Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

I Used to Be a Soldier Like You (09 October 2000)

Back at the eastern approach to the hilltop village, the combined group of the PCs and the Rawa Mazowiecka militia circles up about four kilometers away. Their first move is to send in a trio of motorcycle scouts. Through their binoculars, they can see the point, about 700 to 800 meters away, at which the three riders start losing cohesion, then all sense of direction.

The group waits for the riders to regain their sense of direction and return. Then Arkadi and Alexei move in on foot. The probe confirms Arkadi’s theory of the previous day: whatever is interfering with vehicles and other machinery isn’t having a noticeable effect on the ability of personnel on foot to move and navigate.

Red, Leks, and Arkadi confer with Captain Majewski. The PCs will mount the initial assault on the village, augmented by three of Majewski’s troops. Sergeant Jablonski and two of his cousins volunteer for the detail.

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Foglights (08 October 2000)

Magda stares at the map. She knows what it means – though she’d lost the signal for a moment – but she now has no idea where she is on it. None of what she’s seeing lines up with any landmarks in her field of view. “I… I don’t know,” she whispers.

Behind the OT-64’s wheel, Alexei shakes his head, fighting off a wave of fatigue. A stray ray of sunlight pierces the incoming rain clouds. It’s lower in the sky than it should be. He frowns and looks at the APC’s fuel gauge. The needle is well below a half-tank. He doesn’t remember driving that much. No one in the vehicle can remember eating lunch, nor the last time they hydrated.

Red squeezes his forehead against his pounding headache. “I really don’t want to do this, but I’m going to have to bluescreen all of these people.” The blank expressions around him remind him that he’s the only one present who knows what a Windows 95 is. He sighs, sets his carbine inside the Hilux’s cab, unbuckles his pistol belt, and gestures for Magda to do the same and join him.

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Fog and Fire (07-08 October 2000)

“We’re getting pretty far afield, and this is getting weirder. I want more firepower,” Red declares. He cranks up the Hilux’s radio and calls back to Ponika. The signal is attenuated and static-laden, but he’s eventually able to reach Alexei. The East German teenager whistles up Arkadi and Miko and heads north in the team’s OT-64. It’s about a three-hour trip. By the time the reinforcements link up, there’s maybe an hour remaining before sunset.

The team decides to make the best possible use of their remaining light. They shuffle vehicle assignments and push on, following the tracks, which are still more-or-less straight to the north-northwest. As the sun dips below the western horizon, Magda calls a halt. She pulls the precious set of night-vision goggles out of her pack and heads for high ground. After a few minutes of careful scanning, she trots back down the hill. “I’m not going to be able to track in this. I can’t see any campfires. There’s some sky-glow to the west, but that looks more like a larger community. And there’s fog coming in from the north.”

“The north?” Minka asks sharply. At Magda’s nod, she frowns. “The river is to the south.”

Red scratches his beard. “Supernatural fuckery aside, fog is usually caused by cold air. Or,” he looks at Minka, “it could be supernatural fuckery.”

“Or supernatural fuckery could be causing cold air,” Zenobia snarks.

“Farmhouse?” ventures Magda.

Farmhouse,” Minka hisses emphatically.

“Farmhouse,” Red concurs.

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Boundaries (07 October 2000)

‘Horse eaters,'” Minka quotes in a cold, flat voice. Her knuckles whiten on the haft of her hammer. Her eyes are unfocused. She takes a step toward the northwest. Another.

Leks moves in front of her. Stares her down. “We don’t do these things alone.”

Minka breathes deep and refocuses on Leks. “Fine. But I’m going to do this thing. I will crush every last one of them if they ate my fucking horse! I don’t even care what it is! I will kill them!”

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Fugitive (07 October 2000)

The morning after Leks’ journey to the Bracia Wilkow, the Estonian steps out of his lodging to see Stanislaw walking up the south road to Ponikla. The teenager is clearly exhausted. Under the lingering effects of whatever Filip shared with him, Leks can clearly see – and smell – what Stanislaw has been up to. Leks grins to himself and falls into step alongside Stanislaw. “Welcome back! Long night?”

“Um.” Stanislaw flushes. “Uh, yes. Yeah.”

“You look tired.” Leks nudges his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get some breakfast in you.” He steers the younger man toward the hostel-turned-town-hall.


It’s been a few weeks since the team has had much of a chance to just sit down and talk. Constant rain has made the harvest harder, and the week-long diversion to organize the allied salvage operation at the wrecked train didn’t help matters. The crowd filters into the hostel’s common room, where Magda and her staff of pre-teens and elders have laid out the usual communal meal for sixty to eighty people.

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Pivoting to Ponikla

A brief update on Kaserne on the Borderlands:

With the expedition team’s arrival in Czestochowa, I’m shifting the campaign’s focus back to Ponikla for a while. This will entail a time shift. When we last saw the Ponikla-based PCs on screen, it was early September 2000 in-game… and July 2023 in meatspace.

To maintain a loose semblance of continuity, I’m picking up in Ponikla in early October. In the weeks since the expedition left, the village has been busy salvaging the train wreck, bringing in the harvest, training the seeds of a local militia, and pursuing various infrastructure projects (wind and micro hydro power, upgrades to Red’s medical clinic, establishing radio broadcast capability).


My longer-term intent for the campaign is to get the Ponikla team caught up to the expedition team in the timeline before shifting focus again. As readers familiar with the first-edition canon may have inferred, my plan for the expedition team is to follow them through The Free City of Krakow and Pirates of the Vistula, with the two PC groups hopefully reuniting for The Ruins of Warsaw. We’ll see how far we get… and, with scheduling issues for nine adults, how many years it takes us.

Copper and Bone (24 October 2000)

And then, the road. Mud and gravel, winding up into the hills southwest of Czestochowa.

Pettimore knows this land. The echoes of Appalachian mining country run in these valleys. The reflections of the last time he came here flicker before his eyes. He taps Cat on the shoulder, takes point, leads off. The rest of the team follows, weapons pointed out. Pettimore isn’t concerned. The danger is ahead, not around.

And then, the mine.

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The War That Was (24 October 2000)

Dawn over the hills north of Czestochowa reveals a low-hanging grey sky spitting intermittent rain showers. The team gathers for breakfast – for many of them, the first food they’ve been able to keep down in a couple of days.

As they’re gearing up, Kavaliova wanders over. “If you’re heading into the city, you’ll want to know what it’s like on the ground,” she offers. The picture she paints isn’t a pretty one. 1997’s Operation Rampart and the subsequent ADMs and cruise missile strike left much of the city impassable, and three years of no maintenance have only added to the issues. The whole area is thick with debris, craters, unexploded ordnance, and other hazards. Taking vehicles through the ruins will risk severe damage once a driver leaves one of the few semi-cleared routes. When Pettimore visited the copper mine before – three months ago by the calendar but a year ago subjectively – he and his then-companions arrived from the south, and hooking around Czestochowa to pick up his remembered route will consume far more time and fuel. Ellis bitterly makes the decision to hike in, leaving the vehicles back at the salvagers’ base with the merchants, Ortiz, Hernandez, Bell, and the temporarily one-armed Erick.

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Post Tagging Updates

Because I’m always in search of a better taxonomy, the cluttering of my post tag cloud in the right sidebar has become an annoyance. Accordingly, I’ve gone through the post histories for both of my currently-documented campaigns, Kaserne on the Borderlands and Somewhere West of Light, and removed, respectively, the Twilight: 2000/Twilight: 2000 4e and Shadowdark tags from most of them. Going forward, campaign log posts will only be tagged with the game system in question if the post:

  • is an initial post for setting up that campaign; or
  • contains mechanics or other general content that readers may find useful at their own tables.

My vague hope is that this change will make the blog incrementally more usable for readers who come here in search of material for a specific game line and don’t want to have to sift through the (currently) 106 Kaserne posts trying to find my NM-116 writeup or something like that.

Behind the Screen: Blurred Lines

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…