Before continuing with the narrative of Kaserne on the Borderlands, a GM interjection is in order here, because many upcoming story elements are buried in previous posts or haven’t actually shown up in the blog.
In 2018, I ran a previous incarnation of this setting for the players who are now behind Pettimore/Alexei, Betsy/Magda (Dr. Ellie Wright), Ellis/Arkadi (Agent Broadstreet), Octavia/Zenobia (GintarĂ© Vilkiene), and Cowboy/Red (James Smith). Pettimore is the only PC from that campaign to reappear in this one. The catch is that for Pettimore, he and his original team were with the 5th Infantry Division until a couple of days before its last stand at Kalisz. That group subsequently made their way to Krakow via Czestochowa, encountering many of the plot beats of The Black Madonna along the way. Once in Krakow, they became embroiled in the covert conflict between the DIA, CIA, KGB, and local authorities, as well as delving deeper into the paranormal manifestations they’d seen along the way. That campaign ended in what was, for Pettimore, October 2000.
This campaign began up in May 2000. Subjectively, Pettimore remembers the events of the last campaign – but after that, he has a period of missing time and foggy memories of wandering into Ponikla sometime in the spring, before the other PCs arrived there. For the first few months of the game, he believed the year was 2001. It wasn’t until a conversation with Ellis in mid-July that the group started to realize that Pettimore’s timeline wasn’t in sync with theirs.
Among Pettimore’s belongings when he arrived in Ponikla was a thick packet of documents, which the current group references as the Broadstreet Dossier. Its apparent author is one of Ellis’ fellow CIA operatives, who was part of Pettimore’s previous group. It details the political situations in Silesia and Krakow, as well as the paranormal manifestations that the character had observed – including those surrounding that team’s first encounter with Florian Filipowicz of The Black Madonna fame.
When the first PC team left Czestochowa, they left the titular Black Madonna stashed in the depths of an abandoned copper mine. One of the current team’s ongoing long-term goals – particularly for Pettimore and Ellis – has been to reach that site. Their expectation is that what they find there will confirm or negate Pettimore’s memories and at least some of the contents of the Broadstreet Dossier…