PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: SHACKLETON MARGIN // ANTARCTIC PENINSULA
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-07
RESULT: DATA SECURED // 4 OF 5 // T6
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-07
録
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
DOCUMENT
THE SCREAM
DATA RECOVERY // HUNT 02
BIG GAME HUNTS
HUNT 02 // SHACKLETON MARGIN
DATA SECURED // 4 OF 5
OPERATOR MORTAL-WOUNDED
T6 // BLIZZARD LOCK
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
A documentation contract on the Antarctic ice, where the job is to film a glacier that grew a nervous system and the one thing you have to capture is the one thing that kills your camera. Saga Mørk gets four of the five behavioral segments, including the scream Tanaka demanded by name, and pays for a single piece of greed with a seal in the water.
THE COLD RECORD
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: SHACKLETON MARGIN // ANTARCTIC PENINSULA // 2026-06-07
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
A documentation job is the one contract where you can do everything right and still come home with a hole in the reel. Mørk came home with four fifths of a glacier and a bite that needed stitches, and the missing fifth is the part nobody was going to watch anyway.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts (solo). Core D6 engine, the Big Game hunt loop, OT Solo Rules.
SCENARIOHunt 02: Shackleton Margin. BAFO contract #089-P, Data Recovery. Antarctic Peninsula oasis, active weather advisory.
OPERATORSaga Mørk, call sign "Pelt." Gene-forged, arctic-fox cold-recon stock. OPINT/TACT/GUTS Good (2+), SHOOT/FIGHT Ord (4+). MOBI 6". 3 Flesh / 2 Mortal.
SPECIMENGlaciosymbiont Type-3, merged into the glacier face. Intel was wrong, run as Heavy tier: FIGHT 2+, AR 3, 4 FW / 2 MW. Resonance Scream + Glacier Merge + a 3-round Surface Sequence.
FIELDRogue BAFO cell (2 veterans) already on site, documenting. Three Lobodon (modified leopard seals) drawn by the station beacon. Pagodroma flock, moulin voids, katabatic risk, Condition One blizzard.
OBJECTIVERecord the specimen's full behavioral set without destroying it. Tanaka requires the complete Resonance Scream cycle by name. Tissue sample if it comes cheap.
WIN CONDITIONCapture all five behavioral segments (merged baseline / surface-attack / defensive / remerge / scream) and extract alive. Loss on operator Out of Action or leaving without the record.
TURN CAPOpen clock against the weather. Condition One locks the area and grounds extraction at the start of Threat Phase 6.
The beacon at Shackleton Station Alpha has been transmitting for eighteen months. Nobody is listening at the other end. Saga Mørk listens to it for about four seconds on the coastal shingle, decides it is a tool she might want later, and leaves it running. That choice is the whole hunt. She just does not know it yet.
Mørk works the Bureau under the call sign Pelt. Arctic-fox stock, cold-recon build, the kind of gene-forged you send when the contract reads document and do not touch. This one reads exactly that. A glaciosymbiont has grown into the face of the Erebus approach glacier, eight meters of blue-gray skin that scans as part of the ice until it moves. The handler, Tanaka, wants it on the field log. Behavior, anatomy, the full resonance cycle by name. A tissue sample if it comes cheap. She does not want it dead. Dead specimens do not perform.
Pelt climbs rather than walks. The melt-channel floor is the obvious line and the wrong one, so she takes the glaciovine cliff and comes onto the high shelf above the merged zone with the wind covering her and the rig still cold in its sheath. From up there she reads the animal off its own skin. Where the nerves run, and the resonance core sitting under the surface like a held breath. She has the whole map of it before it has so much as twitched.
She is not alone on the shelf. A rogue Bureau cell got here first, two ex-staff veterans with documentation gear of their own and tracks that go in and do not come back out. They are reading the same animal. One of them is standing on it. He has braced his boots on the merged zone to steady his camera, and he does not know that the ground under him has a nervous system.
Then the sea arrives. Three modified leopard seals come up the melt channels on the beacon Pelt left live, because a transmitting beacon is a dinner bell to anything that learned to hunt sound. The first one takes the man on the ice across the hip. He fires back. His partner fires. And the glacier, which has been waiting a very long time for this much vibration, opens.
THE GROUND UNDER HIM HAD A NERVOUS SYSTEM.
What comes up is documentation gold and a death sentence in the same shape. The specimen surfaces under the cell veteran, swings, misses, and screams. Pelt has the eruption clean on the reel. The scream she loses entirely. The thing puts out an electromagnetic wash when it calls, and the wash walks straight through her rig and browns out every channel she is recording on. The one phenomenon the contract is built around is the one phenomenon that eats her ability to capture it.
So she stops fighting the wash and goes around it. One pass on the rig to drop the corrupted optical channel and record on pressure and heat instead, the scream as a wavefront and a bloom of warmth in the cold rather than as a picture. The next time it calls she has it. Acoustic and thermal, the full cycle, the duration Tanaka asked for by name. That is the segment that makes the contract.
She does not get the last one. The specimen finishes its cycle and sinks back into the face before she can frame the descent, and the descent is the cheapest fifth of the job, so she lets it go. Four of five, and the four include the only one that mattered. The reel is made. What is left is leaving.
Leaving is where the beacon comes back for her. The blizzard the advisory promised arrives on schedule and drops the world to arm's length. The aircraft stands down. The rogue cell, trying to break for the same shelter, does not make it. One veteran goes under in the melt channel and the other is left stranded in the white. A seal that has spent the whole fight riding the beacon turns and keys on Pelt as she moves, because she is gene-forged and she is suddenly the loudest warm thing left on the ice.
She punches through a snow bridge on the crossing and goes into the water. The seal is already there. It opens her up, a wound deep enough to count, and the thing that saves her is the one move she should have made in the first four seconds. She reaches the station structure and kills the beacon. The dinner bell stops. The seals lose the thread and fade back to the channels, and Pelt folds into the glaciovine shelter with a torn side and a finished reel while Condition One leans on the walls.
The animal is still in the glacier. It was never the target. Somewhere on the cell veteran's recovered gear is a contract number with an Archive suffix that Tanaka will not explain. That is a different hunt. This one is on tape.
// THE TAPE
SETUPOperator roll comes up gene-forged (d6 4). Free anatomy by instinct: Neural Cluster (d3 1). Beacon left live, so Lobodon convergence timer rolls Threat Phase 1 (d6 1). Jokulhlaup crack seated east; Pagodroma flock 5.
APPRApproach Protocol, three obstacles, Pelt Good (2+) with situational mods. Detection Window 3 minus 1 vis = 2 hit. Silent Approach 4 hit. Environmental Hazard 5 minus 1 (old terrain data) = 4 hit. 3 of 3, ~1 Tempo banked, no alert raised.
READRead 1 OPINT 4 (solo DC 3+): draws Resonance Core. Read 2 natural 6: draw two, completes Primary Limb. Full anatomy known before contact.
T1Priority 4 v 2, Pelt leads. Films the merged baseline (OPINT 3 minus 1 = 2 hit). Shimmer-watch natural 6, perfect read of the glacier face. Three seals arrive in the melt channels on the beacon. RECORD 1/5.
T2Priority 5 v 6, threat leads. Seal Torpedo Strike tags Cell Vet #2 (5, 1 FW). Glacier erupts, vet holds his feet (GUTS 4). Surface Sequence duration D3 = 3. Pelt films the eruption (OPINT 4 minus 1 = 3 hit). Specimen's first swing misses (3 v 4+). RECORD 2/5.
T3Hunt Event D8 6: competition escalates, the cell commits. Priority 6 v 4, Pelt leads. Scream capture natural 1; defensive capture 2 minus 1 = 1. The scream's EM wash browns out the rig, both captures fail. Scream stuns both vets (1, 3). Seal Torpedo natural 1 miss. Specimen counter natural 1 miss. Five natural 1s in one round, no bodies, no footage. RECORD still 2/5.
T4Priority 3 v 4, threat leads. Rig retune TACT 3 minus 1 = 2 hit: drop the optical channel, record on acoustic + thermal. Scream fires; Pelt catches it off the wavefront and heat bloom (OPINT 4 minus 1 = 3 hit). The retuned pass banks both the Resonance Scream cycle and the defensive behavior. Cell #2 eats another scream stun (1); Cell #1 shoots the AR3 hide for 5, no good without a natural 6. RECORD 4/5.
T5Priority 2 v 5, threat leads. Remerge capture 2 minus 1 = 1, miss; the specimen sinks before she can frame it. Pelt breaks contact 6". Seal redirects onto her gene-forged signature (SITREP Even 5 = yes). Cell escape SITREP Even natural 1 = no and worse: a vet goes under. Katabatic d6 6, none. Condition One check 3 = blizzard locks at T6.
T6Whiteout. Priority 2 v 5, threat leads. Crossing GUTS natural 1, punches through a snow bridge (1 FW). Seal Torpedo natural 6 = Mortal Wound in the water. Pelt reaches the station and kills the beacon (TACT 4); Station Memory ends, seals scatter. She shelters with the reel. Game called: 4/5, operator at 1 FW + 1 MW.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED // Q. ADAIR
The dice were generous early and cruel late, and the run split cleanly down that line. The approach was a 3 of 3 sweep and the second Read hit a natural 6 for the full anatomy, so Pelt got to play the front half as a documentarian instead of a survivor. None of that was hard. The back half tried to kill her and nearly did.
The turn it swung was T4, and it swung on a decision, not a die. Through T3 the contract was failing: the Resonance Scream is Tanaka's named deliverable and the scream's own EM wash brownout was eating every attempt to record it. The fix was the retune, dropping the corrupted optical channel and capturing on pressure and heat instead. That single TACT action turned an unrecordable phenomenon into the centerpiece of the reel. Everything before it was setup and everything after it was the bill.
Balance read. Two honest things came out of this one:
- Data Recovery has no subsystem. Big Game assumes you kill the thing or you cage it. This contract says document and do not destroy, and the rules give no checks, no track, no win state for "record the behavior." I built one: five behavioral segments, each an OPINT capture. It was the best part of the game and it is entirely house-made. This wants real rules.
- The scream-versus-rig interaction is a ruling, too. Nothing in the book says an aberrant ability degrades documentation or sensor gear. Ruling that the scream's EM wash fouls the reel created the whole drama of the back half, but it is invented, and a documentation contract lives or dies on exactly this kind of interaction.
One read on the specimen itself: the Heavy-tier AR3 ice hide made it functionally unkillable by ordinary shooters. The cell could only have hurt it on a natural 6 and never rolled one. That is correct for a do-not-destroy target and a hard wall for any player who shows up planning to shoot it.
One thing to try next: run this hunt baseline human instead of gene-forged. The arctic-fox stock was the wrong tool for a stealth documentation job. The seal keyed onto her gene-forged signature on the way out and the resonance tax sat on every contact. A baseline operator dodges the convergence entirely and only pays in the Read, and the Read was a cakewalk this time. Pelt brought claws to a job that wanted a quiet camera.
Kit and terrain aside: the station beacon is the best terrain piece in the box, a dinner bell you control. Leaving it live cost Pelt two wounds; killing it saved her life; doing both, late and under a seal, was the worst possible order. Disable it on insertion unless you have a specific use for the noise. She thought she had one. She did not.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTDATA SECURED // 4 of 5 behavioral segments, including the full Resonance Scream cycle Tanaka required. Operator extracts alive (blizzard-pinned, aircraft on Condition One). Only the low-value remerge segment unrecorded.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORSaga Mørk "Pelt": 1 Flesh + 1 Mortal Wound. Punched through a snow bridge, mauled by a Lobodon in the melt water on a natural 6. Sheltered, stable, reel intact.
CASUALTIES // FIELDRogue BAFO cell destroyed: Veteran #2 dragged under by a seal, Veteran #1 stranded in the whiteout. Three Lobodon scattered, none down. Specimen undamaged, AR3 hide never breached, remerged into the glacier.
MVPThe rig retune (T4). Dropping the EM-fouled optical channel for acoustic + thermal capture converted an unrecordable scream into the contract's centerpiece. A decision, on Pelt's best stat, that won the job.
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT BIG GAME HUNTS (Hunt 02: Shackleton Margin), with the core D6 engine and the OT Solo Rules.
THE GLACIER KEPT ITS SKIN. SHE KEPT THE RECORD.