Weather: Clear skies with a waning gibbous moon and an overnight low 39ºF, afternoon high around 60ºF. Hernandez’s forecast has clouds moving in tomorrow with cooler temperatures, followed by rain and possible sleet the following day.
Health: All personnel are in good health.
Food: 161 person-days plus emergency reserves and trade goods.
Weapons and Ammo: Green on small arms ammo (Pettimore and Cowboy yellow on secondary weapons). Yellow on anti-armor (105 rounds KPV ammo on Comms; SPG-9 w/ 3 HEAT and 8 HE rounds on UAZ-469; 2 HEAT rifle grenades and 1 RPG-18 distributed).
October 18 dawns cool and crisp, but with the promise of unseasonable near-warmth. Hernandez finishes his morning readings from the weather station mounted on ILM and warns the team that the next couple of days, at least, are likely to be craptastic.
From last night’s visit with a few of the American troops living here, the team is aware of several points of interest in Dobrodzien:
We’re back in action, slowly. To save time introducing the community of Dobrodzien and B Troop of 1/116 ACR, I ran the following scene in a text thread on our Discord server. This post is a lightly-edited transcript of that playthrough.
The team’s first impression of Dobrodzien is that it’s… big. The town itself would not have been anything spectacular by prewar standards, but it appears to be supporting a population pretty close to what it had five years ago. Tomaszow and Radomsko each had a larger prewar population in absolute terms, but both cities also had huge swaths of devastated and abandoned ruins. Dobrodzien, at first glance, has surprisingly little war damage.
My Experience: I’ve tinkered with 4th edition for a while. As amply documented on this blog, I’ve been running a campaign (with added paranormal elements) for about two years now. Haven’t actually gotten to play yet, though.
Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars
My Experience: The second edition of Twilight: 2000 came out in 1990, when the so-called end of history had rendered the first edition’s game history obsolete. It featured an updated timeline to which, admittedly, I paid very little attention. More of my focus was on the more playable game engine, which eliminated a lot of the headaches high-school-age-me had with the original game. I snapped up the yellow boxed set as soon as it released, flailed ineffectually with it through high school and my early college years, and shelved it when it became clear that I wasn’t going to find anyone interested in playing. Along the way, GDW released v2.2, which I didn’t actually use until I was in my late thirties and involved in a few play-by-post games. But we did have some pretty fantastic PbPs…
Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)
My Experience: The first edition Twilight: 2000 boxed set was probably the second or third RPG I owned. I would like to say I ran it for my Boy Scout troop during my middle school years, but the truth of the matter is that I was in middle school and had no idea what the hell I was doing. By the time I did scrape together some sort of clue, first edition had long since fallen by the wayside in favor of the Big Yellow Book and later iterations. Still, it’s a universe I’ve found compelling for almost forty years, so for the last four days of this challenge, I’m going to build a character for a different edition each day.
On the morning of 15 October, the team breaks camp and crosses the Warta over Betsy’s newly-repaired bridge. There are a few scrapes and shudders, but all three vehicles pass without incident. The convoy shakes out into its usual order of march and rolls southwest toward Czestochowa.
The sun is climbing toward what passes for noon in autumn when the point vehicle’s crew spots a village coming up on the side of the road. It’s apparently abandoned. Stopping a few hundred meters out, the lookouts glass the area. The graveyard has a number of fresh graves. A brief conference reveals no particular inclination to stop and check it out. The team goes overland to skirt the deserted community, picking up the crumbling road again on the other side.
Midafternoon brings another noteworthy sight, this one of greater interest. As the team is approaching an intersection, Erick and Betsy sight two armored vehicles a few hundred meters back along the side road, half-hidden in a copse of trees. The team halts, reverses to break line of sight, and dismounts. Pettimore, Ellis, Erick, and Betsy creep in for a close recon.
As is so often the case in the Poland of 2000, the vegetation tells the story. Although brown and withered with frost, it’s had a couple of years to overgrow the vehicles. The team IDs them as British: an FV434 armored recovery vehicle towing an FV432 APC. The APC bears the marks of an RPG hit to the engine compartment and a subsequent fuel fire. The ARV is halted where it hit an antitank mine.
“Freeze,” Pettimore hisses. “Nobody sets out just one mine.”
Betsy checks the ground at her feet, takes a knee, and starts scanning. “Cut me a probe and some stakes,” she murmurs to Ellis. The agent draws his knife and swiftly dismantles a nearby sapling. Betsy goes to work. A half-hour yields a safe path back to the convoy. Another hour, and she’s convinced that she’s found and safed the other three AT mines.
The team moves in for a damage and loot assessment. The surviving crews or later scavengers have mostly stripped the vehicles of anything usable, but the FV434 yields a couple of items too heavy for a dismounted crew to carry off: a hydraulic power unit with a spreader/cutter tool and a rotary rescue saw. The FV432’s crew compartment also contains a Colt 635 and four magazines.
Both vehicles are disabled, but the damage is mutually exclusive. In theory, it might be possible to piece together one working light AFV from the two derelicts. Octavia and Cowboy put their heads together and lobby for trying to restore the FV434. The allure of an armored workshop, even with empty tool lockers, is too strong to pass up.
It’s a day and a half of hard work to transplant the FV432’s tracks and running gear to the FV434. The ARV is barely functional [Reliabilty currently 1 with a permanent cap of 4], but the engine will turn over. The driving experience is akin to being locked in a rolling rock tumbler, but the team hopes it’s enough to get someplace with more security and better facilities for making permanent repairs. Octavia dubs it Lazarus and bravely volunteers to drive. Comrade whines unhappily and takes the commander’s seat so he can ride with his head out of the hatch.
The morning of 17 October sees the team back on the road, approaching Czestochowa’s northwestern outskirts. The terrain is lifting into rugged and forested hill country, reminding Pettimore and Erick of home. The road is cut into a hillside, with the right (west) side rising sharply and the left (east) side dropping away into a shallow valley. The convoy is approaching a roundabout when the sound of gunfire erupts from the west. It’s close, just over the hill crest to the west.
The drivers slow as everyone else searches for the source of the gunfire. The cadence is that of a pretty serious gunfight, small arms intermingled with heavy machine guns and the occasional clatter of a light autocannon.
Without warning, an armored vehicle with a massive gun erupts from the treeline on the hillside above the road, turning sharply to cut in behind Lazarus and Industrial Light and Mayhem at the back of the convoy. Octavia yanks Comrade down into the armored crew compartment and buries the throttle, trying to outrun whatever is coming at the unarmed and barely-functional ARV. Aboard ILM, Miko swings around the gunring’s M249 and begins bouncing ineffectual rounds off the vehicle’s glacis.
The UAZ-469 and Comms are farther down the road, unable to immediately engage. Cowboy is in the BTR-70K’s turret, though, and she immediately recognizes the problem: it’s a SAU-122 self-propelled howitzer. The main gun is clamped in its travel locks, but at least four men in Soviet uniforms are riding tankodesantniki-style – and firing back into the woods at unseen pursuers.
The team is light on anti-armor weapons. Comms‘ KPV is their best immediate option for dealing with the SAU-122, but turning around to engage will be problematic at best. Ellis orders Bell to turn right, climbing the hill in the beginning of a clockwise circle that will put Comms on the SAU-122’s back trail. Aboard the UAZ-469, Erick follows suit, swinging wide to let the larger vehicle take point.
Ortiz tries to slew ILT through the roundabout, but a tangle of wrecked cars forces her to slow to a crawl. The SAU-122’s commander opens up on the truck with his DShK. Rounds tear into the cargo compartment. Ortiz slams on the brakes. She and Cat look at each other and fling their doors open, bailing out to get away from the massive amount of combustible and explosive material back there. Miko stays on the SAW, chipping the SAU-122’s paint and forcing the desantniki to abandon their mount.
“What the hell would spook somebody with a goddamn howitzer?” yells Pettimore as Comms mounts the hill.
“A bigger howitzer,” Ellis replies grimly, then grunts as Bell stomps the brake to avoid a head-on collision with a HMMWV. Beyond the smaller vehicle, everyone aboard Comms and the UAZ can see a pair of LAV-25s bouncing cross-country in pursuit of the SAU-122. Ellis grabs for the radio.
Erick brings the UAZ to a screeching halt as well, slewing to one side to avoid a collision. The HMMWV’s gunner has his M2HB pointed directly at the ex-Soviet vehicle. Erick, Betsy, and Hernandez raise their hands, hoping that between the three of them, they have enough remaining scraps of American uniforms to be identified as friendlies.
There’s a brief, intense flurry of gunfire. It abates as the SAU-122 rams its nose into the hillside and stalls out. The desantniki are sprawled in the ditch, extinguished by a quick and vicious crossfire from Comms and both LAVs. Approaching the SAU-122, the team finds its crew dead in their seats, victims of a massive volley of fire from Cat, Miko, and Ortiz that somehow punched through already-weakened rear armor.
An uneasy silence falls at the team and the new arrivals regard one another. Cat, Pettimore, Ellis all recognize the tactical markings on the other guys’ vehicles. They’re from Bravo, 1-116 ACR – or, more formally, B Troop, 1st Squadron, 116th Armored Cavalry Regiment (Idaho National Guard). 1-116 ACR was attached to the U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division for the spring 2000 offensive into central Poland. About a week before the division arrived at Lodz and ran into a massive Soviet counterattack, B Troop received new orders direct from Northern Army Group HQ in West Germany. 5th ID never heard from them again, and the assumption before everything came apart was that they had run into massive Soviet forces and been captured or wiped out. Neither Cat, Pettimore, nor Ellis was party to exactly what those orders involved…
… but they’re here now. The HMMWV’s front-seat passenger dismounts and approaches Comms and the UAZ under the watchful eyes of his gunners. He’s of obvious Native American extraction, much moreso than Erick’s mixed heritage, and is wearing BDUs with first sergeant’s stripes. Introductions occur with a degree of mutual wariness; he identifies himself as John Wheeler, SNCO of B Troop. Some exposition reveals that the SAU-122 crew was the last remnants of a marauder band from the former Soviet 129th Motor Rifle Division. B Troop has established itself as the protectors of a community some distance to the west of here and has been conducting local stabilization operations.
Ellis pulls the team aside for a conference and to assess the damage to ILM. The DShK rounds tore through the cargo compartment, missing the munitions and fuel but trashing the precious still beyond repair. Worse, from Cat’s perspective, her rucksack also took a direct hit, nothing identifiable remains of her chocolate stash or other personal effects.
The team is so close to Czestochowa, their goal, but the prospect of making contact with friendlies – who appear to be at least partially “awake” – is a powerful lure. Even Pettimore agrees it’s worth the detour. There’s some more negotiation, but the outcome isn’t really in doubt. The team mounts up and heads west with their new friends, rolling toward Dobrodzien.
Things sort of fell apart for me in August with a home purchase and move combined with one of the annual busy seasons at work, so this post is from four-month-old notes. As a result, accuracy and detail are somewhat less than I might hope. But this gets the broad strokes, and it wasn’t a bad place to pause the campaign for real life again.
The team encamps on the north bank of the Warta. Betsy takes charge of the bridge repair efforts. It’s a case of “must have the tools to make the tools” – she and the team’s other technical specialists need to repair the abandoned heavy equipment at the job site before they can get much work done. Worse, all of the machinery has been sitting inactive since ’97 – which means the engines are still set up to run on diesel, so the mechanics also need to convert them to alcohol fuel.
Those not directly involved in repairs find other things to do – hunting and foraging to reduce the net rate of food consumption, brewing fuel to keep the construction equipment going, and, of course, maintaining security while the team is immobile. It’s a few days of hard work for all hands, with much cursing and a good number of minor injuries for Erick and Octavia to tend. But when the reconstruction crew breaks for lunch on October 14, Betsy declares herself satisfied with the bridge’s stability.
The team decides to remain encamped overnight, building their fuel reserves and doing a little more hunting and foraging. As the morning of October 15 dawns clear and crisp, they break camp and, with Betsy ground-guiding each vehicle in turn, cross the Warta.
Bridge repair was an extended Tech roll for Betsy, predicated on the team repairing the abandoned crane. Each roll took one shift and restored one ton of load rating to the bridge deck. On a pushed roll, each 1 reduced the crane’s Reliability by 1, raising the possibility of breaking it and needing to take extra repair time. Industrial Light and Mayhem is the team’s heaviest vehicle, an 8×8 MAN KAT1 that weighs in around 10 tons unladen, and between 15 and 18 tons with its current load. Betsy accumulated 16 successes, which was enough – with some careful driving.
The team spends a couple of days in Kamiensk – resting, healing, repairing their gear, brewing fuel, helping out with the local harvest, and analyzing the take from their raid on Shotkin’s headquarters. They can’t stay indefinitely, though. Winter is closing in and they’re only halfway to the expedition’s destination.
The sky is low and sullen as the team loads up. Most of the village turns out to see them off. Father Miroslav leads a prayer for those who still hold faith and blesses the team’s vehicles. With a last round of farewells, they mount up and roll south.
Their first destination isn’t far away. During their route planning discussions, someone suggested a quick stop at Radomsko’s airport to see what else might be salvageable – particularly in the control tower, which seemed to have somehow resisted the decay that’s otherwise widespread in the ruined city.
The trip in is without resistance, though some changes are evident. Over the last couple of days, the team has heard occasional gunfire in the city. They’ve assumed it’s Shotkin’s subordinate bands settling the new pecking order now that the warlord is out of the picture. As they pass the farming collectives on the city’s north side, the locals are out and about, gathered in small groups. There’s quite a bit more curious interest in the convoy than Radomsko’s citizenry has displayed before. No one flags them down or fires at them, though.
The airport is quiet as the team pulls up. Betsy, Erick, and Hernandez take security on the south side with the UAZ. Betsy stays in the gun ring with the M2, while Erick and Hernandez set up the SPG-9 on its tripod. To the north, Ellis, Bell, Ortiz, and Octavia remain with Comms. Cowboy, the team’s resident electrician, heads up to the tower to rig a pulley. Cat remains at ground level with Industrial Light and Mayhem to receive and stow salvage. Miko veers off to investigate the rest of the terminal and admin building, looking specifically for a microwave – Cowboy has plans. Pettimore climbs the control tower for an elevated lookout position.
An hour’s work yields a good haul of electronic components, two console-mounted aviation-band radios, and a semi-portable weather station. Cowboy is lowering the last load to Cat when Pettimore calls an alert. Two civilian cars and a BRDM-2 are heading toward the airport from the southwest.
The team tracks the incoming vehicles but doesn’t want to make the first move. The small convoy pulls onto a taxiway and heads straight for the terminal building. The Polski Fiats peel off, each disgorging a trio of riflemen behind cover. The BRDM parks in the open, swinging its gun to cover Comms. Over a loudspeaker crudely welded to the turret, someone begins making demands in Russian for the team to leave their territory immediately. The gunner squeezes off a warning burst over Comms.
Pettimore’s patience expires first. He’s been holding aim on the BRDM, and its vision slits are open. He squeezes off seven rounds from Thoughts and Prayers. The loudspeaker emits a wet sound of impact and a crackle of static, then goes dead. The scout car holds position for a moment longer, then executes a J-turn and begins withdrawing in the direction from which it arrived. The six dismounts appear to be confused and dismayed by this unexpected turn of events.
Pettimore whistles down to Miko to get his attention, then tosses down the arrow from Rasputin’s bow that he’s been carrying since it went through Ellis’ arm. Miko takes the arrow and Shotkin’s Nagant, moves up through the terminal building, and tosses them out onto the tarmac. There’s a brief grinding sound as six paradigms abruptly shift, and then the remaining marauders are backing away toward their cars.
[The team had gone in hoping to not have a fight on their hands, so I was not planning to run one. This was supposed to be a tense but non-combat encounter to illustrate the disarray of the local marauders in the post-Shotkin power vacuum. It nearly turned into “we have an SPG-9, your argument is irrelevant.]
Having pushed their luck enough, the team packs up and withdraws. Once outside the city, they go cross-country, circling to the west. A freshly-adorned hanging tree demonstrates that at least one of the local farming collectives has already taken marauder removal into its own hands.
The next major obstacle is the Warta River. Due to some navigational difficulties along the way, the team doesn’t make their way back to the main highway until late in the afternoon, and dusk is falling by the time they’re approaching the bridge. Even from a couple hundred meters out, Betsy can tell she’s got her work cut out for her. The bridge deck is more crater than intact roadway.
At least some tools are available. It appears someone had staged the equipment for an attempt at a repair. A crane is parked on the north side of the span, along with a pile of repair materials and a couple of shipping containers. Farther off to three east, a scattering of derelict military vehicles – an MT-LB, a BTR-70, and a T-55 – suggests a possible reason for the interrupted work.
Modular terrain maps by Pulpscape from Patreon, augmented by vehicle and scatter terrain tokens from the same source. This was actually a pretty good match for the real-world width of the Warta in this location.
Looking around, the area is actually somewhat resource-rich. A highway maintenance garage stands about a hundred meters to the north, and there’s a sand pit with a derelict front-end loader a few hundred meters to the east.
The team sets a perimeter and dismounts. Betsy begins assessing the damage. It appears someone who knew what they were doing set a cratering charge on the bridge deck. There’s also some spalling on the support pylons in the middle of the span, and their steel reinforcements are cracked and rusted. If the team can get the crane running again, Betsy thinks she can get the bridge in good enough shape to take the UAZ-469 and Comms… but Industrial Light and Mayhem is a beefy 10 tons unladen, and closer to 15-18 tons with its current load. It’s going to be dicey, and it’ll take a few days. But the alternative is to continue following the Warta south and hope to find another crossing point somewhere in unknown territory. The team sets up camp for the night.
The weather the next morning improves somewhat, with the clouds parting to reveal stray patches of blue. After breakfast, most of the team sets to various tasks – repairing the crane and converting it to run on alcohol fuel, setting up the still, inventorying construction materials and running very rough math on what will be required for field-expedient repairs.
Miko sets off on his own to explore the surrounding area. He’s about two hours out from camp when he spots the first sign of company. Three horsedrawn wagons, accompanied by a half-dozen or so people on foot, are rolling along a farm road, heading generally south toward the river.
Miko watches for a while, then decides to make contact. It doesn’t end in gunfire, but it doesn’t go particularly well. Miko is well-adapted to solo survival, but the price of that is a certain lack of social graces. To the merchant caravan, he looks like a distraction for an ambush, and they warn him off not quite at gunpoint.
When Miko reports back in, Ellis and Pettimore exchange looks. They’ve been working together long enough to have the same thought: we need more intel. Within an hour, they’re eastbound on foot, carrying a heavy load of trade goods to reinforce Ellis’ legend.
Pettimore has no difficulty picking up the merchants’ trail. The duo catches up to the convoy shortly before nightfall, encamped in an abandoned farm. Pettimore finds a good overwatch position and settles in with Thoughts and Prayers. Ellis sets his appearance to be that of an itinerant trader and heads in on foot.
Initial contact is relatively smooth once the initial awkwardness of an unexpected visitor passes. Ellis introduces himself as Maksim Kuusik, layering an Estonian accent over his Polish (from Miko’s earlier report, the traders’ spokesman “sounded like Leks,” so Ellis infers that the man is likely from one of the Baltic republics). Maksim is a merchant himself, currently trafficking in luxury foodstuffs and liquors. The traders’ leader, Gabor Vanags, offers him the hospitality of the group’s temporary hearth and a chance at commerce.
Over a meal – lubricated by a bottle of the good booze from Ellis’ pack – Ellis learns that the merchants are partnered with a team of salvagers somewhere up north (Gabor is understandably a bit vague on the subject of exactly where he’s getting his supplies). The rest of the group is a mix of Poles, Baltic ex-Soviets, and a couple of Finns, and appears mostly civilian. Gabor’s crew is headed south to Krakow with a load of winter clothing. Is Ellis/Maksim interested? Oh, yes.
Ellis’ alternate persona works out a deal for enough winter clothing to equip the entire expedition. As he’s inspecting the wares, though, he notices that one of the wagons holds something else under its load of coats and socks. It’s a large mechanical device, disassembled and packed down, along with a couple of old and weathered wooden cases. Ellis has suspicions.
As he’s wrapping up the deal, Ellis blinks, as if a thought has occurred to him. “Oh, there’s just one more thing…”
Gabor turns. “Hmm?”
Ellis pulls out his notepad and quickly sketches an annotated map that gives the approximate position of the 124th Motor Rifle Division. “Here – for free,” he says, handing Gabor the note and watching for a reaction.
“Huh.” Gabor looks at it. Looks back at Ellis. Passes the paper to the Finn who seems to be his second. “So it’s like that, then?” There’s a general stir as the group realizes what Ellis/Maksim just did. Their wary/curious slider moves back toward the wary end of the scale.
Ellis cocks an eyebrow. “I’m not sure what you mean by, ‘like that.’ If I’ve done something to offend… I believed sharing the location of the 124th would be beneficial… especially considering how things went for us,” he states, indicating the Baltic heritage Maksim ostensibly shares with Gabor.
“Not a lot of literate men out here these days,” the Finn says slowly, in heavily-accented Polish. “Where’d you learn to read?”
Ellis shrugs. “Primary school, mostly, but if I’m being honest, I was reading before starting school. But you’re right. Not a lot of literate folk these days.”
“Seems rarer since the war,” Gabor states. “You’ve probably noticed that. Lots of blank spots on the map, too.”
“True statements… I had a good feeling that reading wasn’t an issue for you and yours, though I didn’t think extending that trust would be seen as potentially unsettling. Forgive me for taking that for granted.”
“Some people around here have been unfriendly to anyone who seems to know too much,” Gabor says. He takes the sketch-map back from the Finn and rests his finger atop the dot labeled Radomsko. “Your kid had something to say about that.”
“Ahh… yeah, that’s true, there are definitely folks who are not very kind to those who still have their letters.” Glancing at the map, Ellis nods again. “Yes, the Warlord and his personal gang have been killed as I understand it. Shotkin was very much against reading, and when I dropped in a few weeks ago to try to trade, no one there could either read or write… nor wanted to trade much.”
“Well,” Gabor muses. “Maybe the neighborhood is less unfriendly, but I think it’ll be a while before we try our luck in Radomsko again. We had similar results a few months ago.”
Ellis smiles. “I’d give them at least a month to let the gangs finish killing each other off. I have a good feeling that there won’t be systematic destruction of books, magazines, presses, and maps now that Shotkin is out of the picture.”
The exchange of oh-shit glances among the traders confirms the suspicion Ellis has been harboring since he spotted the hidden cargo. He maintains his deadpan expression.
“Huh. Let’s hope the new management is friendlier, once they’ve sorted things out.” Gabor scratches his beard. “Well, then. If we keep you much longer, your friends out there might get concerned. Safe travels, Maksim.”
“Likewise, Gabor. Safe travels.” With that, Maksim/Ellis hefts his overloaded rucksack and begins heading back out to the road – and the “friends” he’s implied are waiting in the dark in case he suffers a misfortune.
He’s taken a few steps when Gabor calls out. “Oh. Maksim?” He waits for Ellis to turn back, then tosses him something small and metallic.
Ellis catches the object and holds it up to examine it in the dim light from the group’s cookfire. It’s an iron disc about the size of a large coin, evidently hand-stamped. One side bears the Polish double-headed heraldic eagle; the other, a cross.
Maksim waits just a beat too long, watching Ellis reaction, then nods as if he’s satisfied some sort of curiosity. Or as if Ellis has passed some sort of test. “For luck,” he calls.
“Thanks, Gabor. We can use all the luck we can find out there.” Ellis pockets the coin and moves out.
Pettimore is waiting down the road and transfers some of Ellis’ load to his own ruck while the intelligence officer unpacks his interactions. “Huh. Iron. Cold-forged, I reckon. Man thought you weren’t exactly human, huh?”
“Huh… they’re more read-in than I realized. Interesting crew, those folks. Reminds me of some other folks,” Ellis replies.
“So any idea of what was in that wagon?”
Ellis chuckles. “I’d bet nickles we don’t have to dollars we can’t spend that it’s a printing press for a secret buyer in Krakow.”
The following was post-session investigation and analysis handled on our chat server. I’ve transcribed it here with light edits.
Octavia and Erick have no trouble cleaning and dressing everyone’s wounds. There are no secondary infections, and everyone heals with the expected speed (though most of the team crashes and sleeps for the better part of twelve hours once they’re back in Kamiensk, and eat ravenously upon awakening).
Of particular note, despite having taken a serious hit, Comrade also is up and moving normally after a similarly long and uncharacteristically deep nap. His only apparent lasting effect is a patch of white fur over his new scar. He is, however, begging food from everyone except Miko, who he continues to avoid.
With living patients taken care of, Octavia and Erick turn their attention to Rasputin’s decapitated body and severed head.
Whatever healing process Octavia thought she was seeing stopped when she took a hacksaw to the Kazakh. There is some inflammation and initial scar tissue formation around some of the minor injuries to suggest that she wasn’t imagining it.
The fibrous subcutaneous layer (which Erick also observed on Shotkin) is present everywhere. It’s between 2mm and a 0.5mm thick, with the thinnest places being face, joints, genitals, and extremities and the thickest being across the torso. It’s remarkably cut-resistant – Octavia dulls several scalpel blades on it and has to hand them off to Cowboy for resharpening (and the hacksaw blade is just done). Betsy’s 5.56mm rounds penetrated it in several places, and the overall reduction in internal trauma is similar to that seen with soft body armor. In game terms, Rasputin had Armor 1 everywhere – on top of the protection from the vest he was wearing.
Rasputin’s skull also displays some signs of bone growth – it’s about 1mm thicker than it should be. It’s not even, and there are the beginning of spurs and nodules. Inside the skull, there’s also anomalously increased growth and blood flow in the parts of the brain that process auditory and olfactory input.
Inside the chest cavity, once the examiners finally get in there with the assistance of some non-medical tools, it looks like Rasputin was nearly killed at least once or twice before. Scar tracks through his lungs and liver are consistent with rifle-caliber penetrating hits. In both cases, the wound tracks show anomalous healing… and other growth. There are dense, glossy black, tumor-like structures speckled throughout the wound areas. They’re in an advanced state of decomposition compared to the tissue around them. Disturbingly, where they’re densest, there’s also evidence of new organ growth. The damaged lung appears to have a half-developed third lung alongside it, attached to the corresponding bronchial tube. There’s a similar structure next to the damaged-and-healed liver that looks like a fetal liver.
The team doesn’t have a microscope for close examination of blood or tissue samples. However, it’s easy to improvise a centrifuge: tie a small container to the end of a string and have one of the local kids spin it for five minutes. When a control sample from one of the team gets this treatment, the nanites (briefly) precipitate out of solution (and Octavia confirms that Comrade is now carrying them). However, there’s no such precipitate from Rasputin, nor from the sample Erick took from Shotkin.
Rasputin also has one of those ugly circular wounds, very much like the one Shotkin had but not quite as inflamed. It’s in the same spot: left of centerline, just below the collarbone. Upon surgical examination, there’s a weak patch in the fibrous subdermal layer there, and the wound track goes to the aorta. If this was done with something mechanical, it was not medical-grade. The wound was too ragged and irregular for that. Upon closer examination, there’s healed scarring (and pinhead-sized nodules of those tumor-like things) on the surface of the aorta itself. The team is at the limit of what they can resolve with unaided eyesight, but they think the subcutaneous fibers also show evidence of repeated regrowth at the wound site.
Ellis takes point on analyzing the intel items collected from the museum. He pulls in Pettimore, Cat, Miko, and Bell, and eventually the whole team once they’re done with other tasks.
The Russian translation of the Koran is heavily annotated in a mix of Russian and Kazakh. It’s all the same handwriting, though there’s noticeable deterioration over time in both penmanship and coherence. The older annotations appear to be the writer’s own religious studies – a man trying to reconnect with his ancestors’ faith without benefit of formal tutelage. The newer notes are more like aggressive edits. There’s refutation of some passages, expansion of others, and an overall departure from the original theology (once Erick is done with the medical work, he’ll be able to confirm this from an academic perspective, as will Father Miroslav.
The general tone of the newer writing is consistent with the marauders’ observed behavior. There’s broad rejection of traditions of scholarship, hospitality, and any sense of exploration or discovery. Prohibited behaviors are broadly expanded to include any expression of other faiths – and any technology powered by anything more complex than simple machines or human or animal labor. There are some weird reinterpretations of passages on social customs, twisting them into something that’s almost a caste system written as a madman’s justification for despotism.
The notebook is more of the same – where it’s even intelligible. It’s written in Kazakh with some Russian loan words and a few shreds of Arabic, and no one present speaks Arabic or any Turkic language. Bell and Father Miroslav are able to piece together a few fragments. However, it is illustrated in places, and dates are easy to decipher. It appears to be a record of Shotkin’s interactions with an angelic being named al-Khidr, beginning in April 2000. This messenger revealed God’s displeasure at mankind for the destruction of Creation and charged Shotkin with being the hand of the divine in the local region. God’s new command, according to al-Khidr, was to return humanity to its intended pastoral state by eliminating all traces of the fallen world’s technology. As solidiers of God, Shotkin and his followers received special dispensation to use the weapons and tools of the old world in their efforts to bring about the new.
There are several versions of the star chart from the catchbasin ceiling. From what Cat and Betsy can recall from their celestial navigation training, each iteration grows more refined and accurate. The one deviation is the prominence of Altair – it’s in the right place relative to the rest of the sky, but it’s the pattern’s focal point, and far larger than its relative magnitude would normally show it.
Shotkin also wrote extensively about a process he underwent with al-Khidr, and it gives Erick and Father Miroslav some pause. They know of no direct equivalent in Islamic faith, and the warlord used an unfamiliar term. There’s some debate over whether “communion” is the closest equivalent, but after Bell unpacks some of the text around it, Father Miroslav suggests that “shriving” or “pennance” may be closer. It’s the closest Shotkin comes to pure religious expression in his writing. He’s short on practical details but long on flowery descriptions of the ritual’s exquisite pain and the release of sins and worldly cares. After each such encounter, Shotkin doesn’t write for a few days, and when he does, he often mentions that his “communion” requires extensive recovery – but he can feel himself growing stronger each time.
The dagger recovered from Shotkin is a bronze blade with an openwork hilt. It’s clearly ancient, and the hilt likely surrounded a wood core that’s long since rotted away. Despite its age, it’s still quite sharp. It was well-made once, but it’s seen extensive use and is not as robust as a modern steel blade (Reliability caps at 4). Aside from the layered bloodstains that fleck its surface, it has no detectable properties that are out of character for what it is. Pettimore and Father Miroslav agree it was most likely looted from the museum.
The rescued prisoner, Sebastian Mazur, takes about 36 hours to come back to full lucidity. Physically, he’s chronically malnourished and had started to develop sores on his ankles where he was chained up. He has a number of bruises from the beating he took when he was captured, and he’s not displaying any accelerated healing.
His last clear memory is the flight and capture whose end the recon team witnessed. He and a few of his friends were clearing debris from a field for cultivation when they found a leather rucksack containing a few books. The experience he describes is similar to what the team has seen when the brain fog lifts – they found themselves standing there, suddenly having remembered the concept of book. Once they recovered, they immediately started planning their escape. A patrol of Shotkin’s forces spotted them and they split up. He doesn’t know what happened to the others. He and the two with him were captured and severely beaten, then brought to the warlord.
Things get a little hazy for Sebastian after that. He witnessed something, but even the combined powers of Ellis and Father Miroslav can’t convince him to look directly at those memories. From the fragments he can remember and communicate, he was witness to at least one ritual in the starmap chamber, attended by Shotkin, Rasputin, and Shotkin’s personal war-band. Shotkin invoked al-Khidr as a divine messenger, guardian, and patron. Witek, one of Sebastian’s captured friends, was an offering to al-Khidr. Sebastian says al-Khidr “took” Witek, but can’t or won’t elaborate on how Witek was “taken” and becomes near-violent if pushed on al-Khidr’s appearance or identity.
Between that and his rescue, Sebastian and Renata (the girl who Shotkin sacrificed in front of the team) were kept chained in the alcove off the maintenance tunnel. They received maintenance rations of food and water. Shotkin occasionally spoke to them, but Sebastien characterizes it as a madman’s sermons from an unholy book and couldn’t make any sense of it. The fragments he relates align with the team’s decryption/translation of Shotkin’s writing. Sebastien believes he and Renata were under constant surveillance during their captivity – “they were always watching us,” he says.
Sebastian is mildly agoraphobic in the daytime. At night, he refuses to go outdoors for fear of seeing stars. “They won’t stop watching me,” he repeats over and over.
