PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: JAVA SCATTER // SECTOR 9
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-14
RESULT: NO CAPTURE // OPERATOR WALKS
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-14
逃
BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
EMPTY
NET
BAFO #213-P // THE NINTH CREW CAME BACK
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
HUNT 03 // SCATTER LANE
LIVE CAPTURE // FAILED
SPECIMEN UNWOUNDED
OPERATOR 0 FW / 1 MW
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
A baseline diver takes a priority live-capture contract on a specimen that talks in your own voice, and loses it on the third roll of the night, before she has the thing clearly in sight. What follows is one long chase through a flooded city with a shark working the same corridor. She never lands a hit. She comes home anyway.
EMPTY NET
BY TIB MARLOW
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: JAVA SCATTER // SECTOR 9 // 2026-06-14
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Eight crews went into Sector 9 for a live capture and the water kept all eight. The ninth was one diver, and she came back with the only thing a hunt like this reliably yields, which is the diver. Watch the approach roll // everything after it was already decided.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts (solo)
SCENARIOHunt 03 "Scatter Lane" // BAFO Contract #213-P // Java Scatter, Sector 9 submerged ruin network
OPERATORMara Quist "Brine" // baseline human, ex-PFZ aquaculture diver, BAFO Rank 2 // OPINT / TACT / GUTS Good, FIGHT Ordinary, SHOOT Bad // 3 FW / 2 MW
QUARRYLaut Dalam Type-4 primary (Veteran, 3 FW / 1 MW, Radio Lure + Adaptive Hide) and a Type-4 secondary (Soldier). A Carcharhinus Profundus and a feral sea-eagle colony stand in as live terrain.
COMPETITIONThe Menagerie // black-market live-capture crew (1 Soldier, 1 Tech) running the same target with a containment frame
TABLEFive flooded zones, Insertion to Extraction. Kelp, four floating mines, a glowing bloom, and 3 inches of monsoon visibility by Threat Phase 5.
OBJECTIVETake the primary alive with its Resonance Core node intact, extract north
WIN CONDITIONDeliver the living specimen. A kill drops the contract to Standard payout. An escape pays nothing and adds Heat.
TURN CAPOpen clock // monsoon lands at Threat Phase 5, the hunt resolved Round 7
Daud is at the channel marker when Brine comes up the north lane. He has the gel and he has bad news, which he delivers like weather. The bloom has not cycled down. He has been waiting eleven months for it to dim and it has not dimmed, and under the dark green mats the water is still saying things in voices that belong to other people.
She is a diver, not a gunhand. The contract wants the specimen alive with its core node whole, a job for steady hands and a canister of gel, not for a rifle she can barely use. So she goes in slow. Half speed through the kelp, reading the street before she swims it. Three times the flooded corridor puts a question to her and twice she answers it clean. The third time, in a gap between two drowned storefronts where the light comes down, something on the far side of the water sees her first.
She does not know it yet, but the hunt ends there. The Type-4 had been sitting easy on its territory, a big patient animal on a slow patrol. Now it knows it is being hunted, and it has made the decision a cornered thing makes, which is that it would rather be anywhere but here.
IT WOULD RATHER BE ANYWHERE BUT HERE. SO IT RAN, AND IT KEPT RUNNING.
It runs on the first exchange and it runs well. Brine has one thing banked from the approach, a little reserve of momentum, and she spends all of it just to stay in the same stretch of water as the thing. That puts her in the south corridor, which is the wrong place to be, because the south corridor belongs to something else.
The shark works that corridor on a loop and does not care which warm body is nearest, only that one is. It takes a piece of her on the way through. She keeps swimming. The Type-4 keeps opening water ahead of her, a length here, a length there, until it reaches the open edge of the transit zone where the city stops and the deep starts, and for one breath it is gone, off the board, eleven months of dead contractors plus one more.
Voss's voice is the only thing that catches it. The handler had been holding one card back all night, the way Voss holds everything back, and she plays it now. The thing checks at the edge. It turns. It is still whole and still fast, wearing every advantage it started with, but it is facing her now instead of leaving.
Then the sky opens. The monsoon Daud could not warn her about, because she has no people in the Scatter and no people means no warning, drops the world to the length of her own arm. In three inches of brown water a diver should own a thing like this. She swings twice for the joint that would fold it and put it on the floor for the gel. The water takes both swings. She never touches it.
And the thing learns her. That is the part that ends it. By the time the murk is thickest her spear has only one number left that will land, and that number is a killing number, and a kill is the single outcome the contract cannot survive. Her arm can reach the animal now. It just cannot reach it alive.
So she counts what is on her. The primary, unmarked. Its smaller shadow come up the flank, unmarked. Her own body down to the last box before the lights go out. The rivals she might have feared are a kilometer behind her getting flayed by a colony of feral eagles they were stupid enough to wake. She has one action left and a clear north heading.
She spends the action living. North into the murk that beat her, and the murk pays her back the only way it can, by hiding her from the shark on the way out. Daud keeps the engine warm. She clears the trap coral on the pilings, confirms the hull, and goes. The net comes up empty. The diver does not.
Eight crews investigated the signal in Sector 9 and none of them reported back. Brine is the ninth, and she is the first. That is not nothing. On a night like this it is most of what there is.
// THE TAPE
APPRApproach Protocol, three obstacles. Specimen Patrol natural 6, auto-pass. Environmental Hazard 4, pass. Detection Window natural 1, auto-fail. The nat-1 advances the primary from Hunting to Cornered before first contact. Two passes bank 1 Tempo.
R1Brine locates the Core (OPINT 5) and Reads the Primary Limb (OPINT 2, target roll 3). Threat phase: cornered primary flee/fight SITREP 6, yes and advantage. It bolts. Pursuit window opens, 4 rounds (D3 3 +1).
PURS AMomentum: Brine 6 vs primary 3 +3 boosts = 6. Tie. Brine spends her only Tempo to close to the same zone, in the shark's corridor.
R2Read #2 reveals the Resonance Core (OPINT 3). Primary flee SITREP 6 again. Pursuit B: Brine 4 vs primary 2 +3 = 5. Primary opens 1 zone. Shark proximity 2, still closing.
R3Hunt Event 1, Deep Frequency // baseline Brine never hears it, no penalty, primary gets +1. Pursuit C: Brine 6 vs primary 3 +3 = 6. Tie, no Tempo left, no move. Shark reaches her: bite 3, hit. Brine to 2 FW.
R4Pursuit D, final round: Brine 5 vs primary 6 +2 = 8. Primary reaches the map edge. Escape SITREP 5, it escapes. Voss reroll: 2, no. It stops and turns. Contract saved on the wire.
CLMXClimax variable 3: the Menagerie fired near the eagle nests. 6 Corsairs mob the rivals, the secondary activates. Competition out of contention.
R5Monsoon Banjir Bandang lands, visibility 3 inches. Brine closes to the primary at the edge. It attacks: 3, hit. Brine to 1 FW.
R6Hunt Event 7, specimen adapts // Brine's FIGHT drops to 6+, and a 6 in combat is a kill. Double-swing for the limb: 4 and 3, both miss. Threat phase: primary 4 hit, secondary 5 hit. Brine to 0 FW / first MW. First-MW GUTS check natural 1, fail, down to one action.
R7Capture is dead, the spear can only kill now. Brine breaks north. Withdrawal: crossing GUTS 2 pass, slip past the shark natural 6, hull TACT 5, trap coral OPINT 2. Extracts at 0 FW / 1 MW. No capture.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
This one was lost on the third roll of the night and everything after it was the bill arriving. The approach put a natural 1 on the Detection Window, which advances a Hunting specimen straight to Cornered, and a Cornered specimen rolls to flee every threat phase. It rolled a 6 and bolted before Brine had a clean eye on it, let alone a hand. From there a live capture was a chase, and a chase against a MOBI-10 animal in water when you swim at six is not a thing you win on the dice. You win it on Tempo, and she had exactly one token.
Read the dice honestly and the story is a slow no. The primary's pursuit rolls were ordinary (a 3, a 2, a 3, a 6) and the boosts did the work, +1 for speed and +1 for the cornered state, plus the advantage off each flee. Brine's own dice were good when they did not matter (two 6s in pursuit ties she had no Tempo to spend) and gone when they did (the 4 and the 3 on the only two swings that could have ended it). The single best roll of her night was a 2, Voss's reroll turning a clean escape into a stand. That reroll is the whole reason this is a survival story and not a missing-persons report.
Balance read: Hunt 03 is brutal for a baseline operator and I think that is the point, but the failure cascade is sharper than it should be. One bad approach roll on a Live Capture can pre-empt the whole contract by bolting the specimen off the board before contact, and the Pursuit math leaves a slow operator almost no way to claw it back without a stack of Tempo. Then Hunt Event 7 dropped her FIGHT to 6+, and since a natural 6 in combat is a forced Mortal Wound, the only number she could roll to hit was the one number that voids a live-capture contract. At that table state the capture is not hard, it is arithmetically impossible, and nothing tells you so out loud.
- The turn it swung: the approach, before turn one. The nat-1 cornered the thing and the contract was decided there.
- MVP: the Laut Dalam primary. Never took a scratch, ran a flawless evasion, sent the ninth crew home like the eight before it. Honorable mention to Voss's one reroll for keeping the diver breathing.
- One thing to try next: spend the Tempo differently, or do not chase it into the shark's corridor at all. A Tier-2 requisition that hands you Containment Gel on a held specimen, or banking two Tempo before contact, changes the whole math against a runner.
- Terrain aside: the 3-inch monsoon is a beautiful trap. It ruined her capture (two swings into the dark) and then saved her life (the shark could not find her on the way out). Same weather, opposite verdicts, twenty minutes apart. That is the table doing exactly what good terrain should.
Rulings I made and am sending to Jesse: whether Adaptive Hide's absorbed first hit also eats an anatomy effect or just the wound, whether a live capture has any non-lethal strike option against the natural-6 kill rule, and whether a failed approach should be able to bolt a specimen off the board pre-contact on a capture job. They are in the gaps log.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTLive capture FAILED. Specimen untaken and unwounded. Operator extracts alive with an empty net. Contract pays nothing // Heat +2.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORBrine reduced to 0 FW / 1 MW remaining (shark bite, then primary and secondary in the murk). No KIA. Recovers.
CASUALTIES // QUARRYNone. Primary and secondary both untouched, full health, still holding Sector 9.
COLLATERALThe rival Menagerie mauled by a 6-strong sea-eagle mob they woke themselves. Scatter Lane stays open.
MVPThe Laut Dalam Type-4 primary // three flee rolls, a held edge, and not a mark on it. Honorable mention: Voss's one reroll.
THE NET CAME UP EMPTY. THE DIVER DID NOT.