Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 244 is now published, and can be found added to the main book and the 2 fan-fic sites.

This one was a little delayed as I got sick and had to cancel for a week while I was in hospital – hopefully that doesn’t come through in the storytelling.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Having accepted Aden’s job, the next stage was to introduce a local NPC with some specific knowledge about what happens and to arrange some safe spaces for them to land and base from. I had a friend suddenly log in to discord, described how the phone rang, and then let Kai and the NPC just chat.
To help out, I’d prepared a brief for the NPC, which is reproduced below:

Name: Yezda Khan
Handle: Yez
Type: Freedom Fighter / Guerilla
Allegiance: Kurdistan Workers' Party
Description: Approx 1.72m tall, about 71kg in weight. Solidly muscled with slender shoulders, dark hair in a rough cut (clearly done with scissors in the field), and dark brown eyes. No facial marks or other distinguishing characteristics.
History

• Grew up in the eastern parts of Turkey, in a family that strongly supported Kurdish liberation and self-governance. Was well educated (fluent in English, Kurdish, Azerbaijani and Turkish) until the age of 10, when increasing brutal suppression by the Turkish government closed down schools and radicalised much of the younger population. NB – the team often talk in Azerbaijani as their “secret” language, as it’s not that common – feel free to keep the fact that you understand it to yourself… 😊
• With still unknown benefactors starting to channel money and guns/ammo into the PKK movement, the uprising managed to liberate the “Kurdish Autonomous Zone” to the point that Turkey washed its hands of the area, and the corps at least acknowledged its existence.
• Continuing efforts have been made to free traditionally Kurdish lands to the west, a hotbed for the Alliance for Allah and a Muslim stronghold – with minority Kurdish farmers constantly living under brutal suppression.

Current Events

• The Turkish army escalated things by starting a chemical weapon campaign against the people in the hills – civilians and PKK alike, seeking to render entire areas of the mountains uninhabitable. The players received this info when they over-flew an area:
• “Hunter had some information for them a few minutes later, though it raised just as many questions as it answered. First he played them the news report from the Turkish media, thankfully dubbed with English subtitles, announcing that the Turkish army had launched an assault on several suspected PKK strongholds, using artillery strikes to blast away at their hiding places and strike at the enemies of the people, clearing out the vermin that were seeking to destabilise their country and destroy the Turkish people. The propaganda was laid on thick, though it did at least stop short of accusing them of eating babies, but it was clear that the noble, heroic and virtuous Turkish Army were doing only what they had to do, to defeat the murderous savage guerrillas.
• After that though he showed some of the messages being posted on fringe groups and hidden noticeboards, and a few articles recently uploaded to Shadowland, claiming to be from the PKK. Some pictures appeared too, showing men, women and children covered in horrific chemical burns, blinding and debilitated by direct exposure with whatever poison the army was using to bomb the mountain strongholds. Then it moved to a grainy and low-quality video showing guerrillas moving in to a village, storming the houses and dragging out the people, shoving them away from their homes and workplaces before the teams moved in with flamethrowers, torching them all and working their way through the settlement. The announcer laid out the terms of the PKK – for every chemical attack on the countryside, one Turkish town would be destroyed, the people safe but with their lives destroyed, the blame being pointed to the Turkish government, who were responsible for the situation. “
• The turks started their attack in November of last year, to “test” the policy, then stopped for the winter. It’s now February so they’re starting up their attacks again, trying to make sure that nothing grows at the start of the season.

Your Role

• You can steer them to the general area that you think they’re going to hit next, based on operational history and intelligence – the area around Erzincan. Word has come down from high command that some “special operations” troops are going to strike, so he and all the other cells have been forbidden from acting on that intelligence, to avoid tipping off the Turkish. You don’t know who the “special” team are, but you’re assuming it’s the player team.
• That doesn’t stop you from being an angry, bitter, committed and very strongly driven man – you hate the Turkish with every fibre of your being for everything they’ve done to your people for hundreds of years, and there’s pretty much nothing you wouldn’t do to further the cause – you’re fighting fire with fire, and it’s a war of survival. Atrocities are things described by people that have never had someone try to wipe them out. Even the foot soldiers, at the bottom of the pile – they’re conscripted, sure – but they serve, and work towards your end. They’re legitimate targets.
• You can guide the team to a decent observation point, a high pass in the mountain that should be secure, and give good coverage except for direct overflights. You can also get them fresh food and water, and standard ammo to resupply. Your cell of 20 men, women and kids are ready to provide covering fire or diversions if needed. But the team had better get it done – you trust your next cell up that *they* say the team is trustworthy, but you’re still very suspicious, especially about trusting outsiders with something so important.
• Other than food, water and ammo, you’re very light on supplies – the team were listening when you told them about the scouring of their farmlands and communities right? Feel free to be surly and slightly antagonistic if they give you cause and let your distrust show. You’ll stop short of hostilities – the Kurds have excellent discipline, and you won’t go against your leaders orders. If the team are very much giving the impression of being on the Kurdish people’s side, then feel free to warm to them, especially if they start getting results.

You’re not aware of the makeup of the Turkish Army units – they’re firing at up to 60km ranges, so they’re waaaaaay out of LOS, and they seem to have reasonable security on their ops – you’re not sure how they got the information about this strike, but you know better than to ask.
As far as you’re concerned, anyone living in a town or large village is almost certainly fundamentalist Muslim, the oppressors and can be summarily dealt with. Only the small freeholders and tiny mountain villages remain Kurdish.

You’re not going to be afraid of any obvious shows of magic, though you will pay close attention to the teams capabilities for future notice. Likewise, you had a technical upbringing, so drones, computers and high tech gear won’t phase you. Make you jealous perhaps – but not phase you.

My friend did an admirable job of getting the players to promise to help, and even got them to offer in some medical supplies “for the cause”, to make sure they’re really committed to his side before ending the call.

After that, there was the usual skull session as they tried to work out the general plan of attack, and what they could do to take on the artillery. I actually used the real world Turkish arty T-155 stats and fluff, as there’s some good pictures around and it just seemed to make sense – just improving the range about to account for SR tech creep.

Once they had their supplies, we could bring the session to a close, and next week should see them heading to the forward observation point, and working out how to run the attack.

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session, to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Monday 28/2/2061, Location: 40.02426, 48.95799 Time 06:00
2. Studying map - navigation and politics rolls, merc background, display info and countries. Check that Jenkins is not close. Awson - not the other jobs, Aden has a probably personal interest, we should do that first. Shimazu - any details on how long the recon was for.
3. Kai gets phone call from PKK operative. "is this the team I've heard so much about" Kai - depends if you heard good things about us. Who is this?" "This is Yez. Are you coming." K- is this about pest control?" Y - I've been told you are trustworthy. K - our big scaly friend? Y - I have no idea what you're talking about. Details local stand-down. Gives quick brief on local area, limited info. K - is there a schedule? Or just ASAP to prevent damage. Y - we can guide you to obs point. You have long range intel gathering? K - we're very adaptable
4. Claims secure commlink. Gives name of Kai, 5 other people. Small group but effective. Ask for fuel - Y says no. Landing spots only. Arrange resupply ID and co-ords. Kai says they'll just come and get on with it.
5. Hunter nav check - topographic detail and downtime over winter.
6. Marius - need to optimise cargo. Take the drones. Tads - skip the bikes, too noisy and too rough terrain. Kai - another question Yez, we're in logistics and supply. What do you need. Y - medicine especially chemical burn treatments. K - we'll do what we can, send us info on what you want, especially brands.
7. Tads - if they're happy, 24-36 hour stop off at medical facility.
8. Marius - different denomination, but technically Muslim - want to check with them. Aswon - want to check now. Kai - back to Y, he says if it saves lives,
9. Aswon gets a passphrase asked -, then civil goodbyes.
10. Aswon says get battlefield medicines and anti-biotics
11. Kai - how do we deal with arty. My assumption is kill all the crew, then take the devices out at leisure.
12. Aswon - might be a lot of crew and other people in the area as well.
13. Marius - assuming it's modern, take out the electronics, cripple the battery. Or if old gun, disable the breach.
14. Aswon demo charge - need C12, high impulse, shaped charges
15. Metallurgy check for tads - just need to overcome the balance. Also suggest blocking barrel and then using earthshape to turn it into stone in the barrel. Hunter - melt? With Acid maybe? Aswon - difficult to get there. Marius - very volatile. Hunter - maybe adding a pancake of C12, though need to get observations. Aswon - maybe taking out the ammo dump.
16. Marius - shells may be two part to avoid that. Eastern style is cheaper, more dangerous. Marius - no risk from counter battery fire, no fear of that. Hunter - footage from Russia, mortar attack, variable fusing.
17. Hunter research, gets details of the T-155. Aswon - APC levels of armour? Hunter/Marius - no, at that weight, it's heavily armoured. Aswon - mind control? Tads, probably not. Aswon - maybe. Might if you got a strong enough suggestion. Tads - how much armour on the bottom? Anti-land mine? But less? Aswon, probably as much as the main hull for exactly that reason. Tads - to do good protection, it needs to be on the outside, not the inside. Kai - spirit accident? Tads - can target the thing, not components, but might work. Aswon - especially if it's moving.Also depends on the unit size - if there's 6 we can take them on, if there's 50 - something else. Tads - if there's 50, we get into the mess hall, and spike their dinner...
18. Tads - did we see the firing spot? Background test? Marius - we only saw the results, not the launch site.
19. Aswon - and the launch site probably isn't too bad, unless they're like the toxic shit we took to the Russians. We should head to the FOB and do recon, after getting supplies.
20. Kai - head to their base. Aswan - no cell structure, need to arrange with Yez. Also get pattern of attacks.
21. Marius - describes TOT attacks, burst fire. Tads - can we infiltrate their electronics? Hunter/Marius - we have skills, but not the kit for a viral infestation. Aswon - chances of taking out their network, fairly small - likely to have military grade ICE / EW suites. I think taking the ammo out, that's got to be Aden's main aim.
22. Marius - we really need to get eyes on. Aswon - I know, we need minimum shopping list and to crack on.
23. Look at fuel ranges, 650km each way, leaves 800km buffer. Tads - we're using it for transport, not attack. Aswon fuel is not a concern. Kai - anti-air? Aswon - the PKK doesn't have much in the way of air force, so probably not.
24. Confirm the drones are repaired. Discuss what the hq might look like, like the team truck. Marius - not the kit, it's the people. Strike at the leadership. Aswon wondering about blow out panels, grenades or charges inside. Marius - should mission kill it,
25. Shimazu - psy ops, they expect to be safe, massively demoralising.
26. Kai - and a bow and arrow. Shimazu - even more psy-ops value.
27. Shopping
28. Battlefield med supplies+antibiotics,50ny each, antibiotics, antidote patches, 5k of supplies. Kai negotiates with pharmacist, threatens to expose.
29. Aswon - multiple 6s on making shaped charges
30. Hunter - getting winter camo / nets, battery powered electric blankets+ solar panels
31. takes about 5 days to get supplies - up to 4/3/61
32. Saito calls, set up a meeting room. Min 4 weeks, that should be, Baikonur, got at least 2 months, can supply you with the specialist gear - 1200mm lenses etc. 200k, long range observations. Saito makes arrangements for supplies and gear needed.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 245 is now published, and can be found added to the main book and the 2 fan-fic sites.


Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Well, the team got into position and did their usual stuff – hiding the tilt-wing, setting up an observation point and getting their gear ready, then settling in to wait. Not too long after, I had the convoy appear around town, after feeding them some tidbits of information on the town layout and surrounding area. The convoy headed fairly close towards them, then got set up in a nice circular formation, giving the players an outer perimeter of soldiers to bypass and a juicy target in the middle, all under the watchful eye of some decent surveillance drones. Not a trivial set of obstacles, but not insurmountable either.

I had a timetable for their attack already worked out, so the players were left to watch, discuss and plan, as time marched on – they seemed to think the units would be here for multiple days, though I’d certainly not given them that impression in any way. So, we got to just after lunch time, and the first gun fired its ranging shot, waiting for feedback from the recon aircraft orbiting the strike site at high altitude. When that was reported as “good”, the 2nd gun then fired, and the rest of the arty got ready to follow on, at precisely timed intervals.
In theory, once the first shot was ranged in, then the other 17 guns would have exchanged target info, got ready and then all 18 guns could have fired in a massive salvo, and repeated every 30 seconds and kept that up for an hour. But, that would not only have *really* put the team off from getting down anywhere near that kind of blast wave/pressure front, it would also have given them no time to do the assault before massive damage was caused at the strike site. Instead, working on elements of both a psychological effect, and the crews doing a very slow, almost training like attack speed that cuts down on accidents, wear and tear on the barrel and reflects the enemies complete lack of ability to strike back (so they think), the attack can be stretched out to make it a horrifically long bombardment – but that also gave the players chance to do something. And for me as a GM to keep narrating the probable consequences where the shells were landing, 50km away, adding some emotional pressure to them in terms of what they were supposed to be stopping.
Some of them bought into this quite happily – Aswon, Shimazu and especially Tads (for she is a very care-bear player), while the others were more thinking about how angry Aden will be and the effects upon them. Either way, and for whatever reason – they all realised that the shelling was a ‘bad thing ™’, and they needed to stop it.

We actually ended the session with the team deciding that ‘something has to be done’ and getting ready for the full frontal assault they were very much trying to avoid. Just after the game though, Tads was looking upset and saying “I don’t know what I could have done to stop that”, so I sighed, and got her to make an intelligence roll – and then, thanks to her “magical common sense” said…

“Right, you know they’re firing every 120 seconds – that’s a clear pattern. You have geology. You have shape earth. You get into line of sight, and wait, and just at the exact moment the next gun fires, you do shape earth and make a sinkhole or earth-fault under tracks of the gun firing, as if the recoil has triggered a seismic event. It won’t stop that shell from firing – but do you think the next one down will want to fire after they see what happened? And if they do, you do it again, but try and make the track fall over this time. After it’s happened twice, an apparently ‘natural’ event, do you think any more of the crew, who are trapped inside their vehicles, would want to risk it?”

A lightbulb goes off in her face at the cunningness of the plan (which I was hoping the team would come up with on their own – but hey, it means I get a point of GM karma to spend later) as she realises she CAN do something, so I changed the emphasis on the last few paragraphs of the story to reflect this new found knowledge.
Next Tuesday of course, we’ll see if they can carry it through and make something of it…

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session, to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Monday 28/2/2061, Location: 40.02426, 48.95799 Time 06:00
2. Aswon - need to determine magical surveillance, because if not - we have invisibility and concealment, and can get right in there. We still can't affect the vehicles directly probably, too big and heavily armoured - but if they have only light cover, and we can take that out as part of our first strike.
3. Marius, 11 on vehicle stealth, come in from the north,
4. Town at 1200m, Obs points at 2600m, 5km away. Gentle blizzard
5. Hunter research - used to be major ski resort / wilderness camp town until the fundies drove the tourists away.
6. Kai - if we get hit by arty, we're all fucked aren't we. Marius confirmed, probably inside 20m. Aswon - what's the min range? They can fire almost flat and level, so whatever they need. Aswon checks direction of fire - we're pretty much behind them
7. Land on a ledge below the ridge, from an avalanche. Cover the bird in cammo nets.
8. Tads - what's stopping us "arriving" via airport and booking into area as tourists - just a thought. Hunter - not very subtle though. Aswon - nah, but unlikely to get to the armies attention, and might get us even closer.
9. Kai - Examine the area, roads few and far between in the mountains, major thoroughfare, good firing arcs, flanks protected
10. Bit before 10am, train comes into view. Tads assenses F6-8 wards on most of the vehicles, look permanent.
11. Arty deploys in 3 X 6 rows, + hq function. Infantry surrounds and extends. MBTs go forward and block the road.
12. No active magical assets. Can see them getting drones ready. Team spot and double cammo the bird and dig in further. Tads starts to build up a rock wall around the tilt-wing to cover it. Marius looks at breaking out the decrypt gear to at least listen in on stuff. Hunter perception looking for command vehicles - spot them laying out the fibre links to each arty piece. Aswon suggests that Tads stop the shape earth and does an influence to get them to fiddle with the cables and keep messing them up. Tads suggest influence them to not plug them in, then alter memory to stop them remembering it needs doing.
13. Tads cast influence, 8 success on F5, "crosswire things or not connect properly, damage the connectors if possible." Then returns to shielding the tilt-wing. Drones launch to 2000m and calibrate, huge, very long endurance.
14. Spot the infantry digging in, infantry HQ and heavy weapons sections back from the arty park.
15. Kai - if we got close, could we tap those data lines? Marius - yes, but it's a bit slow, might be risky. If they have a rigger, non-effective. Need to take the rigger out first to have any chance. Maybe if it's an older system, matrix based. We might be able to mess with them with illusions, ghosts etc - like back in Constantinople.
16. Tads - think about how far you might be thinking of me digging this tunnel, it's kilometres. Also the ground pressure of some of those heavy vehicles might collapse the tunnels.
17. Foxholes set up in LOS of each other, even early gen NVGs. Aswon confident spirit concealment would get them through the perimeter.
18. Midday - drones push up and go to 4000m and spread out. Good sensor package on gondola, no obvious armament. Marius suggest infiltrate with lots of magic, then go nuts with demo. No count on crew for the T-155s, no sign of them yet.
19. Marius looking at Altays, big turrets, thinking about planning demo under the tank bustle to mission kill them by detonating ammo.
20. Kai - if we stole a tank, could we use it to take them all out? Marius - not sure we could all fit in. I could drive it, not sure you could operate it and fire the gun.
21. Officers come out and start diagnosing cables, find the "sabotage", start abusing the enlisted men, backhand one of them to the ground. Spot them setting up tactical net, get enough to go that penetrating tac net is not feasible.
22. Marius - we need to take out the command vehicle to reduce accuracy. Hunter - yeah, that needs to die first, that'll stop them. Marius - well, it will slow them and stop them being as accurate, but they can still fire on their own computers / grid reference.
23. Tads - can we detrack them, how long will that take them out? Marius - not long, competent crew can probably repair in 20 mins. Some extra detail about how that happens. Kai - could we use 18 cans of expanding foam to mess them up by blocking their vents? Marius - we'd need schematics of what the systems are to work out how to do that. Not worth trying to block the barrels.
24. 13:30, first gun up. Elevates to 50 degrees. Team a little dismayed, can a spirit stop a shell? No. Can we create water in the engine intake - can't see it. Talk about texting Yez on the sat-phone, warn him to take cover. Very short, can't triangulate message that quickly. Call from Mr Yez "what is going on, I asked you to deal with this days ago."
25. Kai - the convoy just arrived and set up. We're heading in tonight, striking as soon as we can.
26. Yez it's been four days since I spoke to you.
27. First arty fires. Snow pattern, audio report, slowly fades away, kids screaming and running home. Some cars stop on highway to look.
28. Team - we can't go in, not until dusk. Too risky...
29. Big burst of encrypted traffic, platoon wiggles, then other 17 barrels rise. Kai - could we invisible and fly in shaped charges? Aswon, yes - but very difficult to place at range. Might be able to invisible me and fly me in with charges to set them...
30. Tads - if I put static charge on a vehicle, would it weird them out and make them stop firing, at least with that vehicle? Aswon - probably, but that will make them call in magical backup. 2nd piece fires, exactly 2m after the first.
31. Team looking at how long to cover the ground, getting down the mountain very difficult, slow even with being levitated by Tads on a direct course. Kai makes the call to push for a daylight attack and interrupt the attack.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 246 is now published, and can be found added to the main book and the 2 fan-fic sites.


Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
After a tiny little nudge, Tads ‘discovered’ that the situation wasn’t as hopeless as she thought it was, and decided to use her massively powerful Force 7 shape-earth spell to dig holes under the artillery and really mess up their firing – which remarkably enough worked very well. I mean, I figured if I was in an artillery vehicle that when it fired collapsed a metre down into a chasm that had apparently opened up in the unstable earth below me, with a spiders web of cracks radiating outwards from my vehicles and ominous creaking indicating that it might collapse further – I would *NOT* be interested in doing anything to make the situation worse!

Once that happened to the 2nd vehicle, the other crews would also start getting very nervous – and the officers would become involved very quickly. Tads dealt with that by using the third machine to kill the officer, sowing even more confusion.

I was running a screen-share over Discord at this point, where I had a map of the area (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Erzincan,+Erzincan+Merkez%2FErzincan,+Turkey/@39.7476011,39.5484545,11990m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x40700cc900531deb:0x1fb8de6e1302e7a9!8m2!3d39.746797!4d39.491124 gets you to the right place, if you’re curious) with various overlaid information – a large perimeter for the infantry, three lines of artillery, with the command section just behind them, and then the drone truck, supply trucks and infantry trucks surrounding the command vehicles, so there was a lot of pointing and referencing to positions on the map as the players described what they were doing and how.

With the arty stopped, the rest of the team decided to head down, and managed to waltz through the security perimeter – showing once more just how powerful magic is if one side has it and the other doesn’t. With the force-4 great form spirits concealing the team, the enemy were on base targets of around ten to spot them, taking into account concealment and cover, then adding on the individual stealth-scores, and nobody even got close – even when I was making repeated scans with the over-head drones, their cover held.

On the other hand, the team were respectful of the threat – planning everything they did as quietly as possible, and making sure they didn’t start a noisy fight until they were absolutely ready. Whether they ‘knew’ that I’d have the units engage in suppressive blind fire (that only has to get lucky once, after all), or just suspected or feared doesn’t really matter – they treated the threat as real and worked hard to mitigate it. Only once did they get “spotted”, and quick and more importantly SILENT action from the two closest team-members dealt with it, and they hid the evidence for long enough to get away with what they were doing.

I did have a moment as they were just about to set the bombs off – all of them, when I just smiled at the camera and asked the entire team to make intelligence checks – with strangely enough only Marius making the target number to suddenly remember they were dealing with chemical warheads and that maybe they wanted to make sure they were upwind or well clear of the blast area – which caused a *very* sudden change of plans and rethink of what they were doing!

In preparation for this part, I’d done a bit of research on artillery, and plumped on a current generation Turkish artillery unit, produced locally under licence from South Korea. I figured it was better to have really good stats, layout and pictures of the vehicle than to come up with some “future-tech” that wouldn’t be as well illustrated and described.

I had the following details for the Turkish army units:
18 X T-155 Fırtına, 56 ton 12m long 3.5m wide 3.4m high 155mm SPG, 5 man crew (commander, driver, gunner, 2 loaders), 52 calibre gun, 12.7mm machine gun for close defence. 8 cylinder water cooled diesel engine, hydro pneumatic suspension, 66kph max

Forward screen = 3 X Altay MBT, 64 tons, 7.3m long, 3.9m wide, 2.6m high, crew 4 (commander, gunner, loader, driver), EW, active protection, 120mm smoothbore gun, 12.7mm AA and 7.62mm coax, 12 cylinder diesel engine, 65kph

Local screen - Aselsan Karagoz recon drones, blimps, IR/HDTV cameras, unarmed
1 company of Turkish infantry (Stats of 3s, 3/3 armour, low end AR, 1 radio per squad of 5 men, 10 squards on perimeter security, transported by 5 trucks. 1 command squad with a heavy weapons section (LMG and mortar). 2 10-ton truck equivalents for technical support - drone bays and blimps, 2 reloading trucks with more ammo and spares.

Current shelling, southeast of the Erzincan area, off the E80 highway which forms the logistics trail.

SOP - drive into area at speed, 2MBT up front, trucks, arty, one MBT rear.
Get to staging area and deploy arty battery and CP.
Push out patrols and establish perimeter.
MBTs echelon forward to provide primary barrier to PKK forces.
Artillery leader fires one high-ex ranging shot, observed by recon aircraft and GPS calibrated.
Artillery begins saturation pattern bombardment, one shell per two minute, working in line abreast and driving across a wedge shaped area. Pause at 30 mins
Artillery reload, recon aircraft pass to confirm.
Commence sector 2 bombardment.
Rinse and repeat 5-6 times.
MBTs fall back, troops collapse in, all equipment stowed, retreat back to deeper holdings.

Source materials / images to show players:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-155_F%C4%B1rt%C4%B1na
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altay_(main_battle_tank)
https://www.aselsan.com.tr/KARAGOZ_Balonlu_...Ailesi_2661.pdf
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-j5gt/...088&zoom=10
http://www.military-today.com/trucks/bmc_235_16p.htm
https://xpatloop.com/channels/2022/03/defen...ar-hungary.html

With the force sketched out into what I thought looked like a reasonable organisation, I could then describe how they arrived and set up, how the emphasis changed from tank defence to dug in infantry, how the tanks then moved forward to provide a hard armour barrier across the highway and the layout of the camp itself – hopefully providing some inspiration to the players on how they could achieve their goals.

The infantry themselves were very little threat to the team, being barely trained conscripts with low end equipment – but their main danger lay in them all having radios, and being able to lay down copious amounts of fire, while more and more troops flooded into the engagement. Wards on the tanks and artillery cut down on direct magical attack, and they were heavily armoured, meaning the team really had to work to isolate and find weak-spots, based on the weapons they were carrying.

My original “solution” I had worked out, was to have the drone truck able to be infiltrated – and once they had taken out the rigger inside, between Marius and Hunter they could have compromised the tactical net from the inside. I’d envisaged them shifting or poisoning the GPS co-ordinates, and then feeding out bad data to the artillery platoon, and modifying their orders. Then, instead of firing at the incredibly slow rate they were engaged in initially (which did save barrel wear and had a psychological impact on the enemy), they would go to maximum rate fire of 20 rounds per minute, shooting themselves dry in two and a half minutes… by which point some unsuspecting towns on their own side would have been absolutely destroyed, causing a massive political stink and something that probably would make the global news.

Instead we have a poison gas attack rolling over an international airport and destroying an entire valley, narrowly missing a big town / small city – which from Aden’s point of view is probably just as good. So – mission accomplished, and the Dragon is still happy (or as happy as he’s going to reveal to these puny mortals), so the job is a good’un. Of course I’m still going to ham up the massive ecological damage to the area and give them some free guilt feels (or at least those of the team that care about such things).


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session, to compare / contrast with the narrative:
Monday 28/2/2061, Location: 40.02426, 48.95799 Time 13:37
1. Tads - "Hang on lads, I've got an idea..." Shape earth to make fault lines go under the arty, timed to the recoil. Rest of team agree, they will move down while Tads does from elevation. Hunter good geology roll to support. Last few seconds, precast ok, Force 5, track slides 0.5m down and to the right, then crew bail out. Aswon, Hunter, Marius, Kai and Shimazu all start to head down. Gun 5 fires, Tads casts a few seconds after, same effect, joins the first. Crews start to look out of tracks as gun 5 slides backwards and down a metre.
2. Commander waving arms around at officer, refusing to fire. Team starts getting towards bottom of slope. Arty commander gets pistol aimed at him, shrugs, agrees, they fire. Tads casts again. Officer gets deafened, then shits himself as the arty slides back towards him, he sinks neck deep as the gun almost capsizes. Tads starts to cleanse. Drones fail to pick up team again.
3. Crew get out of all nearby tracks and stand close, some smoke, clearly not getting ready to fire. Team will take about 10 minutes to close to infantry line. One officer assessing, one with a spade, start to dig out, then realise it's futile. Tads assense - fear, curiosity, apprehension (4 success, 5 1s). Tads starts to magic fingers, letting air out of wheeled vehicles. Tads also relays what she can see to the rest of the team - Aswon SUT and Shimazu psychology. Aswon - broken line of responsibility. Shimazu - crews will probably not want to fire. Tads, influence the officers NOT to call in for instructions. (6 and 7 successes)
4. Assault team spot the foxholes, some distracted and looking in, some looking out. Tads adds trid-phantasm to help cover the team movement past the infantry. Sneaking past infantry goes well, they get inside the perimeter.
5. Aswon thinks - get in, plant explosives, when they go off, it's an obvious attack. Shimazu - but conscripts, may fail WP, may abort, especially with top officer dead. Aswon, only have 12 shaped charges.
6. Hunter - we have to take out the heavy weapons squad, for our exfiltration.
7. SUT roles for Aswon/Hunter - get one demo set up, then sink the track and blow it, make it look like more natrual effects. Use that as distraction to plant more demo. Tads planning on more crazy paving to head to other vehicles after capsizing on. Hunter thinking about moving on the mortar team to blow up their ammo store.
8. Marius (5) and Hunter (17) go to the heavy team, Kai nearby with bow, Shimazu and Aswon(7) going to track 4 for demo.
9. Hunter aiming for mortar ammo, Aswon plants demo on 4,3,2. Aswon gets to track 3 ok. Demo good roll, gets to track 2 ok. Demo good. Marius spots a rigger in the demo truck, in interface. Asks the question to team - take the rigger out? Aswon says wait until demo is all placed. Marius aims at rigger.
10. Aswon gets to 2nd row, and plants on tracks 7,8,9,10, guy walks around the corner and spots Aswon. Aswon thrown knife at the guy - takes a moderate, ceramic knife in the body armour. Shimazu closes, kills the guy in one hit, manage to keep things quiet, hide him under the arty. All bombs on 2nd row good.
11. Aswon moves to 14-16, not spotted. Demo on the 3rd row, RR, 2 successes. Aswon planning on them moving north when the party starts, to strike at any remaining comms structure. Then take out the rigger and get into the drone truck.
12. Getting ready to start the party off, int check for the outdoors team. Marius - hang on, gas? Wind blowing from north to south.
13. Mushroom cloud, track explodes up out of the hole. Grass withers,
14. Marius takes out the rigger with a 3-round burst. Hunter fires grenade blows up the mortar ammo. Aswon sets off the other demo packs. All of the crews are running for the hills. Massive gas cloud heading south, covers the airport and main road.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 247 is now published, and can be found added to the main book and the 2 fan-fic sites.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Well – WTF? I did not see that coming at all. The session started off ok, with the escape from the valley going ahead in a straight-forward manner, and the team heading to go and meet Yez and the Kurdish guerrillas. Once they landed through, the rails were firmly jumped, and the situation took a sharp left turn heading into very confusing territory. Shimazu suddenly got a major hump on, and when the NPC responded in his angsty/broody fashion as they’d seen and encountered before, he kicked off and threatened to chop off his hands. The rest of the team seemed as surprised at the sudden development as I was, but decided to back him up (as soon as they’d finished face-palming, quite literally in one case) and support him. Suddenly the NPC was facing off against Shimazu, Kai was lost for words, there was a bunch of Kurds in the woods armed with all kinds of random weapons, and the team armed for bear, facing them down. Their contact didn’t want to back down, and neither did Shimazu, and things just escalated from there, until I thought a massive firefight was inevitable.

Shimazu moved in to deliver his ultimatum, getting well inside melee range, and I spotted a way to bring this to a conclusion – and Yez went for his gun. He never stood a chance – with no wires or reaction boosting abilities, Shimazu was *always* going to out-draw him. But, with a bit of cinematic licence, we could turn this into a ‘teaching moment’ for the Kurdish forces. Quick-strike and quick-draw allowed Shimazu to get the blade out, and with the number of dice he had to throw, he could have sliced Yez in half – however, without any prompting or guidance from me, he thankfully went for a called shot on the gun itself. With a big handful of 6s on his dice roll, I went with the gun being sliced in half – then asked if Shimazu wanted to go for broke and try a ‘quick-sheathe’ to make it look like he’d barely moved? I think this appealed to the players view of his character and he went for it – and thankfully made the quickness check easily.

That gave me a perfect out to describe this superhuman feat of quickness and strength, and for Yez to have a sudden and chilling realisation of how badly he was outmatched, and just how one-sided any fight would be – and a chance to back down suddenly.
The encounter as a whole was still a massive bust. In my notes I’d originally had “once the players arrive at the camp, if Shimazu and Kai do their doctoring and Tads does magically healing on the civilians and guerrillas there, they will move the PKK movement from Neutral to Friendly”. This was their chance to get the entire movement recognising them as friends and allies – well it was. Now it was time for them to leave, with the Kurds firmly thinking they’re a bunch of assholes, and relationships between them being ‘strained’ to say the least.
*shrug* Oh well! That’s the thing with free will, and the joy of RP. Sometimes people will view things very differently from you, and you just have to roll with the punches. I’ll have to do a little re-writing of some of the future stuff, but not much – and the best RP normally comes from conflict anyway, so this will bound to be interesting!

Once they were back at the ranch, I could dangle the next job to them – helping someone over the border. This was ideally going to make them think and realise how far they’d come – a year ago, they’d needed the help of a team to cross the same border, being carried over and dropped near Kum Dag to start the oil-field jobs for Maersk. Now they were doing the same for someone else… except they decided they didn’t want to go to the hassle of getting an external hook installed at short notice, and turned the job down.

Oh well! They might still change their mind of course – the team can be fickle, but if not, we’ll just have to make do.

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session, to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Monday 28/2/2061, Location: 40.02426, 48.95799 Time 14:54
2. Team moving back to the base of the hill, toxic cloud spreading, infantry generally still running. Some abandoning kit so they can sprint faster. Team stop by a foxhole to loot some random kit including a bivvy bag and rat-pack. Tads doing a phantasm over the team as they start to climb. Kai - when will the response force turn up? Aswon, probably fast jets - but nobody called for help. Flipped command vehicles, the officers at ground zero, probably dead.
3. Team have 1000m to climb. Soldiers talking in town with the local police, blue lights. Listen in on police channels, evaccing the eastern part of the city, starting to panic, then calling the airport and real panic sets in as there is zero response. Team make it to the top.
4. Astral perception checks to spot background count rising. Hunter worried about tanks. Aswon - far away, and they don't know where we are. All back to top of hill by 16:00. Aswon hears a jet coming, watches as it comes in at low level, south of the city, north of the airport, banks to the south, then crashes into the ground at 650 kts
5. Make letterbox, Marius flies out like a pro, two 10s no RRs, Tads seals up hole behind. Fly out, 100km away to Mr Yez
6. Kai calls Yez. Y: At least you stopped them shelling, K: Yeah, got a bit messy, if you have anyone near the front line, pull them back. Y: What do you mean? How messy, how far: K: Err - tell you when we get to camp! Bye! <Hangs up>
7. Team land and decloak, natives shit themselves and arm up with what they they have. Kai gets out "Is Yez around,we have medical supplies."
8. Yez comes out, calms people down - these are the SF unit, they stopped the shelling - eventually. Hunter translates. Yez walks up to Kai, surprises him and punches him in the face. Shimazu gets out and says to Kai in Mandarin "load the supplies up, he gets to chose a hand or the med supplies." Kai says the same kind of thing to Yez, but he doesn't want that to happen. Makes netotiation check - good roll.
9. Don't lie to me - you said you were in the tunnel. You said you were flying. Offers Kai a hand up. Just don't lie to us.
10. Shimazu asks which hand - as he's chosen the medical supplies. He's an ingrate, white lie, we did what he couldn't, he's a shit bag. He needs to be dealt with.
11. Aswon - tell Aden that. I don't think you should do anything here and now. Shimazu - I don't want to do the equivalent of telling his mum... Kai - just a moment, Shimazu give me a mo. Come over here. Shimazu - get your point across, or I'll get my point across. Kai leads Yez away from Shimazu. Explains what has just happened. I'll take it, but he'll cut you in two. If you're open to it, I'll slap you over the face, and that will be the end of it. Yez - no, you were told about this days ago, you let them shell us.
12. Kai - we said we'd bring medical supplies, so that's what we'll do. Yez tells him to just leave - not wishing to escalate to a fight.
13. Aswon - don't waste your mana on healing them. Tads - helping allies not a waste of mana. Aswon - he's been ungrateful.
14. Shimazu walks over to Yez, asks which hand. Calls on radio in Kurdish, then tells Shimazu none, stands hands on hip. Aswon hearing - this might kick off.
15. Shimazu leans forward again, which hand, or we'll make it clear to your boss that we're more valuable than you are, don't bite the hand that brings you medical supplies. Don't look down on us. So I ask again, which hand - or are you the coward that we think you are.
16. Yez looses temper, goes for pistol. Shimazu quickstrike. Quickdraw. Aiming to cut the gun in two. Five successes on called shot, cuts off the gun barrel, quick sheathe test - plenty of successes.
17. Shimazu "I offer you this mercy, I won't offer you another one..." Spits on his boot, turns and walks away. Aswon and Hunter at arms, ready to fire, Shimazu 11 on an intimidation check. Marius in the cockpit, wondering what is going on. Kai just unloading medical supplies.
18. Yez is intimidated, just stares at the cut gun in his hand. On his radio "stand down, now" Aswon hears, tells the team. They unload the supplies, and get ready to leave.
19. Marius takes off, head home, arcs a little to avoid Mt Ararat.
20. Aswon - Shimazu, what's up? Are you ok?
21. S: We go everywhere, we help people, nobody ever expresses gratitude, it's tiring.
22. A: That's true, but maybe just say "next time try that with me". You're right, but there was a camp full of armed goons that we didn't want to kick off with.
23. K - he was pissy about the 4 days, not the white lie
24. A - do you want a cup of tea Shimazu?
25. Tads - they may have different perspectives, they had enough time, backtrack to their base and stop them even setting off and causing damage. Crossovers and miscommunications.
26. Aswon - he's out of his gourd, but wasn't necessary to take his hand. No way we could have got ready in that short a time. He's mental.
27. Ka - alter memory, fix this all?
28. Tads - doesn't work like that
29. Aswon - and there's all kinds of evidence to the contrary. We need to talk to Aden and tell him we can't work with his minions if they're not going to respect us.
30. Back at the ranch about 20:00. Tads goes to lodge and start to commune with elk. Before she goes - Kai asks about slay X, what can you do? Tads - explains - no.
31. Refuel the bird, reload the cargo area. Aswon goes for a walk. Marius then goes to see family. Shimazu up into the hills to meditate. Tads checks on her tribe, then the larder.
32. Hunter puts info about the Turkish up onto Shadowland under his ID with an oopsy!
33. Kai goes looking for Shimazu to thank him - doesn't find anyone, just small creatures and trip hazards.
34. Morning of Tuesday 1st of march.
35. Confirm details of going back to Aden on the 19th.
36. Kai - have we run out of quests? Nothing until the end of the month.
37. Shimazu - we could go and sort out the theme park? Tads - I LIKE THAT IDEA! Rest of team NO! Marius - who's paying for the fuel?
38. Germaine calls, loud and exuberant, team across the border, light vehicle - unknown weight. Germaine just sounding them out, can get more details. Outlines details to the team, specifically Marius. M: what are you not telling me? A: nothing! Border hotter than normal.
39. Aswon looking on Trid - nothing there. Have a quick look at the map, border location, smuggler stops.
40. Marius - I'm deeply unhappy about the "no Iran rule" breaking... Tads - I'm not happy either - didn't we have a job with Johanna at Maersk. Marius - no, that was a while back, clashed with eagles+boars.
41. Marius - reliant on EDs+Magic. And we need size details for hooks and stuff, we need to fit it inside the vehicle. Aswon - if we can't fit it in, then we tell her we can't do the job then, is that our line?
42. Tads - not happy about Iran to start off with, but could we help them get over the border ourselves? Aswon - we're not doing their job for them though!
43. Germaine calls back with specs, establish it'll not fit. Aswon keeps trying to say no, rest of team keep trying to think of ways to do it. Tads reminds the team about themselves getting over the border. Shimazu it was Saito's. Aswon tells Germaine. Offers to try and get a team to help - Shimazu calls Saito, stopping there.

Oh, and the image I used for the vehicle that needed a lift over the border was this - make up your own mind if it's as bad as I make out, or not! Suzuki X-head concept

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 248 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
We were one player down this week, Marius having caught Peruvian Death Flu and being laid low. Our general agreement is that we’ll still run with only one missing (unless I know that the character in question is going to be a key part of the plot, or is integral to the story in some way), and they got in the “blanket box” – nothing bad will really happen to them, but they also won’t be very helpful to the run.

Tads had been speaking to me offline, and wasn’t happy with the way things ended up with the refugee camp, and wanted to know what she could do about it – coming up with the idea of riding over on one of the motorbikes. So, we had a look at the map and worked out the approximate distance (950km by road) and route – looking at the types of terrain and levels of development. It was pretty remote, and went over some decent sized mountains – just looking at some of the series of hairpin bends and series of snaking paths winding back and forth told you it was a serious elevation change for that area of the route. I pointed out to her that she was likely to be targeted by several people who saw “single female riding alone in remote area” and then we both giggled…

Quite some time ago you see, in a previous Shadowrun campaign, she was playing another shaman, this time a Snake totem, and she had the “Blind” flaw. She had to get to the meet with the Johnson for the run, so was riding the city bus. So, we’ve got a middle aged, blind, single, female sitting on the city bus, after dark, driving through a D/E rated area. The gangers thought all their Christmas wishes had come true. They were not aware that she was an initiated mage, could see them clearly with her astral sight and had discerned their intentions more clearly than they had thanks to her assensing / aura-reading, and was ready. And so were her little stable of invoked great-form spirits. Let’s just say it got messy, the bus driver had to have his memory altered, and the bus depot wondered just how all that blood had gotten there. So, as Tads is now a Grade 7 mage, chances are things would go a very similar way. Of course, she’s still have to deal with the attempt, and that’s a bit of a pain all by itself.

Then she came up with the idea of using shapechange into a familiar shape, and using a spirit to boost her speed via the movement power – and that ended up giving her a speed of about 304kph and of course the ability to fly direct, using the shortest distance. But, she also didn’t want to explain what she was doing to the rest of the team unless she had to, to avoid any hassle with either Shimazu or anyone else. So, I worked out the travel time and gave her the figures, and we did some healing roles and etiquette checks, just in case, and worked out the RP consequences of her actions, in case she did get the 2+ days she needed to make it happen. And if the team suddenly went haring off in a different direction, then it just wouldn’t have happened…

They didn’t, it did, and she made a big difference to the guerrilla camp, healing a LOT of sick people and making a huge impact on their quality of life from not only the magical healing, but also making clean fresh water and basic foodstuffs, and did a huge repair job on the teams rep with the Kurds, which will make a big difference going forwards.

The rest of the team did the prep for getting to the amusement park, and I handled the travel arrangements with a few etiquette and negotiations rolls from Kai – keeping it very high level because he does have people as a contact, and he is pretty good – a social face phys-adept with Kinescics and all sorts of other tricks *should* be able to arrange fairly legit and no-risk stuff like this very easily. Likewise the trip over and the drive towards Turkmenabat were handled fairly abstractly with a few random rolls – I didn’t want to draw it out unnecessarily, as Hunter’s player was waiting patiently, and it wouldn’t really have helped the story that much or added much drama. Even the Wolf tribe they ran into previously would be much harder pressed to deal with the team now compared to 1 year ago in game (and nearly 6 in real life).

Once we got to the amusement park, it got a lot more indepth though, as they got the descriptions for how the ghosts acted to let them understand how they had died, and start to get an impression of the level of incompetence and penny-pinching that was going on at the park. This is where I ran into my second problem – poor old Tads. Or rather, the player – who along with being caring, empathic and compassionate, also has a very vivid imagination, and really isn’t into horror and ghost stories, especially not just before bed-time. So in some parts I had to keep the descriptions a little vague, or go into just enough detail to make it clear what was going on, but without adding too much detail – saving that for the writeup instead. It also meant that I had to get someone else to proof-read this week’s chapter (and probably next weeks as well) to avoid giving her nightmares that way!

Still, we got there in the end, and they’re closing in on the amusement park HQ where all the dodgy deals took place, and hopefully will get to find some damming evidence that they need to resolve the issue and break the ghost’s chains, and they can get back to the ranch in plenty of time to meet back up with the others, before heading to go and meet Aden – where Hunter is convinced that Aden has a special butt-plug with his name on it.


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Tuesday 1/3/2061, Location: 40.02442, 48.95752 Time 10:00
2. Aswon - suggestion, we just caused a horrible natural disaster. Commune with the avatar, fix things up.
3. Shimazu - we could go to the amusement park. Aswon - you already suggested that. Tads - I have something I want to do, will take a few days. Kai - Shimazu might have an idea, if we go clean things up, maybe it will help - the dragon will kill us slower than he might other. Tads - he trashed Tehran, I don't think he's that bothered... Aswon - I could get behind declaring that as a deed for our group. Just have to work out what we do to reward Hunter / Marius. Aswon - not concerned about the dragon, we did the best we could, short notice, no supplies - aint worried about him. Worried about the stain on my soul.
4. Marius goes upstairs to be with Nadia and the baby...
5. Saito - calls, what does he want. Shimazu asks about over the border - Saito, no, Moving Company not avaialble. Team horrible feeling. Much confusion and giggling. Then they get details about the job, realise its the same job, Saito very confused.
6. Shimazu asks about the border (after Aswon nudges), and the theme park.
7. Kai asks if Tads could make the vehicle invisible - yes. More discussion, still turn the job down.
8. Kai asks about putting a hook on the bottom. Engineering tests. Possible cut holes in the bottom of the tilt-wing.
9. Aswon - we could - and I hate this idea - open both side doors and the rear door and drop straps out the sides, and we can carry stuff like that... It would be super hard, because we'd be so visible and detectable, and very magically reliant.
10. Kai - but tads, can we do it. Tads - I can help.
11. Aswon - we might be able to talk to Johanna / Dekita to see about if she would pay for shooting up Esprit stuff as well.
12. Much discussion about loading all the pressure onto Marius / Tads, feasibility and possible options.
13. Steering away from that, Kai asks Shiamzu about the theme park again. "It's fun", right?
14. Go back to the border crossing job - we keep assuming air. Int checks, Aswon remembers crossing the border previously - tripple rolls of razorwire and minefields, probably the assumption that the team needs to be in the air to avoid it.
15. Hunter announces he's going up into the hills to chill for the next week or two. Aswon suggests getting to a phone position twice a day, just in case, just in case.
16. Team declare deed for clearing out the theme park
17. Kai makes a call - arrange a boat, drive to Baku, boat to Kum-Dag, drive to Turkmenabat. Tads suggest they take a bag of her stuff, she'll catch up. Kai etiquette checks for boat transfer. 3X6s on etiquette test to arrange transport - 750Ny transport fee for the truck, on a Maersk oil freighter.
18. Tads summons F9, headache, rest, eagle, 300kph due west.
19. Marius no doubt threats of doom and gloom, then team magic head to Baku, to get boat over to Maersk terminal
20. Morning of the 3rd, across the caspian, over to the Maersk terminal. Do not stop at Kum-Dag, in case they get a job, push on to Ashgabat. Takes until the end of the 3rd.
21. Drive to Turkmenabat 576km. Random roll is good, quiet and easy day, handling check ok, meet with 2 artics heading the same way, Kai talk on radio - they want to know what the team is doing, Kai explains heading to Turkmenabat. Sleep in the truck
22. Morning of the 5th.
23. Random roll for Tads travelling over - 1 then 4. Team get up, get breakfast, eagle on the front of the truck. Aswon lets it in, Tads shifts back.
24. Go for a walk around the edge of the theme park. Feeling of malevolence, coldness, hatred. Drops off quickly. Team assense and keep looking carefully.
25. All team spot the ghost of a small boy watching them. Stalks towards them, head flips back and is destroyed - WP2 test. Team try to communicate Aswon - "What would bring you peace" Ghost uncertain. It moves to attack and is easily defeated. Team moves on.
26. Onto path - see girl, looking down, feral grin, Kai - commanding voice - stop! She doesn't stop, bounces up and down. Screams - Tads has resistance up though. Psychic scream ineffective. Team deal with her, keep walking. Find the carousel. One horse feels "cold" and has astral bloodstains over it. Tads sterilises, just to see if it helps.
27. Tads - what can we do? Aswon - clean it - physically, say a prayer for the girl. Tads - starts looking for chains / links. Aswon cleans and prayers, then they move on. Team at the split, go left. Find the "runaway mine train" wooden coaster, decrepit death trap, probably where the boy came from. Team repeat the same - sterilise, clean, pray, move on.
28. Round corner, teen boy, ripped clothing, eyes electric blue. Instantly becomes angry, lurches to attack, static finger. Kai pulls out taser, the zombie comes straight at him. Force 3 ghost, Tads casts influence. Gets 11 successes, open mouth, static from the teeth. Tads tries to speak, no comprehension. aswon tries (1), transfers anger to him, held by Tads influence.
29. Kai tries to close, sit, be inoffensive, stare at him, be calm, use facial sculpt to be similar. After 20 seconds it attacks, Shimazu deals. Finds dodgems, one car with burn marks in astral, Aswon up on roof. Looks for something that has common line of sight to all the rides with ghosts.
30. Looks in astral spots the faux fairytale castle, freefall ride, or the biggest coaster - Aswon says the castle is the most likely target...
31. Tads checks if anyone wants static field up - no, too hostile, affects investigation a little.
32. Find the drowned girl on the way to the castle. Investigate, frog cab on the chain water ride, clean the ride, then head into the castle. Stop for the night.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 249 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Back up to full strength this week, though we started off with Team Magic at the amusement park. They very unsurprisingly managed to make it up to the top of the castle, and blow their way through the locks to get at the paydata and clues that would lead them on to the next section of the adventure.

If they’d been at the “level appropriate” part of this, they almost certainly wouldn’t have had the skills / power to do so, and would have had to go exploring further into the park, constantly being harassed by the low force ghosts – gradually being worn down and picking up the odd box of stun here or there, until they discovered the key for the lock in one of the buildings, and worked out how to get some power on and get the mag-lock working elsewhere – then it would have been a race to get back before the ghosts got lucky with their rolls and managed to make it difficult for the team.

However, as we’re now doing this quest 3-4 years after it was originally placed, the team are MAHoosively over-levelled and geared for it, and just nuked their way through. If this was World of Warcraft, it would have been a grey quest in the zone just outside the starting area, and a bunch of raiders dropping in on their flying mounts with tier sets and just mulching their way through with no concerns. They even got Kai with his negligible weapon skills to do the killing this week, as a good training exercise where he’s unlikely to get hurt.

I could have “up-gunned” the events and ghosts to make them meaningful, but I didn’t for 2 reasons. One is that the ghosts had effectively driven off all the locals, and thus starved themselves of food source – with nobody to prey on and kill, there was nobody to drain karma from and increase in force. The second was as a reminder to the players for just how far they’ve come, and how crazy powerful they are when compared to “normal” people.

Otherwise, things went pretty much according to plan, they got the information they need to follow up on, and can now discover the park CEO living under his new identity, drawing from his various funds to enjoy his party lifestyle, all earnt on the back of appalling safety violations and manslaughter. The players will no doubt deal with him harshly – but it’ll be interesting to see if they redirect the various funds of accounts to themselves, or if they throw any at the families of those who lost children – or the permanently disabled staff that were savaged by the poor maintenance. Their call on this one – do they want lots of Nuyen and little Karma, or vice-versa!

Tomorrow night we’ll have about 2 days of downtime to get through, then they’re off to see Aden and get the “device” implanted into Hunter. This is his campaign special unique item, and is an enchanted doohickey that gives him a bit of draconic essence, boosting his essence from a starting value of 6 to 9. With the various implants he has, that will then lower back down to 5.2 (or effectively 5) – but it gives some interesting options. If he stays where he is implant wise, it means the target number for magical healing is 5 (as opposed to 4 for the magical members) instead of the previous 8 – making him *much* easier to deal with. Or, he can go the other route and look at getting 5 MORE points of cyber/bio installed, and really become a monster at what he does! Choices, choices… There’s also some “unlocks” in a similar vein to the others, that will become available as we progress through the campaign – these are simple enough stat boosts for him, as they will directly buff his combat potential.

That will leave only Tads still to do – which will probably take a while as it’s coming as part of “Survival of the Fittest” due in 2064 when they graduate from messing with just a few great dragons to messing with a whole BUNCH of the big scaly buggers.

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Wednesday 9/3/2061, Location: 40.02442, 48.95752 Time 09:00
2. Walking up slope - looking at portcullis, once painted red, spot the little kid they first dealt with, hiding at the top of the portcullis. Aswon - hmm - LOS looking more likely. Tads - he might have died high up on the ride?
3. Move up towards the castle, portcullis drops on Aswon, he combat rolls out of the way. Tries to lift it - fails. Shimazu tries - fails. Tads moves up and tries - and that works! Kid does a drop-bear attack, easily killed. BGC1, Team look in astral, trail of little kids energy rising up into the castle. Castle cafeteria, souvenir shops, then a door marked "staff only", fibreglass surrounds. Lightweight door. Shimazu charges, partial success. Dodgems guy attacks - easily defeated. See frame of 3m square sections on skeleton frame, bare concrete. Switchback, up into darkness. Repair rooms, gutted, CCTV room - Tads catalogue, nothing useful.
4. Drowned girl out of bathroom, Kai defends, gets 4 success, does a D, kills her. Go up, odd shaped larger rooms. Gutted, Shimazu takes newtons cradle. Gutted more carefully. Go up.
5. Carousel girl attacks down stairs, Kai one shots again.
6. Get to top floor, glass door, antechamber, security door and heavy structural material. Aswon suggests Shimazu attempts physical lockpick - does on first attempt. Maglock still closed, unpowered. Tads, does F3 lightning bolt at D Aswon suggests - Tads prefers S, gets 2 success, Reaction check for others. Shimazu gets 6s, catches and levers door open. Find desiccated bodies in bags, + unlooted room, lever arch files, storage boxes, random tat. Check for ID, looks sanitised. Kai checks for ward, F5 on inside of storeroom. All 4 ghosts animate.
7. Kai attacks, only a moderate, but kills next round. Tads one shots, Aswon and Shimazu kill theirs easily. Kai looks for magical societies stuff - nothing. Tads looks at ward - how are the ghosts getting out. Aswon - they're off this place, I guess?
8. Tads does catalogue, gets hit on "heavily encrypted data chip" Aswon suggests finding local authority figures to investigate. Take bodies to somewhere to deal with respectfully, local town.
9. Kai - we can leave them here, few more days won't hurt after a decade of haunting. Can look into who committed the atrocities.
10. Aswon - I'm all for extracting them if still alive, and making them come here and face the ghosts.
11. Tads - not comfortable leaving this, it took ages to deal with at first, don't want to leave it again.
12. Kai - most important is laying the spirits to rest. Tads - once we deal with Aden, we can come back with tilt-wing, will cost in fuel, but be a lot faster, bring whole team.
13. Aswon - definite cover up, all trashed below, carefully hidden up here, no bodies to account for, just missing people. Aswon finds chip hidden behind a box. Read on a p-sec, readable but encrypted. Squirt back to the ranch. 4 ghosts apparated, lacking hostility and malevolence this time - just watching. Couple of metres from team. Aswon lowers spear a bit, Kai puts dagger away. Kai tries to communicate in Azerbaijani, "Hello I am kai", look at him, but no answer. "We want to help - what are your names" No answers, but recognition. Aswon suggest asking if the bodies should be taken outside. No response. Aswon carefully picks up body and takes outside. Aswon takes little boy out, ghost follows. Aswon "Keep going then, find some quite woodland, head down." Shimazu grabs one, Kai grabs one, Tads levitates one. All followed by appropriate ghost, go to secluded area, Tads earth shape dig graves.
14. Marius gets data squirt with message "unwrap this for me will you" - treats as dodgy, firewalls up, analyses. Marius gets a 16 on decryption, then analyses file. It was top end civilian security - at the time. Start to analyse - dodgy books, heavily cooked. Massive embezzlement to local "contractors". Ongoing banking instructions to pay Cary on an ongoing basis, 10k per month. Turkmenistan bank.
15. Aswon - Kai, could you sleaze your way into the bank, fake being a bank investigator?
16. Tads - would be ironic if the last payment had just gone out...
17. Marius on the phone - advising locals might have to comply for terrorism. Aswon - maybe find the owning bank. Tads - maybe influence + Kai doing talking?
18. Shimazu - Shinto background, need meaningful burial rites. Tads does Nenet one, Aswon ritual making of grave markers. Magic background checks - each of the 4 team members need to do a little ritual for "their" ghosts. Shimazu does a sword rite and kneels, Kai great horses of the plains to take them to their ancestors. Ghosts disappear back into the bodies.
19. Kai - lets head back home. Tads I need to sterilise first. She goes and does that, takes us to midday.
20. Aswon suggests coming in as tax officials, investigating money laundering. Can't reveal information, can't tarnish reputation, go in at end of the day when they want to leave. Kai - and also investigate missing children. Aswon - later, that's a much longer and more painstaking search, due to age and area. Lean on the bank and get info on the account and look for current info. Kai - we need suits. Tads - got you covered, makeover, high force.
21. Kai - what's the worst that could happen. Aswon - the guy finds some PI/investigators to start looking for whoever is sniffing around - but not top flight, at least not to start with.
22. Leave the park, no sense of being watched. Death sites are still cold and icky, but team are unmolested heading out to the truck. Find the bank on the main drag in Turkmenabat. Bank is warded, F1 including door when open. Tads checks if managers name matches either of the names found earlier - no.
23. Customer service looks up, grabs tablet. Say hello, are you setting up a new account. No, we have megacorp accounts. Here to investigate possible fraud. Not on the part of the bank. Go fetch branch manager. Bank manager, investigate some "irregularities". Kai = Manooj, bank manager is Tahwar. Irregularities, subtle investigation. Cust serv drone goes to follow, put back in their place, Nateen - two more chairs. Closes blinds - do you have some details. Yes, we have dates and account numbers, amounts transfer. You are aware of amusement park - yes, very sad - it's to do with that, sensitive nature, can't reveal any details. Asks for ID. Tads influences - no you don't. Kai goes for embarrassment for corp, megacorp politics and leadership. Politics none, RR, 1. Leadership 2. Does a lookup, live account, house in Ashgabat. Kai keep details to your yourself, told to come to you personally, keep it quiet. Account is for a penthouse suite, 16k per month. Kai checks days off - just the weekend. Treats him with respect, then team leaves.
24. Look at map and discuss - could ask Hunter and Marius to fly over and meet them at Ashgabat, possibly go to meet Aden directly from there. Team head back to the ranch via the boat, very smooth, meet back up with the rest of the team.
25. Arrive back at ranch 17/3/2061 midday

No game this week as we were two players down – so I got to relax this weekend with no writeup either, and get some good quality painting time in for my 40K scenery as well as play some games on the PC, along with a bit of planning for the next section – when the players go to see Aden, returning 1 calendar month after dropping off the strange device with him.

They have of course assumed there’s some enchanting going on (correct) but have no idea what it’s for… So, they’ll land on the mountain, at the same spot they’ve met him before – about 2,500m up, near an old climbing waystation. He’ll do a monster shape-earth spell to put Tads’s efforts into perspective, opening up a tunnel into the mountain itself, and then revealing the interior of his lair – or at least part of one of his lairs. I’ll be going with this description:
“You reach the end of the access tunnel and come across an oddly shaped room – an octagonal shaft drops down vertically below you, disappearing into the darkness, with no handrail or safety barrier between you and an indeterminate drop. The room at your level though has three other tunnels branching off, each of which has an octagonal profile too, extruded from the complex geometry of the room you are in, with equilateral triangles formed to make a perfect mesh in-between each of the octahedral tunnels. Several of the triangles glow softly with a pearl light, casting an even glow around the room, perfectly lighting it from all sides.”

They need to get down the shaft, and after some discussion with a drake NPC, they probably will end up having a floating disc style platform created for them to drop on…

“Descending, the disk or platform of force drops quickly, the smooth walls blurring past you, and the lit chamber above quickly diminishes to a tiny dot. At an estimate you’ve dropped at least a thousand metres, maybe more – it’s hard to tell. Cell signals, sat-links, GPS – all electronic signals have long since faded away, blocked by the mega-tons of rock surrounding you, and even cybernetic spatial recognisers are glitching out, confused and disoriented by the perfect geometric shapes and lack of identifying features. Far below you a speck of light starts to grow as you quickly drop towards it, revealing the bottom of the shaft.

Arriving at the bottom you find a mirror of the room far above you, with four access tunnels leading off, all again carved as perfect octahedrons. Your guide leads you down one tunnel, and as you enter the tunnel the topmost part of the rock begins to glow, casting the same even light down into the space. A quick check in the astral plane reveals a simple light spell anchored to a detection spell of some kind, both fairly low in force.

Progressing down the tunnel, you spot some irregular holes in the sides, the first signs of imperfection you’ve seen since your arrival. Drawing level you see the holes appear to be caused by pyroducts, roughly spherical tubes of roughly gouged rock with steps and serrations at the bottom marking the flow of different heights of lava. These are dark, the light quickly being swallowed as you stare into the stygian depths as the tunnels fade off into the distance, curving and twisting gently in accordance with the natural makeup of the rock.

Finally you reach another of those unusual geometric junctions, but this time instead of tunnels, it appears that the exits are into a series of rooms – each of the main facets is closed by a door, some of which are at unusual or odd angles that could only be reached by flying or levitating travel – or creatures who can just move in three dimensions naturally. Inside the room you are led to is a large stone slab, smooth on the top but with jagged hewn sides. Laying on one corner are a set of bronze tools – knives, pliers, retractors, rib-spreaders. The design looks refined, but the metallurgy screams of ancient techniques and there’s an indefinable air of antiquity to them…”

Then I’m going to go with “the doctor” entering, and give a description and share an image – and see how many (if any) of the players spot the image of Hippocrates. Having re-read Aden’s entry in Dragons of the Sixth World I noted that he had no known metahuman forms, and of course his dealing with Tehran showed that he had a ‘testy’ side to him.

My brain, being what it is, went off on a tangent then, coming up with all kinds of ideas. What if Aden had originally been like Dunklezhan, quite on the side of metahumans, helping them along and working to better them and advance their civilisation. What if Aden, in the form of several ancient Egyptian and Greek mathematicians, philosophers and doctors was one of the key reasons that so many of the advances in ancient civilisations sprang from the area? And how annoyed would he be then if despite his prodding and manipulation his efforts had been thwarted or derailed by the subtle machinations of other draconic agents, the manipulation of the immortal elves, or just sheer human bloody-mindedness. I’d imagine that everyone has a limit to their patience, and having ‘your’ people that you’ve helped and guided for thousands of years, and shown huge numbers of advances to suddenly turn on you and refuse to accept yours and theirs rightful places in the grand scheme of things could lead to you losing your temper…

So, that’s where I’m heading – I think. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates himself, will be doing open-heart surgery on Hunter, and both Kai and Tads had better be ready with the medkit and healing spell afterwards.

I’m also going to have Aden turn on Kai, and suddenly pick him up and fling him into the wall, holding him there by this throat, with one hand raised warningly to Shimazu not to interfere.

‘The doctor leans forward, until his nose is almost touching yours, and his eyes are locked upon your own. He blinks, and for a moment the pupils change shape, elongating and becoming reptilian.
“I made a promise that I wouldn’t kill you. I never said anything about maiming you. Do not be so quick to test my patience again.”
Then he lowers you to the ground, and turns away, giving a vague smile and a slightly bemused nod to the rest of the team before returning to the stone slab to collect his instruments, sliding each one into a slot in an ancient leather roll…’
I’ve already made the open test for his intimidation check, and let’s just say that Kai is going to have a hard time making that target number. More than anything else though, I’m hoping that the players will latch on to the fact that he’s promised not to kill them – and be wondering *WHO* he’s made that promise to, and why…

But – does anyone know any more info about Aden that would run counter to this, or mean it wasn’t going to gel with his personality / background from some other source???

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 250 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Huzzah! Here’s the pre-christmas writeup, now I’ve managed to get a day sorted out to actually write it up. It’s been looming over me for a week or so, but work has been crazy busy with upgrades and network changes that needed to get done while the factory was shut down and I could rip the network to pieces without people screaming. Anyway… we’re done now and ready to go!
With the last side quest finally complete, they were off to see Aden in his secret volcano lair, including his adorable sidekick Scottish Drake ™. I spared my players my attempts at a Scottish accent, and as I type this realised that his Scottish typed-accent probably disappeared on the way out of the lair as well. Not sure if it’s worth going back to edit, or if it can be safely left to the readers imagination to put a good twang to the voice. That seems safest… But hoping that will create a suitable memory for them that was unexpected, along with discovering that the 5.4km high active volcano in Iraq is riddled with a surprisingly complex fully functional dragon lair with all sorts of stuff going on inside.

So, in they went, and Tads specifically and some of the others got to see Draconic style magic for the first time. In particular I’d designed a variation of the levitate spell that could carry more weight than 100kg, but only travelled between two distinct, fixed points for them to look at and wonder about. Down into the mountain and to the operating room, and then in walks the doctor.
Here I showed them a picture – using this: https://theconversation.com/hippocrates-did...-medicine-32334

I had no idea if they’d recognise it (after all, it’s an idea of what he looked like, and I’m not sure there’s any actual descriptions) so I doubled down with the toga and ancient bronze instruments. There was some bickering about if Hunter should be unconscious, until they persuaded him that yes he should be, and then on their went with the operation. A “hibernate” spell over the body during the operation to stop having to deal with the blood seemed like a nice themed thing, and gave Tads and the others another chance to get a view on Draconic style magic, emphasising the difference between the normal Hermetic/Shamanic flavours, and hopefully adding more flavour to the encounter.
At the end of the operation, I told them that Hunter had taken an effective deadly wound from the “open heart surgery”, so Kai got busy with the medkit and rolled ok, reducing the damage level from deadly to serious. Then it was time for Tads to roll, and she started to work out the TN based on what she thought Hunter would be on – 10 minus essence, so normally 8s. I told her to roll against 5s. She was confused, but then rolled badly anyway, only getting 3 – which would leave him with a moderate wound to heal naturally. A quick reroll and boom – 9 successes, leaving some free to go into the base time, and a sudden click of “oh, Dragon magic. I think I get it! Oh, and this place might be a power site, or aspected or all sorts of things.

At this point they’ve still not clicked on what’s happened. The device is the “Heart of the Dragon” and is Hunter’s campaign special item. The base effect is to instill his soul / aura with draconic essence – raising his natural essence from 6 to 9, and marking him out as a very unusual ork. I updated his character sheet and sent him a new copy, and it took him a good few minutes to work out what the change was, then I saw eyes go wide as he worked out the possible options…
1) Stay with the new essence and current cyberware, but now be *way* easier to heal magically after taking damage.
2) Oh look – more space. Now we need to earn several million Nuyen so I can become Robocop!
It remains to be seen which way he leans. He also was asked if he wanted to spend 5 karma on a random upgrade, which he eventually said yes to, and now has a +1 Body bonus – hence the tight fitting safety harness and clothes. He might need to get those adjusted some time soon… *grin*

After that, I had a more serious moment where Hippocrates / Aden tells Kai to behave – in this case it wasn’t Kai himself, but Kai as the team leader and person responsible for the teams behaviour, in particular winding up Yez and threatening to cut his hand off. Only Aden gets to threaten his minions! And Shimazu either hadn’t twigged that the doctor was Aden in a human form, or just didn’t care….
Aden doesn’t really want to damage the team, they’re still going to be useful to him – but he’s not going to take any shit from them either, so a high force bind on Shimazu to keep him out of range after he decides to get involved. Unfortunately for Aden, Shimazu has been working for months on his modified distance strike phys-ad ability that he can use with his sword.
Equally unfortunately for Shimazu, was Aden using “twist fate”. I think both Jez (Aswon) and Lee (Marius) knew exactly what was going on, but stayed thankfully quiet. But after Shimazu had to reroll all his hits, enough of them turned into misses that Aden could dodge, like a ninja grand-master, without breaking a sweat, and effectively just ignore Shimazu despite him giving it his best shot. While taking note of the new ability and reminding himself to keep an eye on these upstarts!

And Shimazu was left wondering just how he’d managed to miss. And despite that he still complained to the drake on the way out (who I then played as having only seen some of the jigsaw and being confused, and this was the missing piece – or at least a big enough part that he could guess at the picture) and tactfully stay quiet and definitely not say anything that might be seen as going against Aden.

But, they made it out of the lair. Tads is salivating at the idea of learning some spells from Aden’s drakes. And hopefully they’re ready to go off to the steppes and get involved in at least one mission to do with the probe race and some of the main timeline plot for the year. It’d be a shame not to at least do something, after all.


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Thursday 17/3/2061, Location: 40.02442, 48.95752 Time 12:00
2. Nadia asks Kai about money - team have 245k, she wants to do cut and cover, steel box, Kai offers 100k, Nadia takes the money and runs to order stuff.
3. Tads does digging, makes food. Hunter long bath, rest of team training. She raises secrecy aspect for crane operators. Discussion about alter memory on crane operators - tads, not polite. Others not fussed.
4. Fast forward to 19th, off to visit Aden
5. Over the Caspian sea, easily slide into Iranian air defence, head over to the climbing station.
6. Tads asked - can we get codes from Aiden to allow us in past the borders. They won't want to upset him, surely. Kai - you might not be wrong... Aswon - maybe, but possibly not, it might be a minion problem.
7. Team head to landing spot, Marius spots the drake that "guided" them down the first time. He tells rest of team - Kai, we didn't piss that off did we? No, all good.
8. Team getting out, Kai respectful nod/bow. It walks over, returns head nod. Thick Scottish brogue, right on time. Kai - hope you're well? Aye, aye... Opens shaft on 10 degree slope into the mountain. Tads assense - triggered spell, shape earth, very high force.
9. Can you see in the dark. Tads - no. Casts a light. Tads asks, confused by draconic magic somewhat.
10. Description of top room. Drake - whenever you're ready. Hunter - for what. Kai - we're confused. Turns to tads - aren't you going to float people down. Tads - only one at a time. Changes, kilt, asks about levitate.
11. Drake creates disk, Aswon assense room, all natural, BGC of 1. Test gecko crawl for a moment on disk descent.
12. Descent description. Into the surgery room. Kai antiquity check - 2 successes, 2-2.5k years old, very valuable.
13. Tads asks - Hunter, would you want those sterilised if they're actually going to be used on you? Hunter - don't ask me, ask whoever is going to use them.. Doctor enters, Kai greets. "ahh, you're here, let's get on with it." Kai flicks into astral to assense. Hunter - why what's going on. Doctor pulls out box, with the device - implanting this.
14. Hunter, where is that going, there's not much natural left. Doc - plenty of room, don't worry. Hunter - where? Doc, in your chest. Hunter - it won't interfere with stuff? Doc - it won't affect your primitive machines. Hunter - you've not answered my questions. Doc - dismissive. Hunter - accent detected, but can't place it.
15. Hunter gets undressed, passes clothes to Marius. Quick argument with Hunter about sedation. Hunter doesn't want any. Kai tries to convince Hunter to be knocked out, increases healing chances. Tads - and we're here to look after you, unlike Marius. Sedate Hunter. Operation begins. Aswon watching in Astral - something magical over Hunter. Tads checks - health domain, - super stabilise spell. Checks for Biotech/medicine. Marius recording the surgery. Check - very competent surgeon.
16. Kai biotech - lowers from D to S. Tads does magical healing. Gets 3, RR 9 - enough to do quickly. Tads feels it was an "easier" cast than normal, maybe the room is aspected towards healing. Aswon - or the tunnel design and layout.
17. Figure warns Shimazu to stay there, stalks towards Kai with knife. Kai uncomfortable. Shimazu goes to intercept, bound to floor. He assenses feet. Very high force bind spell.
18. Shimazu threatens to put Kai down, or lose the hand. Tads also intervenes, tries to cast levitate.
19. Pins Kai to the wall, “I made a promise that I wouldn’t kill you. I never said anything about maiming you. Do not be so quick to test my patience again.” Kai is very definitely intimidated.
20. Shimazu uses attribute boost strength, and tries to use distance strike. Gets a bunch of success - twist fate. Halves the number of success. Dodges to the side subtly, creating a miss.
21. Aswon - please, Kai, apologise for whatever you've done. Kai - he's said his piece, I'll see him again some time in the long grass.
22. Doctor wraps tools, starts to leave - tads thanks for his assistance. Turns and gives her a smile. Tads- do we have post operative care. No - he'll be fine. Aswon - what does it do? Makes him better. A-but how? IT just works, stop with all the questions.
23. Assensing, get 2 successes.
24. Drake knocks on door - ready to leave? Team head out, Aswon asks "What's next". Drake - you just carry on with what you were doing? Tads "what about the horror?" What horror. "Tads explains. Can you pass on feedback." Err. no. You can ask, but no. "Tads - but we need more experience, info, but thanks for listening."
25. Shimazu - "do you deal with rebel fighters". What fighters? "The PKK, we have a formal complaint." Shimazu recounts story, future jobs need more courtesty and respect." Ahh, that's what that is about. Hmm.
26. Deepest condolences for dealing with a serious situation and saving many lives and dealing with the situation. And I'm owed a hand." Then Shimazu goes to leave. Kai "he's not wrong." Drake giggles to self in Gaelic, leads the team out. Tads - "do you need permission to share spells?" it depends on the spell. "Light, seen you, want it." Tads offers mass oxygenate / static aura - he sounds intrigued. Tads offers to come back, Drake says he will need to arrange.
27. Get back to tilt-wing ok. Kai nods respectfully to the drake again. Tads asks for number - he says use the one they already have.
28. Test getting hunter in through the ward - no difference.
29. Getting back over the border ok, returning to the ranch.
30. Medical and cyber systems check on Hunter. Cyber works ok. He appears holistically more healthy. Tads assenses - it's like he's a shapeshifter, stronger healthy field.
31. Team starts prepping for trip to Baikonur. Kai asks Shimazu to call Saito to confirm details.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 250 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Huzzah! Here’s the pre-christmas writeup, now I’ve managed to get a day sorted out to actually write it up. It’s been looming over me for a week or so, but work has been crazy busy with upgrades and network changes that needed to get done while the factory was shut down and I could rip the network to pieces without people screaming. Anyway… we’re done now and ready to go!
With the last side quest finally complete, they were off to see Aden in his secret volcano lair, including his adorable sidekick Scottish Drake ™. I spared my players my attempts at a Scottish accent, and as I type this realised that his Scottish typed-accent probably disappeared on the way out of the lair as well. Not sure if it’s worth going back to edit, or if it can be safely left to the readers imagination to put a good twang to the voice. That seems safest… But hoping that will create a suitable memory for them that was unexpected, along with discovering that the 5.4km high active volcano in Iraq is riddled with a surprisingly complex fully functional dragon lair with all sorts of stuff going on inside.

So, in they went, and Tads specifically and some of the others got to see Draconic style magic for the first time. In particular I’d designed a variation of the levitate spell that could carry more weight than 100kg, but only travelled between two distinct, fixed points for them to look at and wonder about. Down into the mountain and to the operating room, and then in walks the doctor.
Here I showed them a picture – using this: https://theconversation.com/hippocrates-did...-medicine-32334

I had no idea if they’d recognise it (after all, it’s an idea of what he looked like, and I’m not sure there’s any actual descriptions) so I doubled down with the toga and ancient bronze instruments. There was some bickering about if Hunter should be unconscious, until they persuaded him that yes he should be, and then on their went with the operation. A “hibernate” spell over the body during the operation to stop having to deal with the blood seemed like a nice themed thing, and gave Tads and the others another chance to get a view on Draconic style magic, emphasising the difference between the normal Hermetic/Shamanic flavours, and hopefully adding more flavour to the encounter.
At the end of the operation, I told them that Hunter had taken an effective deadly wound from the “open heart surgery”, so Kai got busy with the medkit and rolled ok, reducing the damage level from deadly to serious. Then it was time for Tads to roll, and she started to work out the TN based on what she thought Hunter would be on – 10 minus essence, so normally 8s. I told her to roll against 5s. She was confused, but then rolled badly anyway, only getting 3 – which would leave him with a moderate wound to heal naturally. A quick reroll and boom – 9 successes, leaving some free to go into the base time, and a sudden click of “oh, Dragon magic. I think I get it! Oh, and this place might be a power site, or aspected or all sorts of things.

At this point they’ve still not clicked on what’s happened. The device is the “Heart of the Dragon” and is Hunter’s campaign special item. The base effect is to instill his soul / aura with draconic essence – raising his natural essence from 6 to 9, and marking him out as a very unusual ork. I updated his character sheet and sent him a new copy, and it took him a good few minutes to work out what the change was, then I saw eyes go wide as he worked out the possible options…
1) Stay with the new essence and current cyberware, but now be *way* easier to heal magically after taking damage.
2) Oh look – more space. Now we need to earn several million Nuyen so I can become Robocop!
It remains to be seen which way he leans. He also was asked if he wanted to spend 5 karma on a random upgrade, which he eventually said yes to, and now has a +1 Body bonus – hence the tight fitting safety harness and clothes. He might need to get those adjusted some time soon… *grin*

After that, I had a more serious moment where Hippocrates / Aden tells Kai to behave – in this case it wasn’t Kai himself, but Kai as the team leader and person responsible for the teams behaviour, in particular winding up Yez and threatening to cut his hand off. Only Aden gets to threaten his minions! And Shimazu either hadn’t twigged that the doctor was Aden in a human form, or just didn’t care….
Aden doesn’t really want to damage the team, they’re still going to be useful to him – but he’s not going to take any shit from them either, so a high force bind on Shimazu to keep him out of range after he decides to get involved. Unfortunately for Aden, Shimazu has been working for months on his modified distance strike phys-ad ability that he can use with his sword.
Equally unfortunately for Shimazu, was Aden using “twist fate”. I think both Jez (Aswon) and Lee (Marius) knew exactly what was going on, but stayed thankfully quiet. But after Shimazu had to reroll all his hits, enough of them turned into misses that Aden could dodge, like a ninja grand-master, without breaking a sweat, and effectively just ignore Shimazu despite him giving it his best shot. While taking note of the new ability and reminding himself to keep an eye on these upstarts!

And Shimazu was left wondering just how he’d managed to miss. And despite that he still complained to the drake on the way out (who I then played as having only seen some of the jigsaw and being confused, and this was the missing piece – or at least a big enough part that he could guess at the picture) and tactfully stay quiet and definitely not say anything that might be seen as going against Aden.

But, they made it out of the lair. Tads is salivating at the idea of learning some spells from Aden’s drakes. And hopefully they’re ready to go off to the steppes and get involved in at least one mission to do with the probe race and some of the main timeline plot for the year. It’d be a shame not to at least do something, after all.


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Thursday 17/3/2061, Location: 40.02442, 48.95752 Time 12:00
2. Nadia asks Kai about money - team have 245k, she wants to do cut and cover, steel box, Kai offers 100k, Nadia takes the money and runs to order stuff.
3. Tads does digging, makes food. Hunter long bath, rest of team training. She raises secrecy aspect for crane operators. Discussion about alter memory on crane operators - tads, not polite. Others not fussed.
4. Fast forward to 19th, off to visit Aden
5. Over the Caspian sea, easily slide into Iranian air defence, head over to the climbing station.
6. Tads asked - can we get codes from Aiden to allow us in past the borders. They won't want to upset him, surely. Kai - you might not be wrong... Aswon - maybe, but possibly not, it might be a minion problem.
7. Team head to landing spot, Marius spots the drake that "guided" them down the first time. He tells rest of team - Kai, we didn't piss that off did we? No, all good.
8. Team getting out, Kai respectful nod/bow. It walks over, returns head nod. Thick Scottish brogue, right on time. Kai - hope you're well? Aye, aye... Opens shaft on 10 degree slope into the mountain. Tads assense - triggered spell, shape earth, very high force.
9. Can you see in the dark. Tads - no. Casts a light. Tads asks, confused by draconic magic somewhat.
10. Description of top room. Drake - whenever you're ready. Hunter - for what. Kai - we're confused. Turns to tads - aren't you going to float people down. Tads - only one at a time. Changes, kilt, asks about levitate.
11. Drake creates disk, Aswon assense room, all natural, BGC of 1. Test gecko crawl for a moment on disk descent.
12. Descent description. Into the surgery room. Kai antiquity check - 2 successes, 2-2.5k years old, very valuable.
13. Tads asks - Hunter, would you want those sterilised if they're actually going to be used on you? Hunter - don't ask me, ask whoever is going to use them.. Doctor enters, Kai greets. "ahh, you're here, let's get on with it." Kai flicks into astral to assense. Hunter - why what's going on. Doctor pulls out box, with the device - implanting this.
14. Hunter, where is that going, there's not much natural left. Doc - plenty of room, don't worry. Hunter - where? Doc, in your chest. Hunter - it won't interfere with stuff? Doc - it won't affect your primitive machines. Hunter - you've not answered my questions. Doc - dismissive. Hunter - accent detected, but can't place it.
15. Hunter gets undressed, passes clothes to Marius. Quick argument with Hunter about sedation. Hunter doesn't want any. Kai tries to convince Hunter to be knocked out, increases healing chances. Tads - and we're here to look after you, unlike Marius. Sedate Hunter. Operation begins. Aswon watching in Astral - something magical over Hunter. Tads checks - health domain, - super stabilise spell. Checks for Biotech/medicine. Marius recording the surgery. Check - very competent surgeon.
16. Kai biotech - lowers from D to S. Tads does magical healing. Gets 3, RR 9 - enough to do quickly. Tads feels it was an "easier" cast than normal, maybe the room is aspected towards healing. Aswon - or the tunnel design and layout.
17. Figure warns Shimazu to stay there, stalks towards Kai with knife. Kai uncomfortable. Shimazu goes to intercept, bound to floor. He assenses feet. Very high force bind spell.
18. Shimazu threatens to put Kai down, or lose the hand. Tads also intervenes, tries to cast levitate.
19. Pins Kai to the wall, “I made a promise that I wouldn’t kill you. I never said anything about maiming you. Do not be so quick to test my patience again.” Kai is very definitely intimidated.
20. Shimazu uses attribute boost strength, and tries to use distance strike. Gets a bunch of success - twist fate. Halves the number of success. Dodges to the side subtly, creating a miss.
21. Aswon - please, Kai, apologise for whatever you've done. Kai - he's said his piece, I'll see him again some time in the long grass.
22. Doctor wraps tools, starts to leave - tads thanks for his assistance. Turns and gives her a smile. Tads- do we have post operative care. No - he'll be fine. Aswon - what does it do? Makes him better. A-but how? IT just works, stop with all the questions.
23. Assensing, get 2 successes.
24. Drake knocks on door - ready to leave? Team head out, Aswon asks "What's next". Drake - you just carry on with what you were doing? Tads "what about the horror?" What horror. "Tads explains. Can you pass on feedback." Err. no. You can ask, but no. "Tads - but we need more experience, info, but thanks for listening."
25. Shimazu - "do you deal with rebel fighters". What fighters? "The PKK, we have a formal complaint." Shimazu recounts story, future jobs need more courtesty and respect." Ahh, that's what that is about. Hmm.
26. Deepest condolences for dealing with a serious situation and saving many lives and dealing with the situation. And I'm owed a hand." Then Shimazu goes to leave. Kai "he's not wrong." Drake giggles to self in Gaelic, leads the team out. Tads - "do you need permission to share spells?" it depends on the spell. "Light, seen you, want it." Tads offers mass oxygenate / static aura - he sounds intrigued. Tads offers to come back, Drake says he will need to arrange.
27. Get back to tilt-wing ok. Kai nods respectfully to the drake again. Tads asks for number - he says use the one they already have.
28. Test getting hunter in through the ward - no difference.
29. Getting back over the border ok, returning to the ranch.
30. Medical and cyber systems check on Hunter. Cyber works ok. He appears holistically more healthy. Tads assenses - it's like he's a shapeshifter, stronger healthy field.
31. Team starts prepping for trip to Baikonur. Kai asks Shimazu to call Saito to confirm details.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 251 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Very late this week – work exploded, and I’ve been doing lots of out of hours support, working over the weekend to try and get things back to operational status. For anyone vaguely into IT – our finance system relied on a Server 2003 instance. We’ve warned them for years it’s unsupported and a massive risk, and they’ve ignored us. Well, we’re not being ignored any more…

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Quite a simple one this week – from being back at the ranch, they just had to head over to the smuggler stop and pick up the gear and final briefing, and then head to the space port to do the job. They were so focussed on how scary it was to be traipsing into the back-yard of SK and messing with one of their rockets, that they just assumed the smuggler stop would be easy peasy.
Off they go, into the arid plains of the ‘stans. Little did they know, that purely by chance only a few weeks ago I saw a great little video on the tubes titled “Why Russia Destroyed the World's 4th Biggest Lake” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp0Sxn42TGs if you’re curious.

Oh look – it’s *exactly* the area the players are going to now. Let me see….redirecting water, exploitation of intense farming, ecological collapse, the lake shrinking and leaving coastal fishing villages high and dry in the desert with rusting hulks. That sounds like *exactly* the kind of shit-show that causes massive background count and mana warps. Ok – so that’s what we’ll have then.

And when you have an environment like that, where clean water was plentiful and now is incredibly rare – the price goes up and the importance is magnified greatly. And that’s where the second punch came in – the local economy has swapped over from Nuyen and other intangibles, to “bottles”. A sealed bottle of water has an inherent value and worth to *everyone* that lives or works there, and they need them for survival (or a mage with create water!). And, as a result, the cost for those in Nuyen in nearby places will have risen considerably, leading to hording, rationing, price gouging and smuggling. Lots of fun stuff!

I don’t know if Kai’s player had had a bad day/week, but he wasn’t that keen on engaging with the smuggler and doing some charisma based stuff, and nobody else stepped up to do the negotiations either. They did have alternatives, and it wasn’t enough to stop the adventure – so I didn’t relent and drop them down to “easy difficulty” either. These are all veteran players now, so they shouldn’t need to have to handed out freebies either.

So, with a surreal air of crazy, and the Benny Hill music playing in my head, they burnt through thousands of Nuyens worth of fuel and hours of time going shopping for water, discovering the local town which was awful, and eventually revisiting Ashgabat, as the closest place they *knew* would sell what they wanted, before heading back to meet the smuggler and pay him. And then he just points them into the hut to where the team is waiting.

I’m just glad they didn’t decide that violence was the answer – they could have just blown him away, and still gone and met the contacts – but then lost access to the smuggler stop. Now at least they know about it – and that they have to bring some water with them for their landing fee!

Finally, a quick bit of RP with the other team and they got the laser designator, and could be on their way to the spaceport!


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:

1. Sunday 20/3/2061, Location: 40.02442, 48.95752 Time 08:00
2. Tads - nightmare of bonfire again, wakeup just before dawn.
3. At breakfast - tads says she will need some time off. Aswon - what's next anyway? Kai - the spying job, then that's it. For Saito wasn't it? Shimazu - yes.
4. Saito message - go to Muynak, ask for Meester Grok, he will put you in touch with the other part of the team.
5. 842km from ranch to Muynak. Kai - anything we shouldn't take? Aswon - depends on the politics of the area I think. Kai has a think - mad max style lawless barren wastes, preying on the new silk road. Kai suggests taking all the winter camping gear. Aswon magic background check - destruction of the Aral sea and ecosystem, millions of deaths.
6. Check on shadowland for toxic threats and stuff like that - yep, all of that. Borders will be soft as nobody cares about it.
7. Team pack up and go, via Baku, get acid resistant gear and facemasks, filters and some spray paint to hide the neon colours
8. Tads explains to Nadia about how alter memory works and needs to be done at the time, not later.
9. Hunter contacts Julius for Marius, to get appraisal of Muynak airport. Tads offers to go. Marius - but it's super toxic? Tads - well, I can look and give it a go, and come back if it's too much. Tads goes and does a standard loop around. Discovers BGC4, gets some recon and back via east exit. Team make sure all the survival gear is topped off.
10. Team head off over the caspian, handling check ok, spot fuzzy signal right on the limit, divert south to avoid, disappear off sensors. Head into Muynak, come in for conventional landing, despite good runway, hick airport. Marius int check - emergency stop, easy to find location.
11. Meester Grok comes out of the building. Hands on hips. Kai goes to back up Shimazu as his contact. Marius keeps engines ticking over.
12. "You need to pay landing fee!" Kai mentions "say saito sent" "Ahh, ok, 20 bottles then!" Broadcasting to team. Kai asks if he has containers - no. Kai - Shimazu, can I take over chat now you've said hello? Yep. Hi, I'm kai, team leader. It's still 20 bottles. We need a tank to fill. What? No, need bottle. You have a tank? No. Need bottles! Back and forth...
13. Look for nearest place - Nukus, 160-200km south of Muynak, team thinking about heading there to buy water. On the river Amu Danya
14. Perception checks on arrival - shrunken city, dried up river, chemical plant, mana warp. Massively shrunken river, now like a stream.
15. Head to service station at edge of town, 10Ny per bottle of 500ml, max 3 per customer. Also chemical smell and *everyone* is wearing facemasks. Hunter Chemistry check - heavy industrial processes
16. Agree to fly south to Ashgabat, 520km, to get supplies. 2ny per name brand, 1.5 per supermarket brand. Slabs of 24. Buy 1 pallet for 1.5k, takes bird to load limit
17. Now used 1500km. Top up at Ashgabat airport - 1512km of fuel, median price
18. 645km back to Muynak. Give him 2 slabs, 8 bottle tip. Hunter asks for info - Kai interupts. Starts trying to trade water for Nuyen
19. Aswon - just get the info you need for the job - sent into the hut.
20. Go in, meet the team, very guarded. Kai passes off to Shimazu. Shimazu assenses - spell defence on dwarf. Mention Saito, immediately chill out, Invite to sit, Shimazu stays standing but Kai sits.
21. Talks through briefing pack and explains each slide. Kai asks about magic, expresses bad area. Hoshimo confirms Devron is sad.
22. Go around back of hut, get the LTD in case, see the vehicle all shot up.

Glad to see a GM using BGC so well! An oft-forgotten, easy tool to humble the magicians.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 252 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Back on track – the issue with our finance system got sorted Saturday and the business is back in operation – at least for now. Let’s see if those obsolescent systems get replaced any sooner! But, enough work nonsense, back to the Shadows…

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
One player down this week – stranded in town when multiple buses failed to turn up – but thankfully Shimazu’s skillset wasn’t really going to be called up in this one, so we cand play on – and the advantage to doing the story writeup is that he as a player should be able to be all caught up with what went on, and also probably read between the lines on how the session actually played out regarding the interactions between the players, so he’s not going to be surprised next week.
The team were suitably careful with the designator, bug-scanning it thoroughly and checking it out magically, before taking it away to test and determine the tracking speed. Now they know it will move quickly, I think they’re planning on getting quite close to the rocket to give it a bit more tracking time.

I dangled the “mysterious sensor blob” in front of the pilot again and this time they went to investigate – and found the Kuchuk Horde on the move. I have not worked out how feasible it is to keep an entire tribe / small town in the air, even with suncells and advances in power – but it sounds cool as hell, and hey when the story gets adapted into a multi-million pound film franchise (what – I can dream…) it’ll be a headache for the Director of Photography, not me as the author of the screenplay. I wanted to go for a “Mad Max in Airships” feel, and the reaction was just about what I hoped for – the players want to make sure they are on *their* side in the future, but also don’t want to go near them at the moment as they’re potentially a run-ending variable if it goes wrong. Having them air-mobile also changes the threat-parameters for Marius, and might provide some interesting contacts in the future.

Still, they made it past the horde and the space base, landed and got stealthed up, then started to head into the perimeter, on foot. They’ve found the first barrier, and will soon run into the second – the *actual* main security perimeter for the facility.
My notes / plan for this is as follows: “Beyond is a SOSUS-like line, running around the perimeter. Microphones every 50m, capturing engine noise/footsteps/overhead engine noise. Computer working out speed/distance/altitude using trig. 204km boundary, 4080 units. There is a bunker with power/processing/subnets every 2km, also containing R2 medkit, some water, distress flares, 4 clips reg rifle ammo and an emergency phone, protected by a R4 lock with AT1.
Sensors give an effective swarm detection rating of 7 for any non-silent approach.”

On a site as big as this, regular patrols just wouldn’t work, and a passive fence isn’t enough – so I figured this would be a good technical barrier for the team to cope with. Tads does have a stealth spell, but in a background count 4 area, that +1D drain code becomes a serious impediment, and the casting target number rises from 4 to 6. It’s also a single target spell, so she might have to cast multiple times, taking more modifiers there too. So magic is possible, but it’s nowhere near as easy as they would normally have it. Her spirits are not going to be much help either (that’s if she would even try and call them after dusk – I suspect not because ‘it would hurt them to be here’ and Ali takes that side of her RP seriously – so they will have to maybe rely on their stealth and guile. Chances are that someone is going to goof, and a security patrol is going to be sent over to investigate, and we’ll have to take it from there.

And heaven help them if they raise the alarm and get the elite unit coming after them – because they will be tooled up for hunting piasma and ready to chew gum and take names.

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Sunday 20/3/2061, Location: 40.02442, 48.95752 Time 12:00
2. Hunter - nobody touches the gear with bare skin, must be gloved. This feels dodgy as all hell. Team generally agree.
3. Hoshimo unloads the box, then unloads 2nd heavier box from underneath, leave on floor - ok, we good to go? You guys know what you're doing?
4. Aswon - know anything about the facility? Hoshi - no, far away from home. Make Devron sad. Aswon to Kai, don't ask the smuggler guy anything, don't trust him. Hunter gets bug scanner. Check bottom box, stuffed full of power cells. No bugs. Tads checks magically, looks clean.
5. Hunter - Kai, do you realise what this is? Kai - yeah. Hunter - really? Shall I spell it out? Kai - targeting dohickey for military ordinance. Hunter - I could do the maths, but only range of 12.5km, long enough time for very long range missiles. Aswon - it *would* work for science gathering - don't look at me like that, it would. I don't think that's what’s happening at all. But it would.
6. Kai - is this a manned flight do we know? Nobody does. Hunter - does Saito know what this is - is he being set up?
7. Hunter - I don't like this at all, I'd rather get frakked directly by a dragon than this.
8. Aswon - going to be on SKs shit list, AAA corp looking - we shouldn't go home after this. Need to plan an exfil that is hot and cold. If its data only, we can sneak. If it blows up, we need distractions and contingencies.
9. Marius - got to assume the worse, it's gonna fuck the rocket.
10. Kai - we can check the device, see if it can transmit. Can it actually send info, or just gather info.
11. Aswon - we can do some testing, we have storage and cables, we can just set it up and test it. Also - we could be the decoys, they get a laser ping and send goons after us, while the "real" team do the job.
12. Tads - and we need to find out about medical expenses. Team snigger. Aswon - and if it's probe race, it's prestige too, that'll REALLY get us on his shit list. Kai - can we check on SN on device, maybe find out something about it. Aswon - dangerous, could lead back to us. Maybe we should put demo on it so we can blow it if we have to abandon it.
13. Hunter thinks about maths and dwell time and trig.
14. Tads - suggestion to fly up and around the north, penetrate outer perimeter and then stop outside the inner, get more time for foot penetration
15. Team talk about where to enter, look at maps, Hunter navigation check. Look at maps, generally agree to enter from the north.
16. Aswon - if there is rocket debris from previous launches, improvised shelters to be giving us cover.
17. Hunter thinking about range and dwell, Marius suggest footage will be on the matrix for the vehicle launching less sensitive payloads.
18. Aswon - if we're at max distance, do you have the reflexes/aim to keep the laser on target?
19. Kai - do we know the weather for the next few days? No. Check - steady for next few days, n-nw winds, dry, cold.
20. Fly north to test /look at the LTD. Break it out, discover extra actuators and computer support.
21. Are you in final position? Y/N
22. Are you performing systems test? Y/N - Y
23. Slew and yaw, warning test for GPS. Confirm location.
24. Hunter confirms it's more than fast enough to track.
25. Try and examine for it holding / storing / supplying data - perception checks. Spot that it's been doctored with, well fabricated.
26. Aswon plugs in data cartridge - do you wish to output... downloads, then analyse. Massive amount of data, dwell time, angular, flex, vibration, roll, inclination, etc
27. Pack back up and takeoff, head around to the north.
28. Checks batteries and weight, used 1%. Tads - why so many batteries then? Aswon, don't know. But it's a bit weird. But maybe in case launch gets delayed.
29. Aswon - after tads suggest check orientation, works out how to check pad and tower orientation. Work out that they need to be on the NW side of the pad.
30. Take off again, fly north, Marius picks up the sensor bulge of the horde. Team heading north, they are heading ne at 40-50knts. Check in case they're being flanked, but no. Tads offers to recon for more info. Marius rotorcraft check - spot a-b line
31. Tads - the wolf tribe were ground based, could this horde be air based? Team land, then tads does a recon, good roll.
32. Kai - could we blag to go along with them? Marius, maybe, but drinking fuel in vtol mode.
33. Mad max style small town / large village in the sky, ramshackle,
34. Aswon - we should assume they have a deal / pay fealty to SK and avoid. Maybe make friends later. But not now.
35. Tads - check for cannibalism first. Marius - avoid fucking with the locals. Hunter - it's an intercept route with the new silk road.
36. Aswon - can we just burn past? Tads - or go around the other way. Marius EW check, NOTE flying should be able to get through. Handling check - absolutely fine, get around to 25km north of site and land. Get cammo nets up. Move forward and spot the fence.
37. Aswon checks demo - minefields? Almost certainly not, rocket debris and wildlife. No animals visible, BGC 4. Check survival, some life - hare/rabbit/fox maybe?
38. Kai - astral check? They check, get good rolls - nothing here. Nothing to alarm. No sign of any spirits.
39. Check with Marius - would the security forces be armoured up and wear helmets? Out here, yes. Team move in a bit. SK background roll for Marius - info on SF, mix of skills. Remembers carrying something that matches the description. Aswon - probably live at the airfield and move to the pad on the launch day.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 253 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
One player down again this week – this time it was Hunter, sent to Jersey with his work.
I’d devised a suitable sensor net for the cosmodrome, based on the size and the environment, and had given it a number of dice that should provide a challenge – but not be insurmountable. The team spotted it, analysed it and then went WAAAAY out on left field to come up with a….novel…. solution.

Who am I to argue with lunacy? So, off they went, playing piggyback rides and spending several hours to cross 400m of open terrain. I guess “if it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid” applies here. It did however cost Shimazu 5 rerolls on just this one section, along with another two from Hunter and Aswon – but because of that the sensor net didn’t get a sniff of them on the way in.

One random encounter with an empty animal burrow to keep them wondering, and then they spotted a tower and decided to head up to it. I’d actually mapped out all of the pads at the Cosmodrome, and noted that some have had bad accidents – this one wasn’t actually one of them, but I decided to put in a pad-fire that had caused some deaths and a bit of warping on the top level, both as some background flavour, and also as a possible tactical use later – if they went up there and hid in it, with all their powers turned off, then they’re pretty much immune to being spotted by mages, spirits or being tracked or detected by magic. Let’s see if they figure that out…

Otherwise the run went pretty much as expected, and next week I think we’ll be able to burn through the 24 hours of laying low and doing observations pretty quickly, then get to the launch countdown and the main event – and wait for the fireworks.

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Sunday 20/3/2061, Location: 46.18711, 63.07211 Time 15:00
2. 1.5km from fence. BGC 4, team discuss hardness of ground, making scrapes, cover with cammo net.
3. Aswon - wait to cover the ground to the fence after dark. Expect sensors, but it's a big perimeter, if we blow up the rocket, they will jam - but otherwise they definitely won't, would interfere with their ability to control.
4. Marius - if it does blow up, I don't fancy our chances of getting out.... if it doesn't, we just walk out.
5. Kai - I don't think it will have a transmitter, so we have to walk out, trust in the Johnson that they actually want the data, unless the Johnson is being burnt as well, I think they would have told them it was a suicide mission in case they wanted to get rid of a team.
6. Aswon - what if we get discovered, and can't take them out quietly? Marius - just leg it. Aswon - not over 8-10km of open ground, we'll get caught for sure. If need be, we look for anywhere where the BGC is less than it is here, and Tads digs us a hole and we hide - for days if need be.
7. Tads - is it likely to be less near where people are living? Aswon - perhaps. Some of the bgc is the lack of life, and life makes more mana - but some of it is toxics and pollution. Thinking this is our plan if we get tagged by security or something. Lone maintenance worker - maybe we just put up with the BGC and deal with the alter memory drain.
8. Aswon - save a bullet for you Marius? Marius - ask me again when we're closer. Not keen. Aswon - well decide, just in case, if we see you being dragged off.
9. Aswon SUT roll, maybe move in on the fence to make spotting stuff easier. Spot the microphone line and freeze, about 500m inside the outer fence.
10. Spot the patrol vehicle doing 40kph from W to E, getting good air. Aswon - we potentially have a new evac strategy. Crawls back, gets back to group about 16:00
11. Aswon - how secure are they likely to be? Marius - top end, but practical. Tech heavy, but cost/benefit analysis.
12. Check electronics + SK + security systems. Details on system, good roll. Thinking about Shimazu giving piggybacks, being stealthy, walking without rhythm, listening for metallic noises, check rucksacks for rattle, bind cloth around boots etc. Aswon - wind might stop this. Hunter - many point sources, noise cancelling. Tads - get people together to simulate a 4 person beast. Aswon - good call, but tricky. And have to remember it on the way out otherwise we draw a line showing exactly which way we're heading.
13. Aswon - maybe get Marius piggybacked to the device to try and spike it, they can't have anti-tamper worth anything, not when buying thousands and thousands of them.
14. Tads - how about going to the bird and flying in. Aswon - fake engine trouble and have Kai blag us a way in? Marius - I'm not convinced. Kai - neither am I!
15. Aswon - do you think they sell tickets to the launch, with observation stands? Dress up the LTD as a sick child... team... nahhhh.
16. Team go with the piggyback plan, having to go about 200m either side of the microphone line. Hunter thinks mics would have 100+ range, to allow 3 sources and triangulation.
17. Hunter - not happy losing gear / being carried - suggest Shimazu carry his gear.
18. Hunter and Shimazu sneak in first, both get 11s on stealth, sensor net 7s - make it, shallow defile. Shimazu back, gets Kai, slightly different route. RR, 2nd RR, burn one karma and RR - get an 11.
19. Marius next - RR and then an 11. Tads next - RR, 9 - ok. Aswon going self - 9, RR 11 - all good.
20. Aswon - get Shimazu to lay down in the defile and cool off, rest of team spread out a bit.
21. Spot the first pad on the horizon, occluding stars. Team discuss using that as a spotting point to their own target. Check map - it's about 9km away, right side for lasing. About 8km from current position
22. Just taking first steps, dune buggy appears, team drops. IR headlights, still motoring, don't spot the team - just. About 5 hours since the last patrol - set a reminder for 5 hour cycles.
23. Head for pad 171, find an abandoned den for something wolverine sized, Shimazu combat rolls out of the way. Abandoned, paracritter role - maybe badger sized.
24. Get near the pad, description, fence about 200m out, chain link, rusty barbed wire. Examine, abandoned for months, check it out. Still toxic, but manageable for a few days, take some precautions. Check out the area for Tads digging. Spot the warp at the top of the tower. Investigate - find memorial for the pad-fire, long list of names. Dated about 30 years ago, but no lairing creatures. Pad has been used since the disaster. But not used for a long time. Tads digs a hole - hard work.
25. T minus 27 hours or so...

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 254 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
The team were in position in the abandoned launch tower, had left the mana warp area well alone and had not been spotted on the way in, or while setting up their camp – though burning a copious number of re-rolls and some careful planning. And I’m all about actions having consequences, and not making stuff happen “just because” wherever possible (unless it’s a truly critical plot point), so they get a pass – a full day of boredom and nothing happening, and no corporate investigation or response.
I’d written up the final activation sequence beforehand, making sure I had the text ready to copy and paste into Discord and used it as an interactive bit of activity for Marius – it also meant I could listen in on their conversation and make notes, but drop in my next line of dialogue at appropriate time points – whether the team was ready or not.

It was very interesting listening to the discussions about *when* to activate the sequence, with Aswon arguing for last minute, because they’d already calibrated the device, while Kai – normally mr “seat of my pants make it up as we go along” was the once arguing to take the time and do it early, because otherwise it would blow the whole mission. It was a real change of dynamic, and with my pre-knowledge of how long it would take to set up and do the diagnostics, I was trying VERY hard not to give the game away or say something.
Fortunately for the team, they listened to Kai and left enough time to do the checks, working through. I could see a bunch of reactions when power pack five showed as faulty, with them wondering if this was the “last minute glitch” that would require heroic electronics tests with them needing lots of successes to get the base time down../ then to relax when at the end of the sequence it went “all fine thanks, kk bye”

Always good to keep them guessing, and it’s nice to see them actually being relieved rather than very blasé about the whole thing.

When the rocket exploded, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone – not even the ever optimistic Tads, so there was a degree of urgency to getting away. That all changed when I described the escape pod arcing in their general direction, and estimated to land about 800m away from them. Aswon’s player looked directly into the camera and said “Really Kren? REALLY? For fucks sake… ok – run FASTER then!” and then it turned into a bit of a scramble as I was describing the scene, trying to keep things short and punch, and making sure everyone only got a few words in or a short run – almost like we were in combat time, but without having to roll initiative or get into the book-keeping side of things. Hopefully it gave a sense of drama or pressure to the players.
Having them decide to hide down in the depression under the launch pad was not what I expected them to do, so it was time for the random roll – and they lucked out with a 6, so I gave them the smoking hole – I figured that those oppressed citizens of the Soviet Union back in the 60s would probably have wanted to skive off for a craft cig just as much as modern workers, and they could have dug a hole like this without their commissar noticing or finding out.
Tads suggested they check out the cigarette packages from my description, and I realised that if they *were* the original diggers packs of smokes, they would be just over 100 years old – and that’s almost certainly going to make them vintage / rare and worth something – so she’ll be getting a karma point for that at the end of this run!

Then, once they were safely tucked away, they decided to risk a shape-earth spell (or rather Tads agreed to run the risk once asked) and they walled themselves in to avoid detection. That meant that they were all safe and sound, but missed out on some VITAL information.
You see – it *was* a manned mission (hence the escape pod) but included with the men was also some new missiles and offensive systems that they were also taking up to put on their probe. When the pod crash landed, these were going to be damaged and highly unstable. The surviving crew would spot them realise they could blow at any moment and decide to use them rather than run that risk, look around and spot the players hiding place as a good target point and fire off some MAW equivalent missiles at them – completely ignorant of the players presence. Of course it would have been dodge and soak rolls all round, and potentially some nasty wounds for them to deal with, that would have then made the exfiltration much harder.
However, the players missed all this – so all they *heard* was multiple missile strikes hitting their tower. From that limited information, they drew the somewhat logical, but entirely wrong conclusion that they’d been spotted or left evidence somehow and that a helicopter gunship was now strafing the position they’d just abandoned, and that SK was on to them.
Time to practice that poker face again!

It remains to be seen how that will affect their exfiltration plans from the site and what they think was going on. It also means they can’t tell their employer what kind of weapons SK were launching into space to deal with the OTHER probe missions either. C’est la vie!
Still, they managed to get away with things quite well, a bit of light damage and light stun, which will soon disappear – mostly by being very careful and taking a good while to plan, and coming up with some novel solutions to the problems. Let’s see how they do on the way out, and where they intend to go next.

And more importantly – what they spend the pay on – especially as they *STILL* don’t know how much they’re being paid for this one! How a team can be this careful and this dumb all at the same time amazes me sometimes…

And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Sunday 21/3/2061, Location: 46.10413, 63.00804 Time 07:30
2. Set up on level 4 of Baikonur Pad 171, two levels below the "fire" nexus.
3. Aswon on watch while rest of team sleep. Advises to do minimal effort, conserve food and water. Limit exposure. Tads doesn't summon spirits.
4. Train arrives 10:00, glacially slow installation. Aswon takes some snaps. Thinks - checks local gate - secure and locked.
5. Sees APCs about 1km out.
6. When team wakes up, Marius listens - double checks, Passive only - no chance of emmisions. Hears message saying airspace is closed on repeating loop.
7. Tads thinks about putting up a masking ward - the team has enough mojo to overcome the BGC, may help against any critters. But would leave evidence, clean spot. Decide not to in the end.
8. News check items
9. March 19: A power outage strikes Seattle. It takes forty-eight hours before service is initially restored and brownouts plague the metroplex for weeks afterward.
10. March 21: The Corporate Court founds the Grid Overwatch Division as a cross-jurisdictional Matrix law enforcement division.
11. Night falls, searchlights, continued patrols. Bitterly cold, Aswon suggests one level down, leave the designator as a "lookout post". Survival check. Rotate people from the side on the wind into the middle. Lots of stars visible, all twinkle.
12. Get to dawn, no issues, Aswon starts getting people packed, checking for debris, scuff marks, any evidence.
13. Some news about probe race, science shows, crazy counterpunch
14. Get to 9:15 am, activity at the tower, pixels moving. Aswon trying to see if it's a manned launch - tries to spot, can't make out detail.
15. 9:45 - alarm klaxxon drifts over. Spot APC coming their way. Perception checks all round, Aswon worried, Tads sees other APCs in other directions, fanning out.
16. Jet overflight, 3km altitude, 3km separation, from N to S, Marius electronics check - massive flux and full sweep.
17. Aswon checks the LTDs. T minus 15
18. [ARE YOU PERFORMING A SYSTEMS TEST? KEY 1 FOR YES, 2 FOR NO]
19. Talk about doing it just as the engines start - no, might have a test routine. Marius blocks the emitter, just in case. Note the current bearing for the calibration test routine.
20. Kai - don't we need to do the systems test, so we don't fail the mission
21. [PHYSICAL CALIBRATION COMPLETE. DISABLE ANY JAMMING FOR GPS SIGNAL LOCK. SYSTEM TEST WILL TAKE 15 SECONDS]
22. [SEEKING SATELLITE. SATELLITE 1 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
23. [SEEKING SATELLITE. SATELLITE 2 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
24. [SEEKING SATELLITE. SATELLITE 3 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
25. [SEEKING SATELLITE. SATELLITE 4 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
26. [TIME UPDATE COMPLETE. DRIFT COMPENSATION FACTOR COMPLETE. ALTITUDE CORRECTION COMPLETE. JITTER COMPENSATION COMPLETE.]
27. [LOCATION ACQUIRED 46.1041334, 63.0080462. CHECK LOCATION ACCURACY IS ACCURATE. KEY 1 FOR YES, 2 FOR NO]
28. Team waiting impatiently... Hunter and Marius check and confirm
29. [GPS SYSTEM TEST COMPLETE.]
30. [ATTACH ALL BATTERY MODULES. KEY 1 WHEN COMPLETE]
31. [CHECKING CHARGE LEVELS.]
32. [CELL 1...97% CAPACITY. CELL 1 ONLINE]
33. Tads - what would it do that it needs that much power?
34. [CELL 2...100% CAPACITY. CELL 2 ONLINE]
35. Aswon For the laser, 9k, long way in atmos
36. [CELL 3...100% CAPACITY. CELL 3 ONLINE]
37. Aswon, with the scatter and amount of fuel and stuff in the air
38. [CELL 4...100% CAPACITY. CELL 4 ONLINE]
39. Marius - depends on the type of laser and stuff as well
40. [CELL 5...ERROR READING CELL LEVELS RETRYING... ERROR. CELL 5 OFFLINE]
41. Marius - shit, checking.
42. [CELL 6...100% CAPACITY. CELL 6 ONLINE]
43. [CELL 7...100% CAPACITY. CELL 7 ONLINE]
44. Cell 5 has plenty of volts, but no amps - must be a manufacturing downside.
45. [CELL TEST COMPLETE. POWER LEVELS EXCEED REQUIRED THRESHOLDS.]
46. [CONNECT EXTERNAL DATA STORAGE UNITS]
47. [I/O DEVICE FOUND. FORMATTING STORAGE. FORMAT COMPLETE.]
48. [ARE YOU READY TO ENGAGE FINAL SEQUENCE? KEY 1 FOR YES, 2 FOR NO]
49. Marius - is this lighting up the target? Aswon, I guess so... Marius - I shall have to wait then! Check -
50. [LASER ACQUISITION MODE. PREPARING LOW INTENSITY SPOTTING BEAM. KEY 1 WHEN READY]
51. Aswon verifies aim, one tiny sliver off.
52. Tads - can we leave the batteries?
53. Aswon - not worried about pollution, given the area - am worried about evidence.
54. Tads - can hoof them off the side if we're spotted, use them as missiles if nothing else.
55. Double check the APCs - all stopped half way between towers, about 5km out.
56. 3 mins to go.Aswon adjusts position using previous co-ords.
57. [DETACHING KEYPAD. ENSURE ALL PERSONNEL REMAIN >1M FROM EQUIPMENT. KEEP VIBRATIONS TO MINIMUM. DO NOT STARE AT EMITTER]
58. Team step back apart from Marius.
59. [ADJUST LASER TARGET TO MATCH MISSION PARAMETERS. KEY 1 WHEN COMPLETE]
60. [TARGET IDENTIFIED. PATTERN RECOGNITION MATCHED - TARGET IS VALID. RANGE IS 9116.45983M]
61. [AWAITING FINAL COUNTDOWN. KEY 9 WHEN LAUNCH KLAXON IS HEARD]
62. /play 31580
63. /stop
64. [FINAL SEQUENCE MODE. KEY * WHEN MAIN ENGINE IGNITION IS SEEN]
65. [GATHERING TELEMETRY]
66. [.]
67. [..]
68. [...]
69. [HARMONIC VARIANCE DETECTED. TARGET WILL REACH MAX=Q IN 5]
70. [4]
71. [3]
72. [2]
73. [FIRING]
74. [1]
75. Team spotting
76. [POWER CELLS DEPLETED]
77. [TELEMETRY GATHERING COMPLETE. PLEASE KEY IN THE NUMBER OF MINUTES FOR SELF-DESTRUCT CHARGE]
78. M: How long do we need?
79. T: take it down and put it in the hole I dug!
80. A: do 15 mins, then put it in the hole
81. Two large cracks from the rocket, very loud. Top of boosters flame out. Hovering. Spinning wildly.
82. Team heading down the stairs as quickly as possible.
83. Down two levels, top of rocket launching in parabolic arc towards the team. Will land about 800-1000m from team.
84. Main rocket body explodes 5kt explosion. 4S soaks. Tads takes a light, Kai takes a light. Equipment shredded, on the spacecraft one parachute drops, others shredded, drops at much faster velocity.
85. Get under the launch pad and hide, find the smoking shelter. Tads enquires about cigarette packs - antique value. Kai examines - 100 years old, good spot.
86. Hunker down, Aswon suggest trying to block off the front a bit. Survival checks, build two holes in for air circulation.
87. Spell goes off, but drain is nasty, takes a long time.
88. Explosion at 8 minutes. Aswon perception - definitely a missile attack. Then another hits 20 seconds later. Then 1:40 another crump as the LTD goes off. Demo check for Aswon - cell 5 was full of C12...
89. Chopper, t-bird, then APCs, t-bird goes. Crews looking for isotopes. Hunter thinks - isotope for either science gear or fuel cell.
90. Tads moderately stunned, about 45 mins of rest needed.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 255 is now published, and added onto book 9.

Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
The team were clearly confused to start the session off, with Aswon raising his thoughts and the team having a good old chin-wag about what they thought might have been going on. I’ve cut this down a chunk, as there was lots of bank and forth, wild assed guesses and speculation, but none of it was either a) character defining or building or b) actually added to the story in any meaningful way and c) trying to catch the nuance and details of dialogue in note form mid-game and keep track of other stuff is pretty tough. Where it’s important RP, I try harder – but when it’s just the team chewing the fat with little information, it’s not worth the effort.

So, after a while we got to dusk, and they set off on their escape route. I sent the SK goons back to base for at least the first night as I really didn’t want to have the players living in a hole and shitting into plastic bags for 4 days straight while they went over the terrain with a fine tooth comb – it would have been more than a little boring, and again doesn’t serve the plot or story in any way. So – daytime operations only for them, and a chance for the players to escape. After all – I knew what was going to crop up in their path!
They make good time on the way out, and I ask one of the players for the “random travel encounter roll”, then look down at the chart and go all quiet for a minute, before looking back up and saying “oh. Oh dear.” That makes them all sit up and pay attention, as I share out my screen and put out two columns of three circles on a powerpoint slide, each with the first letter of their names in, just to confirm the marching order and positions. Then I slap down a picture of some kind of armoured spiny lizard thing I found on t’interwebs, that takes up most of the screen, dwarfing the players. Two of them are right over the top, and we roll for surprise – and unfortunately most of them are!

Into combat time we go, and Aswon gets to roll his paracritters, gets a good roll and is told it’s a juggernaut – of some kind or variant, but with a few visible differences from what he knows from other types.
Straight away Aswon is shaking his head in despair – as a long time GM he knows that a Juggernaut is going to be tough for the weapons and abilities on hand at the best of times. In a BGC 4 area, that’s nastier – and with the “it’s a variant of some kind” he just *knows* I’ve sprinkled in some mutations or new powers to keep things interesting and him and Marius guessing.

The fight kicks off, hampered by 2/3 of the team not having offensive first actions due to being surprised, and the Juggernaut ‘Sandy’ goes off trying to munch a few people, leading to some frantic melee rolls and declarations of “full defence” mode where possible. The team manage to get through without injury – but also without causing any injury, and start to engage, but keep finding their weapons just can’t get through the armour and body combo. Aswon manages to stab it into the mouth, and I go with a much lower armour rating for the attack – it is *inside* after all, and he manages to get some damage in, then Shimazu has to go all out on an attack – activating his improved strength (the drain for which is coming next session), and then throwing everything he has into the attack, including multiple re-rolls, and manages to get high enough with his damage to overcome the armour and actually hurt it – at which point it starts to leg it.

Everyone is relieved – especially Aswon – when Shimazu starts to give chase, wanting to finish it off. There were multiple face-palms all around and cries of dismay – but he is resolute and tries once more. But, without the combat pool for the next attack, he can’t get a high enough damage roll and it gets soaked – and I figure as the Jugger is disengaging anyway, it’s time to hit them with the third type of attack, which they haven’t seen yet.

Shimazu suddenly realises that a 6D sonic attack (so no armour) could seriously mess with his magic, and has to blow yet more karma on taking it down to a serious, meaning that the guy they are relying on to get them over the microphone network on the way out is pretty much out of re-rolls now, and seriously stunned.

Oh no. 😊


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Monday 22/3/2061, Location: 46.05769, 63.03197 Time 11:30
2. 1 hour after the explosion. Sound of vehicles above them still there, but less frequent and close. Tads has healed her stun.
3. Listening in on the noise - looking for fragments and shrapnel.
4. Aswon - so *what* were the missiles about? There was definitely missile whoosh-bangs. Marius exports audio record from his cyber-ears, gives to Hunter to analyse. Confirm - sounds like a MAW.
5. Aswon - maybe that was someone *else* - another team? Someone hired to wipe us out? But we have their data... Sato?
6. Tads - he's the middle man, he doesn't want the data, or us dead. He wants it for someone else
7. Or shimazu needs to prepare for Sato being dead - he wouldn't be a willing particpant for this.
8. Hunter - he was bessie mates, right?
9. Aswon - yeah - either massive duress, or he's dead, or he's on the run or something.
10. Tads - on a side note, keep all the shredded bits of kit to fix later. Aswon - and for not leaving evidence!
11. Marius - human nature to boggle when shit goes wrong, maybe they could get away with rocket attack.
12. Aswon - maybe they just don't want the data, just the rocket down. Hunter - doh, really? Much sarcasm
13. Kai does biotech on Tads, gets rid of the light wound.
14. Aswon asks Hunter to analyse the fragments.Heat treated rocket components, skin, fairly clean from being in the explosion, not too toxic.
15. Kai - we want to look for this other team, if there is one - though they should have trouble getting out as well.
16. Hunter - works out that missile trace came from the direction of the escape pod.
17. Aswon - ahh, maybe the other team were trying to take out or destroy the escape pod. Maybe kill the crew, if it was manned. Maybe they just missed the pod and it overflew into the tower. We need to get out and try to contact Sato - if he's still alive.
18. Shimazu - didn't that other team have a rocket - the ones we got the equipment from? Aswon, maybe, but not two rockets in quick succession, surely.
19. Kai - they think we're dead though, probably. Aswon - we should try to keep people thinking that.
20. Tads - think about ward/water/food. Aswon - only when we need to, we've got days yet. Cross that bridge when we need to.
21. Wait about 6 hours, search winds down as it gets dark. Aswon asks Marius to check for drones. Can't hear anything. Aswon asks Kai when he wants to go? Kai - lets go now, before they analyse too much footage. Tads - go as far as we can over the pad to avoid a trail. Think about position - 10km to fence, another 10 to bird. Slightly west to avoid the same route back as in.
22. Tads - plans for the sensor net? Aswon - like what? T-animal noises? A-I'm not sure...
23. Pad lit up like a xmas tree, tent over the escape pod all lit up, spot the aircraft way up high orbiting. Marius - slow moving, keep electronics signature low, mask like a biological, Hunter does nav check, head out, bitterly cold, keep moving.
24. Head out over the desert - 75% to fence, reaction checks. Tads+Aswon 2, Marius +shimazu 1, Hunter+Kai 0. Monster 2
25. Aswon critters check - good roll, oh shit...
26. Shimazu 21 11 1
27. Hunter 17 7 0
28. Marius 16 6 0
29. Tads 16 6 0
30. Aswon 15 5 0
31. Kai 13 3
32. Sandy 9 -
33.
34. Shimazu backs off with traceless walk, Aswon sprints and jumps to grab tads, Marius runs away, Tads tries to land safely, Hunter, moves away, Kai tries to get off right and back, Sandy goes to bite Marius - Marius does full dodge and wins, backs away, Claw on Hunter, he wins too and backs off.
35. 2nd pass, Shimazu charges in as fast as he can, Aswon throws Tads out of the way, grabs spear and looks for a weak spot. Marius tries to GTFA, runs fast. Tads - back off, thinks about spells, delays then prepares slingshot. Hunter GTFA as well, Kai backs off and stays out of sight line, Sandy turns to attack Shimazu. Shimazu 14 hits with centering, Sandy gets 5, beats by 9. Soaked. Shimazu last action of the phase. Disengage and great leap towards throat.
36.
37. 2nd combat round, Shimazu tries to slide under the neck and tries echo location to look for less dense spots. Gets about 1m under. Hunter called shot eye - on 8s, 2 hits+rr=6 - soaked, but bellows in pain. Marius continues to run. Tads backs away. Aswon called shot for a weak spot, gets 1,rr, buys 1, 10L , soaked. Kai tries taser - 5 successes, 10D, then 2nd shot, 3. Saves damage, takes +4 from taser for a round. Sandy turns to bite Aswon, Aswon beats it by 10, but soaked
38. Shimazu shouts to stop it moving, slides to underbelly. Hunter standing still, trying not to be seen and aim with launcher. Marius moves to side to get out of LOS and puts hunter between him and it. Tads - called shot with slingshot to eye - misses. Aswon spots fibrillation, shouts to kai to hit it again. Stabs. Does M damage to inside mouth - fear power. Aswon backs off. Kai shoots again - two more hits.
39. Shimazu - attribute boost Str, 9 combat turns of Str 12, called shot soft underbelly, 22 dice-1 success. RR 4 in total.2nd RR, 6 total. Buys 2 for 8. 15m base 17D hit. It takes an S. It turns and legs it.
40. Shimazu called shot on the tail as it legs it, buys successes to win by 1, base 15m - it has to RR but soaks. Tail splits and sonic slap.
41. Team head north, leaving it to run NEE

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 256 is now published, and added onto book 9.


Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Oh boy – a fun one for me this week! But I’m getting ahead of myself… so – we ended up last week with them facing off against a Sand Juggernaut, and managing to do enough damage to it with called shots to actually drive it away – with not having taken too much damage in return. Very definitely a win for the team, given the size and power of it!

They did realise that with Shimazu down to his last two re-rolls, AND having a serious stun, that crossing the sensor net was going to be a lot more difficult on the way out than on the way in, and started to discuss contingencies. Throw in the complication of an AWACS above them, and they were feeling a bit miserable and up against it – exactly as they should feel when playing in Saeder-Krupp’s back yard in my view!

They got the first two people ready to go, and the sensors got a hit – but just one – on Marius, so they sent a unit to investigate. And then of course, Marius managed to get a sucky stealth roll, and it didn’t get better even after a re-roll, taking a second re-roll at double cost to get a score that wasn’t awful.

So, they managed to get away with that, and after nosing around, the patrol vehicle headed away, declaring it a “false alarm”. Then they got to see the t-bird from the elite unit take out the Sand Juggernaut as it blundered into and set off the alarms further east – and let me show the players the kind of firepower they would be up against if they DID get discovered, and just how bad that would be. They did seize the moment though and use the sounds of the jet hammering back and forth over the sensor line and the long ripples of gunfire as cover while the rest of the team got over the sensors as quickly as they could – which seemed like a really good idea, and with the stealth rolls they all managed as well, very effective! So – with that problem down, they just had a 10km jog back to the aircraft, and to get away.

So, of course, it’s time to “enhance their role-play experience” AKA make life interesting for them – and I described how they suddenly turn around and find Aswon face down in the dirt. Jez (Aswon) gives me a quizzical look, as he’s not been asked to soak anything, then spots that I’ve sent him a DM, and settles back to read. This is the “vision” that he received – as he didn’t explain much in-character to the rest of the team, given the situation. I’m not sure he will unless asked directly – so will have to see how that goes.

***Aswon - dream sequence***
You open your eyes to see Urwan the elder, sitting at the head of the circle. Around him the tribe sit quietly, legs crossed, swaying back and forth in time to the beat. He wears a large ceremonial mask, carved with the crossed spears of a Hunter, a carving of Lion, the rising sun and a rain cloud, bringing together the disparate members of the tribe. As the drummer finishes his piece, Urwan lifts his mask, but instead of his face, you see Cukwu the creator. His gaze pierces into you, then he gestures to the drummer. When you turn your head to face him, he too lifts his mask, revealing Amadioh the god of thunder. He raised his drumsticks to beat upon the ekwo, but instead of the standard drumming noise, a massive thundering noise blasts your ears - it's the *second* loudest thing you've heard this year. A sudden shock overcomes you as you hear the noise and realise its one you heard only a day ago - the sound of a rocket taking off.
Surroundings suddenly blur around you as you find yourself running down a track at an impossible speed. Barely glimpsed on either side of you are members of your tribe, your neighbouring tribes, other Igbo tribes. The path climbs and winds, and you find yourself staring at the Mountain of Death. With a suddenness that jars you the motion stops and the world ripples around you as time returns to normal. Gazing up at the peak, huge explosions rip through the mountain top, blowing gigatons of earth high into the sky. Ala, the spirit of the earth wails and sobs to your left, while Idemili the water goddess is striken to your right, polluted as her waters are filled with choking earth and pollution.
Atop the flattened peak, a mighty tower rises, ghostly now but becoming more and more substantial, while an army of labourers carry materials up the winding path to the summit, building the metal monster.
Around you the jungle dies and withers, the animals fading away as their home is destroyed by rails and roads, the animals fading away as their spirits weaken and diminish. The vision blurs again, and once more you find yourself back at the tribal circle, sitting amongst the centre of the circle, with concentric rings of your people reaching in to touch you, all chanting the same thing - Bia N'ulo! BIA N'ULO!.... "come home"...

Jez being a good egg nods in understanding, accepts the plot stick upside the head and then immediately runs with it and embraces it as an important character moment for him, presenting the team with the fact that HE is going home, with or without them, but he won’t judge them if he has to go alone. As they’re taking off (just – with the piloting roll that Marius made, they could well have looked like they were rolling across the ground, he was flying that low) they’re already looking at the situation and planning how to get to Nigeria and working out the logistics and costs. So – mission accomplished on that one by the looks of things.

I give them a few minutes to discuss, and some IC team to clear the previous mission area and get back over “neutral” ground, then pull out the second plot stick and twat Lee (Marius) upside the head with it, relaying a frantic message from Nadia about the sick baby. Now the pilot is determined to get him, and he makes it clear that this is what’s gonna happen first, regardless of who want to go to Nigeria. So, increasing speed, they head back and arrange a meet out in the wilds to avoid tracking anything back home and discover Nadia and a very sick baby, and begin to deal with the situation. I’d had a chat with a doctor friend of mine about the illness – wanting something that would be dangerous and COULD have been deadly if left untreated, but that would be very easy to treat and recover from – the main thing I needed was for the medical people in the team to have a good reason to run a full set of diagnostics on the baby.

Which they did.

*** big cheesy grin***

Nadia got pregnant back in episode 92, when the team stopped in Sochi and Marius ended up going out for a massive bender with her and some friends. They got completely shit-faced and rocked back up the following morning with no memory of the night before due to drink/drugs, and with throbbing hangovers that made the next day “interesting” for them.

In episode 237 I told them that I’d randomly generated eveyones blood groups, as they were about to head out into the wilderness, and it was a just in case anyone needed a blood transfusion – as the medics on the team were more than competent enough not to make mistakes about who could have who’s blood etc. That caused a few raised eyebrows, but when nothing came of it, I’m pretty sure it went out of their minds as they had other things to think about. I even added the blood group generator to my tracker:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=101582...127696150847352
I spent a bit of time on this trying to make sure the science worked, and checking the distribution – as Ali (Tads) has a biology degree, and if it wasn’t right I *knew* I’d get moaned at!

And now in episode 256 the team doctor finally gets to see that the blood type of the baby indicates that Marius *CANNOT* be the father. *cue blinking and looking at me silent in the webcam after I sent a DM to him telling him this*.

Then I get back a message via return:
:open-mouth-emoticon:
Holy Shit
Saying nothing.
Hooooooooly shit!

It remains to be seen if he WILL ever reveal this to Marius. Or if something else will happen that might give the game away. Or if Marius would actually care at all – I *suspect* that he’d approach it as shit that’s happened, he has to deal with it, Nadia is his wife now, and just move on. But hey, I’m not the only one that can throw curveballs – and it might be the start of a one man crusade to find the dad and deal with it. And of course, Marius having a “photographic memory”, if there’s anyone that would remember exactly who he went out with that evening before they got trashed, it’s gonna be him!

But, I’m hoping that the player really enjoyed this sudden plot reveal and the knowledge that they now have a REALLY important secret about one of the other characters and could make life really interesting for them!

Anyway, with the cosmodrome behind them, here are the stats I used for various encounters:
First of all the perimeter fence-
Single wire fence, 1m high poles, signs saying SK property, entry prohibited, punishable by death - cheapest way to demark area possible
Beyond is a SOSUS line, running around the perimeter. Microphones every 50m, capturing engine noise/footsteps/overhead engine noise. Computer working out speed/distance/altitude using trig. 204km boundary, 4080 units. There is a bunker with power/processing/subnets every 2km, also containing R2 medkit, some water, distress flares, 4 clips reg rifle ammo and an emergency phone, protected by a R4 lock with AT1.
Sensors give an effective swarm detection rating of 7 for any non-silent approach.

This was backed up by
Standard patrols
4 man patrols, HK416 battle rifles, 9M, SA,BF,FA, smartlink 2, 40 round clips. Melee 5, Rifles 5, 1 X SUT 5, 1 X medic 5, 1 X Nav 5+Heavy 5, 1 X Radio+Demo 5.
Riding a VW Sandstorm (P165R3) with HK HK21 MMG on ring mount
Will drive at 40kph as standard, covering a half perimeter in 2.5 hours, then stopping for 2.5 hours as "backup" while a tag team drives the other half.Repeat again, to mark one shift.

And on call from the local airport was the elite unit:
LAV-62A1 light t-bird Handle 4, Speed 250/850, Accel 30, Body 7, Armour 20, Sig 2, Auto 3, Pilot 2, Sensor 7, Cargo 30, Load 750, Seating 5, Entry 2 (pilots door, rear ramp) Fuel Jet 7,500L, Econ 0.06km/l, L/T VSTOL, Chass T-bird
ECM 3, ECCM3, RAM2, Thermal Baffles 2, Gas EnviroSeal, Light Launch control, 2 missile launchers, Medium nose turret (1CF ammo bin)
2 X 4 Rhienmetal Hetzer-B (Ballista Mk 2) missiles, Int 6, Damage 14D (AV), -7/m blast, 2d6 scatter
1 X HK Franz-autocannon (Ares Vigilant) - SS/FA, 6 round burst, 18D, belt fed
4 elite troops, R7 skills,
1 X sniper (HK MSG54A3, 14D, 5 rounds, SA), 1 rifleman (HK416 battle rifles, 9M, SA,BF,FA, smartlink 2, 40 round clips), 1 gunner (MMG on ring+SMG (MP5), 1 comms/demo/nav (shotgun/machine pistol)

And finally the sand juggernaut was statted as:
Sand-jugger - 20m long,
B15, Q4, S16, C1, I1/3, W9, E7, R4, CP 8, Armour 14, Init 2d6+4
Enhanced quickness (14D6 turns, once per day), Hardened armour (counts as vehicle), enhanced senses (hearing. motion sense), Fear, immunity to cold/fire/pathogens/posions
Attacks
8D Bite, inflicts a str 8 acid attack on armour/clothing if successful.
12M claw, with a body check vs 10s for knockdown/back
8S tail slap, does a 6D (stun) sonic slap on the split attack.


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Wednesday 23/3/2061, Location: 46.13499, 63.04016 Time 00:47
2. Aswon - merc roll and SUT. Should we hunker down or run? Run and move away from loci, get away from SK strongpoint.
3. Shimazu test for SS - 15 mins rest.
4. Paracritters roll - Juggernaut likely a solo, large range, likely to have been encountered by SK before. Team discuss and go stealthy, pushing on. Reach the 500m mark from the sensors at 01:45, BGC4. Awacs is still up and circling, no sign of perimeter patrol.
5. Aswon thinks hunker down and wait for Shimazu to recover - Hunter and Marius seem to agree, find a defile. Improvised shelters roll, get the best position they can. Rest up, 15 mins for first box, 12 mins, 15 mins. Patrol in the distance - stealth checks ok, all hide well, patrol goes past. 30mins. 20mins, 20mins, 1:52 rest in total.
6. Tads suggest splitting up a lot more than the first time, so any noise might hit multiple sensors? Shimazu wonders about getting Marius and Hunter over first and them making a fast move to the tilt-wing. Aswon thinks this is a good idea. Team discus how to get people across in best order, secure their packs etc. Hunter thinks about Marius making a run, and doing a hot pickup - but worried about SK response.
7. Hunter and Marius crossing first - Hunter stealth=10, RR = 11. Array gets a 17. Visual perception check - spot the patrol vehicle doubling back. Athletics then stealth from H and M
8. Stealth Hunter=15, Marius 5 after double RR. Good roll from patrol, 1 success, start a slower search.
9. Marius tries to re-hide as they do their cone search. Manages to reposition and avoid the patrol. Gets close, but then veer off, while Hunter is tracking the driver.
10. Everyone back at camp, audio perception - catch the noise of the t-bird approaching.Hear the fire of 30mm autocannon. Turns, another burst, the waiting team run and use the noise for cover.
11. Shimazu no noise, Aswon 19, Tads 21, Kai 10 - Microphones don't pick them up under the echoes and noise, and they make it. Team slow to a jog, move at a sustainable rate back to the tilt-wing
12. Back to the tilt-wing at 6am. Pre-dawn. Get rest of cammo netting in, and then plan to leave. Magic test for Aswon - gets nothing, passes out, dream sequence message. Rest drag him onto the tilt-wing and get away.
13. Vehicle stealth for the tilt-wing to avoid the AWACs = 9. AWACs gets a 10, but EDs. Fly out towards the Caspian, then down the centre in " international waters", back to the TCL and then to the ranch. Kai does Biotech on Aswon to determine what is going on. Reports as a coma, Kai has seen before, checks, he's on a weird metaplane quest. Ten mins later, Aswon awakens.
14. Tads - you didn't get bitten by anything toxic did you?
15. Aswon - hmm, I need to go home. Not the ranch, home home. Marius - which is where? Aswon, Nigeria. Might be connected to the rocket, might not. But the gods are calling me home. Tads - if you give me directions, I can go check it out. Aswon - I would appreciate it. Tads - if they speak to me. Aswon, I'll give you the shamens name, they will speak to you.
16. Hunter checking route - bad countries for the first 2k km, then 2k km over the sahara, so no fuel for miles.
17. Aswon - this seemed urgent. Explosions, corporate slavery.
18. Marius - head back to the ranch, get refueled.
19. Aswon - is that wise? Leading them back to the ranch? They think we're dead.
20. Marius continues to fly west, decide on destination later. Marius gets a text from Nadia - urgent. Calls her on the sat-phone. Marius Jr is ill, dry papery skin, gunk at both ends. Has she taken him to the doctor. She doesn't trust them. Marius checks the points and plans a place about half way between her and Baku to head to. Marius tells Hunter, and they plot route.
21. Looking for landing spots / refuelling - too far to get to smuggler stop in Iraq/Sochi/Mt Ararrat. Think about Baku airport landing commercially, need Hunter to get permits up to date.
22. Tads -can we get a favour from Germaine? Aswon - no, don't want to involve her, she has lots of reach. Marius - agree, need to keep a low profile. Tads - Shimazu, can you contact Sato by a non-standard method. Shimazu - no, not really - payphone maybe? Airport?
23. Marius - well, we're going to help Junior. Aswon - I agree, that's a given.
24. Computer check for Hunter. Gets alternate permit for Zabrat Airport / Silkway Helicopter services.
25. Tads checks the back for a disguise for Nadia - Hijab. Tads suggest doing a thorough sweep on the tilt-wing for bugs.
26. Head for the mud-volcano. Nadia in bits, baby looks proper poorly.
27. Kai biotech test - check the baby over. Relaxes as tests results come in.
28. Gasto enteritis, explains - serious but very treatable. Hunter checks with medicine - sounds legit.
29. Hunter bug-scanned the tilt-wing 11. Aswon doing overwatch from 1/4 km away. Marius comforts Nadia, she starts to get herself back together. Marius reassures her it's just a bug, one of those things, nothing she did was wrong. Hunter "you should see when I get it"... Good charisma check, helps Nadia smile and laugh - and then throw something at Hunters head.
30. Tads goes out of earshot, then calls Marius - offers to remove memory, but Marius says no, it shouldn't be a problem.
31. Make Nadia and Junior comfy and get some sleep, clear out the car, make breakfast etc.

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 257 is now published, and added onto book 9.


Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
With the cosmodrome adventure behind them, and the baby now treated, the team had a bit of breathing space and could work out how they were going to get down to Nigeria to sort out Aswon’s dream-vision. I’d prepared smuggler stops that they could have been referred to by some of their contacts (for a small fee, or a favour perhaps) – but instead they decided to trave legit. So, several hours of computer work for Hunter building up fake documents and permits, but no trouble crossing borders and it helps build up their legit business front a little more.

They also got a phone call from Sato, Shimazu’s fixer – who was alive, well and worried that the team hadn’t called in – as he’d heard from the Johnson that the job had gone off well and the rocket was destroyed. The team were suspicious, relating that they’d been burnt, so I played off Sato as being genuinely confused as he’d been paid, and had the money for the team as well.

This one really does seem to have thrown them a bit of a curveball – mostly because they “missed” clues as to what happened, made assumptions that were *entirely* logical based on what they knew, but happened to be *very* wrong – so that has really skewed their thinking.

It’s a tough call – part of me is tempted to explain so the players are less confused, and don’t think it’s just me making up random crap to throw at them along the way (though I hope they don’t actually think that – they know I put in a fair bit of effort into the writeups and the plotline) or some weird inconsistencies. On the other hand, I don’t want to give them information they really shouldn’t know (it’s one of the reasons why the writeups go the way they do – sometimes incomplete, and nearly all entirely based only on what the team can see/feel/experience…)

I think this is one of those perennial GM challenges – what to do when the players don’t “get” something, either because they missed a vital clue, or just didn’t put two and two together and get the right answer. On one hand, we game to have fun, and making things not-fun should be against every GM’s ethos (IMO). On the other hand, if you make things easy, and there is never a challenge – then there’s unlikely to be a reward.

I’m reminded of a video that Josh Hayes did on “League of Angels: Heaven’s Fury” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNcmfFQeEAQ) – where at one point you just see him take his hands off the keyboard and just describe how the game was ‘auto-battling’ and quite literally playing itself, and ‘winning’, and he was just watching the pretty animations and seeing his level increasing with every few characters being ‘defeated’. And how as a game it was utterly bereft of challenge and achievement, and once you realised this, the dopamine hit vanished in an instant…
But, anyway – they were confused, and it was behind them, so probably not going to upset them too much, as long as they had something else to distract them soon. The journey down to Nigeria went fairly smoothly as a result of their legit flight plan, with the only point of interest being them spotting a smuggler coming out of one of the smuggler stops I’d prepared for them – just to clue them in that there was *something* there to investigate.

Once at Aswon’s village we did a little plot exposition, and they got the info that a corp was building a railroad to the site, that they had some pictures to determine which corp it probably was, and that they might be building a space facility.

At which point the team started looking into the geology of the mountain, trying to determine just how big a spirit might be required to “wake the volcano” and deal with the problem! Nothing like shooting for the moon as plan A….


So, time for me to do some more in-depth research on the mountain range to find out a bit about the geology of the area, and for see how likely they are to be able to kick off some sort of instability. Otherwise it’s going to be a guerrilla campaign against the corporate guards, making the building site so expensive to run that eventually it becomes unprofitable to develop further and the corp pulls out. Or, they find some other way to “solve” the challenge that sounds vaguely plausible. There was mention of calling Aden and seeing if he’s up for a second razing – not that I think he’d be up for that, but at least they’re being creative!


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Wednesday 23/3/2061, Location: 40.24407, 49.52073 Time 10:13
2. Aswon - we need fuel - either the airport, or the ranch. Once Nadia is recovered. What do you want to do Marius. M - once she's rested and recovered. Aswon has looked around - looks very quiet, off season - and not busy to start off with. Maybe just kids coming up for a smoke - and alter memory is always available.
3. T-not if I've gone to your tribe. Discuss translations and spell. Tads works out a route and gets some local knowledge from Aswon.
4. Local is surprised, Shaman is not, Aswon needs to come, wing winged bird of fire and friends. How many are coming - we will carve you masks. Tads asks for messages - none. Comes back and mindlinks journey to Aswon. Aswon - right, if you need masks, you need an animal. An African animal. Think of one for you all, maybe Ali can return with your choice. Tads - I got the impression the next time they expected anything it would be you...
5. Shimazu gets a call from Sato. you haven't called yet. I've been waiting for a payphone - we got burnt? Did you? Got rockets fired at us. And the rocket got blown up, then non SK missile fire. Don't know - I've got a stick with Nuyen for you, been paid fine - and I got my brokerage fee. Shimazu - we don't want any more work from them. Oh - hmm, well it seemed to go fine from their POV, think they were playing cards close to chest. Brief discussion with team, pay to front company. Within ten minutes there is a deposit. Hunter logs in - 750k extra. Aswon - frak, have to be careful moving that around, tax laws and things.
6. Hunter - don't worry, I have plans for at least half of that - upgrades to my ware. Marius goes to see Nadia - crashed out after 2 days+
7. Shimazu will drive the car back to the ranch with Tads after concealing the tilt-wing, rest of the team fly back. Load up the tilt-wing with toys, bike and drones, but no room for cargo.
8. Hunter - it's 5200km to get there. Aswon - only one refuel then. Marius - no, need two, safety margin, need fuel when we're there.
9. Thinking about a legit route - towards Khartoum (fuel stop in Sudan), then to Zaria in Nigeria - check route for mana storms and such like - should be clear. 5800km total.
10. Tads - Nadia will probably want some money as well for more upgrades. But we should have another hidey hole somewhere with some fuel and stuff.
11. Team spot steelwork, concrete, cabins and windmill/solar.
12. Marius - wish you could design a "create avgas" spell! Some discussion on how that's not feasible... not yet.
13. Nadia asleep until about 18:00. Family ok, they were worried about baby but Nadia was "firm opinions".
14. Family also warn about the vendors on the main road. Discussion about sending Shimazu up to assess - Aswon, don't draw attention just before we leave.
15. By 6pm baby is back to normal, Nadia is a bit discombobulated, but Marius explains they all need to go to Nigeria, all Aswon's fault. When are you going? After dark. How long for? Two days to get there, but don't know why we're going. Just important that we do. Well, the concrete and steel, it'll wait until you come back, we can dig later. Tads - dig? Shown the blueprints, nuclear bunker style with multiple tunnels.
16. Hunter has got permits and flight plans sorted - took most of the day, to do (2 successes).
17. Split up some of the money to credsticks and distribute around the team.
18. First leg - 3100km to Khartoum, no trouble on the way, 27467 costs. Get to the airport around midnight, rest until dawn, leave Khartoum at 8am arrive Zaria, 12:30. Hunter cramming Nigerian en-route.
19. Mid-way to Zaria, vehicle stealth roll for Marius - gets a ping, but not a lock, but nothing there. Marius informs the team look around, spots a tilt-wing leaving to NE going stealth, and Aswon spots a BGC4 area. Record - but move on. Land at Zaria, refuel, 24,167 Aswon calls ahead to warn them.
20. Arrive at the village - people waiting, area clear for landing, shaman and elder waiting in the middle.
21. Describe, make and make do, mix of old culture and new tech, Aswon goes first. Whistles on thongs,
22. Shaman explains about railroad, corp, they have lawyers - laughing - Aswon, no - this is important, it's how they do business - Not mitushama or Aztechnology. Look at imagery from mobiles - corp started to use tech to defend. Same dream for multiple shamen, close,
23. Marius image analysis - Novatech. Botched politics - massive bribes, no defence for the land?
24. Go looking for Novatech / mining / space launch in the news.
25. SK announce their Duccio probe will launch from their facility in Kourou, French Guiana "as planned", sudden activity in the area.
26. Some details on mining in the area, over the border into Cameroon, 999 year lease for the mountain, building railroad.
27. Team do research and spitball ideas - geothermal, computer checks. Mount Kilimanjaro previously tried - Aswon wants clippings and history.
28. Team agree to go check out the mountain...

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 258 is now published, and added onto book 9.


Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Having arrived at Aswon’s village and with the situation explained somewhat, the players had indicated to me they wanted to do some research – so there was a chunk of info dump for them. Details on the geological makeup of Nigeria, and letting them know that they probably weren’t going to be able to do a mini-ghost dance and make a volcano explode, some info on construction rates and costs to put stuff into context and establish a timeframe for them, some details from the local scouts to let them know what they were up against, and a bit of flavour on the local area.

With that sorted, I also then gave out the “masks”, which are going to be there mostly for RP flavour – they might come up in some minor way in some ceremonies or rituals, but that’s very dependent on the player action. Otherwise it’s just a “nice souvenir” item for them.

Once the info was dumped out to the players, there was a *LOT* of talking, as I’d expected. I captured most of the key stuff, but there was the usual amount of silliness in places, along with the “if Novatech catch us, we are so fucked” kind of chat. And they’re not wrong… if they do cause some serious damage, then Novatech is probably going to be majorly pissed – but they are taking that threat very seriously, and I’m sure they’re going to cover their tracks carefully.

One of the players asked about maps and locations, so I gave them an out of game steer on how I was going to be handling this one. With the remoteness of the terrain, and the activity going on, I wasn’t likely to be finding stock images or documentary footage to use as a reference, or any similar projects that would quite fit – so a lot of the stuff was going to be handled abstractly. If they do a raid on a location, I’ll put together a tactical map of the locations to facilitate combat – but probably not on a strategic level. Instead it will be small-unit tactics, or other skill rolls that will provide information to them, and let them get into the right positions to carry out their plans.

Partly this is to keep the logistics simple from my side – no need to prepare intricate maps showing the 6 different construction locations and progress of the 12 teams in detail, no need to try and track progress through a jungle environment, and partly to avoid inflicting my crappy MS-Paint or PowerPoint graphics on the players when ultimately it doesn’t really matter. With the team being relatively powerful now, their efforts against the rent-a-cop style security forces are going to be a pushover, and it’s only the elites that they need to worry about. So, in the coming week with the first raids against Novatech, the players are probably going to have resounding successes and cause huge amounts of damage to the corp. With good attributes and skills, spirit concealment and protection, modern high power weaponry, good force magical weapons and plenty of drone support and knowledge of modern sensor systems they’re going to trounce the enemy – I’m thinking this is going to be like the Rebels vs the Galactic Empire – the players can choose the engagement site, and as long as they’re not sloppy they can sting and fade, and the Empire can’t be strong everywhere.

Once the losses mount up, the corp is going to escalate of course, and *that’s* where we’ll roll out the battle map, when we’ve got some elite special forces with drone and magical support to put them in shouting distance of the players, and we’ve got a combat that will actually give them a challenge or represents a risk.

One of the things I wanted to do this week was have a bit of a “hero” moment. The team are used to going up against reasonable force enemies – after all it needs to be a challenge – so they don’t really appreciate the kind of power level they’re operating at. So, with the friendly NPCs they were going to meet, I gave them three shamans – which represents ALL of the magical users in the area – and some guards/scouts to work with. They are all quite weak, relatively speaking – on the basis that they’re just villagers going about their regular business, not carrying out high level missions in a globe-trotting campaign. So, the hunters have decent stealth/survival/spear skills, but not much else, while the shaman were all quite low power. Two haven’t initiated yet, while the third has – to grade 1.

When I assigned the totems and put Snake for the grade 1, it created a chance for what I’d hoped would be a nice little moment. They would summon and invoke a F3 great form, demonstrating their “secret knowledge” to the other two shaman and having a moment to be smug – but take a bit of stun from their efforts. That would really firmly identify the power level to the team, and set things up for a nice reveal.

I’ve gone through the maths with Tads, and now we have an agreement – unless something stops her, I assume that she has summoned 8 X force 3 great forms at each dawn/dusk, and each has 3 services – without her needing to roll. When we looked at her dice pools and made some sample rolls, this proved to be entirely feasible with only random average rolls, so it cuts down on a massive amount of admin time for her and me, and makes life a lot easier. So when the NPC shows off his 1 spirit that made his nose bleed, Tads could firmly put him in his place by displaying her stable of 9 great forms, none of which gave her a nosebleed.

But, it didn’t quite work out like that. Tads being Tads – or rather Ali being Ali, she felt uncomfortable in the spotlight, and sorry for the NPC, and kept want to apologise to him for embarrassing him!

Oh well!

Still, they’re in position on the mountain now, have established their bona-fides with the natives and are starting their recon, and can soon move on to a campaign of wholesale destruction that’s going to poke the Novatech ant-hive, and we’ll see what happens to them…

The last thing I did, in case the team progressed that far was to randomly roll up a free spirit and see what I got, as I know that’s one of the primary plans. It’s going to be sympathetic to their plight, and somewhat helpful – rather than an avenger/prankster style spirit, and it’ll have 60% of force as spirit energy – so not too bad, though a little under average. However, it’s the two starting powers it randomly got that made me chuckle – hidden life and personal domain.

With hidden life, the spirit has a connection to a thing, somewhere in it’s domain that acts as a hoarcrux effectively – while the thing exists, the spirit can’t be killed. Disrupted and inconvenienced – but not gotten rid of. And the second one – personal domain – sets an area as the particular stomping ground of the spirit, in this case the top of the mountain. And inside that area, the spirit counts as TWICE as powerful as it should be, based on force.

So, if the team go for something like a force 9 spirit – which I think they may well do, given the possibilities and the potential dice spread from Tads’ pool, then it will have a spirit energy of 6 – but the personal domain will boost the force from 9 to 18 – which the spirit energy then adds to. So at the top of the hill, we’ve got a spirit blasting out magic with a rating of 24… Novatech won’t know what hit them! Assuming the players go for that of course…But Tads has got 11 re-rolls available, so there could be a monster spirit incoming!


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Thursday 24/3/2061, Location: 11.41811, 6.63024 Time 13:38
2. Masks
3. Hunter - Hyena
4. Aswon - Lion
5. Marius - Cape Buffalo
6. Tads - Barbary Stag
7. Shimazu - Dog
8. Kai - Chamaeleon
9. Aswon - brief discussion on tribal area to the south, generally treat the same.
10. He briefs on stuff from the scouts
11. Talking with the scouts
12. Initially they scouted out the corporate activity, so they have good maps / understandings of where they are and what kind of activity they are performing, along with rough numbers of workers and amount of machinery in use.
13. While shamans and their representatives made the initial protests and complaints, the scouts kept a passive watch on the construction. When it became clear they didn't get anywhere with the protest route, the shamans "let them loose" and they started with acts of sabotage and theft - stealing a lot of food, and materials they saw as "key". They have some stashes of blasting compound and explosives, det-cord and the like, but one attempt to use it caused a bit of an accident. They also took things like oil filters and machine parts and threw them into the valleys, making them hard to recover.
14. The corp responded with rentacops from the local area, who were dealt with reasonably easily - they were city boys, and struggled in the local environment, and were only armed with pistols and light body armour. It slowed down the sabotage, but didn't stop it.
15. The corp then bought in some much better trained security forces, armed with SMGs / rifles, better trained and with a lot more tech. It's the tech in particular that has been catching the scouts out - they're not sure how it works, or what methods they're using, but they've been intercepting or ambushing hunting parties with ever increasing hit rates, and inflicting mounting losses on the locals - unsustainable losses, and the local tribes are already facing issues with loss of hunters and food for the locals.
16. The corp has also started to offer "jobs" down in the lowlands for the women / older men, with food and benefits, and the tribes are seeing a trickle of people starting to leave, further impacting their viability.
17. Aswon suggests using this to infiltrate the enemy, send spies / saboteurs in.
18. Mentions shamans MAY not be magical, but should be respected.
19. Tads - but also wake up the spirit of the mountain. Aswon, why not both. Tads - can we negotiate with local shaman / lodges / spell sharing. And also need consent for waking the local spirit of the mountain.
20. Hunter - how easy to unify the tribes? Aswon - they are against the threat. H - not working cohesively though. Aswon - they can't afford to go to war, they need training / info
21. Kai - can we make the air / space above the mountain unusable? Aswon - magic, maybe. Some discussion about spirits, summoning, magical response from Novatech. Spirits will have free will, can't rely on them being aligned, may need to kill them if they go mental.
22. Aswon - get down there, and build a warded area to have a space to retreat to. Tads asks about BGC - Aswon, near the blasting site yes, away no - there might be glare though.
23. Marius - it does sound like we need to set off a volcano. Aswon, if we can make it look "natural", the insurance won't underwrite stuff like that...
24. Marius - because of the investment, almost no amount of resistance will put them off. Might lock the natives into a perpetual conflict with the corps. Might lead to their decimation.
25. Aswon - need to train the locals so they have the options to fight - but their choice. But otherwise we do whatever we can to make it look like the land uprising.
26. Hunter - what about publicity? Aswon - of what. Ripping apart the jungle? A - we'd need an atrocity - one that WE didn't cause, otherwise people won't care...
27. Marius - One possibility that might work - is if you can hit REALLY hard REALLY quick, and make the costs spiral out of all projections - before they spend too much and get into the sunk cost fallacy. If you can make a 1.5 billion nuyen project suddenly look like a 5 billion project, they might bail on the big plan - and say just do some local mining to recoup the costs put in so far... but we can't leave ANY evidence, or we get hunted to the ends of the earth.
28. Tads - not sure if this would work, but the quoll? Locals having lots of stories. Maybe persuade them to act in the same way.
29. Team agree to go, the sooner they recon, the less roads are built.
30. Fly down and make contact, get hidden. Set up a force 10 warded area
31. Local shaman arrive with 24 warriors. Team explain, pandering to aspects of the shaman based on totems:
32. Hit Novatech with something that looks like the land itself objects to their efforts.
33. It needs to make a clear impact and look like it could be big trouble for the long term, but with nothing to link back directly to the tribes. We must not start a war here, its not one we think you can win, and we can't stay forever.
34. We also will investigate their security and new security, and do what we can to teach you how to evade and defeat these things, if that is possible - and most things are.
35. First, does the mountain have a protector - in legend only maybe? We would prefer to enlist it's help.
36. Our thoughts for options here are:
37. Spirits - a lot of spirits - to attack the construction sites, particularly the machinery, not the people except for those who resist. We do this for a few days/nights. Whilst that's going on, we are calling, negotiating with, and freeing powerful spirits to protect the mountain in a similar way, starting with a big splashy, showy combined attack once we have enough of them ready.
38. OR, AND
39. Possibly, looking to call up magma, or make it look like magma has been called up, from the mountain - this will be very hard, and may not be possible at all without the aid of a very powerful spirit, but if we can this is almost guaranteed to make them at least reassess. This is partly why we asked about any ancient protectors.
40. Second, when it comes to learning how to defeat the enemy technology: our shaman has many useful spells. It would help us to know what spells you have. Sometimes you already know what you need to know: you just didn't know you it was relevant.
41. Hunter - explain about weaknesses of machines in targeted sabotage.
42. Tads - when do they work? Scouts - daytime only, not nights. Tads - infiltrate at night for sabotage then, imp-invis will work great.
43. Kai - what is your level of commitment? What is on/off limits. locals explain they are willing to fight
44. Tads - they're following terrain - land slips would be a good option.
45. Aswon - are you prepared to sacrifice access to the mountain to drive them off. Locals - yes. Aswon - warning that spirits may wander.
46. Snake shaman look at my powerful spirit - F3 GF, Aswon asks Tads to drop masking. She does and mentally pokes them. Snake blanches. Monkey makes trid-entertainment of monkey pack around them. Tads masks up again. Snake wallows in his own hubris. Others still laughing, but Aswon explains about the level of force involved. They still agree it's worth the risk.
47. Kai - what about calling in dragon allies? Some laughing. Aswon - maybe... I mean Aden just because he's angry? What about the others? Eastern friends - they want to play games. I mean... *edges away from Marius* - what about someone else who has an interest in space? Marius face palms.
48. Settle down for food, get tales from the local area - general background fluff, but nothing specific indicating a major power. But - get explanation of the "mountain of death" and hidden "children of the lost valley"
49. Parrot shaman asks what the team does. Simple intros, pumps up the values of the mundanes. Rest of team unmask.
50. Surok explains he can fly. but also that the team are clearly the big hitters. Exchange info about spells, Malik looks at Farik about trid, Aswon distracts with the spear. Marius shows vtol drone, Hunter shows gun. Tads does fix on their commlinks
51. Aswon brings them back to ground with relative power levels. Mice may scare the elephant, but can still be trodden on.
52. Aswon and Hunter want to go to site #5 for recon, rest sleep.
53. Geology research
54. The African plate meets the North and South American plates at the mid-Atlantic ridge far to the west, and shears to the Arabian plate and diverges from the Somali plate far to the east - so the area is generally fairly stable with no recent volcanic activity.
55. (You're unlikely to get volcanic activity anywhere in mainland western Africa due to the distance from the nearest plate boundaries)
56. Chappal Wadi sits on the Benin-Nigerian Shield, part of the West African Craton, a tectonically inactive region forming the late Precambrian era. It consists of two Archean centres juxtaposed against multiple Paleoproterozoic domains made of greenstone belts, sedimentary basins, regional granitoid-tonalite-trondhjemite-granodiorite (TTG) plutons, and large shear zones.
57. (The shear zones explain the formation of the deep sided valleys in the mountainous areas and the sharp drops, but the mountains are pretty old (200 million years+) and a mix of different granite types mainly)
58. The geology of Nigeria formed beginning in the Archean and Proterozoic eons of the Precambrian. The country forms the Nigerian Province and more than half of its surface is igneous and metamorphic crystalline basement rock from the Precambrian. Between 2.9 billion and 500 million years ago, Nigeria was affected by three major orogeny mountain-building events and related igneous intrusions. Nigeria has tremendous oil and natural gas resources housed in its thick sedimentary basins, as well as reserves of gold, lead, zinc, tantalite, columbite, coal and tin.
59. (The country does have natural resources, but much of it is deep - below 600m thick bands of rock formations for instance, which makes extraction expensive and less desirable to the corps. It's also hard to drill/blast - but does make for superior foundations and seismically stable areas)
60. Construction research
61. Cost for the railroad is approx. 1 million Nuyen per kilometre. The railroad extension is 156km long.
62. Expected construction time would be approx. 2 weeks per km for a prepared route, giving 300 weeks of construction for a single crew.
63. Novatech have employed 12 separate crews, working from staging areas along the route, each responsible for one section of the build, giving an approx 0.5 year build time
64. With the time taken to construct the railroad, along with the actual launch facility once the railroad reached the plateau, catching *either* of the comet passes are going to be almost impossible
65. The track gauge is planned at a massive 2140mm, presumably to carry the large rocket sections up to the spaceport, which requires extensive sweeping turns and lots of grading
66. Rockets can most easily reach satellite orbits if launched near the equator in an easterly direction, as this maximizes use of the Earth's rotational speed (465 m/s at the equator). Such launches also provide a desirable orientation for arriving at a geostationary orbit.
67. Normally mountain railroad construction goes for a narrow gauge to reduce construction costs. However due to the geography of the area and the nature of the plateau, they have a relatively easy climb without sharp turns - but they do have a number of narrow but deep valleys to cross which will require bridging.
68. Construction equipment
69. Surveys are apparently complete, and a major road-building effort is underway in 6 locations, corresponding to the 6 track building efforts - they are driving in dozers and drillers and construction compacted gravel roads - only sturdy enough to last 2-3 seasons, but long enough to complete the railroad.
70. Crawler dozer: https://www.constructioncost.co/images/img/...nstruction5.jpg
71. Loader tractors: https://www.constructioncost.co/images/img/...nstruction8.jpg
72. Mega-dozer, 1 X 180 ton https://cranemarket.com/blog/wp-content/upl...per-dozer-2.jpg
73. 100t crawler cranes: https://b7c9z6m8.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/up...awler-crane.png
74. Liebherr LR 11350 - 1350 t crane with 150m boom for bridge laying https://www.liebherr.com/external/products/...350-DSC0300.jpg
75. The local shamans
76. Not all villages / tribes have magical shamans - some just have "wise men" who follow the traditions and live the lifestyle (but are accorded the same respect). None of the local shamans are willing to leave their tribes uncovered to make the journey south with you, as they're needed to administrate and protect their own people.
77. The tribes around Chappal Wadi *are* prepared to send immediate aid - up to 25 hunters/warriors, and 3 shaman from the tribes surrounding the mountain and threatened by the railroad.
78. Shaman NPCs
79. Malik, Human male - Monkey shaman, uninitiated (stealth, detect enemies, heal, detox, trid entertainment)
80. Surok, Human female - Parrot shaman, uninitiated (vocalise, translate, heal, levitate)
81. Farik, Human male - Snake shaman, G1 with invoking (mindlink, mindprobe, treat, trid phantasm)
82. 24 Hunters
83. If they summon and free a mountain spirit: 60% of force as spirit energy, 2 powers - Personal Domain, Hidden Life
84. Novatech standard sec-forces
85. 3 man teams, Colt-Cobra TZ-115, Armour vest with plates

Hi everyone - and welcome to another update for the Smuggler campaign. Episode 259 is now published, and added onto book 9.


Here's the "behind the scenes" from this week's run:
Unfortunately a bit of a boring session for 3 of the players this week. We were down one (Kai), but Shimazu, Tads and Marius were pretty much spectators while Aswon and Hunter went off to do some recon. As a general thing they try not to split the party too much, but it does sometimes happen – and I try to keep things moving along when it does happen.

In this case though it unfortunately dragged out to most of the session before we got the team back together. At least when they got back to brief the rest on what they’d found, the players knew exactly what had gone on – having sat and listened to it.

It’s always a difficult thing when the party splits, especially if you have time limited events happening. Most of the team were getting some rest, so they weren’t going to be doing anything that would test their skills or give them interest. If I’d put in a “random paracritter attack” (which I’m not a massive fan of, in terms of ‘oh I’ll put this in to give this half of the player base something to do’ then it would have been soundly whooped by the team remaining at the base – with either Shimazu turning stuff into kebabs, Tads stunning stuff into the ground, or a pack of 24 angry natives with excellent ratings in spear going all stabby on it. It would have been obvious ‘filler’ and I don’t like that kind of thing at all. If it had been a corporate team, then it could have been more challenging based on what tech was used – but then the base would have had to be abandoned in case their position had been made, and that wouldn’t really help the story along either… so, they ended up having a quiet night, with nothing exciting going on.

Meanwhile team sneaky-bois got to meet two NPCs who are definitely just run of the mill eco-warriors and definitely not a pair of Drakes working for Hestaby. Honest.

They made nice, acted with restraint and as a result got a meeting arranged, to at least bring them to meet the rest of the team, and get the rest of the players involved. What they didn’t do was assense the pair, at all, not wanting to appear “rude” – which is fair enough, and entirely in character for Aswon.

It remains to be seen if the rest of the team will be so restrained!

Meanwhile, I had a chat with Tads to find out her intentions, and she confirmed that she was going to have a look at summoning a big spirit and then setting it free. I’d thought that was likely, based on the discussions the team had had, so I’d gotten one of the players to do me a bunch of random rolls at the start of the night, working through the “free spirit creation tables” from Magic In The Shadows” – and got a monster result. The spirit got 2 powers on a 1D3 roll, and those powers were…. Personal Domain, and Hidden Life.

Awesome! That makes the spirit *ridiculously* resilient in it’s chosen area, and almost indestructible without some serious magical effort to discover its source of life and deal with it – without the spirit knowing of course. Tough work!

And tonight, while doing the writeup I sat down with Tads and asked her about the spirit, and worked through the maths with her, and had her do the summoning rolls now, so we can just go through the RP of what happens on Tuesday night. She ended up going for a force 9 great form spirit, which is pretty monster at the best of times, and would be a serious challenge. Add in the hidden life and personal domain, and that becomes very stronk! At force 9, it has an effective armour rating of 18, so any normal weapons with a power of 18 or lower *automatically* spang off – so that includes the Panther Assault Cannon, often seen as the pinnacle of Shadowrun gun desires. On top of that, Tads had chosen to use her extra bonus grade powers all in armour, giving it +3 armour… so that means you need to hit it with a power 22 weapon or higher to avoid an auto ricochet! That means that even a chunk of air-to-ground missiles are now going to bounce off the spirit, before you even factor in spirit energy (of which it has 6), and the personal domain boost. And with Hidden life, the spirit now has regen, so if you don’t wipe it out in one turn, it’s gonna get back up and be *really* pissed with you…

We went through the summoning and Tads ended up coming out with a bunch of drain which she’ll have to nurse next session – but she made the numbers for the summoning and great form test, and got one service – which is all she needs to get it in front of her and set it free. And then the personality from the table takes over – so now the mountain has a “Guardian” spirit that will eat 90% of mages for breakfast and can sow untold havoc on mundanes that have no magical defence, while the corporate issued weapons spang off and do absolutely no damage at all. Once that’s released upon Novatech, things are going to get very, VERY, expensive for them!


And as usual, here are the notes from the game session to compare / contrast with the narrative:
1. Friday 25/3/2061, Location: 7.03486, 11.71462, Time 00:15
2. Hunter asks locals for advice on moving quietly. They tell him to take off arms and armour. Sigh. Warn about boars and snakes - Hunter ask if boars in packs? No - too nasty for that, they kill each other. Nothing major, few minor bits of advice.
3. Start being really stealthy at about 6km from camp. Burnt spots from VTOL. Get about 500m out, guides want to stop - very nervous. Team go full spectrum on senses. Y shape path split, up to spit of land, 200m up, or down to camp. They go up, stealth 10 for Hunter and Aswon. Spot the bright light of the compound, perception check. Hunter spots the sensor pod - small IR camera and microphone brick. USB style interface on the brick, probably detects only specific noises like metallic clinks,
4. Nova-Eye Bl94-6/5. Look for similar, keep eyes open for trip-wires and pressure pads etc.
5. Hunter shows pics, they ask to come up, look at it, shamefaced, then head back down.
6. Spot someone on the crane. Aswon spots demo attempt on crane. Hunter spots a tiny loop of webbing, points out to Aswon, they look, 2 X rucksacks. Check the contents, Hunter looks at laptop, it's "secure". Fence is 3m high, spot the pair in the camp moving around, Hunter penetrates the invisibility. Spot them moving around tactically, covering, does NOT assense. Watch for 1 hour. Invis drops on orc, levitate straight up. Aswon - let's go sit in a non-threatening manner, not pointing guns. They appear, freak, pull guns, team waves at the others. Offer water bottles, put guns down, they drift in. Drop invis and levitate, unclip. Look quizzically. Hunter says hi in Sioux, ork says "what's that chummer?" Long way from home.
7. Aswon - nice op, we're not on the clock - anti Novatech, or just what... mischief or paid for.
8. takes a drink - 1 for 1. Who are you guys? I am Aswon, came to plan a job, seems the job is done, who wants to work hard if they don't have to? She turns to look at H, "I am hunter, or at least the name I'm know by. Part of a team." Aswon - we have strategic goals in this area. "Hmm, ok, your question." A-Are you hear on campaign or just the pretty lights.
9. Who are you working for? A-We're not on the clock, P-what do you mean A-we got a call for help to come here. A - the trick is to help without causing a war. Where does this leave us? Wherever, we're not going to stop you. Maybe joint operations perhaps?
10. So you were coming to look at this place - thumbs over shoulder. Saw quite a lot. So what are your intentions. Well, what you've been doing is one of your options. Depends, we have lots of options, evaluating, working out scale.
11. Leans in close, intense, what other options do you have. Aswon - part of a team, I can't do them, but others can. Hunter internal call to Aswon - give them Kai's number? Aswon, no - might make things complicated.
12. So where are you from - Aswon, I'm local, my friend is not.
13. We're from a fair way away, but eco damage, they have to be stopped - do you agree? A-yes. We thought about doing things like this, but shooting war, maybe dangerous.
14. A- have you done this elsewhere, we don't want to ruin your plans. P - we should leave so we can set this off.
15. A - options again. P - sudden realisation about locals being blamed. Ask to meet team, A - not rendezvous. Near the teams hideout, move a bit into the treeline.
16. Ask for 1 hour, Hunter warns about the cam, they went around. Introduce as Phoss and Ury, arrange to meet at dusk, then head off.
17. Aswon asking hunter - not head back to camp, maybe go hide, maybe watch - or play it honest. Sneak past the camera, get back to the hunters, tell they we need to get out, going to be very noisy soon. GTFO quickly. Check for trails and watchers. After an hour, big badda boom. Climb a tree - spot troop carriers and attack choppers arrive on scene in <10 mins. Troop carriers came from the top of the mountain, attack choppers from the lowlands.
18. Back to camp for about 6am, meet team.
19. Marius - choppers will need proper base, especially the attack birds, heavy maintenance. Tads - and pilots probably want better sleep / quarters. Marius - agree, probably a base down in the valley / lowlands somewhere. Aswon - but we know about response time now. Interested in scouting top of the mountain now, maybe they have troops up there.
20. Aswon and Hunter brief the rest of the team. Tads asks for mindlink for spell signature. Suggests getting in touch with Fang about eco-warriors. Aswon - yeah, he called me chummer.
21. Marius starts a thorough check of everything on the bird, asking Kai and Shimazu to help. Aswon gets kip, as does Hunter. Tads calls Fang in Seattle. Squints at screen -oh, you, hello. Tads, sorry to bother you, maybe run into people you know, wanted to check. What? Explains a bit more. Gives names. No dice. Gives details. F-can do you a datasearch. T - don't know if we need that, will get Kai to get in touch if we do.
22. Aswon - maybe go back tonight - maybe not, probably all the sites will be on alert. Maybe best to give them the night off. Talk to Marius, find out where the microcams are to do surveillance next time.
23. Tads - if I go with you to see them, I can send spirits to go pick them up later if that will help.
24. Hunter - maybe take Marius next time, they have a network to hack.
25. Tads - I'm going to spend time talking to the shaman today to learn about magic, offer to share her F1 spells to them in her lodge. Aswon - worth looking for the spirit of the mountain, or seeing if you can find it? Tads - maybe, it might come anyway, whether we want it or not. A - hmm, yeah. Maybe teach them a low force spell to get all in tune together.
26. After sleep Aswon scouts with Shimazu the meet point for that night. Nothing special, but gets the lay of the land.
27. Marius looks at quality of gear, part of a range, 3 camo types, flux 1, sensor net about 1km wide, encryption 1 on civi models, anti-tamper 1 on most models. the one they have is towards top of the range.