This session picked up immediately after the previous one, in which the PCs had returned from finding the museum storage site only to learn that Malvina, one of the teenagers “rescued” from the PKP railyard, was missing. At the beginning of the campaign, I’d asked my players to give me three problems the village was facing. One of those was:

Something is taking the children.

Because of the village’s size, the table had tweaked that to recurring abductions from which each kid eventually returned with no memory of what happened while they were gone. This hadn’t appeared on screen since the campaign began, but Malvina and Jacob’s addition to the village gave me a great opportunity to bring it to the surface…

---

The team splits up [because three of the players who were present last time couldn’t make this session]. Pettimore and Miko set out to canvas the woods to the south. Magda stays in the village to organize a defense and to see if anyone saw or heard anything. Ellis, of course, has already jumped off on his infiltration mission to Tomaszów Mazowiecki. This leaves Minka, Red, Zenobia, and Leks [in play] to check the village’s north side.

Starting from the hostel, which was the last place anyone definitely saw Malvina, Leks begins looking for tracks. After about half an hour of stumbling around in the dark, he finds some of her hair and a few threads from her hoodie snagged on some thornbushes. That leads him to intermittent tracks which curve northwest through the woods, then back to the southwest. Following the tracks takes the team to the crossroads east of Ponikla, where the dirt road splits off down to the river and the flooded ruins of the spa village of Kozłowiec. There, they find more tracks: two sets of men’s dress shoes and the tires of a wheeled vehicle. It looks like a car pulled up (coming from the direction of Kozłowiec), two men got out, Malvina walked up and got in, and the car drove away to the west.

Also of note, the tires appear factory-new. There’s no wear evident.

This is the point at which Zenobia, being a native Pole who spent most of her adulthood in Warsaw, recalls several variations of an urban legend in which child abductions are linked to a black Volga sedan. Do the tire marks look like they could have come from a sedan? Yes. Yes, they do.

The team walks back toward Ponikla along the darkened dirt track, scanning for other evidence. The village’s westernmost inhabited home is that of Kaja and Miroslav, who the PCs met and recruited during their first exploration of the area. The glow of firelight comes through the curtains, and as the PCs approach, Miroslav comes out to meet them. They inquire about anything odd he might have seen or heard the previous night, and he tells them that he and Kaja did hear an engine and see brake lights in the distance. At the time, they assumed it was Zenobia or one of the other PCs doing something with one of the village’s vehicles… but it’s further evidence of hinkiness.

At this point [I was really expecting the PCs to set off in pursuit, but] the consensus is that there’s very little to be gained by attempting to track tire marks in the dark. The team heads off to bed to grab a few hours of sleep before heading out at first light. Red and Minka both have awful dreams in which they’re restrained and paralyzed, but still conscious, as a masked surgical team begins cutting on them…

---

Early in the morning of July 15, the UAZ-469 rolls out of Ponikla, heading west. Zenobia is driving. Leks has mounted his spare PK on the pintle. Minka and Red are scanning the forest on either side.

No one in Ponikla has much cause to regularly travel west, and none at all in the past week. Thus, it’s easy to track the tire marks from whatever vehicle presumably carried Malvina away. About three kilometers out, it turned south at a crossroads. From there, the dirt track continues roughly south, turning into an old paved road just before passing through one of the ghost towns that dots the map out here. The team is somewhat familiar with this place from local patrols: a few collapsed and burned-out buildings, a couple of intact but thoroughly-looted shops and restaurants, and about a dozen uninhabited homes.

They park the UAZ on the north edge of town and walk in, weapons ready. Leks and Red are ranging about thirty meters ahead of Zenobia and Minka when Red catches a flash of movement in the ruins to his left. It’s just enough to negate the ambush, and the fight is on!

It’s a tougher fight than the team has experienced up to now. The opposition is four men with no necks, cheap suits, and unbreakable morale. Everyone takes some hits. One climbs onto the roof of the restaurant and rushes Zenobia’s sniping position, forcing her to use her rifle like a spear before shooting him point-blank in the face. Red’s M4 jams, so he pulls his axe and closes with his nearest opponent. Minka charges another and takes a shotgun blast to the chest which her armor can’t quite stop. She sledgehammers him to death – and his fall clears the line of fire for his teammate to put a burst into her head. She drops.

[ This was the first time so far that I’ve put a PC down with damage. Thankfully, the critical roll was “only” a concussion, not a permanent injury or an insta-kill. ]

Zenobia rushes to Minka’s aid. Red drops his adversary mook, only to be set upon by two more men who burst out of the adjacent building. These guys wear black suits and fedoras and carry Glock 18 machine pistols, with which they immediately open up, catching Red with a nasty arm wound. Leks dashes in, pulling his shotgun as he does so. Zenobia also converges, with Minka staggering close behind her, and the fight turns into a confused melee.

The black-clad men don’t seem interested in negotiation but the team’s superior numbers eventually tell. One drops; Red and Leks wrestle the other one into submission and tie him up, at which point he… dies.

With a sudden growl, a black Volga bursts out from behind a building on the south side of town! The team unloads into it. The driver attempts to run down Leks, but miraculously misses the Estonian despite his prone position in the middle of the street. Leks spins in place and rakes a burst from his MG3 across the vehicle’s rear tires. The Volga spins out into a pile of rubble. The team approaches cautiously, finding a third black-clad man slumped behind the wheel, bullets from Minka’s AKM stitched across his upper chest. It doesn’t look bad enough to have been fatal, though. Like the tied-up man, he appears to have just… stopped living.

The building where the Volga was parked demands examination. It’s a boarded-up shop. They make their way to the back door. Leks is about to kick it but Zenobia waves her lockpicks in front of his face. The lock yields to her tender ministrations and Red enters. He dodges back as a scalpel cleaves the air in front of his nose!

The two masked men fight with desperate aggression but little skill. The team’s axe, shotgun, sledgehammer, and hatchet quickly put them down.

Searching the building, Red finds Malvina. She’s unconscious, strapped to a table with IVs in both her arms. Both lines feed into a large steel apparatus with no external controls or markings. It looks like it’s circulating her blood through the machine. Red disconnects her and the device immediately begins emitting smoke. He kicks it out the window just as it bursts into magnesium-brilliant combustion.

Looking around the room, Red finds a set of surgical instruments and some unlabeled glass drug vials. He also notes that the head of his axe and Minka’s sledgehammer are both… smoking? On closer examination, the blood of the creepy doctors is boiling off. Some quick tests show that this happens on contact with iron or steel…

---

The team consolidates their loot and the bodies of the fallen while keeping watch over Malvina as she slowly struggles back to consciousness.

Taking a look at the opposition, the four goons are all of a type: large, burly, neckless. There’s a vague family resemblance among them, possibly all cousins. They’re all dressed in the same cheap suits, but equipped with guns that have… well… screen presence, for lack of a better word: an MP5K, a G3KA4, a Steyr AUG, and a Saiga-12. Each also carries a Walther PPK and a pearl-handled switchblade.

The three men in black suits are all of a type, too – with far more mutual resemblance. They’re completely hairless, nearly identical, and lacking navels. Each has a Glock 18.

The two “doctors” are also eerily-similar, though with different features than the black-clad men. They also lack navels.

The clothes, the weapons, the features… Red’s impression at this point is that these guys are exactly what he would expect if he told a prewar Hollywood director and propmaster to give him some Eastern European organized crime goons and a squad of men in black straight from UFO folklore. The whole situation, in fact, is eerily reminiscent of a fourth-season X-Files arc.

Red improvises some non-steel surgical implements from broken glass and other scrap materials. With Leks’ help, he conducts a couple of field necropsies and collects blood samples from each of the foes. The four goons appear human. The men in black and the “doctors” are… mostly human on gross examination, but their digestive tracts are completely empty and their genitals appear non-functional. Leks gets the whole thing on Betamax, thanks to the team’s earlier find of a CBS News video camera.

---

While Red and Leks are getting their hands bloody, Zenobia is getting hers dirty. The Volga’s existence profoundly offends her. She hauls the dead guy out of the driver’s seat and starts checking it over. Aside from the very recent damage, it appears to be fresh off the showroom floor. It has no serial numbers and no registration tags, and it looks like there’s some up-armoring of the body panels and glass. Also, it has a full tank of gasoline – something she hasn’t seen in at least two years.

---

Malvina regains consciousness. She’s weak, hungry, and dehydrated, and has no memory past walking out of the hostel and seeing a light in the woods. Perhaps that’s for the best. She’s also running a couple of degrees of fever and it looks like her body has been burning fat and calories at an accelerated rate.

Red has a lot of lab work ahead of him, but right now, his top priority is his patients. Zenobia takes the UAZ back to Ponikla to siphon fuel into the OT-64, then brings the APC back to the crossroads town so Red can move Malvina and Minka to his clinic on improvised stretchers. Leks gathers up the weapons, casting an acquisitive eye on the Saiga (and a couple of the Glock 18s find their way into people’s holsters too).

As the team pulls out, Leks tosses a road flare onto an alcohol-soaked pile of timber and bodies.

---

Despite nearly killing Minka, this session was a lot of fun to run. This sets up some downtime research that will answer a couple of long-standing questions for the team while prompting a few more.

Meanwhile, in Kalisz, the U.S. 5th Infantry Division has an appointment with destiny.

I’ve noted before that Pettimore is a recycled character from the first iteration of this campaign. At the end of the last session, this was made clear to the character.

Earlier…

As Ellis prepares to strike out on his own, Pettimore pulls him aside. From his ruck, he produces a thick brown paper envelope, held shut with string that’s tied in an elaborate knot and sealed with some sort of black gummy substance. “Before I got to the village, I was operating down in Krakow,” Pettimore says. “I was working with this spook named Broadstreet. Before we got separated, he gave me this, asked me to give it to the next trustworthy American intelligence officer I met. I figure that’s you.”

Broadstreet was the character that Ellis’ player ran in that same campaign. I’d set up this packet as part of Pettimore’s starting equipment and Ellis’ player had no idea it existed until now. I kind of wish we’d been on video so I could’ve seen his face as present-PC received a briefing packet from past-PC.

Ellis takes the packet and carefully opens it. Inside is a thick stack of typewritten papers. The cover sheet gives him what he’ll need – eventually. It’s a cipher he can decrypt, given sufficient time. For now, all he can determine is the date: 20 October 2000.

“So either this is a prediction of something that’s supposed to happen, or your guy sent me a letter from the future,” Ellis comments.

Pettimore doesn’t get this, and is rather insistent that today is 14 July 2001. Ellis points out that while he’s not an astronomer, several members of the team are sufficiently savvy in the ways of fieldcraft that it should be fairly trivial to determine the year from the moon phase. A quick side consultation with Leks reveals that, yes, the moon phase is correct for 14 July 2000.

“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing since it was July 2000 for you,” Ellis not-quite-orders.

Pettimore infodumps as best he can, given the memory haze that shrouds large potions of his last year. The collapse of the final NATO offensive into central Poland. His breakout along with Broadstreet and a few others. Their delve into the ruins of Czestochowa and their recovery of a madman and a priceless artifact. Their passage to Krakow, finding something resembling sanctuary there, and a series of uncanny incidents that led to Broadstreet holing up in his room with a typewriter for three days to produce whatever was in that encrypted document. That’s where things got a little blurry for Pettimore until he found himself in Ponikla.

Something about the date’s still bugging Pettimore, though.

14 July.

14 July 2000.

14 July 2000 was the night that he, Broadstreet, and the rest of Broadstreet’s operators left the U.S. 5th Infantry Division’s lines to follow up on intel regarding an American physician [the former PC of Magda’s player] who was being held as a Soviet prisoner. They planned a quick raid, only one night out and back.

They never made it back to the 5th Infantry Division’s lines. And 96 hours later, there were no 5th Infantry Division lines for them to return to.

With the immediate area around Ponikla surveyed to some extent, conversation turns to which of the regional issues the team wants to investigate further. Ellis wants to go do his spook thing and perform a long-term infiltration of Tomaszow Mazowiecki to gather intel on the marauders infesting that city, so more direct action against them is off the table for now. Several PCs (and players) are interested in following up on the museum relocation lead, so it’s time to open up a new map hex. The team for this one is everyone but Miko (though Ellis will also take this opportunity to jump off on his operation).

---

Drinking water has been in short supply, but dehydration will kill, so some people have had to risk drinking from the river. Magda and Red both sleep poorly on the night of July 13. Red doesn’t remember his dreams but he awakens profoundly unsettled. Magda awakens in the pre-dawn hours with fragmentary memories of the river flooding the village and something crawling out of the water at the hostel’s front door…

[ Until the PCs solve the village’s water needs, I’m requiring everyone (when I remember) to start each session with a Survival roll. Failure means they didn’t forage or distill clean water and had to drink the river water, which brings a point of stress and a nightmare that may or may not be oracular…]

---

Following the driving directions salvaged from the truck that was carrying the fossils, the team crosses the river (carefully) and drives east. The directions terminate at the well-hidden entrance to a wilderness area. The native Poles in the party note that such sites were often used as private resorts for government officials… or as concealment for high-security military sites.

The team heads in slowly. Pettimore, ranging a bit ahead of the rest of the group, finds a large game trail and some sign that wisent frequent the area (which at least suggests some cleared routes that are unlikely to be mined). This prompts Pettimore to ask Minka to produce a few boar spears once she gets her forge up and running.

[ Wisent reintroduction in Poland is a bit anachronistic for the T2k timeline but I have a couple of things going here. From a mechanical perspective, I wanted something to replace the moose result on T2k 4e’s hunting table. From a plot perspective, this is another very small anomaly that ties into the overall framework of weirdness. ]

Moving further into the forest, a guard post appears, followed by a small parking area and the local equivalent of a ranger station. All show signs of minor combat followed by years-long abandonment. A somewhat-overbuilt road curves away from the parking area into the forest. With Pettimore still on point, the team creeps along.

Around a bend, Pettimore finds the first body.

It’s been there two or three months. It’s a Soviet soldier, apparently shot in the back with a high-caliber rifle. There’s an AKS-74 by the body, rusted into uselessness. Neither it nor the body have been looted.

About a hundred meters away in the direction from which the shot apparently came, visible through the summer foliage, is a cluster of buildings.

Fifty meters on, Pettimore finds another body. It’s another Soviet soldier, in similar condition, and similarly killed with a single shot. This one appears to have been taking cover behind a large tree and – from the empty magazine in his rifle and the 5.45mm casings scattered around – was returning fire when a round entered his right upper chest and exited somewhere around his shoulder blade.

All in all, the team finds a total of nine bodies. None have been looted. Their clothing and gear is heavily weathered, but some magazines and other items were protected in pouches or pockets. All were killed with through-and-through rifle hits.

The buildings are wood construction, probably fifty or sixty years old. At first glance, it’s some kind of camp or retreat complex. There are a dozen four-bedroom residential cabins, a communal restroom/shower facility, and a communal kitchen/dining/recreational facility. There are two sets of minor combat damage – one old, one new. And there are faded places on the wood exteriors where old decorations or plaques or signs were removed. On the dining hall, the weathered outline is clearly visible: a bird of prey with wings outstretched, atop a circular badge of some sort.

---

The road continues through the camp, still curving around the hill. Despite the summer sun, there’s a chill in the air as the PCs follow it past a few concrete pads that once held some sort of heavy machinery. Another couple of hundred meters on, the road ends at a turnaround and a massive bunker entrance. Despite aggressive use of a plasma torch at some point in the past, the emblem from the camp is clearer here.

The bunker door mechanism yields to Zenobia’s mechanical acumen and the team moves in. The UAZ-469’s headlights illuminate another guard post, which spans the entrance of a massive tunnel, easily wide and high enough to admit two tractor-trailers side by side. The main tunnel continues to a T-intersection. Off the cross tunnel are a total of 14 massive chambers, arranged all in one direction like the teeth of a comb. Each end of the cross tunnel has a ramp that curves upward to an upper level of the complex.

Ten of the individual chambers are empty, with cut-off pipes and wiring conduits and other marks showing where machinery was removed at some point in the distant past. Four, however, contain cargo pallets. Two of those appear to be copies of Warsaw’s municipal records from the decade before the war (1986-1996) – taxes, property ownership, city budget, city employees, survey plats.

[ Yes, I finally let them find maps. They’re just useless maps. ]

The final two chambers hold crates similar to those in which the team found the fossil collection. There’s enough for five truckloads – it seems the rest of Warsaw’s natural history museum made it here. Tearing open the crates, the team finds:

• an ornithological specimen collection
• an entomological specimen collection
• a Polish minerals collection and a display on the history of mining in Poland, including a geologic survey map [okay, still not useful tactically, but I’m sure they’ll find a way to get some value out of this one…]
• a fluid specimens collection (ichthyology and herpetology), along with a massive collection of water samples and a partial set of lab equipment from a long-term study of Vistula River ecology
• an exhibit on the oceanography, hydrology, and ecology of the Polish Baltic coast

The team spends a fair amount of time cataloging in here, but that upper level beckons. They pile back into the UAZ and slowly ascend the massive curving ramp. The upper level is arranged much like the lower one, with eight more large chambers jutting off one side of the central corridor. Again, most of the machinery once located here has been removed, but one of the chambers holds a massive cistern fed from what appear to be rain collection channels cut into the hilltop. Some of the power generation, air handling, and water purification machinery is also in place.

One of the chambers is secured with a massive set of steel doors. Zenobia [gets four successes on a Tech roll] has seen its like before, though – the locking mechanism is the same as a bank vault she and her father once worked on. She sets to work and, within a few minutes, the doors slide open.

Inside is another cistern. Where the first one had a safety railing around its perimeter, this one has a grid of steel bars laid horizontally across its surface. It’s deeper than the other one – so deep that the team’s flashlights can’t reveal its bottom. Leks pulls a magnesium flare from the UAZ’s go-kit and tosses it into the water.

The flare sinks… and sinks… and sinks. Its dwindling spark of light passes any reasonable depth, and indeed seems to have fallen far beyond where the complex’s lower level lies. As that tiny flicker drops completely out of view, Leks, Ellis, and Zenobia all see a swirl of motion in the depths…

… and Magda realizes the team’s Geiger counter is clicking.

Leks is profoundly shaken by whatever his visual cortex couldn’t quite process down in that water [2 stress]. The others are able to rationalize it away, but it’s still not a great time to be in a dark bunker that was probably built during the Nazi occupation. A hurried radiological survey reveals that the room has a background count about twice that of the surrounding area. It’s the room, not the water, so far as they can tell – but Red takes samples from both cisterns for later analysis.

Somewhat disturbed, the team heads back outside, making a stop for Ellis to load the Warsaw tax records. He expects some serious downtime during his infiltration of Tomaszow Mazowiecki, and he’s looking for financial trails of the conspiracy whose outlines he’s starting to perceive…

---

Back outside, the team returns to the camp. It shows signs of habitation by about eighteen people, and indications that they evacuated hastily about the same time as all those Soviet troops were shot and left where they fell. From the remaining personal effects and research materials, this was a cross-section of the museum’s academic and maintenance staff. The team secures a few more books and a couple of half-written articles and dissertations, but nothing earth-shattering.

The top of the hill beckons. The team struggles up there and finds the expected air intakes and water collection channels. The view is pretty good – through their binoculars, they can see as far as Tomaszow Mazowiecki, though they can’t make out many details. Looking down at the base of the hill, they spot a clearing that appears to have been cultivated by the last residents – and at its far edge, a glint of metal.

They descend and investigate. The metal is a plaque set into a granite slab at the edge of a small forested bower. The Polish words on the plaque read:

Here lie ten heroes who sacrificed themselves for Poland's future on May 14, 1944.  Their attack on the German garrison here disrupted the occupiers' plans for this site and prevented the expansion of Operation "Riese" to this land. Though their names are lost to history, may their deeds be remembered forever by free Poles.

The vegetation around the marker is neatly trimmed. Someone’s been tending this site.

The PCs attempt to track the responsible party – figuring it might be the same sniper who dropped nine Soviets and left them as a warning to others – but the trail runs out once it reaches a main road. They range around the area a little more, but nothing else of immediate interest turns up. Ellis says his goodbyes (just for now, hopefully) and the rest of the team piles into the UAZ and starts the long drive back to Ponikla.

---

It’s well after dark by the time Red, Magda, Minka, Zenobia, Leks, and Pettimore return to the village that is their home. Uncharacteristically, Ewalina [one of the player-generated NPCs, a former high school science teacher and now the town’s sole educator] is waiting for them. Anxiously, she approaches them and asks, “did Malvina go with you?”

---

I’m fairly happy with how this session turned out, despite a fair amount of improvisation. It also gave me the opportunity to end on an additional “oh, shit” note, as the disappearing-kids problem finally made an on-screen appearance. Technically, injecting an immediate and local problem broke strict adherence to West Marches principles, but it felt right and it immediately engaged the players. No one was carrying damage at the end of this session, but several PCs had stress from sleep deprivation, pushed rolls, or weirdness encountered in this session, so I knew they were going to be a little ragged going into the search for Malvina.

As my PCs are learning (and my players already knew), the world of Kaserne on the Borderlands is not a stock Twilight: 2000 setting. There are definite anomalous elements, starting with their own difficulty in recalling specific events before their arrival in Ponikla. What they’ve experienced so far:

• Zenobia grew up in Ponikla and remembers the forest around the village being much less dense. She also recalls 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 has hallucinogenic properties with possible precognitive visions.
• Something has been taking the village’s children… and returning them with missing time. I haven’t had this occur on-screen yet (it was a player-submitted problem for the village) and I really should do something with it soon…
• The disappearing/appearing swamp road southwest of Ponikla where they acquired their UAZ-469.
• 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’ve encountered from outside Ponikla has 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 probes the latter topic has induced some sort of minor seizure, after which the issues have receded.
• What’s a map? The PCs have 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 is profoundly rare, too. Ponikla only has about five books. The most blatant and recent example of this is 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.
• Pettimore’s memories of living through events of June through October 2000 before finding himself in Ponikla in May 2000.

I’m not saying there’s a pattern (because I may be making all of it up as I go along)… but there is definitely a direction I’m going with this.

09 July is a day of several projects. At the top of the list is saving Jacob’s life. Red and Minka sedate him as best they can and spend all day removing dead tissue and cleaning out infection. At the end of the procedure, the prognosis is mostly positive. He’ll need to stay under observation for a couple of weeks before Red is comfortable with him traveling, but he’ll most likely be able to heal in time.

Zenobia, still rattled by weirdness in the village by the railyard, busies herself with setting up the still that the team brought back. This doubles Ponikla’s fuel production capacity, and a day of test brewing assures her that she got the work right.

Ellis leads Pettimore, Leks, and Miko back to the highway maintenance shop to retrieve the drilling rig, which he wants to put to work on a well. They also take the opportunity to hook up the trailer-mounted air compressor and jackhammer and drag that back to Ponikla as well. Miko insists on a side trip to check out an abandoned farm and returns with 35 liters of lamp oil and an antique set of leatherworking tools.

[Have I mentioned my random loot generator?]

Magda has had quite enough of whatever is going on with the lack of written records. She spends her day in the hostel’s common room, carving the beginnings of a regional map into one of the tables.

---

The team spends the next couple of days down at the railyard, coaxing the four remaining kids out of their collective shell and doing the heavy lifting necessary to relocate the drill press and lathe to Ponikla. Minka and Zenobia have plans for the shop equipment.

(Malvina sends notes back with the team, ostensibly to provide updates on Jacob’s condition. Ellis, who is practiced in his tradecraft, notes that she’s almost certainly slipping codewords in there to reassure the others that she hasn’t been sold to slavers or something of the like.)

On 12 July, the team splits up. Leks, Minka, Pettimore, and Miko make another run to the railyard to recover the locomotive traction motor, as there’s been some discussion around ways to convert that motor to electrical generation via windmill or waterwheel. Ellis, Red, Magda, and Zenobia get to work on the drilling rig, restoring it to operational condition and doing a couple of test bores before trying to figure out the best site for a well. There’s also some fuel brewing to do, as all of this local travel is chewing through the team’s methanol reserves.

Additional salvage during this time :

• more personal hygiene supplies
• a general array of home furnishings to replace/repair stuff in Ponikla that’s wearing out (furniture, curtains, silverware, etc.)
• five 100m spools of electrical wire and 12 blasting caps
• a wood chipper (single-axle mount, can be towed behind the UAZ-469)
• a Beretta 85 with four loaded magazines
• a small drawstring bag of uncut sapphires
• a set of brass knuckles that will imprint the name MANFRED on anyone punched with them
• a fuel drum containing 50 liters of coal oil (the Boxcar Children have been tapping this for lamp oil but will offer to trade it for Magda’s cooking)
• 20 25kg bags of asphalt mix
• a copper sautee pan (which Magda claims for the hostel’s kitchen)
• two motorcycle tires
• five small batteries

---

13 July is a day of much-needed downtime… mostly. Zenobia pulls the UAZ-469 and the farm tractor offline for overdue maintenance [overdue because I wasn’t doing a great job of enforcing the need for it until now].

Minka has enough hand tools and scrap metal to start re-creating her blacksmithing setup. It’ll be an extended project [1 week, Stamina roll, Tech (Blacksmith) roll] but this gets her started.

Ellis grabs Leks and a couple of the older locals and goes surveying for well sites.

Pettimore disappears into the woods. He comes back near dusk with a feral pig over his shoulders and a canvas sack full of wild blueberries and mushrooms.

Magda, perhaps foreseeing this, has spent the day with Fryderyka’s partisans and Malvina, salvaging bricks from the village’s scrapyard to build a smoker. It’s nearly done by the time Pettimore drags his bounty into the hostel’s courtyard.

Miko likewise disappears into the forest. He’s headed upriver a bit, keeping his eye on the surrounding territory and looking for the source of suspected contamination on the river.

Red does some medical clinic work, including checking on Jacob’s healing progress, and spends the rest of the day tending one of the stills.

---

Miko’s Patrol

Adding this separately because it’s the first time I’ve tinkered with my homebrew patrol downtime action.

On the trip out, Miko finds the mummified corpse of a British paratrooper still dangling from his chute in a dense grove of trees. Most of his gear is decayed beyond usability – rust, weather, animals – but Miko does find a pair of laser-protective goggles that look intact. They basically look like dark polarized ski goggles.

He’s at the westernmost edge of his planned patrol route when he sees the wreckage of some sort of structure down at the water’s edge. Creeping closer, he can see fuel tanks, pontoons, pipes… it looks like a military field refueling point, maybe for river patrol boats, maybe for a crossing point here. There’s nothing but scrap left, but it’s a landmark and maybe some of the materials could be salvaged.

On his way back, he spots something odd on the far bank of the river. There’s a spot about 10 to 12 meters wide where the vegetation at the river’s edge is flattened. There are no tracks or footprints that he can see through his binoculars, and no other signs of disturbance, just a swath of evenly-flattened reeds and grass, flattened away from the water and leading up to the firm ground of the riverbank. He’s never seen anything like it before.

The final reconnaissance operation to adjacent hexes sees Red, Leks, Magda, Minka, and Zenobia loading up the UAZ-469 and traveling south.

The team picks up the mostly-paved road heading south out of Ponikla. It leads out to Highway 12, where they encounter the remains of a traffic jam. It looks like someone decided to clear the road with a bulldozer. As would be expected on a major route like this, most of the wrecks are thoroughly stripped, but Leks does find a few usable spare parts on the carcass of a Polski Fiat subcompact.

Feeling a bit exposed on the crumbling blacktop, they cross the highway and continue south. The terrain out here is more of the same: undeveloped grassland and abandoned farms dotted with occasional stands of trees. They’ve been traveling for a couple of hours when they sight an immense industrial building to their west – and a tiny thread of smoke rising from its vicinity. This bears closer examination.

As they move in, the structure resolves into the centerpiece of a complex. It’s a railyard, a maintenance and repair facility for Polskie Koleje Państwowe – PKP or Polish State Railways. It’s taken bombing or artillery damage, with several buildings collapsed and the main depot’s roof in tatters, but enough is intact to give them hope of salvage.

Beyond the depot lies a small village, likely former housing for the PKP workers. Zenobia recalls this place from childhood visits. One of her relatives worked for PKP and lived here.

The team parks the UAZ-469 for a quick getaway and moves in. The smoke trail has vanished, but in the center of the yard are a pair of railcars that don’t look like the others. They’re a passenger coach and a baggage car, concealed from casual view but vividly spraypainted. Lawn furniture and other signs of habitation are scattered around and the smell of fresh baking wafts on the breeze.

Magda and Minka enter while the rest of the team keeps watch. There’s a brief jumpscare from a terrified cat [tabletop is not great for jumpscares] but the cars are otherwise unoccupied. The passenger car appears to be the living quarters for a half-dozen or so people. The baggage car contains a small crew lounge, which is still in use as a kitchen and communal living area. It’s also full of smoke, the result of someone pulling the damper on the small coal stove without quenching the fire. A pan of small cakes is still cooling on the work surface along with other evidence of interrupted food prep.

It seems that whoever lives here saw the PCs coming and hightailed it. A search around the area doesn’t show anyone except the cat, who is now under another railcar and occasionally growling at Leks. The PCs are still very interested in whoever’s living here, because the clothing sizes suggest kids, but they have other things to do, so they turn their attention to the rest of the railyard.

---

The one intact maintenance facility is dark, its roof intact and its windows stained with decades of soot and grease. It takes a moment for the PCs’ eyes to adjust enough to make sense of the massive diesel locomotive parked here, opened up for maintenance with its 18-ton Engine of Damocles hanging from the overhead crane. A clipboard full of paperwork indicates that it was pulled in for an overhaul only a few days before the first battlefield nukes flew in September of ’97. The building has been stripped of most portable items, but in a gloomy back corner, the team uncoveres an industrial lathe and drill press. This may be the most excited anyone has seen Zenobia… and she grows even more effervescent when she finds that one of the locomotive’s traction motors has been pulled for rewiring and is mostly-disassembled on a work stand.

Marking this for definite future looting, the team continues moving through the railyard. Many of the railcars here are derailed or damaged, but their census identifies a total of eight passenger coaches, two baggage cars, and a single lounge/bar car that still seem usable (not counting the two inhabited cars).

A couple of missions ago, Leks developed a sudden passion for philately after unearthing someone’s stamp collection. He nudges the team in the direction of the complex’s office and is rewarded with several uncut sheets of Poczta Polska stamps commemorating the evolution of PKP’s locomotive fleet.

In a maintenance closet, Minka finds a baseball bat, a few baseballs, and a number of gloves – clear evidence of someone’s capitalist imperialist cultural contamination, especially when combined with the small still that appears to have been in use for PKP staff homebrew purposes. Additional exploration turns up a still-charged fire extinguisher and a four-gas meter (set up for oxygen, carbon monoxide, methane, and hydrogen sulfide monitoring). In the supervisor’s office, Zenobia uncovers a wall safe, which she makes short work of. This contains the real prize: two vacuum-sealed bags of coffee beans. The small gold bars are an afterthought, and the stacks of paper currency don’t even rate attention except as possible wallpaper.

---

Zenobia leads the team into the village, heading for her relatives’ home. It looks abandoned, as does everything in the village. She finds the spare key where she remembers it being and lets herself in.

Inside, there are signs of a hasty but orderly evacuation. Luggage, clothing, and valuables are missing. Something else is missing, too. In the room where Zenobia remembers a library crammed with literature and railroad technical manuals, there’s instead a badly-vandalized formal dining room. No books. Zenobia does not take this well [2 stress] and dashes outside.

The team clears the house, recovering a small amount of cleaning chemicals and personal hygiene items. In the kitchen, Magda finds a collection of handwritten recipe cards in an ancient tin file box. Checking several other houses reveals similar conditions: people gone, light looting, and no printed materials. No maps (there wasn’t one in the railyard office either), no books, just a few fragmentary notes or bills or out-of-context documents that provide no useful information.

---

The team heads back to the railyard, determined to find the suspected kids. They catch a lucky break when Magda sights the glint of sun on glass coming from a derailed baggage car on the south end of the yard. Looking closer, the team can see it’s been sketchily fortified.

Minka elects herself as the negotiator and moves in cautiously. She keeps her cool when a warning shot from a slingshot whizzes past her head, and is eventually able to open dialogue with a spokesurchin. Over food and many reassurances, a story emerges from the kid, whose name is Malvina.

The Boxcar Children are six local teenagers, four girls and two boys. They returned from a school trip to find the village empty and their families gone. The story goes nonspecific here, but they decided to stay in the village until looters and slavers started coming through, at which point they relocated to the more hidden and defensible railyard. (All of the team bristles at the mention of slavers and the implications therein.) They’ve been surviving on scrounged canned goods, foraged food from the wilderness, and unwary small game.

To Red’s eye, they’re all suffering from the typical array of apocalyptic vitamin deficiencies and poor hygiene. More critically, one of them has an unspecified respiratory ailment (not asthma, that’s all Red can tell right now) and another, Jacob, has a bad eye injury with a spreading infection that’s already at a life-threatening level.

Through diplomacy, food, Red’s medical credentials, and diplomacy, the team is able to convince Jacob to return to Ponikla for surgery. Malvina agrees/insists on accompanying him. The other four kids aren’t quite ready to leave yet, but they’re willing to negotiate with the team for trade and salvage rights.

---

This session packed quite a bit of exploration and plot into four hours. The entire situation with the kids was pure improv. All I had in my notes was evidence of habitation but the players immediately latched onto that and I didn’t want to give them nothing for the amount of effort they were putting into the project.

Also, I continue to be highly entertained by the amount of work my players are putting into homesteading. They’re heavily invested in upgrading Ponikla.

This is mainly a bookkeeping and time tracking post, as these also serve as my GM notes.

Minka, Zenobia, Leks, Magda, and Pettimore spend a few days repairing and recovering the equipment they located in the abandoned town. It’s a non-trivial fuel investment, but at the end of three days, they’ve added a small bulldozer, a farm wagon, two disc harrows, a hay baler, and a potato spinner to Ponikla’s machine sheds.

Red and Ellis use this time to set up the lab equipment. One of Ponikla’s houses had a geothermal HVAC system that still mostly works, so that’s a logical place for what’s now becoming Red’s medical clinic and analytical lab.

Miko completes work on his sniper hide on the south side of the village [treated as a lookout point base improvement].