PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: EURASIAN CONTESTED ZONE // RESONANCE DRIFT
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-20
RESULT: SITE PURGE FAILED // ENTITY SUBMERGED
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-20
潜
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
INTO THE
WALLS
SITE PURGE FAILED // THE CORE KEPT IT
BIG GAME HUNTS
RESONANCE DRIFT // HUNT 05
SITE PURGE FAILED
ENTITY SUBMERGED // ~T7
OPERATOR EXTRACTS // 2FW 1MW
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
A black-ops site purge on the winter steppe, a target that conventional rounds cannot kill, and a rival who wants it crated alive. RIME cracked the thing open and stood one Lumicite round from the kill. Then it stopped being a target and went down into the floor it lives in.
INTO THE WALLS
BY QUILL ADAIR
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: EURASIAN CONTESTED ZONE // RESONANCE DRIFT // 2026-06-20
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Three rounds in, Sorokina had this thing cracked open and one die-roll from dead. Read what a cornered specimen does with its own floor, then go straight to the workbench, because the dice are not the whole story here. The Pursuit Sequence is.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts (solo). Hunt 05: Resonance Drift.
SCENARIOBAFO #601-BO, Site Purge, black ops rate. Derelict EO Lumicite installation, Eurasian Contested Zone. No handler, comms dead inside the Ferrite moss.
OPERATORYelena Sorokina "RIME" // gene-forged grey-wolf-stock, ex-compound perimeter scout. SHOOT / OPINT / GUTS Good, TACT / FIGHT Ordinary. AR1, 3 FW / 2 MW, MOBI 6. Lumicite-infused rounds.
QUARRYLumicite Resonance Entity, Soldier tier // FIGHT 2+, GUTS 2+, AR2, 3 FW / 1 MW. Distributed through the structure, tracks by resonance not sight. Template Regression, Resonance Scream.
COMPETITIONThe Collector, 1 Heavy, +1 to all rolls // wants the entity alive and portable. Plus a six-dog Psovoi pack on the perimeter and two dormant gun platforms.
OBJECTIVEEliminate the entity with Lumicite rounds while it is still socketed to the installation. Crack the armor, land two mortal wounds.
WIN CONDITIONSpecimen destroyed = purge. Failure if the operator goes down, if the Collector crates it, or if the entity displaces or submerges un-killed.
TURN CAPOpen clock. Resolved in 3 combat rounds plus a 4-round pursuit window, then extraction.
The brief came short on purpose. Site purge, black ops rate, no handler, and one line under the redactions that said the rate was worth it. What the brief left out, Yelena Sorokina found in the moss on the approach: the gun platforms had already let something walk past them, and the tracks went dead straight through the firing arcs without slowing once. The Collector was inside before she had even cleared the fence.
She came in the way a wolf comes in. Grey-stock, ex-compound, she read the feral dog pack on the perimeter the way you read a room you used to live in, and she put both her observation windows on the thing's resonance core before she ever let it see her. That part went clean. The core cracked on the first exchange. The armor that was supposed to eat her rounds came down and stayed down, and for one turn the scream that fills these rooms went quiet.
Then the math turned over. The entity does not stand anywhere. It is poured through the structure, in the walls and the floor and the dead light fixtures, and it does not hunt by sight. It hunts the way she sings without meaning to. It found her frequency on contact, came out of a wall socket eight inches off, and put its hand through her guard before she had landed a single killing round.
IT DOES NOT HUNT BY SIGHT. IT HUNTS THE WAY SHE SINGS WITHOUT MEANING TO.
She had it, though. That is the part worth sitting with. Three flesh wounds into a thing that carries one, the core cracked, the armor gone, one Lumicite round between her and the mortal wound that would have started the kill in earnest. The Collector knew it too. It stopped circling the room and wedged itself between her and the specimen, reaching with both hands, because a cracked entity is a portable entity and the Collector does not come out for corpses.
So she flanked it. Won the read on the room, slid wide off the Collector's blind side, opened a clean lane and filled the wound track to the top. One more. That was the whole game now, one more round through the same hole.
It did not give her the round. This thing is cornered by its own territory, which means cornered things here do not break for the open steppe, they break inward, down toward the core where the substrate runs deepest and a hunter with legs cannot follow. It read the half-beat where she was slow and it simply stopped being there. It went down through the floor it lives in. The Collector closed its hands on dispersing light. So did she.
What came after was not a chase so much as a demonstration. A wolf is faster than most things. She is not faster than a thing that does not run on legs. It opened the distance one room at a time, four rooms, while the drift bled her in the dark and the deep frequency she had been told not to answer kept asking anyway. By the time the structure ran out of inward to give, the entity was in the core, and the core kept it.
She walked out through a perimeter she knew cold, past the dogs and the ridge spike and the platforms that never woke, and she left the door open behind her the way the extraction team wanted it left. No proof of removal. No specimen for the Collector either. The installation is still hot. Whatever the brief actually wanted purged is still in the walls, reforming, and it now knows one more template line by name.
// THE TAPE
SETUPRemembers-You SITREP 3 // it does not know her template line yet. Free gene-forged read: Structural Weak Point. Platform arcs mapped (OPINT 2). Comms dead in the Ferrite moss.
APPRApproach Corridor, three TACT checks (Ordinary, 4+). Competition 6 pass. Silent Approach 3 fail. Terrain Breach 3 fail. Hunting to CORNERED pre-contact, entity banks +1 to its first strike, no Tempo.
READResonance Core OPINT 3 = mapped (priority target). Behavioral Trigger OPINT nat-1 = false read, action lost. She enters knowing Core + Weak Point only.
CONTACTGene-forged resonance pressure vs a Lumicite entity, needs 5+. Rolls 1. Entity +1 to its first attack // stacks to +2 on the opener.
T1Priority entity 7 v RIME 2. It closes 8in, screams (RIME GUTS 3 pass). RIME: shot to the Resonance Core 4 = HIT, AR2 to AR1 for the hunt, scream offline 1 rd, FW 1/3. Second shot 5 = FW 2/3. CLIMAX D6 2 // THE COLLECTOR INTERVENES.
T2Priority RIME nat-6 v 4. Flanks the body-block, shot 2 = FW 3/3 (full, next Lumicite hit converts to MW). Entity melee nat-6 = MORTAL WOUND on RIME. Collector grabs 6 + 2 = containment 2/3.
T3Priority RIME nat-1 v 6 // entity acts first. Flee/fight 6 = FLEE, de-localizes deeper, dodges the crate and the kill, +1 to first pursuit roll. Pursuit window D3+1 = 4.
PURRIME MOBI 6 (+0) v entity MOBI 8 (+1). Momentum: 1 / 4 / 1 / 2 v 4 / 5 / 6 / 3 // entity wins all four, opens to the core. Drift nat-1, nat-1 = RIME +2 FW. Edge SITREP 4 (yes-but) = submerges into the Lumicite core.
EXTPsovoi route OPINT 2 pass (slips the pack), ridge Glaciopuncture Spike GUTS 5 pass, final extraction SITREP 4 yes-but // reaches the vehicle, door left open, installation un-purged.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
She did not lose this on a bad plan. The plan was correct and she ran it well: read the Resonance Core before contact, crack the armor permanently, flank the Collector instead of fighting it, fill the wound track and wait for the one round. She lost it on three dice, in order. A natural 6 the entity rolled in melee that skipped her straight to a mortal wound on turn 2. A natural 1 she rolled on the turn-3 priority that decided whether she shot first or it ran. Then four straight losses on the pursuit momentum while the drift took two natural-1 bites out of her in the dark. Hot start, ice-cold finish.
The turn it swung: turn 3 priority. She was sitting one Lumicite round from the first mortal wound with the entity at a full flesh track. Win priority and the kill starts that round. The natural 1 handed the phase to the specimen, and a cornered thing that rolls a flee does not hand the round back. It went into the floor.
Balance read, and this is the real finding: the Pursuit Sequence makes a fleeing distributed specimen with a movement edge close to uncatchable for a slower operator carrying no Tempo. RIME is MOBI 6 against MOBI 8, she came out of a rough approach with zero banked Tempo, and the moment the entity chose to break inward she had no lever to stay on it. She did not lose a single pursuit round to a decision. She lost all four to arithmetic. A Site Purge that the quarry can simply refuse by de-localizing into its own substrate probably wants to give the hunter a way to deny the break: a Tempo refund for cracking the Core, a pre-placed charge on the core node, something that turns a clean read into a hold.
The gene-forged tax barely landed. RIME is Good GUTS, so the Resonance Drift and the scream almost never touched her. She failed the drift only twice, both on natural 1s, both in the pursuit. The hunt's signature gene-forged pressure is built to be the price of the template, but a steady-nerved build waves most of it through. If the drift is meant to be that price, it reads better as a flat save the stat cannot shrug. Logged for Jesse with the Buran escalation, which is written easier than the base check and looks inverted.
- Try next time: bring a baseline operator, or bring a way to pin the core. The entire hunt is built around the quarry refusing to be a target, and a slow gene-forged shooter is exactly the profile it escapes best. Baseline loses the free read and the detection, but it stops feeding the thing a frequency to run from and it ignores the drift entirely.
- Kit and table note: the Collector is gorgeous antagonist design and we hardly got to use it. It wedged in on the Climax, started crating a thing that was fixated on someone else, and got two-thirds of the way before the specimen dissolved out from under both of them. Model it as a third hand reaching for the same object, not a second gun. It never fired at her once.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTSite purge FAILED. Entity submerged into the installation core, un-eliminated. Not displacement (it never broke for the steppe), not a kill-steal (the Collector came out empty). The territory kept it. Heat +2, no payout, operator survives.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORRIME: 1 Mortal Wound (T2 melee, entity nat-6) + 2 Flesh Wounds (pursuit drift, two nat-1s). Extracts at 2 FW / 1 MW box remaining.
CASUALTIES // QUARRY3 Flesh Wounds + Resonance Core cracked (armor permanently down 1). Zero Mortal Wounds. Never Template-Regressed. Reforms within D6 hours.
CASUALTIES // COLLECTORNone. Containment reached 2 of 3 before the specimen de-localized. Left holding light, empty-handed.
MVPThe entity. It never had to win a fight. It only had to refuse one.
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT BIG GAME HUNTS // HUNT 05: RESONANCE DRIFT (PDF supplement, no in-browser reader yet). Pair it with
OT BIG GAME for the solo loop.
ONE ROUND SHORT. THEN IT WENT INTO THE WALLS.