Today’s game prep work for my next Kaserne on the Borderlands session includes a couple of relationship maps for the factions around Ponikla. Not APP-6e-compliant.
(Sorry about the scaling. Right-click and select “open image in new tab” to slightly embiggen.)
Allies and neutrals:
Hostiles:
(Lost? Find campaign startup notes and PC profiles here.)
reactor online
Glen comes back into his head with a screaming headache. Thousands of echoes of his own voice are bouncing around inside his skull. His awareness resolves – he’s in Dyrnwyn’s cockpit, rising up out of a sandy wasteland. The damage control board is showing severe damage, with everything but his basic config wrecked. The surrounding battlefield is littered with burnt-out wrecks of combat equipment, all bearing the green-and-white shield of the 501st Exploratory Guards.
sensors online
Dyrnwyn tags three frames as sensor contacts. One is Echo’s Mobius; the other two are hostiles. The nearer one is of similar size to the Everests. It’s sprinting toward Dyrnwyn and Mobius, clutching a mech-scale sledgehammer. The other is farther out, an enormous Size 3 quadruped mounting a fuckoff-huge rifle. Its vents are open; it’s glowing white-hot on thermal, and Dyrnwyn is painting it with radiation warnings. Both hostile contacts also read as heavily damaged – though the EW environment is so saturated it’s impossible to be sure of anything.
weapons onlineContinue reading →
After an 11-month drought, I’m finally getting TTRPG player time again. Paladin, one of my old gaming crew from Lexington, is running a Lancer campaign for me and NLP. I haven’t gotten to play a Paladin campaign in well over a decade, and he and NLP are both fantastic storytellers, so this is a rare treat. With their permission, I’m opening another campaign log for this story.
(If you’re not familiar with Lancer, the fan wiki is good for general orientation. Start at https://lancer.wiki.gg/wiki/LANCER before shifting focus to the subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/)
The setting is Tu’rosa, a system outside Union-controlled space on the fringe of the Orion Arm. It’s been settled for several centuries, though much of its original settling empire has been lost to history. It was never intended to be a garden world – just a planetary strip mine. When the empire’s interstellar trade imploded, so too did the polity. Tu’rosa has been clawing its way back up ever since.
Tu’rosa is currently a candidate for Union integration. A diplomatic mission and a cultural contact team are on-planet – but there’s some concern about memetic contamination. The world is under UIB-run interdiction, with nothing allowed off planet except data that’s been vetted by an oversight NHP. The mission is receiving periodic one-way supply drops, routed through the closest Union station, Lai Leng, about four years’ nearlight travel away.
Most of Tu’rosa’s populace supports Union integration, but the minority that does not is both vocal and fractious. It’s not quite to the level of insurgency, but it’s moved beyond political agitation.
Into this mix are dropped the PCs. Unofficially, they’re deployed as mech support for the 501st Exploratory Guards, the mechanized infantry unit that provides security for the on-planet Union presence. Their actual chain of command is UIB’s interdiction enforcement mission. But… allegedly, they were deployed to relieve a previous UIB team. Everyone on planet believes this was accomplished, but the PCs have no memory of that. Their mission briefing/sealed orders packet also has a missing section, despite still passing all data validation tests.
So who are our PCs?
I’m running Glyndwr “Glen” Shaw, callsign Editor.
Glen is a first-generation native of Annwn, a colony world settled in 4953U by the revived cryosleep passengers of a millennium-old slowboat. Annwn was rediscovered in 4984U, when Glen was four years old, by a Harrison Armory-affiliated scout ship. Corporate exploitation quickly followed, and in 4988U, HA attempted to claim the world via gunboat diplomacy. The subsequent occupation and insurgency burned for a decade.
Glen was 18 when Union lifted HA’s boot off his homeworld’s neck by way of a DOJ/HR intervention in 4998U. Legally a minor until the last months of the occupation, he was one of several thousand youthful Annwn freedom fighters who presented a thorny problem for ThirdComm policymakers. Technically, he and his fellow “Tomshones” were child soldiers, but Union investigators encountered unsurprising difficulties in finding any planetary authorities upon whom to pin the blame. DOJ/HR’s eventual solution was to offer assimilation-focused psychotherapy as a pathway toward subsidized off-world secondary schooling, with the intent that the Tomshones thus educated would return to Annwn to raise its social harmony indices and technology gradients.
Glen’s original intent was to return to his family’s terraforming collective, and he majored in planetology (and minored in agribusiness and culinary arts) at the University of Tharsis. However, he felt a certain obligation – not uncommon among the Tomshones – toward ThirdComm, particularly the DOJ/HR and Navy forces that were Union’s face during the Liberation. It’s possible that the assimilation therapy didn’t entirely take (or perhaps took at precisely the intended level, a cynic would say), because Glen was just one of the statistically-improbable number of Tomshones who enlisted in the UN within a few years of leaving Annwn.
Initially trained as a marine infantry scout, Glen cross-branched to mechanized chassis after three years of service. After completing pilot training, he spent the following half-decade in the marine detachment supporting DOJ/HR Liberator Team Yubari. His last promotion and completion of the NCO course (and his second degree in conflict science) came with a reassignment to the 501st Exploratory Guards – a convenient cover for his actual UIB mission.
Glen is a competent enough shooter both in and out of the cockpit. His insurgent childhood and his recon experience predispose him toward asymmetrical warfare. When mounted, he prefers to operate in the classic cavalry model of highly mobile reconnaissance and raiding. However, UIB has no shortage of shooters. Glen’s real value to the organization lies in his ability to not look or act like a soldier and his intuitive ability to connect his operator-level picture with the Bureau’s policy-level needs.
At LL0, Glen rides Dyrnwyn, an Everest chassis mounting an assault rifle, paired light nexuses, and a heavy charged blade. My build intent is a mobile, stealthy striker.
NLP is playing Ilias Vale, callsign Echo.
Ilias is an NHP specialist who got his start in the grey-market tech exchanges. He was recruited (or “recruited”) into Union’s NHP research programs. Whether through trauma, infosec training, or algorithm influence, Ilias maintains a mental trust ladder for systems, sources, and people, assuming deception as a matter of course. If he were foolish enough to have an identifying tattoo, it would read, “trust but verify.”
Ilias is accompanied by Janus, an electronic warfare support NHP that Ilias instantiated himself. At LL0, Ilias and Janus ride Mobius, an Everest chassis carrying a heavy nexus, an assault rifle, and paired thermal pistols. NLP’s build intent is hacking with secondary striker capability.
Explaining a screen shot I included in yesterday’s post:
A few months and sessions ago, I decided to steal a page from Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. With the Challenge Tracker module for Forge, I’ve added PbtA-style progress clocks to some of the party’s major infrastructure projects in Ponikla:
Every 10 shifts of work from a project leader (i.e., a PC with some general competence in the appropriate skill or the Logistician specialty) generates one skill check. Each success fills one segment of the outer (green) ring. Each 1, however, whether natural or pushed, fills one segment of the inner (red) ring, representing breakage, wasted materials, and other problems.
When the outer ring fills, the project is complete. When the inner ring fills, the project fails and must be restarted from scratch.
Generally, inner segments are equal to 1/2 the number of outer segments. I determine the number of outer segments by GM fiat and discussion with the table, as warranted.
Putting a bit more logistics catch-up on screen:
Continue reading →The team heals. Some moreso than others.
Minka seethes and worries. Red is adamant that she cannot ride until her crushed foot is fully healed. There’s no way to know how the things in her blood will reassemble the bones if she keeps abusing them. But her need to get back on Wiegel, to prove to herself that he’s still her horse, is gnawing at her.
Continue reading →I recently received a reader question regarding the systems I use in Kaserne on the Borderlands for tracking the agricultural and infrastructure projects that the Ponikla PCs are undertaking. I was about to write something, but the topic sounded like something I might have written already. A bit of sniffing around my own internet backtrail led me to a three-year-old post on Kato’s forum. In the interest of having a backup, I’ve replicated the original post here.
Continue reading →Now that we’re back in Ponikla, my players’ thoughts are turning to infrastructure and character development. The friend who runs Alexei Brandt, the less-unhinged of our teenage PCs, sent me this look into Alexei’s motivations and downtime activities. (The same player runs Pettimore.)
Continue reading →It’s time for another GM interjection regarding Kaserne on the Borderlands.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noted that the past couple of real-world years of gameplay have focused on the campaign’s expedition team, of which Miko was a part – but when the focus shifted back to the Ponikla team, Miko was also present. This is intentional.
In the lead-up to the Battle of Radom arc, most of my players created secondary PCs (or adopted recently-introduced NPCs, promoting them to PC status). This was to ensure everyone had someone to play in most scenes and to provide bench depth when primary PCs were down with injuries. By the time the expedition team headed south from Ponikla to validate the Broadstreet Dossier’s contents and Pettimore’s time-displaced memories, Miko’s player was the only one without a second character.
In the short term, this wasn’t an issue because we were focused exclusively on the expedition team. Whatever was happening back in Ponikla was irrelevant. However, as I started bringing the campaign closer to Czestochowa and a (partial) resolution of those questions, I knew I was going to have to address the second PC issue sooner or later, or I would have a player without a character to run when the focus returned to Ponikla.
(Among other issues, I’d inadvertently created a Miko power creep problem. To allow my players to develop their PCs as they see fit, my rule for this campaign is that XP accrues to the player, not the PC. Everyone else was spending XP on two PCs, but Miko was getting all the XP from that player. It’s not insurmountable, but it is noticeable.)
This post brings my hypothetical readers up to speed on an agreement that our table reached before we shifted back to Ponikla. For narrative purposes, the Miko with the expedition is separate from the Miko in Ponikla. As far as the other expedition members are concerned, Miko has always been with them. As far as the other Ponikla residents are concerned, Miko never left. The players, of course, are wholly cognizant of this artificiality – but the characters have no clue (and I have very good players).
I do, in fact, have a pretty good idea of what’s actually going on, but that will have to play out.
It’s a long night on Horse Eater Hill. Around 0200, Red finally admits he’s done all he can for Magda. Her survival is now up to her constitution – and the microscopic geometric shapes in her bloodstream. He arranges a rotation for monitoring her condition and collapses on a clear patch of ground.
No one really rests. Miko has managed to get a campfire going, but it’s just enough to turn the fog from grey-opaque to silvery-opaque. It muffles sound, but that just means the noises that are audible are that much more jarring. Leks keeps shifting behind his gun, using the pain of his knee to stay awake through the night.
Continue reading →