Category Archives: Campaign Log – Kaserne on the Borderlands

Janek Wakes Up Again (sometime after 19 October 2000)

Janek doesn’t awaken so much bob to the surface of unconsciousness. The ceiling is unfamiliar, as are the walls and the bed. On the plus side, there’s a ceiling, walls, and a bed.

“Welcome back.” The voice is speaking Polish, but with an accent that it takes Janek a moment to place. The name is more elusive until the associated face appears.

“Doctor Red.”

“Ah. Good.” Red looks at something outside Janek’s field of vision. There’s a scrape of wood on wood as he pulls up a chair. A clink of earthenware. A cool, smooth curve pressed into Janek’s hand. “Water?”

Janek is suddenly, maddeningly thirsty. And hungry. Red seems to anticipate this. “Food is next, if you satisfy me you can handle it.” His diagnostic battery is thorough but swift. When he’s done, he stands and opens the door. “Jacob? Would you see if Magda can make something for our guest?” A muffled reply and withdrawing footsteps indicate an affirmative.

“How bad? How long was I…?” Janek isn’t certain how to finish, or even what questions to ask.

“A few days. Less than it would take in normal circumstances.” Red hesitates. “You may have some short-term memory loss, it seems minor. There are some other factors, which we’ll discuss later. But you’re doing remarkably well for someone who underwent emergency head surgery.”

Janek’s head throbs at that. A memory surfaces: a blank face over a threadbare uniform, a swollen-looking Kalashnikov rising —

Red nods sympathetically. “I assure you, this isn’t how we normally welcome new arrivals to Ponikla.”

At least the room is in a place with a name. But — “Surgery?” Janek’s skin prickles and bile churns in an empty stomach. Surgery usually involves…

Again, Red is ahead of the game. “Your name wasn’t always Janek, was it?”

Janek pauses, weighing Red’s tone. Mild. Accepting. Maybe even understanding. “It’s still not. But it’s a safer name than Joanna.”

Red nods. “We’re in Ponikla now. If you’d rather be Joanna, no one will bother you here.”

“Thank you… but Janek is good for now. At least until more places are safe than just one village.”

Table Flipping (19 October 2000)

Picking up where we left off, with the Ponikla PCs in Opoczno…

It’s midafternoon when the team wraps up their negotiations with Opoczno’s mayor and town council. They still have a few other pieces of business to transact, and at least one more item has arisen during their visit.

Alexei’s PC is out for this session, so the East German teenager slides offscreen with Ludwig. The radiologist allegedly knows the location of a cache of vinyl records.

Minka and Zenobia have heard there’s a machinist in town who’s selling higher-end tools in addition to his fabrication services. It’s not hard to get directions, and within twenty minutes, the team is standing in front of a former laundromat. A 10kw portable generator is emplaced on cinder blocks around the back of the building, plumbed to run off a 200-liter drum of methanol. Zenobia nods approvingly at the heavy-duty muffler that’s been fabricated for what would otherwise be a cacophonous small engine.

The interior of the place has been stripped down to the studs, except for one restroom and a tiny office cubicle with attached service counter. The front half of the space is full of display shelves and pegboard. It’s mostly hand tools and spare parts, with one shelving unit containing basic power tools. Little is factory new, but everything is clean, freshly sharpened or tightened, and otherwise in good condition.

The building’s back half is, as advertised, a machine shop. It’s a little better equipped than what Minka’s been able to piece together, though it lacks her smithy and a couple of other items. In the middle of the floor, an immense heavily-tattooed, red-bearded man sits in the center of an oil-spotted bedsheet, surrounded by the stripped parts of a drill press. He’s painstakingly cleaning and examining each small part. At Minka’s greeting, he holds up a finger, finishes the operation in his hands, and returns the part to its place on the sheet before hoisting himself up. As he stands, it becomes apparent that he’s missing one leg below the knee. He carefully removes his bifocal safety glasses and tucks them into a shirt pocket before extending a hand in greeting.

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Let’s Go Shopping (19 October 2000)

Everyone is finally healed – physically, at least – after the Battle of Horse Eater Hill. Some of the team members have gotten out of town for various errands, but everyone has been going in separate directions for most of the past week. Red and Alexei confer with Wilhelm, Léonard, the Jaroses, Magda, and a few other key village leaders and come away with a solid list of needs and wants. They collect Minka, Miko, Zenobia, and Leks and pile into the Hilux technical and the deuce-and-a-half for a shopping run to Opoczno.

Since early September, when the Battle of Radom cut the Soviet line of communication between Lódz and Lublin, Opoczno has been hard at work to position itself as a regional trade center. There’s still a fair amount of concern about threats from marauders to the west, and a lot of the city’s limited military efforts have been designed to guard against the former Soviet airborne troops occupying Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Those guys have been oddly quiet since a reported large explosion and fire in August, though. The less organized marauders to the southwest, mostly splinters of the 9th Tank Division, have also been going dark over the past couple of months.

The local area’s travel map. Several unresolved plot hooks are still hanging around here.
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Janek Wakes Up (sometime before 19 October 2000)

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.

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Broth, Bread, and Apple Cake

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.”

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Two Ticks to Midnight

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.

Downtime (14-18 October 2000)

The team heals. Some moreso than others.

Minka seethes and worries. Red is adamant that she cannot ride until her crushed foot is fully healed. There’s no way to know how the things in her blood will reassemble the bones if she keeps abusing them. But her need to get back on Wiegel, to prove to herself that he’s still her horse, is gnawing at her.

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Farmville

I recently received a reader question regarding the systems I use in Kaserne on the Borderlands for tracking the agricultural and infrastructure projects that the Ponikla PCs are undertaking. I was about to write something, but the topic sounded like something I might have written already. A bit of sniffing around my own internet backtrail led me to a three-year-old post on Kato’s forum. In the interest of having a backup, I’ve replicated the original post here.

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