We’re back! We’ve restarted what’ll hopefully be regular play. This is the first session since life interfered with gaming last August.

---

In the morning, the team assembles to hear the take from the debriefing of the ambush survivor. Miko gets stuck delivering it, as Ellis is nowhere to be found [player had to miss the session, so Ellis is… off doing spook shit].

Afterward, there’s an extended discussion on what to do about Shotkin’s band of marauders down in Radomsko. Current intelligence suggests a force strength of about 70 and one AFV – reported as a tank, though that may not be accurate. The city’s current total population is estimated at about 4,000, with a quarter of that number residing in the ruins of the city proper and the remainder in outlying farming collectives. 70 men controlling 4,000 seems a significant disparity of force, but the team – and Father Miroslav, who’s included in many of the discussions because his brain still works – conclude that this may be part of the broader effects and regression they’re seeing.

“Keep ’em quiet, keep ’em dumb, keep ’em docile and in the dark,” Pettimore observes.

Father Miroslav gives him a thoughtful look, then notes that the issue of basic nutrition is also in play. This area of Poland is regressing toward pre-industrial agriculture, in which at least nine in ten people are directly involved in food production. When all your energy is going toward subsistence farming, there’s not a lot left for rebellion.

Something else about the debriefing results is worrying Erick (the former chaplain’s assistant) and Octavia (the most widely-read of the PCs on the expedition). They step aside to compare notes and realize that the “al-Khidr” whom Alekseev overhead mentioned shares a name with a figure from Islamic legend – variously described as a prophet, a sorcerer, or an angel.

Everyone, but especially Pettimore, finds this last element particularly problematic.

---

After some more debate, the team decides they’ll at least reconnoiter Radomsko. They time their departure to arrive at the city’s outskirts around midafternoon so they can observe from a distance in daylight before making their next move. They swing wide to approach from the northeast, entering the city at Hex 13:

[I will pause here to note that the in-game Radomsko bears very little resemblance to the real-world Radomsko beyond the basic street layout.]

As the team moves past one of the outlying farming collectives, they note that harvest is well under way here, too. There’s no sign of complex machinery and only a few beasts of burden – the majority of the work is being done solely with human labor.

---

Hex 13

The fields give way to a strip of housing, and then to a large campus. It’s quickly apparent that this was Radomsko’s hospital. Was – someone attempted to smash the place flat. To Betsy’s trained eye, that someone had an excess of demolitions and enthusiasm but not too much skill. She does identify three buildings that are safe to enter, though: an apartment block, the facility’s motor pool and maintenance shop, and an admin and records building.

The apartment block appears to have been housing for lower-status hospital workers. It’s abandoned – not in any kind of rush so much as a gradual leakage of residents. Random household detritus is scattered around the rooms but there’s not much worth salvaging.

Miko, who’s spent a lot of time squatting and hiding in places just like this, asks himself, “where would I set up?” This leads him to the mechanical penthouse on the roof, where he hits paydirt [double 12s on a Survival check to scrounge]. My loot generator burbles to itself and coughs up:

• a solar charger for consumer batteries
• a folding camp chair
• a complete set of Romanian summer-weight fatigues in woodland camouflage [sized to fit Erick]
• an emcrypted manpack tactical radio
• an early-generation home computer with 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppy drives [286 with EGA monitor]

From the other evidence in the space, it looks like someone was running a radio listening or relay position out of here for an extended period of time. The PC and radio were being run off a backup battery wired to the solar charger, but it’s cracked and leaking now. There’s no sign of recent habitation.

The PC is too heavy to carry comfortably, so the team leaves it in place and moves on to the motor pool. Most of the ambulance bays are empty but two UAZ-452s are present. Both are inoperable, though.

Cat pokes around the maintenance supervisor’s office and finds a welder’s mask and gloves, a rather nice oil lamp, and a cassette tape recorder with a handful of blank cassettes. Meanwhile, Betsy wanders around back to find a row of trailers. Most are basic open-topped cargo trailers but one mounts a complex apparatus. She recognizes it as a field decontamination rig, capable of spraying high-pressure water or steam to wash radiological or chemical contamination off of equipment. At three tons, though, it’s a bit heavy for the team to relocate at the moment.

Pettimore sticks his head into the dispatcher’s office. He’s not surprised to see a blank space on the wall where a large map should have hung, nor to find the decomposing shreds of paper in a binder that should have contained more fold-out maps.

The admin and records building is the team’s last stop here. The demolition work was particularly aggressive, but it seems to have mainly damaged the offices’ interiors while leaving the structure intact. A tattered sign on the wall indicates that records are in the basement.

Somehow, seven PCs only have one flashlight between them. Miko takes point with Betsy right behind him. The stairs descent and double back at a landing halfway between the ground floor and the basement. Miko has just stepped off the landing when Betsy’s hand flashes out, grabs his web gear, and yanks him back. She points out the tripwire he was about to encounter.

The tripwire is connected to a pair of improvised directional mines, positioned to sweep up the stairs and catch anyone on the landing. It’s trivial for Betsy to render them safe. Miko shines his light down to check for any more hazards and realizes the basement is flooded with rancid, knee-deep water…

… which is rippling in response to recent motion.

The team moves down cautiously, weapons readied. There’s no sound but the slosh, slosh and drip, drip of the water – until Miko hears a distant door close.

It’s about this time that Pettimore notices the faint sheen of damp footprints on the stairs, leading down to the water. They’re barely visible, fading even as he takes notice of them, but they’re exceptionally large. They have four toes, splayed wider than a human’s, and they’re spread as if to support significant weight.

Comrade begins whining and pressing back against Octavia, urging her out of the basement.

There’s a click as Pettimore swaps the magazine in Thoughts and Prayers with the one he keeps wrapped in grip tape to indicate its special ammo. “Everybody out. Now.”

The team withdraws two-by-two, with Pettimore and Cowboy bringing up the rear. Betsy pauses to re-arm the mines. Once everyone is out, they pile a couple of tons of furniture against the doors to the stairwell.

There’s no consensus on what that might have been – speculation starts with an alligator or crocodile and goes from there – but no one is really interested in sticking around after that near-encounter.

---

Hex 8

With about two hours of daylight remaining, the team moves carefully off to the northwest. A small residential neighborhood quickly gives way to light industrial structures, and then a three-meter chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. On the other side is a large swath of tall grass and asphalt. The airport’s hangars are weathered, with a few falling in, but there’s no sign of heavy fighting here. The main runway is blocked by the broken-winged carcass of a large transport aircraft bearing West German markings.

Miko is about to lead the team through a gap in the fence when he catches sight of a group of armed men leaving the airport’s small terminal building. The PCs ease back into cover and watch, The other group is clad in mixed Soviet fatigues and civilian attire. Four are carrying AKs, a fifth has a light machinegun, and the last is carrying a shotgun but has an RPG launcher slung across his back. They’re obviously patrolling, casually but watching their surroundings. Unwilling to risk detection, the team stays in hiding and lets the patrol pass them by, heading southeast – toward the hospital complex from which the PCs just came.

The team gives it another ten minutes for safety, then advances cautiously toward the terminal building, working their way from hangar to derelict fuel truck to maintenance shed to parking lot. The terminal is dilapidated, weathered, obviously abandoned. Scattered pockparks tell of skirmishes sometime in the past, but there are no craters or other signs of heavy combat.

Inside, it’s more of the same. Not much of value remains. Cowboy points out an empty window frame at the Luftwaffe transport. “Do we want to check that out?”

Pettimore squints at it. “You remember those cartoons where the coyote was always tryin’ t’catch the roadrunner?” He points out the window. “That’s a box on a stick.”

“Yeah, point taken. Control tower instead?”

“Control tower.”

Cowboy, Pettimore, Betsy, and Miko ascend the creaky spiral stair, all eight stories in height, that wraps around the control tower’s central support pillar. The thin metal outer skin groans ominously but the structure is still sound. At the top of the stairs, they’re confronted with a locked steel door [and their only trained locksmith, Zenobia, stayed in Ponikla when the party split]. Miko hefts his looting tool of choice:

… and strains his shoulder to no avail.

Betsy holds out a hand. “Gimme.” She sets the end of the crowbar, braces a heel, and shoves. There’s a shriek and pop as the forces on the locking mechanism exceed its design tolerances, and the door swings open.

The red-gold-purples of a rare unclouded sunset flood through the doorway. The control room is quiet, cool, almost serene. The quartet steps in and stands for a moment, drinking in the sight.

“Almost like L.A.,” Cowboy muses.

As they look around, the PCs realize this space is intact in a way nothing else in Radomsko has been so far. The radios are silent, the radar displays are dark, but there’s no sign of damage. The place appears to have been shut down in good order.

Miko beelines for the small kitchenette set into one wall. There’s no coffee but someone left behind a small stash of seasonings, presumably used when cooking on the ancient hot plate.

Pettimore looks around, rubs his chin, and nods at a locked filing cabinet. Betsy raises an eyebrow and the crowbar. There’s another pop and tinkle, then a scrape of metal on metal as Pettimore pulls a drawer open. He reaches in…

… and comes out with a handful of aviation sectional charts for southern Poland.

“Holy shit,” someone murmurs reverently.

[At this point, I deleted the fog-of-war walls on the world map and opened all of it up to player visibility.]

Pettimore turns, looking for a desk space on which to examine his prize. On the supervisor’s desk, neatly centered on the leather blotter, are a hand-carved wooden stand holding an elegant fountain pen and a thick three-ring binder. Pettimore has enough Polish to read the binder’s label: it’s the facility’s logbook.

The team gathers around. The log tells the small airport’s story: sparse but regular passenger and cargo service until 1996, then dwindling operations. Two military aviation detachments – one an attack helicopter task force, the other a tactical transport unit – arriving, setting up, and departing in turn. Fighting outside the city, ending in the destruction of the factory complex to the west. Very few flights after that.

The last entry is dated October 12, 1997:

Observed nuclear explosion to the south in the vicinity of Czestochowa. Minor EMP effects, no permanent damage notes. Power is out and no generator fuel remains for backup power. We have received no further instructions from Warsaw. On my authority, I am implementing the airfield contingency plan and ceasing operations.

“October twelfth of ninety-seven,” Pettimore says softly. “That was when our side nuked the steel plant at Czestochowa.” He closes the binder and tucks it into his pack along with the maps. He steps over to the window and says a short, silent prayer of thanks for the crew who stood their post and protected this information.

Miko takes a look out the opposite window with his binoculars. In the fading daylight, he can see the patrol the team almost encountered earlier. They’re working their way through the hospital campus, and they seem to have linked up with another patrol of similar size.

The team can’t be sure that the other side has found signs of their passage, but they’re not willing to risk their initial plan of staying in the area overnight. They exit the airport, heading back north to Kamiensk.

Late in the evening of 27 September, Ellis, Miko, and Bell conducted a debrief of the ambush survivor. Ellis kept his GRU uniform on and Bell stayed out of sight, so as far as the prisoner knows, she’s still in Soviet hands.

The ambush survivor is Katyushka Alekseev. Bell identifies her accent as working-class St. Petersburg or thereabouts. She was conscripted in mid-1997 as a field laundry technician, then “promoted” to disposable infantry in ’99.

She was part of a patrol from the Soviet 124th Motor Rifle Division – or what’s left of it after the mauling it received from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division in mid-July. The 124th’s survivors have settled into Piotrków and consolidated with their higher-echelon HQ and support elements (4th Guards Tank Army). The total garrison in Piotrków, which is about 20km north of Kamiensk, is probably 300-400 combat troops and about the same number of rear-echelon personnel; the latter number includes both support troops and civilian hangers-on.

Since July, the 124th’s primary duties have been traffic control at the Sulejów bridge and patrols of the main road between Piotrków and Opoczno. However, after some big unspecified fight out east (she doesn’t know the details of the Battle of Radom), traffic on that route abruptly dried up and the 124th’s focus shifted to areas west of the Pilica River.

The 124th has general awareness of multiple marauder bands, mostly Soviet deserters, operating south and west of Piotrków. Alekseev’s squad was providing escort for a 4th GTA staff officer, a Major Okeanov, who was tasked with contacting survivor settlements in the area and determining more about local conditions, including gathering intel on the deserters. Upon further questioning, Alekseev recalls Okeanov being preoccupied with some large sheets of folded paper. She doesn’t know what they were, but it’s pretty clear that she’s brain-fogged enough to not recognize maps.

Okeanov was in the BRDM-2 that was leading the patrol. Whoever ambushed them – Aleklseev assumes it was a group of the deserters – opened the fight with an RPG into the rear of the BRDM as it came around a corner. It lost power and coasted into the trees, on fire. The crew bailed out and got machine-gunned immediately. The MG team then shifted fire to the GAZ-66 that her squad was riding in, killing the driver and gunner. The squad bailed out and took cover in a ruined farmhouse, but they were receiving heavy fire from the MG team and a rifle squad was maneuvering around to their flank. That’s all she remembers of the fight. Her best estimate of enemy numbers is 2 or 3 in the machine gun team, 2 or 3 in the RPG team, and 5 to 8 in the rifle squad. She didn’t see or hear any vehicles.

Alekseev was in and out of consciousness near the end of the fight. She’s fairly certain she was the only survivor. Once the attackers moved up to secure the bodies, she heard them speaking Russian – several had Kazakh accents (which aligns with Shotkin and most of his inner circle being Kazakh).

The only conversation she can specifically recall, other than the usual litany of dudes checking bodies for useful stuff, was:

“Put away that knife. Al-Khidr wants us to leave him any who are still breathing. That one, and the guy over there. Leave them alone.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“Shit. Don’t say that. No, I haven’t, don’t let Shotkin hear you asking that.”

Afterward, Bell points out you that “al-Khidr” sounds Arabic. Shotkin, the local warlord who’s occupying Radomsko, is known to be Kazakh. Very few Kazakhs are fluent in Arabic but many of them (despite Moscow’s wishes) remain Sunni Muslim.

---

As a private in a rifle squad, she wouldn’t have had great access to intel. However, they did all get general briefings about the situation to the extent that the 4th GTA’s GRU contingent could parse it. They are generally aware that the area south of Piotrków and west of the Pilica River is infested with marauders (she refers to them as “deserters”) from the former Soviet 9th Tank Division, which mutinied in late 1999.

Before the mutiny, 9th TD’s reported force strength was 1,000 combat troops and a handful of armored vehicles, including 2 tanks. It’s generally believed that none of the splinter bands number more than 100 and they haven’t kept any tanks operational (though some groups may have lesser AFVs). They were stationed in Germany before the war and had been fighting NATO from late 1996, so they had a good amount of salvaged Western equipment as well as some East German gear.

There’s no known organization between the marauder groups. Collectively, they’re believed to exert control as far south as the ruins of Czestochowa. They control at least two bridges across the Pilica but have not expanded or migrated east for some unknown reason. (The PCs know that going farther east would put the marauders into the territory of either the Bracia Wilkow… or the unspecified force which the Bracia Wilkow warned the team about.)

This is a meta post to bring my players up to speed on previously-collected intel about the situation around Kamiensk.

---

Kamiensk

Survivor community of about 190 people, led by Father Miroslav Kasprzak, a Polish Catholic priest. Until recently, the town was occupied by marauders – Soviet deserters/mutineers from the former 9th Tank Division. The village suffered on multiple levels during the occupation, and its problems now range from depleted food reserves to chronic malnutrition and injuries from casual beatings to an incipient baby boom.

Of significant note, Father Miroslav is the first community leader the PCs have met who is metaphorically keeping the lights on. He has preserved his church’s small library, he’s running elementary school sessions for the kids and church services for the adults, and these seem to be keeping the worst of the “brain fog” from the local population. He doesn’t have as much of a conceptual framework for the problem as the PCs do, but he’s aware that some sort of effect is suppressing knowledge and critical thought in certain areas.

Kamiensk was effectively defenseless before the PCs arrived, with only a handful of hunting weapons and two or three AKs. After dealing with the immediate marauder problem (see next), the PCs had turned over a number of captured Kalashnikovs, a PK machine gun, and an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, as well as a working PTS-M amphibious transport.

There’s been some discussion of relocating Kamiensk’s population to the Ponikla area, but that’s been strictly an internal conversation among the PCs.

---

Local Marauders

About six months ago, a band of about 50 marauders took over Kamiensk. In the process, they killed most of the local militia (which also drastically reduced the village’s workforce).

The marauders were a splinter group formerly aligned with a warlord named Shotkin (see next), who holds the nearby small city of Radomsko. They’d come up here because they’d become disillusioned with Shotkin’s rule – though there were undercurrents of fear and disquiet when they spoke of him.

About a month ago, they became aware that the remnants of the Soviet 124th Motor Rifle Division had moved into Piotrków Trybunalski, about 20 kilometers to the north. They had some intense internal disputes about how to handle this, which led them to splinter along ethnic lines and abandon the village for fear of discovery. The PCs subsequently tracked down those bands, eliminating two of them and convincing the third to depart eastward.

---

Shotkin and Radomsko

Radomsko is a larger survivor community, numbering about 4,000, which is about 10-12km south of Kamiensk. Of those, a quarter live in the remains of the city, while the rest are scattered around its surroundings in farming enclaves. The population there is heavily fogged.

The current “leader” of Radomsko is a Soviet deserter/marauder/warlord named Shotkin. He’s of Kazakh origin, and most of his 70 (estimated) remaining followers are Kazakhs or Uzbeks. He’s reported to have something which non-military sources have described as “something that looks like a tank but isn’t a tank.”

There is evidence that Shotkin’s forces have been active in the immediate vicinity of Kamiensk, successfully ambushing a patrol from the 124th MRD. There were several anomalies around that fight (see the previous post for a summary of intel collected at the scene). One 124th MRD survivor was recovered from that scene and Ellis, Miko, and Bell are now interrogating her…

These session notes are only about eight months overdue, backlogged from when we went on hiatus.

---

The team discusses what to do with the prisoners. Field-expedient executions aren’t off the table, but Leks is back in Ponikla and no one really has the stomach for whacking a handful of injured guys who were trying to leave. In the end, the threat of being handed over to Shotkin is enough to convince them to accept exile; they start walking northeast.

The team camps at the second marauder band’s former bivouac to heal up and finish the repairs on the PTS-M, which they intend to hand over to Kamiensk’s citizens along with its AGS-17. Combined with the small arms they’ve accumulated, that should make the village a harder target – and give it some emergency mobility. Overnight, Ellis hears a brief but intense firefight somewhere to the northwest – in the general direction of Kamiensk, but probably not involving the village itself.

---

There’s still one marauder splinter group to deal with, but intel gathered from prior reconnaissance and Kamiensk residents’ testimony suggests that this will be an easy sell. These are nine Georgians led by a Daniel Gelashvili. They’re currently holed up in an abandoned junkyard, trying to get a trio of Polski Fiats into working order.

Ellis dives into his ruck and pulls out an item he’s had since the start of the campaign:

Gelashvili’s crew is minding their own business, wrenching on their tiny little technicals, when their lookout starts shouting in panicked tones. A minute later, a command-variant BTR (recall that Comms is a BTR-70K, which any motor rifle veteran would recognize by the extra antennas) rolls through the gate. A well-groomed man with a commanding presence, wearing a Soviet uniform with a GRU major’s shoulder boards and collar tabs, leaps out of the commander’s hatch and begins not-quite-berating them. He’s ignoring their AKs, but perhaps the AKs are not pointed at him because the woman in the BTR’s turret looks like she’s gone to the market to find a reason and her shopping basket has room for all nine of their heads.

It takes Ellis about ten minutes to thoroughly confuse the Georgians, extract every scrap of useful intel from them (basically nothing new, only verification of what the team already knows), and convince them to finish fixing up their piecemeal cars and fuck off toward the eastern horizon at their best possible speed.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
– Sun Tzu

---

Betsy is the first to smell the smoke.

The team is on the way back to Kamiensk when the familiar aroma of burned-out vehicles alerts them to the evidence of the firefight Ellis overheard last night. A cautious approach reveals the aftermath of an ambush. At the crossing of two farm roads, a GAZ-66 light truck and a BRDM-2 armored car sit, both riddled with bullets and RPGs and burned to their frames. A number of dead Soviet troops are scattered around the vehicles – while a few of them made it out of the truck and got to cover in a rubble pile, they didn’t last long against whoever hit their patrol. Vehicle and uniform markings indicate these troops were from the 124th Motor Rifle Division – or what’s left of it after its run-in with the U.S. 5th Infantry Division – which is now based about 20 kilometers north in Piotrków.

There’s a pile of smashed tech: flashlights, compasses, a boombox with a collection of hair band cassettes, the scorched remnants of the BRDM’s radio. Everything of direct military value has been taken.

Pettimore starts spiraling out to see what other signs he can find. He finds one, all right – a blood trail, leading southeast through the tall grass. The rest of the team fans out behind him and moves in cautiously.

About a hundred meters away from the ambush site, the bodies of two more Soviet troops lie discarded on a rocky outcropping. Erick and Octavia try to move in to take a closer look, but Comrade does not want his human anywhere near the scene. Erick does manage to get in an examination, assisted by Octavia’s shouted-at-a-distance-over-an-agitated-working-dog questions/suggestions. Both soldiers have bullet wounds, but they appear to be survivable. They weren’t given first aid, and there are indications of rough interrogation. The cause of death, however, is… peculiar. Each one has a ragged wound, roughly circular, at the hollow of his throat and down into his torso. Erick can’t be certain without a full autopsy, but from what he can see, it appears that the heart and lungs were removed – forcefully – through that wound track. There’s a surprisingly low amount of blood splattered around, too, for what amounts to not-quite-open-heart-surgery.

Octavia blinks. “Vampiric Roto-Rooter?”

“Blood-O-Rooter?” Cat chimes in.

“I am disinclined to stay in this area,” Ellis declares, speaking for the whole team. No one objects to expending a couple of jerrycans full of fuel for field-expedient cremation.

The team is about to re-mount when Comrade takes an interest in the rubble pile. There’s another body – or, rather, a survivor. It’s a young woman, also in Soviet uniform. She’s unconscious with fragmentation and blast injuries in addition to the blunt trauma from having a stone wall fall on top of her. Octavia and Erick stabilize her and prep her for transport.

---

Cat gets a nav fix and realizes that this happened only about two kilometers from Kamiensk. There’s some concern that the town may have been raided by the victors – but when the team returns, they’re met with confused looks. The villagers heard the gunfight but it didn’t sound close enough to be cause for concern, and they didn’t see any fire, muzzle flashes, or headlights.

These session notes are only about eight months overdue, backlogged from when we went on hiatus.

---

The team decides to spend a few days in Kamiensk making the area more habitable. Pettimore and Ellis (whose players were out for this session) take Hernandez and the UAZ and head east along the team’s backtrail to look for the Soviet deserters who’d been plaguing the town. Cat and Miko head out on foot for the same purpose. The rest of the team, under Betsy’s direction, begins surveying Kamiensk’s abandoned buildings to see what construction materials can be easily stripped for use in repairs or fortifications.

---

Cat has been through this area before, though it was mostly dark and Task Force Cobalt didn’t have much contact with the locals. Still, she knows a few landmarks – enough to effectively guess where a small marauder band might choose to hole up to avoid attention from Soviet regulars. After all, she did some of that same thinking a month or two ago.

The scout team finds the first marauder band in a former small dairy farm. There’s not a lot of activity, so it’s hard to get an exact count, but Cat and Miko estimate roughly a dozen men. They’ve dug a fighting position to cover both road approaches to the farm and have emplaced an SPG-9 recoilless rifle there. Other than that, they appear to be poorly-equipped, with only small arms. No vehicle or mounts are in evidence.

---

The team regroups, confers, verifies some details with Father Miroslav, and identifies these guys as a band of Kazakhs led by one Bulat Kadyrov. Father Miroslav’s description of Kadyrov suggests that he has his eye set on becoming a petty warlord somewhere. The team decides to stage a night raid.

Cat sneaks in and opens the fight with a grenade into the SPG-9 gun pit. Miko, meanwhile, has been low-crawling up to the farmhouse’s kitchen door (west side), and is nearly overrun when a fireteam of angry, half-awake Kazakhs comes boiling out that door. He spends the rest of the fight playing bullet tag with them.

In the gun pit, Cat is putting suppressive fire on the house’s south face with her M4. It jams, so she picks up an AKM whose former owner is no longer using it. That jams, so she picks up another Kalashnikov. This one at least lasts the fight.

Betsy is maneuvering to the southeast while Erick is maneuvering to the northeast. Both of them are trying to get firing angles on the house’s front door (east side). There’s some inadvertent crossfire action, thankfully with no effects on friendlies beyond suppression.

The team ends this fight with a stack of dead marauders and, for once, no major injuries. High on success, they decide to go after another group on the following night.

---

The second target is Oybek Musayev’s Uzbeks (remember, these three bands used to be one group before they fractured along ethnic lines). Pettimore and Ellis have located them farther east, where they’re encamped in the ruins of a small river+crossroads town. Interestingly, they appear to be trying to salvage a derelict PTS-M amphibious transport.

Another night raid seems like the way to go. This time, the team decides to secure the PTS-M first, since it’s some distance from the main camp. Cowboy, Pettimore, Cat, Octavia, and Comrade go after the vehicle while the rest of the team moves into position to hit anyone moving toward that location from the village.

The team’s stealthy approach is blown when Octavia attempts the swim and succumbs to the weight of her gear. Comrade drags her onto the sandbar where the PTS-M is stranded, but the splashing alerts the three guards there. Cowboy shanks one, Pettimore drops a second with an arrow through the throat, and Cat, Comrade, and Octavia subdue the third. There’s no gunfire – the blocking force actually has to start making noise to alert the marauders’ main body.

In the aftermath, the team discovers that the PTS-M is almost in working order – and it’s mounting an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher.

Interrogation of the prisoners reveals that the marauders of Przedbórz (which is about twenty kilometers southeast of Kamiensk) didn’t stick together long after their Pyrrhic victory over Task Force Cobalt. The prisoners don’t know what happened, but they’ve heard that a bunch died of infighting or unspecified medical causes. Of the survivors, maybe three or four are still squatting there. The rest joined with Shotkin’s band. He doesn’t know anything about any scientists or material they may have recovered from TF Cobalt.

It is late September 2000 of an alternate history in which the Cold War never ended.

In 1995, the Soviet Union and China went to war over border and resource disputes. Seeing an opportunity to weaken the Soviets by proxy, the United States and other Western nations provided military aid to China. As the tide turned against the Soviet Union, its leaders applied pressure to their Warsaw Pact clients/allies, demanding troops and material for the war effort. Tensions spiked in several Pact nations, and a covert request for aid ultimately led West Germany to cross the Inner German Border in the autumn of 1996. This attempt at German reunification triggered the broader European conflict for which NATO and the Warsaw Pact had been preparing since 1945.

The war went nuclear in 1997 – first with tactical-scale warheads on the battlefield, then strikes against rear-area targets, and finally escalating to a “limited” strategic exchange beginning in November. Governments collapsed, cities burned, industrial civilization crumbled – but the war continued in fitful, spiteful spasms.

By spring 2000, most nations and militaries were shells of their former selves. In northern Europe, the remaining NATO forces moved out of their winter cantonments in what would be the war’s last organized offensive. The objective was to clear the Baltic coast and north-central Poland of Warsaw Pact remnant forces, thereby securing a buffer zone and acquiring critical farmland, fishing grounds, and other natural resources. The U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division was tasked with a deep raid into south-central Poland, covering the offensive’s southern flank as the main group of NATO forces traveled east. Like most major units, the 5th ID had less than 20% of its prewar strength, with a sizeable majority of its troops drawn from the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, stragglers from other NATO nations’ armies, and even a scattering of former Warsaw Pact troops who’d defected to the West and proven their loyalty and utility.

Veteran Twilight: 2000 fans know how this story ends… or begins. The 5th ID ran into overwhelming Soviet and Polish forces in the vicinity of Lodz, eventually being pushed back and encircled at Kalisz. Radio transmissions from higher-echelon HQs indicated that the entire NATO offensive was encountering heavy resistance – no help was coming. Running out of ammo, fuel, and personnel, the 5th ID attempted to break out of its encirclement. It failed. Only scattered bands of survivors escaped the Kalisz pocket, finding themselves on their own in a hostile Poland collapsing ever farther into post-nuclear ruin.

But our story began a bit earlier than that, and somewhat off to the side…

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In May 2000, a handful of survivors arrived at Ponikla, a small village on the south bank of central Poland’s Pilica River. Some were Poles fleeing the war’s devastation; others were NATO stragglers who’d been cut off behind enemy lines. Well away from any major travel routes and untouched by combat, Ponikla seemed to be a safe haven.

The PCs knew very little about the area around Ponikla. Even Zenobia, who’d grown up in the village, found herself having difficulty remembering the surrounding area, and some major geographic features didn’t match her recollections from childhood. After about a month of resting and healing, they began cautiously exploring the surrounding countryside. They met a couple of other survivor bands and convinced some of them to join the community, skirmished with ex-Soviet Army marauders, and identified a site or two with salvage potential.

During these initial explorations, the PCs also made contact with a couple of other survivor communities. The first was a band of former militia from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, a city on the north bank of the Pilica about 20 kilometers to the southwest of Ponikla. From this group, the PCs learned that Tomaszów was now controlled by more ex-Soviet Army marauders (a problem which the team has, to date, reconnoitered and poked but not dealt with conclusively – though Ellis and Miko did mount a covert operation to sabotage the fuel supply used by the marauders’ flagship hovercraft). The second was a loose coalition of seven large family farms north of Ponikla.

Several… anomalies… also surfaced during this initial exploration phase. As of early July, these included (list copied from an earlier post, Cracks and Breakage)

• Zenobia grew up in Ponikla and remembered the forest around the village being much less dense. She also recalled 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 had (and still has) hallucinogenic properties with possible precognitive visions.
• Something had been taking the village’s children… and returning them with missing time. (I eventually addressed this with an encounter that nearly went horribly wrong. More horribly than planned, even.)
• 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’d encountered from outside Ponikla 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 probed the latter topic induced some sort of minor seizure, after which the issues usually receded.
• What’s a map? The PCs 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 was (and remains) profoundly rare, too. Ponikla only had about five books. The most blatant and recent example of this was 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. (This was eventually discovered to be the aforementioned marauder hovercraft.)
• Pettimore’s memories of living through events of June through October 2000 before finding himself in Ponikla in May 2000. (This is an artifact of Pettimore being the one PC ported from a previous iteration of this campaign and setting.)

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The next phase of the campaign, beginning in mid-June 2000, saw the PCs ranging farther afield. By this time, they had a couple of small alliances, they’d accumulated a decent motor pool, and they’d started building Ponikla up into a small but robust base of operations.

Their first expedition was a follow-up on an early discovery of a derelict tractor-trailer. Said vehicle contained a Stegosaurus skeleton, some other mineral samples, and documentation indicating that these contents were part of the collection from Warsaw’s natural history museum. Apparently, the collection’s most valuable assets were being relocated to a secure location before the war reached Warsaw. With written directions to a location, the team decided to head there to see if any of the museum staff were still present. What they discovered, instead, was a former Nazi bunker complex repurposed into a secure vault for government records and museum exhibits. They also found a mildly-radioactive room containing a cistern with no apparent bottom and hints of motion in its depths. They declined to further investigate.

Immediately upon returning from this expedition, the team discovered that one of Ponikla’s kids (actually one of a group of teenagers rescued/recruited from their hideaway in an abandoned railyard) was missing. The search for her led the team to a vicious encounter with mirrorshaded and exotically-armed Soviet surplus thugs, Slavic Men in Black, and profoundly creepy doctors, none of whom had normal human anatomical or medical traits, as well as a black Volga sedan. They recovered the teenager, who was being subjected to some sort of blood treatment. Further scientific investigation by Red revealed that the MiBs and doctors had some sort of oddly-regular microscopic things in their blood… and, upon following a hunch, Red discovered that the PCs and Ponikla’s other residents did as well.

(Speculation at the time, borne out by further observations, is that these are some sort of nanites. It’s uncertain whether they have undiscovered functions, but their effect is to drastically increase healing speed [at the expense of significantly-increased caloric intake]. On a meta level, this is both a creepifying plot element and a way to explain the core rules’ unnaturally-fast healing times. I’ll note that allied NPCs who don’t have these little passengers have shown healing times much closer to what medical science dictates they should display.)

Ranging farther southwest, the PCs made contact with Opoczno, a larger survivor community located on a major east-west highway. Opoczno, despite suffering from the same brain fog and memory loss (or mental blind spots) as other survivor enclaves, turned out to be the closest thing to a nearby trade center. The team also rescued Arkadi, a former KGB Ninth Directorate operator who’d defected to NATO and had previously served alongside Pettimore. From Arkadi, the PCs learned of the recent NATO offensive and the demise of the 5th Infantry Division… and Pettimore realized that he somehow was living the summer of 2000 again from a completely different perspective.

In early August, the PCs made contact with three loosely-affiliated groups of potential allies. One was White Eagle Battalion, a unit of the pro-Western Polish Home Army that was operating out of Skarzysko-Kamienna, some distance southeast of Ponikla. The second was the Bracia Wilkow – literally “Wolf-Brothers” – a group of Polish partisans who aren’t pro-Western so much as anti-invader. The Bracia Wilkow know things they shouldn’t know, and the team’s general suspicion was (and remains) that they’re something akin to lycanthropes. Or at least really creepy.

The third group of potential allies was a band of East German troops – but East Germans who’d been on the side of reunification, and who fought on NATO’s side as part of the reunified Bundeswehr. Under the command of former Oberstleutnant Boris Von Bahr, they were holding the town of Bialobrzegi, about thirty kilometers east/downriver of Ponikla. This included both an intact road bridge… and a small hydroelectric power plant. Somewhat accidentally, the PCs figured out how to weaponize the brain fog – while removing Von Bahr and his command staff from it.

Meeting Von Bahr set some events in motion that would move the campaign into a new and deadlier phase, though none of the PCs realized it at the time…

A few days after this meeting, the PCs received an urgent summons to the North Farms. They arrived to find a rapidly-spreading grass and field fire. In the process of attempting to fight it, Minka, Pettimore, and Arkadi became aware of invisible spirit-presences within the fire, and Pettimore demonstrated that Thoughts and Prayers, his Dragunov SVD, has some measure of power beyond ordinary ballistics. Following this incident, the PCs participated in an interfaith blessing/cleansing of those fields which demonstrated that two of Ponikla’s elders, Wilhelm and Aina, were quite well-versed in Slavic Pagan rites…

Von Bahr had previously warned the PCs about a large Soviet presence in the ruined city of Radom, and the team had several escalating encounters with these troops and other forces with whom they were in contact. This included the liberation of a number of POWs from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division (some of whom were later “adopted” as secondary PCs). Intensive reconnaissance in the Radom area identified most of the Soviet garrison there and linked it to Soviet Reserve Front HQ and the puppet Polish Communist government in Lublin.

Exploring south and west, the team had another encounter with the Bracia Wilkow. This pointed them to a patch of land south of Tomaszów under the claim of another unspecified power – but one which the Wolf-Brothers treat with very cautious respect. This began a clue chain which led the team to the remains of a crashed MH-53J – and the last survivors of Task Force Cobalt, a joint special operations team which raided the campus of the Politechnika Łódzka under cover of 5th Infantry’s assault on the city. TF Cobalt, it appears, was tasked with recovering materials and researchers who were involved in some questionable physics.

This was the point at which Ellis and Pettimore began seriously contemplating the likelihood that at least some of the war, as well as much of the weirdness they’d seen over the past few months, had been deliberately orchestrated. This was stoked by the Broadstreet Dossier, a document which one of Pettimore’s teammates handed off to him in his past-that-was.

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As these various explorations and revelations had been progressing, the Soviets in Radom were getting more aggressive. They were pushing Von Bahr’s people and patrolling west along the highway. There was concern that they might try to get Opoczno under their thumb, or even discover and annex Ponikla itself.

The PCs’ response was to escalate before the problem escalated itself at them. A couple of weeks of additional recon, planning, and coalition-building resulted in a joint effort between the PCs, the White Eagle Battalion, Von Bahr’s people, and the Bracia Wilkow to neutralize the Soviet presence in Radom. On September 10, the alliance moved against the Soviets. It was a confused and bloody series of skirmishes that distinctly showed the difference between planned ambushes and unplanned meeting engagements, but the PCs and their allies carried the day.

In the battle’s aftermath, the team brokered a regional security and reconstruction agreement. They also negotiated a POW exchange with the Soviet command structure… and learned that at least some of the Soviets at Lublin are as awake as they are, and were trying to stabilize the region against whatever is happening. They also received a warning that whatever that unknown force is, some kind of escalation is brewing in Warsaw.

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Edited to add: here’s the current campaign map. “Foggy” hexes are those which the PCs have on their fragmentary maps but haven’t yet explored. Hexes with little lightning icons are those in which electrical power could theoretically be restored from the hydro plant at Bialobrzegi.

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That brings us to the current phase of the campaign. I recommend reading the following posts, in order, for the detailed catch-up:

• Splitting the Party
• Expedition Preparations
• A Girl and Her Dog
• The Train Salvage Job
• Kamiensk

Be seeing you…