greenfan dress uniform. When Baron Carlos Antunez’s racing hydrofoil slammed into a spectator barge at 90 knots, the resulting fireball killed every adult Sokolsky except Dominik, who found himself unexpectedly thrust into several roles he’d never desired nor trained for. Although he’s come along well under Sir Alistair’s tutelage, he still lacks confidence at the controls of Red Hussar, the Sokolsky ancestral Wyvern WVE-6N. However, his background as an infantry platoon leader has allowed him to training alongside his former militia comrades with a rare degree of cooperation, going so far as to develop the force’s first stirrings of anti-Mech infantry doctrine.
Dame Janelle Adams is the first Adams in living memory to pilot her family’s venerable Crab CRB-20, Pathfinder. 72 years ago, Baronet Clarence Adams led an unsuccessful plot to overthrow the Antunez family and claim the Barony of Greenfan for himself. The Adams line fell under a writ of attainder, stripping them of their rule of Adamsport in perpetuity and Dispossessing them for three generations. While allowed to train in the baron’s simulator to pass down proficiency, Adams heirs were forbidden upon pain of death from laying so much as a gloved finger on Pathfinder without baronial permission. The proudest – and most terrifying – moment in Dame Janelle’s life was the day she walked her Mech out of the hangar where it had lain dormant for seven decades. As the sole MechWarrior in Adamsport, she knows she’s expected to be a scout and tripwire, not to mount any sort of credible defense on her own, and she’s leaning heavily on Sir Dominik for tactical and political advice.
I was looking heavily at quirks when I put this force and their barony together. The Wolverine and Wyvern are both command units and the Crab also has superior comms gear. This lets them overcome a lot of the area’s natural interference to maintain communications where an invading force wouldn’t. Also, all three of the Mechs based in Nemea are jump-capable, which helps them out when operating in the marshes and soft alluvial soil of the delta. The Crab isn’t a jumper but it has more stable terrain and a road network to use. If called up for the planetary defense mission, this lance would likely deploy via barge (if going upriver) or merchant vessel (if forces were assembling at another coastal port).
“Invulnerable black-clad moody lone wolf in a black trench coat wielding twin titanium monokatanas and smartlinked Desert Eagles firing incendiary moonsilver depleted uranium cold iron explosive tracer bullets while a bloodthirsty yet mournful heavy metal soundtrack wails distantly over the incessant rain that falls like the tears of a thousand fallen angels crying over the heart’s mournful lament for a lost paradise.”
