After their gunfight with the Soviet (ex-Soviet?) squad, the PCs return to Ponikla and come back with the village’s oxen to haul the UAZ-469 back to town (it had apparently been left running until it ran out of fuel). With a functional vehicle now in their possession, building a still to brew alcohol fuel is added to their to-do list. But reconnaissance of the immediate area is still the priority.

22 June is a maintenance and recovery day after the gunfight. Leks had sustained minor injuries, a few people were carrying a significant stress load, and weapon maintenance had added to Zenobia’s workload.

Kaja, Miroslav, and Marika settle into an untenanted house a few hundred meters west of the village core, where they can graze their small flock. Red examines Kaja (the newly-recruited NPC), who is about four months pregnant; his diagnostic capabilities are limited but she and the child appear healthy. Kaja and Miroslav learn that Ponikla has a priest, Father Maciej Frankowski, and express interest in being formally (if not “legally,” given the general absence of law these days) married. Maciej the Priest (as differentiated from Maciej the Brewer, also a local resident) is delighted to have something to do in this remote village that seems to be backsliding into Slavic paganism…

Late in the night, the village is awakened by a loud howling or rushing sound coming from the north, toward the river. The trees in the area aren’t moving and the sky is mostly clear – it seems to not be meteorological in nature. Zenobia theorizes that it might be mechanical in origin – maybe some sort of turbine? But no one’s seen a working aircraft in a few years. Miroslav shows up and confirms that it’s the same noise he and Kaja heard a couple of nights ago. There’s some additional speculation, but without anything concrete, everyone goes back to bed.

Meeting at Mysiakowiec

In the morning, the full team (all eight PCs) sets out for reconnaissance north, across the Pilica. To cross the river, they’ll need to head a few kilometers east to Mysiakowiec, an abandoned village [still in the PCs’ home hex] that has a heavily-damaged two-lane bridge. That bridge will support foot traffic, and a skilled horseman could get a horse across, but vehicle traffic is right out.

(In the last two years, Mysiakowiec has briefly been home to two marauder bands and a Soviet infantry detachment, all of whom apparently moved in with the intent of setting up a checkpoint or tollbooth on the bridge. As far as the Ponikla villagers know, the marauders gave up because there wasn’t enough traffic to exploit, and the Soviets got reassigned for much the same reason. All three groups departed in haste.)

In game, the Pilica is much larger than it is in real life. It’s about 400 to 500 meters wide in this area and deep enough to support barge traffic as far upriver as Tomaszów Mazowiecki. I wanted its navigational significance to match the river as it appears on the 4e boxed set’s travel map, and I wanted to accommodate later riverine shenanigans if the PCs decide to go in that direction…

The PCs arrive at the outskirts of Mysiakowiec and set up to recon the area. They find tracks suggesting that someone recently brought a couple of motorcycles across the bridge, parked them, and reconned the village on foot before returning back across the bridge.

While the PCs are doing their own assessment of the area, they notice a small group of maybe a dozen people approaching the bridge’s northern end and settling down to rest. They try to get an accurate count but it’s hard – either 13 or 14 people. There’s one guy in the back of the group who’s hard to see (admittedly, it’s 400+ meters, but they have binoculars and Pettimore has good glass on his rifle). Pettimore and Ellis are fairly sure the group numbers 14, but when they wearily get up and begin to cross the bridge, only 13 are present. This greatly disconcerts Pettimore… there’s something just on the tip of his memory about a similar experience in Krakow.

The PCs watch from hiding as a baker’s dozen of refugees settles into shelter in an abandoned building in Mysiakowiec. Doc, looking through borrowed binoculars and making the mistake of getting downwind of them, is fairly certain that dysentery is tearing through that group. The PCs decide not to confront them, though Pettimore does take a deer with his bow and stealthily leave it where they can find it later.

Truck Stop

The team crosses the bridge and moves out into the slowly-rising hills north of the Pilica, following the motorcycle tracks. The terrain here is mixed small farms and undeveloped plains. Some of the farms appear habitable if anyone wanted to set up shop with no neighbors. The skeletal, charred remains of a crashed C-130 are draped across one of the hills.

Moving cross-country and along empty farm roads, the team comes across a tractor-trailer rig in a ditch. They move in for a closer look and find the driver still strapped into his seat, where he died when a large number of bullets hit him and his truck’s engine. The vehicle’s tires are flat and its fuel tank has been siphoned, but Zenobia thinks she could get it running again with the right parts.

Miko gets the rear doors open and climbs in. He finds a number of tumbled crates full of what appear, to him, to be rocks in an excess of protective packing material. Minka comes in for a second opinion and is astonished and delighted to find a… Stegosaurus skeleton?

The PCs toss the cab. They find a roll of toilet paper in a plastic bag, some tools, a couple of cans of spray paint… and a bill of lading and a set of driving directions. This truck was one of six that were dispatched from a natural history museum in Warsaw shortly before the nuclear exchanges started in late summer ’97. They were supposed to deliver the most valuable items from the museum’s collection to a secure facility about 20 kilometers southwest of the PCs’ current location.

This scene raises as many questions as it answers, and the team marks this for later follow-up. But there’s still more recon to do.

Ossi Encounter

The team continues exploring the area, still following the motorcycles’ trail. They’re coming up on a paved road when Magda, on point, spots something angular lurking in the trees within the saddle of a pair of hills. The team’s scouts creep closer and identify it as an OT-64 – a Polish/Czechoslovakian armored personnel carrier. They also spot two motorcycles tucked back in the trees, several tents, and about six to eight armed men in piecemeal East German camo. They’ve found a marauder band – and one that’s likely heading in Ponikla’s direction, if the motorcyclists were scouting a route.

Guessing that the East Germans are going to send their scouts back across the river in advance of a crossing, the PCs backtrack to Mysiakowiec and set an ambush for the bikers. They’re hoping to whittle down the enemy numbers and score a couple of free motorcycles.

The initial ambush goes well. The PCs set up for a crossfire and Miko kicks off the ambush by taunting the bikers into chasing him on foot once they’ve crossed the bridge and dismounted. The scouts get dropped immediately. Miko and Minka go forward to retrieve the bikes – at which point they realize that the OT-64 is amphibious and the rest of the marauders are crossing the river.

I’m not sure what my players thought the marauders were planning to do with the OT-64 after sending their scouts across again. Did they assume it was going to be abandoned on the north bank? I did give them several Tech checks to recall it was amphibious and not a single player succeeded, so our Discord channel was a verbal “surprised Pikachu face meme” when this happened.

The PCs started with no anti-armor capability and the previous session’s fight had ended with the escape of three enemies, including one who had a few rifle grenades. So Miko finding an M72 LAW strapped to one of the motorcycles is a well-timed twist of fortune [or GM benevolence]. He sprints to get it to Leks [the only PC with Heavy Weapons skill] while the rest of the team tries to re-orient toward the incoming threat.

The OT-64 lands and disgorges a half-dozen angry East German deserters, who fan out into the wooded area just south of the riverbank. Minka and Zenobia take them under fire immediately. Miko executes a Leroy Jenkins charge with a frag grenade and suppresses three of the dismounts before finding himself the unhappy recipient of four wounds from the ones he didn’t suppress. He pulls back to the rest of the team and preps another grenade.

Several turns of urban fighting ensue, with a lot of enemy hits being stopped by the combination of cover and body armor. [Seriously, I could not roll a head or arm hit for love or money.] The OT-64 circles the block to try to flank the PCs. Leks realizes its left side was holed and poorly patched [Armor 2 there, as opposed to Armor 4 on the other facings] and starts dumping a belt of 7.62x51mm from his MG3 through the replacement plate. Minka engages in a pop-up duel with a sniper with an SSG-82, which ends when Miko runs across the street in front of the OT-64 while carrying a live grenade, lobs the grenade at the sniper, narrowly misses being shot in return, and decides that his best course of action is to tackle and grapple the guy and beat him unconscious with the landscaping. [I can’t even. Everyone expected Miko’s player to be rolling up a new character. This all happened out of the other PCs’ LOS, too, so all they know is that Miko ran off into the park and came back bruised and carrying a rifle he didn’t have before…]

The PCs put the last two dismounts out of action when they attempt to cross the street and flank their position. Minka and Red gun one down; the other makes the mistake of charging Leks in close combat and learns about his d12 Strength.

The OT-64 is maneuvering to keep its weak side out of Leks’ fire, but Leks and Zenobia get a series of lucky hits and manage to disable the feeds for both its KPV and its coaxial PK. With no guns, the crew tries to run over Leks and Red, but both men dive out of the way. Minka, seeing this, charges the vehicle and somehow [3 successes on a Mobility check] mounts it while it’s backing away. She begins pounding on its turret with her sledgehammer. Red sees this, joins her, and stuffs the barrel of his M4 into the commander’s hatch. This is the point at which surrender is back on the menu.

This mission actually spanned two sessions, with the break point occurring at the start of the PCs’ ambush. Ellis, Pettimore, and Magda’s players weren’t able to join for the second session. I ruled that Ellis was off-screen shadowing the refugees (who ran as soon as the gunfire started), while Pettimore and Magda were pulling local defense back at Ponikla in case there were more undetected marauders (there weren’t, but it was a logical in-game excuse.)

I really expected Leks to light up the OT-64 with the LAW, but he never got close enough to feel confident taking a shot with it – it has a crappy Range 3 and the terrain wasn’t in his favor. He got lucky early in the fight with an ammunition hit on the KPV’s feed, so the crew never engaged the PCs with the big gun.

Amazingly, despite having five PCs in a fight I’d designed for eight, only one PC came away with wounds. They took four prisoners (the APC crew and the sniper), who Ellis and Leks interrogated between sessions. The greater take was the captured material: the OT-64 (which is no longer amphibious because Leks turned its left side into a colander), the motorcycles, and a bunch of small arms and personal gear. This gives the team some more options for mobility as soon as they can start brewing fuel.

The PCs have been in Ponikla about a month. They’ve recovered from the wounds they were carrying when they arrived, they’ve tended to their gear, and they’ve decided that this is, at least for the foreseeable future, home.

As this is a West Marches game, the world map is unexplored outside their home hex. They know they’re on the south bank of the Pilica, but little else [there are, in fact, reasons they can’t just look at a topographical or highway map and go from there]. So the first order of business is reconnaissance.

They launch their first recon mission the morning after the village’s summer solstice celebrations. Magda, Ellis, Red, Leks, and Minka set out on foot to explore to the southeast. The terrain here is gentle, mostly forested with occasional cleared patches where small family farms were hacked out of the woods. They’re abandoned now, mostly in ruins.

Late in the morning, they come upon something different: new ruins. It’s another small cottage, this one with a now-empty sheep pen next to its sprawling vegetable garden. The fire that claimed it must have been recent – the smell of smoke still hangs in the air. The PCs recover a few items (hand tools, a spinning wheel, some spun and hand-dyed yarn) from the ruins. Leks finds tracks where three people and about a dozen sheep headed south. Figuring those folks can’t have gotten too far, the team follows them.

The tracks lead them through an otherwise-trackless forest to a ruined village. This place appears to have been the scene of some heavy fighting a couple of years ago, with most of its buildings burned or toppled. But at the western side of this forest clearing is a light industrial structure, apparently intact, with a small flock of sheep grazing amidst a plum orchard.

Meeting the Neighbors

The PCs approach cautiously, with Magda and Ellis on point and trying to appear non-threatening. They’re met by a very cautious one-armed man in his twenties who’s carrying a submachine gun. He’s wearing local civilian attire but his Polish, Ellis notes, has a distinct Russian accent. He’s being backed up by a woman about his age with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. They’re initially suspicious but quickly warm to the power of Ellis’ persuasive tongue.

The squatters are Miroslav and Kaja (and Kaja’s mother, Marika). They’re rather nonspecific about their prewar history – especially Miroslav – but they’ve been staying out of the way of, well, everyone in the family cottage. That is, until Marika’s cat triggered a cooking accident that burned the place down. They knew the village was here, so they salvaged their remaining belongings and brought the flock here for shelter. Miroslav wants to rebuild eventually, but this is “home” for now.

(Miroslav and Kaja also mention that they heard what sounded like a windstorm the previous night. There was a great howling noise and rush of air north of their location. This croggles the PCs a bit because the weather has been clear to partly cloudy – certainly no storms in Ponikla, less than 10km away…)

The PCs confer. The trio apparently has some skill if they’re surviving out here on their own, and the sheep would be a welcome addition to Ponikla’s herds. Recruitment is easy enough. The NPCs gather their things and prepare to return to Ponikla with the PCs.

While Ellis and Doc are making the recruiting pitch, Minka and Magda check out the building in which the NPCs are sheltering. It’s a small cannery! Judging from the boxes of pre-printed labels, this village’s main business was plum preserves. The machinery looks like it’s still usable if someone could restore power, and there’s a good stock of empty jars. It would be a bit of a commute but when harvest season comes, Ponikla could use this place…

Starter Gunfight

The PCs, now with NPCs and sheep in tow, retrace their steps. They’re a bit croggled when they cross a dirt road that none of them remember from their trip into the village. About a hundred meters away, they spot two vehicles: a burned-out BTR-60 sitting beside the road and an intact UAZ-469 parked in the middle of the road with its doors open.

There’s a small metallic click from behind the party, like the sound of a weapon coming off safe. Miroslav has, unasked, moved Kaja and Marika into cover and taken a position to cover the party’s back-trail. Ellis and Leks exchange a look – clearly, Miroslav has seen some shit, and there may be future questions about just where he went to school. But for now, there’s a more immediate issue. Leaving the NPCs and the sheep, the party moves up to investigate.

There’s a large dent in the UAZ-469’s front bumper and hood. Its doors are open and there are several large puddles and sprays of blood in the dirt and grass around it. Ellis reconstructs the scene: the vehicle hit something organic, the crew got out, and something tore their shit up. A few expended casings indicate that someone got off a burst from an AKM but there are no bodies. The vehicle does contain a few useful items; nothing earthshattering. It’s out of fuel, apparently having been left idling in place until it ran dry.

While the PCs are checking out the scene, they come under attack from a half-dozen armed men. There’s a brief (introductory) firefight in which the PCs drop three of the attackers and drive off the remaining three. Available intelligence is limited, but Ellis does note that all of the fallen are in piecemeal Soviet uniforms with the insignia of the 124th Motor Rifle Division. The PCs recover the usable personal gear and weapons (two SKSes and an AKM) and return to Ponikla.

This was an intro session with some exploration, a bit of NPC interaction, and some combat. I also threw in an initial indication that the world has gotten a little bit strange…