PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: UNSO TRAVELER // INNER CORE
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-16
RESULT: DATA SECURED // NO WOUNDS // SOUSA LOST
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-16
標
OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG // RECONSTRUCTED
TISSUE
COUNT
DEAD LOOP // THE SHIP COUNTED US
OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG
DEAD LOOP // HORROR MODULE
5 SECTORS // BREACH 3
DATA SECURED // NO WOUNDS
SOUSA LOST
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG
An UNSO crew boards the two-centuries-derelict generation ship Traveler to lift Cold Fusion data and trips an immune response that reads them as contaminant. They walk out with the drive, the recorder, and not one wound. They leave a living woman in a stairwell, and a gene-forged scout who could not read the dark that already knew his name.
TISSUE COUNT
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG
FILED: UNSO TRAVELER // INNER CORE // 2026-06-16
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Margit here. A clean extraction is supposed to read like a win, so notice that this one does not, and notice that the crew never fired a shot to earn it. I kept it for the night the scout went blind and the mechanic read the machine, and for the woman they left in the stairwell.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // RPG, the Dead Loop horror module (d6 vs threshold // Good 2+, Ordinary 4+, Bad 5+; wounds run 3 Flesh, then 2 Mortal, then Out of Action)
SCENARIODead Loop // the UNSO Traveler, a colony ship on autopilot for two hundred years. Insert through the sheared shuttle dock, cross five sectors, lift the Cold Fusion data, get off a ship with no clean way off.
SQUADGREY LADDER // VANTZ "Latch" (Infiltrator, gene-forged marten-stock, OPINT and TACT 2+), OKONJO "Solder" (Tech Specialist, TACT 2+, fragile in a fight), DRUSE "Anvil" (Commando, armored, FIGHT 2+), MAVERN "Quiet" (Medic and negotiator, OPINT 2+)
THE SHIPThe threat is the Traveler itself // Stalkers (silent pair-hunters that pin and kill), the Pack (swarm), Corvids (observers that relay your position to everything else). Aberrants run as weather, not enemies. Handler Captain Reeves works the relay with his own angle. One survivor, Sousa, holds half the nav codes.
OBJECTIVEPull the Cold Fusion drive from the Storage Core and extract at least one operator with it. Reeves dangles a secondary, the Breeding Annex reset // declined in the field.
WIN CONDITIONData off the ship. Loss if every operator goes Out of Action or breaks, or the drive never leaves.
DOOM CLOCKSBreach Clock 0 to 6 (ship mobilization; at 6 everything hunts and extraction is a fight for your lives). Dread Track per operator 0 to 6 (at 6 the operator is non-functional). The Sector 5 extraction difficulty is set by the Breach Clock, so keeping it low is the whole game.
TURN CAPFive sectors // no fixed round limit. The Breach Clock is the timer.
The airlock sealed behind GREY LADDER with the sound of a lung emptying, and the bay was warm. That was the first wrong thing. Two centuries with no crew and the deck plates still held body heat, the recyclers still hummed, the emergency strobe still painted the wreck amber on a rhythm nobody had watched since before any of the four were decanted. On the gantry lay the last operator of the team that came before. Her visor was cracked from the inside. There is no wound that explains a visor cracked from the inside, so Quiet did not try to explain it. He searched her chest rig, found the mission recorder UNSO had not mentioned, and pocketed it while the cold came off her armor like breath.
That was the clean part. Latch went forward to read the Stalker cycle and read it wrong. He is gene-forged, marten-stock, built for exactly this dark, and the gap he called was already moving. It came around the wreck with Quiet still on the gantry and the recorder still warm in his fist. Anvil did the one thing that does not raise the alarm. He put his armored body in the lane and stopped a thing that does not stop, long enough for Quiet to fold into a shadow pocket and for the bay to swallow them both. Nobody fired. That was the whole game, though they did not know it yet. The ship counts noise, and noise is what wakes it.
They made the stairwell on nerve and a good break, and went down into the junction, where the air was warmer again and someone was alive in it. Sousa had watched her own team die and she held half the codes that open the ship, and she would trade them for one thing only, which was off. Quiet is the squad's voice, and the squad's voice came out wrong. Maybe it was the body still on him. Maybe it was the Dread already sitting behind his eyes. He pushed when he should have waited. She bolted into the dark stairwell, and the four of them stood in the junction and listened to her run. Then they listened to her not run. Nobody said the thing everybody heard.
While the squad lost a woman, the junction lost patience. Solder put his hands into a navigation terminal and the terminal put the ship's whole power signature up like a flare, and a Corvid overhead turned its head and did not turn it back. Then a dead screen woke on its own and scrolled four thousand names, the colonists, the people this hull was built to carry, and it stopped on one. VANTZ. It printed the gene-forged operator's name two centuries before he existed and held it on the glass until he made himself look away. The briefing had said creatures. The briefing was insufficient.
THE SHIP COUNTS NOISE. NOISE IS WHAT WAKES IT.
The gate to the inner core is three meters of pressure door and a handler who wanted paying. Captain Reeves had demands, and the first would have walked the squad into the Breeding Annex to reset a security system for reasons that were his and not UNSO's. GREY LADDER did the math in the one safe corridor on the ship. The Annex raises the alarm just by being entered, it lights you with every pulse, and it is worst of all for the gene-forged. Latch was four bad reads deep and carrying his own name on a manifest. So they told Reeves nothing, went dark on him, and put Solder on the door.
Solder is baseline. He cannot smell the markers or hear the Pack the way Latch can, and tonight that was the point. His hands fumbled the lock twice while the deterrent field that kept the corridor clear bled out round by round. On the third try the door gave, on the best roll he had in him. A Stalker came in on the worst timing it could find, and Anvil met it in the gap again while the seal finished, and the thing threw itself at his plate and missed, and the door closed it out on the wrong side of the inner core. Two fumbles and a breakthrough, back to back, and still not a shot.
Past the gate the ship tried to herd them the way it herds everything, toward the Annex, toward the tanks. Latch could not find the way. The scout who should have owned the dark called nothing right the whole night. It was Solder who read the route, the baseline tech tracing power conduit like a wiring diagram, who threaded them around the horror peak to the Storage Core while the Stalkers kept their ceremony at the feeding cache and never saw them pass. The Cold Fusion drive came out of its housing in one second. The other half of the codes came with it. The thing they had paid for with a woman and a handler and four nights of sleep was the size of a thumb.
Then the long corridor. Four hundred meters, lit, straight, no cover, the only room on the ship built to be empty. The lights began dying behind them from the Annex end and the dark came on at a walk. A Corvid held Quiet's eye one beat too long and the clock ticked over. Solder fumbled the pod controls one more time and then threw the launch on a six. A Stalker reached the cluster as the hatches sealed. Anvil took the last beat on his shoulder, the way he had taken every beat that mattered, and the lunge skidded off and he hauled himself in. Four pods. Four operators. One drive. The Traveler let them go, because it had already taken what it wanted from the count.
// THE TAPE
S1Insertion Point. Quiet searches the dead operative, OPINT 5 // mission recorder secured (hidden objective). Body sighting puts Dread +1 on Quiet and Anvil. Stalker patrol cycle comes up "pass imminent"; Latch read of the cycle is a natural 1 // he calls a gap that is not there.
S1Gantry freeze fails (3 vs 5+) // first Aberrant sighting, Breach 0 to 1, Dread +1 to all who see it. Latch warns in time (4), no surprise. Anvil bodyblock FIGHT 4 holds the lane; Quiet withdraws TACT 5 with the recorder. Latch re-reads the cycle: natural 1 again.
S1Break for the stairwell on a natural 6; lone Stalker loses them (6). Off the X, no shots, Breach holds at 1.
S2Mid-Sphere Junction. A dead terminal scrolls the 4,000-name crew manifest and stops on VANTZ. Quiet works Sousa for her code half: natural 1 // her Trust drops 1 to 0, she bolts into the stairwell and is gone, taking half the nav codes with her.
S2Solder hits a nav terminal: natural 1 // power signature spikes, the Corvid relay goes live, Breach 1 to 2, no schematics pulled. Pack avoidance scrapes through on the masking bonus (3). Latch scout of the stairwells: natural 1, his third blind read. Group move to the gate lands a natural 6 anyway.
S3Inner Core Gate. Reeves refused, comms cut. Solder cracks the door (his Good 2+ at the printed -1, so 3+): natural 1, natural 1 (Deterrent Collapse climbing), then a natural 6 breakthrough and a 3 // Gate Authorization 2 of 3, deterrent field fails, Stalker inbound.
S3Final bypass 5 // gate opens. Anvil holds the chokepoint FIGHT 5; the Stalker strike is a natural 1, a clean miss off his plate. Squad through, three-meter door seals it out. Whole gate fight: zero shots, Breach holds at 2.
S4Breeding Annex declined. Blind nav to the Storage Core: Solder TACT natural 6 routes them around the horror peak. Latch backup read: natural 1, his fourth straight blind call. Core route clear (6). Drive plus the other code half pulled, no check; a Corvid clocks them but they break line of sight before it relays.
S5Extraction, Breach 2 // the Clean band. The corridor lights die behind them and the dark walks after them. Corvid discipline fails (3 vs 4+) // sustained eye contact, Breach 2 to 3. Pod launch natural 1 fumble, then natural 6 hot. Latch steadies on GUTS 5.
S5Stalker reaches the pods before the seal (1). Anvil holds one beat FIGHT 5; final lunge 2, miss. All four launch with the drive and the recorder. No wounds taken, no shot fired, no Aberrant killed.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
This is the Dread Spiral the module promises, and the dice ran it straight. I counted roughly ten natural 1s on the night against five or six natural 6s, and they did not fall evenly. Sector 2 ate four auto-fails in five rolls and cost the squad the survivor, half the codes, and a clean Breach. Then the same swingy d6 handed Solder a six on the gate, a six on the blind route, and a six on the pod launch. A flat curve would have made this a grind. The actual curve made it a horror story.
The turn it swung was the gate. Two fumbles with a Stalker bearing down, deterrent field bleeding out, then the breakthrough six, Anvil's hold, and the Stalker's own natural 1 on the strike, all inside one round. That sequence kept the Breach Clock at 2 through the most exposed point on the map, which is the only reason the Sector 5 extraction came up in the Clean band instead of as a running gunfight.
The story under the dice is the inversion. Latch is the gene-forged Infiltrator, the operator built to own this dark, and he failed all four of his reads. Solder is the baseline tech, and he read the machine like a wiring diagram every time it mattered. That is partly variance, but it sits a little too neatly on the module's own buried note that the Traveler keys on gene-forged tissue and treats it as something to recruit, not repel. The ship printed Latch's name off a two-hundred-year-old manifest. Played straight, the scout going blind on the one ship that recognizes him is the best beat the night produced, and it came out of honest rolls, not a thumb on the scale.
- Balance read: the primary is reachable without the Breeding Annex, which makes Reeves' secondary feel genuinely optional rather than mandatory. Refusing the handler and running a no-shots, Breach-control line is viable and the game rewards it. Good. A horror crawl should let competence buy a clean exit and still make it feel like a loss.
- Where it was generous: the Stalkers whiffed on Anvil three times (two natural 1s and a miss). The no-shots plan was sound, but the plate-and-bodyblock doctrine looked airtight partly because the predators rolled like it. A harder night punishes a squad that never draws a weapon.
- One thing to try next: run it again and actually enter the Annex, ideally with a gene-forged-heavy team, to stress the recruitment thread and the three-terminal pulse gauntlet. We dodged the horror peak entirely. The module's center of gravity is the room we refused.
- Conversion note for Jesse: Dead Loop runs on the OT d6 chassis but ships no d6 stat blocks for the Aberrants; the Traveler supplement stats them in a d20 HP/AC/+to-hit/DC convention, and the module's own checks read TECH and PRES rather than core TACT and OPINT. I converted Stalker, Pack, and Corvid to d6 and mapped TECH to TACT and PRES to OPINT to play it. Logged to the rules-gaps file. A short OT-stat sidebar in the module would close it.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTOperator win // the Cold Fusion data and the previous team's mission recorder are off the ship, all four operators extracted. Breach Clock closed at 3. Reeves refused, the Annex reset declined.
CASUALTIES // SQUADNone. Not one Flesh Wound taken across five sectors. Dread carried out: Quiet 2, Anvil 2, Latch 1, Solder 0. All four functional.
CASUALTIES // THE SHIPNone. No Aberrant killed, no weapon fired the whole run. One loss on the board: Sousa, dead in a stairwell after a parley that misfired on a natural 1.
MVPOKONJO "Solder" // the baseline tech. He fumbled four rolls and threw the three sixes that won the night: the gate breakthrough, the blind route around the Annex to the core, and the pod launch. He read the machine when the gene-forged scout could not.
THREADClean Extraction protocol. UNSO files the Traveler as a solved problem. Six months on, a second team goes in and does not come back, and GREY LADDER is the only crew alive who knows what the ship is. Command calls them back.
IT LET THEM GO. IT HAD ALREADY TAKEN THE COUNT.