{"id":150,"date":"2023-02-13T15:00:22","date_gmt":"2023-02-13T21:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=150"},"modified":"2025-09-11T07:09:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T12:09:21","slug":"the-third-mission-26-june-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"The Third Mission (26 June 2000)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With the intel Ellis unearthed about a new warlord rising in Warsaw, the team needs to know more about the landscape to their north. Red, Ellis, Leks, Magda, Minka, and Miko cross the river again and turn southwest, following the Pilica’s north bank.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The travel map with my craptacular virtual walls limiting visibility because I can’t make Forge’s fog of war and line of sight do quite what I want. The Polish heraldic eagle marks Ponikla’s location.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The terrain in this area [hex]<\/em> slopes gently upward from the river. It’s more undeveloped floodplain and abandoned farms. Several of the latter have the long, low buildings of hog confinement. As the team moves through the countryside, there’s plentiful sign that those buildings’ former inhabitants have escaped and gone feral. On the down side, there’s the potential for an attack. On the up side, there’s the potential for free bacon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Derelict Convoy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The team finds an unpaved access road that parallels the river about 100 to 150 meters from the water’s edge. There’s no sign it’s in use. They decide to follow it cautiously. About a kilometer on, Miko sights a dozen or so vehicles strung out along that road. They’re rusty, overgrown, obviously damaged or destroyed. The team moves in cautiously, spotting and avoiding some unexploded cluster munitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vehicles appear to have been a West German panzergrenadier<\/em> company task force before an air strike caught it. There’s a Leopard II, a few Marders, a couple of trucks, and an M577 command post vehicle. Most of the vehicles are total losses but one of the trucks, one of the Marders, and the M577 may still have some salvageable contents or equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team tosses the vehicles. They find a little bit of salvageable personal kit, a few small arms (HK23, G3, P7M8), and some ammo (including a partial belt of 20mm AP for the Marder’s autocannon). The real prize, though, is the M577’s APU<\/a>, which is salvageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ellis tosses the M577’s crew compartment. There’s a cylindrical case for rolled maps. He unscrews the end cap and all that comes out is ashes. He does, however, find a lockbox bolted to the radio rack. He works that loose and extracts the 80-megabyte hard drive from the one Toughbook<\/a> that wasn’t completely destroyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the salvage, like the 20mm ammo and a couple of spare track links, is too heavy for the team to carry out on foot. They cache it about a hundred meters away from the vehicles and move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partisans and Patients<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Moving away from the river a bit, Magda sights a large-ish building situated next to a two-lane paved road. It looks like some sort of garage or workshop facility. It’s intact, with a chain-link fence around it. A couple of piles of debris or trash are strewn around the grounds, and a small forklift that looks like someone used it for target practice is abandoned outside one of the roll-up doors. Someone may be home, though – two donkeys are grazing inside the fence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team’s stealthy members move in for a closer look. Magda catches sight of someone moving behind the grimy windows. She can only see the person in silhouette but they may be semi-regularly checking for visitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ellis catches sight of a blood trail going into the compound. His best guess is that about a half-dozen people arrived with those donkeys, and more than one of them was wounded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team pulls back and confers. This might be a chance to make contact with other locals who can provide information about the area. Ellis approaches with the others covering him. An initial parley doesn’t get him shot, and when he reveals that he has a doctor, the team is invited in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside, the team meets a half-dozen Polish militia troops who’ve clearly come out on the wrong side of a fight. Their leader, Fryderyka Jankowski, explains that they’re from Tomasz\u00f3w Mazowiecki, a city on the Pilica about 20 kilometers to the southeast. They’re some of the last survivors of the local militia, which was massacre about a month ago when a marauder band took over the city. They and a small number of other survivors have been hiding in safehouses outside Tomasz\u00f3w and harassing the marauders until this morning, when they had a very bad day. They fled to this highway department maintenance station, which they’d previously identified as a safehouse, carrying their wounded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Red and Minka have four patients. The least-injured one has a dislocated shoulder; Minka puts traction on the joint while admiring the woman’s tattoos and forearms. Red triages the others, all of whom have abdominal gunshot wounds [the random table was unkind and not very random]<\/em>. He doesn’t have surgical tools – really, he doesn’t have much – but the alternative is letting them bleed out, so he and Minka and Leks roll up their sleeves and go to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The medical team works well into the night. They manage to get all three patients out of immediate danger, though one will never have great kidney function again and another may still succumb to sepsis from his intestinal wound. [ Some of these medical rolls and recovery times are a bit implausible. I get the need for playability, but no one should come back from a ruptured kidney in a week. OTOH, I don’t know that I want to house-rule longer recovery times, given the speed of the average campaign…]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While they’re working, Ellis and Miko check out the rest of the facility. There’s a locker room in which Miko finds a German-language edition of Battleship<\/em> and a Hungarian porno magazine. In the main garage area, there’s a derelict tractor and dump truck, both long since stripped for parts; a small steamroller; a mowing attachment for the tractor; a trailer-mounted industrial air compressor with a jackhammer; a smallish drilling rig; and a hydraulic log splitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After surgery is done, Minka talks to Natalka, the woman with the dislocated shoulder. Natalka used to work at a factory in Tomasz\u00f3w Mazowiecki that manufactured welding equipment. Minka perks right up and starts picking her brain. [I don’t know if it was there in the 1990s, but IRL, the city really does have a welding equipment factory<\/a>, so this isn’t just the GM giving the players a too-convenient lead on what they just discovered they need…]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tomasz\u00f3w Mazowiecki SITREP<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Led by Ellis, the team interrogates their new acquaintances. Before the war, Tomasz\u00f3w Mazowiecki had about 50,000 residents. Now it has about 2,200. About half of those live in an arc of farm collectives south and west of the city. The rest reside in the city’s southern half, trying to salvage and rebuild what they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The city’s prewar economic cornerstone was textiles: mainly wool, but there were some attempts to diversity into synthetic silk. Several major rug and carpet factories were located there. Other local industries included the aforementioned welding equipment factory and the remnants of the region’s iron mining, which had been in decline since the ’70s. One major road bridge over the Pilica is still up and capable of taking heavy vehicle traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 1997, NATO hit the Polish Air Force airfield northeast of the city with a tactical nuke. The city itself sustained only minor blast damage but much of its north side burned in fires ignited by the thermal pulse. The majority of surviving residents fled and never returned. Everyone avoids the north side and the airbase’s ruins out of fear of residual radiation. [The PCs with military or scientific training are fairly sure the risk is minimal.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In mid-May, the city was hit by a marauder band formerly of the Soviet 89th Air Assault Brigade. They did recon in early spring, sending scouts into town posing as guards for merchant caravans. When they struck, they’d clearly identified key targets. In a night raid, hit the barracks for the militia’s full-time cadre and went after the homes of many other key militia members and local leaders. About twenty militia members escaped the attack and went guerrilla.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The marauders number between 40 and 50. They had no vehicles when they arrived but Fryderyka believes they’re trying to get some into operation. They do have about 20 horses, half draft or pack animals and half cavalry mounts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The marauders’ main base is a warehouse complex by the riverfront. They’ve taken over a couple of houses and a restaurant overlooking the bridge and the western and southern approaches, which they use as watchposts when they feel like doing the work. They’re controlling the population through a combination of random violence, protection rackets, and selective hostage management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Off the Map<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One other thing of note happens during the interrogation-disguised-as-conversation. Ellis asks Fryderyka if she can sketch a rough map of Tomasz\u00f3w Mazowiecki. Fryderyka, Fabian (the other uninjured Pole), and Natalka all… lock up. It’s as if all three of them are having synchronous petit mal <\/em>seizures. Red does a quick assessment: all three have elevated respiratory and heart rates and sharply contracted pupils, and he’d bet that blood pressure is up too. They come out of it after a couple of minutes with mild disorientation, headaches, and no memory of the question. When Ellis repeats himself, Fryderyka has a bit of trouble parsing the question – she clearly has to concentrate on the very concept <\/em>of “map.” She does eventually produce a workable sketch of the city’s layout, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The PCs confer out of earshot of the Poles. Ellis observes that he saw some similar cognitive difficulties with the East German prisoners. He’s also concerned about the fact that it’s been a long time since any of the PCs saw a map themselves – or, for that matter, a book. Ponikla only has five known books: two Bibles (one of them Pettimore’s), a Polish language primer, and two novels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Later edit: Six books. Red’s personal effects include a copy of A Clash of Kings which he picked up at an airport newsstand on his way to deployment.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was a fun session to run, not least because it didn’t have a combat scene. I don’t want this game to turn into unremitting combat rounds, so some exploration, looting, and roleplaying was a comfortable mix. I also got to do a little more worldbuilding and orient the players on a potential regional threat. This being a West Marches game, there’s no requirement for them to go deal with the marauders… but it’s a potential quest hub and resource pool if they want to pick that fight.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bit with the map issue seems to have creeped out the PCs. Heh heh.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the intel Ellis unearthed about a new warlord rising in Warsaw, the team needs to know more about the landscape to their north. Red, Ellis, Leks, Magda, Minka, and Miko cross the river again and turn southwest, following the Pilica’s north bank. The terrain in this area [hex] slopes gently upward from the river. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaserne-on-the-borderlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}