This one is slightly out of order, technically occurring before the guest post which spoilers Janek’s survival. Slow GM is slow.
This post condenses a long but slow-running thread on the group’s Discord server that occurred after the last session. Which was in March. Adulting sucks.
Red goes to work on Janek while Minka begins tending to Miko [downed with damage, but no crit – for once] and the bystanders with minor injuries. Zenobia and Leks obtain heavier weapons from the attackers, as do the surviving Russians. They and Leks are eyeing each other uneasily when the actual Opoczno militia shows up in force.
Thankfully, both actual militiamen survived the attack. Franek stays with the party to prevent lethal misunderstandings while Mieszko peels off to intercept the incoming response at the door. Thanks to their intervention and the known credibility of some of the team (particularly Red and Leks), there’s a minimum of unnecessary friction. Alexei, with Ludwig in tow, arrives at about the same time, and they’re kept cooling their heels outside the perimeter until Ludwig rather loudly announces his medical credentials. He taps in for Minka, freeing her up to assist Red.
With Red wrist-deep in surgery, Ludwig assisting him, and Minka tending to less-critical cases, it falls to Leks to be Ponikla’s face. A couple of the arriving militia members are former cops, who are quick to take over witness statement and evidence collection – to include politely but firmly secure the weapons taken from the dead attackers.
The Russians are shocked, angry, and suspicious. Yevgeniy is dead, Other Boris is badly fucked up, and Taras and Fedorov have minor injuries. Only Boris avoided injury.
Fedorov, with Boris hovering ominously, approaches Leks in time to catch his infodump to the first militia fireteam to arrive. She waits until that conversation is done, then steps in. She’s not quite willing to let her guys shoot their way out of Opoczno (and is aware they probably can’t pull it off anyway), but she sees the need to stop dancing, and with Red busy with Janek, Leks appears to be the next authority figure in line.
All she’s willing to say in front of a larger audience is that this looks like a false-flag operation to her, and she’s afraid that this action confirms some of the worst suspicions that she and her people had. She hasn’t seen something like this before, but she and her team have seen other unspecified things. There’s a promise of a more detailed conversation once her people and the Ponikla representatives have some recovery time and privacy.
The arrival of a ranking militia officer, a slim, graying woman with a captain’s rank tabs and a high school assistant principal’s demeanor, cuts that conversation short. Leks goes back to mostly ignoring the Russians and, with Zenobia’s assistance, walks the Opoczno captain through the after-action examination.
It’s been a few months, but both Leks and Zenobia (as well as Red and Minka) have seen this before. All six attackers have a distinct shared appearance – not close enough for anyone to say “clones,” but oddly familial. All of their weapons appear factory-new, but unserialized and lacking proof marks. The guns themselves are also similarly eclectic: a SPAS-12, two Saiga-12s, a P90, an AUG carbine, a MAC-10, and Glock 18Cs. Needless to say, no such weapons are on the militia’s property books. Each attacker also had a hatchet, likewise apparently new, and a fragmentation grenade of the American WWII-era “pineapple” design.
It’s well after midnight by the time the team is able to confer with their counterparts in relative privacy and security. Red and Minka finally have Janek stable enough to be moved. The Opoczno militia has set up both groups in one of the travelers’ hostels, with a squad on guard outside.
Taras stations himself behind the bar in the common room and begins mixing and distributing drinks. Fedorov accepts hers with a nod of thanks and settles into a chair. She waits for everyone else to get settled in, then starts talking.
Fedorov is the logistics officer (“S-4, you would say in NATO”) of the 124th Motor Rifle Division, which the team knows to be their nearest Soviet neighbor. The 124th MRD is currently stationed in (or occupying, depending on one’s perspective) Piotrków Trybunalski, about 50km west of Opoczno on the far side of the Pilica. Until the Battle of Radom, they were handling security on DK12, the Soviet Reserve Front’s main line of communications between forces in west-central Poland and front headquarters at Lublin (see also these charts).
The 124th’s chain of command runs through the Soviet 4th Guards Tank Army. In practice, 4th Guards HQ has merged with the 20th Tank Division, and the combined unit is sitting on Lodz (where Task Force Cobalt conducted their raid back in early July – though of the Ponikla PCs, only Arkadi, who’s isn’t present in the scene, has a direct connection to that event).
Ostensibly, 4th GTA answers to the Soviet command group in Lublin, where Red and Leks will recall Ellis had an abiding interest. Lublin is also, not coincidentally, the seat of the Polish Soviet-puppet government.
However, since the Battle of Radom cut the MSR from Lublin, 4th GTA command has become increasingly… weird. They were propping up marauders in Tomaszow and elsewhere to get some kind, any kind, of local stabilization, but now they’re actively supporting what looks a lot like destabilization and pocket warlords.
(The population of Lodz is about 20k, maybe half of whom are involved in food production. The 4th GTA command staff was trying to keep some industrial agriculture running, including earmarking about half their fuel production for it. With recent developments, it’s uncertain if that’s still true.)
The 124th is dependent on 4th GTA HQ for key supplies. But with the increasing sketchiness of some of 4th GTA’s behavior – requisitioning all radios, shorting shipments of food, fuel, and parts, declaring certain marauder territory off-limits for patrols, not letting troops rotate back to Lodz for R&R – the 124th’s command staff is starting to question whether the 4th GTA is still a legitimate command authority.
Fedorov’s mission is to re-establish trade relations with Opoczno. She’s prioritizing alternate sources for some of the key things the 124th needs to maintain order in its immediate area – and to ensure it and the civilians under its protection survive the winter.
Clearly, someone didn’t like that mission.
Uncomfortable silence reigns once Fedorov completes her infodump. Leks contemplates his drink and badly wishes Ellis could handle this conversation. Fedorov reminds him a lot of Major Maksim Volkov from the end of the Battle of Radom. She and Leks may disagree on methodology, but they both want the places they’re in to be better. As loath as he is to admit it, Fedorov has scored major points with the firm commitment to ensuring the civilians under her charge are cared for.
(There’s an out-of-game discussion about the status of Opoczno’s citizens. The brain fog is light here. Most are in denial about any reports of supernatural weirdness, but also have a superstitious fear of leaving town [even people who live/work in Opoczno’s outlying farms are regarded as a bit spooky]. Opozno is functional enough to have regular timekeeping and non-military-oriented trades, as well as a barter economy that’s starting to flirt with the concept of work credit currency, all of which requires low to no fog.)
Leks asks if Piotrków Trybunalski is more like Opozno, or more… he resorts to waving his hand in front of his face with a momentary blank expression He also inquires if any of the 124th have been to Lodz lately to check in on their upper command.
The short answer to the first question is, “it depends.” Troops and civilians with more technical jobs seem to be holding together more. Conscript infantry, truck drivers, laborers, farmers, and people who are geographically isolated keep sinking back into fog without regular interventions.
Fedorov admits that once higher command in Lodz cut off R&R rotations into the city, no one from the 124th has gone north. The loss of access was a fairly significant morale hit. The 124th’s CO doesn’t want to give the impression that he’s rotating favorites into Lodz when the rest of the unit can’t get some time off.
(Zenobia is nursing her drink and listening through all of this. From the way Fedorov speaks, the Polish woman is forming the impression that she’s very well educated in some technical area – far moreso than would be typical for a woman in Warsaw Pact military service. Also, all of the PCs who are fluent in Russian will pick up on the fact that she’s not going by the feminine suffix for her patronym [i.e., Fedorov, not Fedorova]. She could be doing it as a social statement, or to present as more masculine within a male-dominated military social structure.)
Leks tries for a polite disconnect to confer privately with the rest of the team. He admits he doesn’t have a problem with the Russians being in Opoczno, especially if they’re trading for things that help out their citizens. His main worry is that they’re going to pick up quickly on the electrical grid restoration project.
Red agrees; it’s all the more reason to get Fedorov and the force she represents on-side before that happens, so he and other involved diplomats can forestall any immediate reports to Lodz or Lublin. His theory is that what was happening to Von Bahr’s troops before the PCs’ intervention is now happening in Lodz – possibly even to the extent that it happened, and is still happening, in the Radom POW prison.
Something doesn’t fit, though: Lodz has a larger civilian population than Opoczno, and its 20,000+ residents should be a regional source of stability. Red admits the fog may not follow hard rules, as it defies a lot of known science – and it may flourish in a situation where local authorities revert to Warsaw Pact-style authoritarianism and paranoia (mistrust of large social groups/movements, and of people who break routine).
The team returns to the Russians, who are huddled in a quiet consultation of their own. Leks and Red take point on the negotiation for further information – and perhaps something more. Their initial offerings are information exchange on whatever is happening in Warsaw; open exchange of medical information, with particular focus on the fog; and one-for-one trades of intel drops on weird shit.
Leks’ ulterior motive is to elicit concrete assurances that the 124th is treating the citizens in its charge well and are allowing self-governance. He’s loath to admit it, but if the local Poles accept the yoke of Russian protection, he’d have to support a voluntary decision.
Looking at the big picture, Red pushes for a future meeting on regional stability, particularly with regards to food in what is shaping up to be a hard winter. He’s not too concerned about the 124th’s current leadership raiding the nascent alliance for food, but he wants to avoid problems with the marauders in Tomaszow if the 124th raids them.
[As this was an asynchronous Discord discussion, I infodumped by category rather than playing out each conversational thread.]
Warsaw: Fedorov admits she hasn’t seen any intel on what’s happening there in a couple of months, but she is able to substantiate what you already know. A new warlord, styling himself “Baron Czarny,” has taken over the city and is expanding into the surrounding area. There was concern that Czarny might want to position himself at the head of a reborn Polish national government. Warsaw is largely in ruins, but there might still be assets or information available for Czarny to unearth that would give him leverage in that quest. She does let slip that while Czarny’s forces are mainly former Polish troops, he does have two separate smaller units in which he’s collecting, respectively, NATO and Soviet/Warsaw Pact stragglers.
Civilians under the 124th MRD: According to Fedorov (and none of her surviving troops blink at this), the 124th MRD’s intent is local stabilization until they can go the fuck home next summer. They’ve been running marauder suppression patrols against the fragments of the former Soviet 9th Tank Division. They did have a couple of bad fights with marauders based out of Radomsko, but about two weeks ago, something happened down there that gutted that organization. The 124th’s command staff wanted to send an expedition in force to mop up, but they made the mistake of asking 4th Guards Tank Army HQ for fuel and ammo. The response was a strongly-worded order against intervening in Radomsko. Fedorov masks her opinion pretty well but her guys are pissed at that.
Tomaszow: The 124th has been ordered to be strictly hands-off of Utkin’s band in Tomaszow. Fedorov won’t say more than that, but Boris opines that the 4th GTA is letting Utkin do his thing because they’re cultivating the Tomaszow deserters as deniable assets for doing shady shit. Fedorov glares at him but can’t quite work up the heart to contradict what he says. [Ellis’ undercover reconnaissance in Tomaszow confirms this, but I’ll be damned if I can find a post for that. I may have failed to blog that entire arc, which we ran on Discord the better part of three years ago.]
89th Cavalry Division: They don’t have any information beyond the fact that the cav troopers stopped responding to orders over the summer and are apparently intent on going back to whatever is left of home.
Lodz and food: They’re all a little uneasy around those topics. Boris, who seems to have positioned himself as the guy willing to say what his boss won’t, finally shrugs. “Look. You know maskirovka – you call ‘false flag’ in the West, right? Someone dressed those assholes up as Opoczno militia and sent them to kill us while we were negotiating with Opoczno for food and fuel. I used to know this Albanian. Good guy with a knife. Anyway, he had a saying – ‘who benefits?’ So I ask you: who benefits from us being dead, our mission being assfucked, and our chain of command blaming the same people we were trying to cut a deal with?” He looks at Red and Leks. “Now how do you think those same people will react if they hear we’re dealing with Americans and Balt defectors?”
Red and Leks exchange looks. It’s apparent to both of them that the 124th’s command staff is trying to keep their troops safe from whatever is happening in Lodz – and the 4th GTA in Lodz, meanwhile, is trying to sideline potential troublemakers and keep them too weak to interfere with whatever is happening there. None of the Russians are willing to give voice to it, but there’s a strong implication that the 124th is looking at the possibility that they may have to cut ties with Lodz altogether.
Red puts an immediate offer on the table. If the Russians can give him a day to make the arrangements, Ponikla will give them an armed escort – and he’s clear this is an escort, not an “escort” – to the current edge of the 124th’s patrolled territory at the Sulejów bridge over the Pilica. He also asks if the Russians have someone who can secure their radio communications. Fedorov warily admits that they do – but so do Lodz and Lublin. Red reminds her that one-time pads are a thing – and Ponikla has a working photocopier.