The team pulls out of Dobrodzien on the morning of October 21, under a leaden sky that’s spitting the year’s first serious snowfall. Erick, Betsy, and Hernandez, running point in the UAZ-469, are quite thankful of their newly-acquired cold-weather gear. Comms takes rear guard, and Industrial Light and Mayhem slots into the middle of the merchant wagons. Moving at the pace of burdened oxen, progress is much slower than the team is accustomed to seeing from their usual mechanized pace.

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The team spends a couple of days in Dobrodzien, enjoying such marvels as hot showers and food they didn’t have to cook themselves. They also barter for a few things in the market: various items of cold-weather apparel, a set of EOD tools upon which Betsy seizes with unholy glee, a partial box of .45 ACP ammo for Pettimore’s MEU(SOC), and a handful of blank Betamax tapes.

Meanwhile, Cowboy takes point on the heavier negotiations…

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Continuing the lightly-edited chat log transcript from the last post…

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Ellis glances up from his notebook and offers the Captain a wan smile. “Captain, if I could have a word in private? And, apologies… I haven’t properly introduced myself. Case Officer Ellis, CIA oversight for what’s left of this region.”

Warren gives Dern an indecipherable look. Dern cracks a faint smile, fishes a notebook and pencil stub of his pen out of his breast pocket, and makes a short entry.

Warren stands and wordlessly gestures Ellis toward the door, then leads him outside and around to the shadows in the back of the house. “This is as private as it gets when the dinner setting is in my office. What’s on your mind, Case Officer ‘Ellis?’”

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Getting caught up after far too long away from this. The following is a lightly-edited – and long – transcript of a scene played out on our Discord server after the last session.

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Recap of previous play not blogged:

After lunch, Octavia and Erick check out the local school. It’s small but functional. Cowboy, Miko, Betsy, and Cat retrun to the team’s encampment to start working on Lazarus. While there, they receive a visit from Sergeant Francisco Lopez (no relation to Cowboy), who runs the maintenance/support section for Bravo Troop. He expresses very strong interest in taking Lazarus off the team’s hands for the right price. Bravo Troop has two light tanks, seven other light combat vehicles, and a collection of HMMWVs/equivalents, but no recovery vehicle. So any time anything breaks down, another combat vehicle has to be the one to tow it home.

Shortly after that, Betsy overheard one of the radios in Comms receiving a transmission. Bell had left it on while he went into town for downtime. The conversation was in Russian – one party clearly in a firefight, the other party not. With no one present who spoke Russian, Erick and Betsy grabbed the team’s tape recorder and got most of it for later analysis. Cat did recognize the candence and repetition of one part of the transmission as a call for artillery support – indicating someone out there speaks Russian and has access to artillery. Comms’ direction-finding gear pointed south-southwest as the source of the transmission. Cowboy’s supposition, based on that, was that the Soviet 129th Motor Rifle Division is getting into it with the Army of Silesia.

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Picking up the in-character thread:

The team (Betsy, Cat, Cowboy, Erick, Ellis, Pettimore, and NPC Hernandez) heads down to Bravo Troop’s encampment for their dinner engagement with Captain Warren. Along the way, the group passes the town’s medical clinic – closed for the evening, but with the glow of an electric light visible through the windows. Hearing no generator, Betsy infers battery power.

Bravo Troop’s encampment is in a former lumber yard. There’s a sign on the gate making it obvious who the new tenants are:

B Troop
1st Squadron
116th Armored Cavalry Regiment
Idaho National Guard

Two gate guards are on duty – uniformed, armed, geared up, alert. One of them escorts the team to the building that used to be the lumberyard office, now the HQ building and CO’s residence. The front half is still in use as a cramped office. First Sergeant John Wheeler (previously encountered) is at one of the desks. He stands, closes the notebook he’s writing, in, greets the PCs, and escorts them into the back.

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Weather: Clear skies with a waning gibbous moon and an overnight low 39ºF, afternoon high around 60ºF. Hernandez’s forecast has clouds moving in tomorrow with cooler temperatures, followed by rain and possible sleet the following day.

Health: All personnel are in good health.

Food: 161 person-days plus emergency reserves and trade goods.

Vehicles:

• Comms: Reliability 5/5, fuel 266/350 liters + 5x 20-liter jerrycans
• Industrial Light and Mayhem: Reliability 5/5, fuel 324/400 liters + 2x empty 200-liter drums
• Lazarus: Reliability 1/4, fuel 92/390 liters; front armor breached 3/4
• Thing One: Reliability 5/5, fuel 20/20
• UAZ-469: Reliability 5/5, fuel 75/75 + 2x 20-liter jerrycans

Weapons and Ammo: Green on small arms ammo (Pettimore and Cowboy yellow on secondary weapons). Yellow on anti-armor (105 rounds KPV ammo on Comms; SPG-9 w/ 3 HEAT and 8 HE rounds on UAZ-469; 2 HEAT rifle grenades and 1 RPG-18 distributed).

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October 18 dawns cool and crisp, but with the promise of unseasonable near-warmth. Hernandez finishes his morning readings from the weather station mounted on ILM and warns the team that the next couple of days, at least, are likely to be craptastic.

From last night’s visit with a few of the American troops living here, the team is aware of several points of interest in Dobrodzien:

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We’re back in action, slowly. To save time introducing the community of Dobrodzien and B Troop of 1/116 ACR, I ran the following scene in a text thread on our Discord server. This post is a lightly-edited transcript of that playthrough.

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The team’s first impression of Dobrodzien is that it’s… big. The town itself would not have been anything spectacular by prewar standards, but it appears to be supporting a population pretty close to what it had five years ago. Tomaszow and Radomsko each had a larger prewar population in absolute terms, but both cities also had huge swaths of devastated and abandoned ruins. Dobrodzien, at first glance, has surprisingly little war damage.

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On the morning of 15 October, the team breaks camp and crosses the Warta over Betsy’s newly-repaired bridge. There are a few scrapes and shudders, but all three vehicles pass without incident. The convoy shakes out into its usual order of march and rolls southwest toward Czestochowa.

The sun is climbing toward what passes for noon in autumn when the point vehicle’s crew spots a village coming up on the side of the road. It’s apparently abandoned. Stopping a few hundred meters out, the lookouts glass the area. The graveyard has a number of fresh graves. A brief conference reveals no particular inclination to stop and check it out. The team goes overland to skirt the deserted community, picking up the crumbling road again on the other side.

Midafternoon brings another noteworthy sight, this one of greater interest. As the team is approaching an intersection, Erick and Betsy sight two armored vehicles a few hundred meters back along the side road, half-hidden in a copse of trees. The team halts, reverses to break line of sight, and dismounts. Pettimore, Ellis, Erick, and Betsy creep in for a close recon.

As is so often the case in the Poland of 2000, the vegetation tells the story. Although brown and withered with frost, it’s had a couple of years to overgrow the vehicles. The team IDs them as British: an FV434 armored recovery vehicle towing an FV432 APC. The APC bears the marks of an RPG hit to the engine compartment and a subsequent fuel fire. The ARV is halted where it hit an antitank mine.

“Freeze,” Pettimore hisses. “Nobody sets out just one mine.”

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The team encamps on the north bank of the Warta. Betsy takes charge of the bridge repair efforts. It’s a case of “must have the tools to make the tools” – she and the team’s other technical specialists need to repair the abandoned heavy equipment at the job site before they can get much work done. Worse, all of the machinery has been sitting inactive since ’97 – which means the engines are still set up to run on diesel, so the mechanics also need to convert them to alcohol fuel.

Those not directly involved in repairs find other things to do – hunting and foraging to reduce the net rate of food consumption, brewing fuel to keep the construction equipment going, and, of course, maintaining security while the team is immobile. It’s a few days of hard work for all hands, with much cursing and a good number of minor injuries for Erick and Octavia to tend. But when the reconstruction crew breaks for lunch on October 14, Betsy declares herself satisfied with the bridge’s stability.

The team decides to remain encamped overnight, building their fuel reserves and doing a little more hunting and foraging. As the morning of October 15 dawns clear and crisp, they break camp and, with Betsy ground-guiding each vehicle in turn, cross the Warta.

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Bridge repair was an extended Tech roll for Betsy, predicated on the team repairing the abandoned crane. Each roll took one shift and restored one ton of load rating to the bridge deck. On a pushed roll, each 1 reduced the crane’s Reliability by 1, raising the possibility of breaking it and needing to take extra repair time. Industrial Light and Mayhem is the team’s heaviest vehicle, an 8×8 MAN KAT1 that weighs in around 10 tons unladen, and between 15 and 18 tons with its current load. Betsy accumulated 16 successes, which was enough – with some careful driving.

The team spends a couple of days in Kamiensk – resting, healing, repairing their gear, brewing fuel, helping out with the local harvest, and analyzing the take from their raid on Shotkin’s headquarters. They can’t stay indefinitely, though. Winter is closing in and they’re only halfway to the expedition’s destination.

The sky is low and sullen as the team loads up. Most of the village turns out to see them off. Father Miroslav leads a prayer for those who still hold faith and blesses the team’s vehicles. With a last round of farewells, they mount up and roll south.

Their first destination isn’t far away. During their route planning discussions, someone suggested a quick stop at Radomsko’s airport to see what else might be salvageable – particularly in the control tower, which seemed to have somehow resisted the decay that’s otherwise widespread in the ruined city.

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