The heavily armed section manning the gates checks your identification despite knowing perfectly well who you are. After all, you are on a first name basis with most of them and one or two you actually met just this morning while doing your shopping or at work. Now they flash you terse smiles and their rifles pointedly stay at a low ready while your IDs are run through the system. Moments later they wave you through and you are in for the next leg of your journey to combat readiness.
All across the base hurried activity can be witnessed. With only very limited personnel numbers on an ordinary day, getting the battalion together and ready to deploy takes its time. Those living closer are already in full gear, getting vehicles ready, and doing their best to fill a fluid personnel roster as the men and women sworn to defend this spot of Cascadia trickle in. One of the dropships is already spooling up its engine, tasked with picking up platoons from more distant settlements so the brass can ultimately put together the puzzle pieces of an entire battalion. But it will take time to get it all together and into place.
As you rush towards the squat building housing your equipment lockers, a young woman runs past in the opposite direction, pilot helmet under one arm, an equipment bag slung over the other shoulder, and a steady stream of creative expletives on her lips as she makes for the dropship before her right-seater takes off without her. You know her, she knows, but there is no time for friendly hellos on either side.
The first sign that the whole affair is not quite the real deal is when the Sergeant in charge of the armoury hands you rifles with the prominently yellow adaptors that need to be fitted for the simulation ammunition. The magazines you receive next are marked with the same signal colour. But even after that revelation, it all still feels very much real. The roaring engines of the dropship taking off, the frantic activity, the harried briefing you get from the platoon commander before you are pushed back out of the gates to do your part-time job in the military.
According to the exercise scenario, an intrusion into BLUFOR-controlled territory was detected when one of the unknown dropships got sloppy on the egress route and pulled up a little too early. Once caught out by radar, this little carelessness set into motion the flurry of activity you are part of now. Your immediate task is straight-forward enough.
The Gervais family called up from their farm to let the powers in charge know that something or someone seemed to be lurking around in the nearby woods. Since the vector for the unknown-presumed-hostile dropships seemed an awful lot like it might fit right in with that mysterious activity, command decided that someone should check it out and figure out whether the intruders came from either the feared Red Alliance or the reviled Yellowland. Ultimately, after moving down through the organisational structure, that tasking landed right in your hands.
You hitch a bumpy ride in the cargo bed of a civilian truck, the driver of which was voluntold to help you out (and got rewarded with a flimsy slip of paper entitling her to be reimbursed for fuel costs as well as wear and tear), and with the sun still reasonably high up in the skies you find yourself pushing up the dirt road towards the farm. Everything seems peaceful enough at first: the birds are singing, the grass and trees sway in the gusting wind, and the Gervais family is nowhere in sight. Possibly off on holiday with no knowledge whatsoever that they are playing an unwitting part in the exercise script.
Issued Equipment
Identical loadouts for this encounter:
- 1x Assault rifle, Ranged (Heavy), Damage 8, Critical 3, Range Long, Encumbrance 3 (reduced to 1 with weapon sling), Autofire
- 1x Extra reloads, Encumbrance 1
- 1x Fragmentation Grenade, Ranged (Light), Damage 8, Critical 3, Range Short, Encumbrance 1, Blast 7, Limited Ammo 1, Vicious 1
- 1x Smoke Grenade, Ranged (Light), Range Short, Encumbrance 1, creates smoke for 2+ turns
- 1x Light Body Armour, Defence 0, Soak +2, Encumbrance 2 (0 when worn)
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1x Emergency Medpack, Encumbrance 1
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Medic also receives
- 1x Medpack, Encumbrance 2
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Medic also receives
You also each deploy with one of your fireteam members. The other four did not make it to base in time and will have to sit this one out. We will be using simplified rules for them: while they are combat effective and can support you, they will add 1 Blue to all relevant rolls. Whenever you take damage, you may opt to reassign the damage to them instead.
What to do
- Add the issue equipment to your character sheets as necessary
- Roll an Average difficulty Perception check in this thread since Baldr currently cannot handle the dice we are using
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Do your introductory post with a little fluff and let me know where you and your buddy are moving
- The dashed arrow is the overall direction the section is planned to travel to check out the farm
- Teams can split off and move around the edge instead, for example
- Corporal O'Donnal is in charge in-universe, but players obviously get to decide what their fireteam does, so avoid issuing orders in fluff text
- Bullets will start flying soon, but who is going to stumble over whom remains to be seen
- The map currently refuses to upload to Baldr itself, I'm working on that