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…