UNSTABLE SIGNALS // THE LEDGER STAYS OPEN

PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK

FILED_FROM: SCSF OPEN WATER // MARITIME INTERDICTION
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-21
RESULT: TARGET ESCAPES // HP 2

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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-21

逃

OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT // RECONSTRUCTED ONE GUN
OVERBOARD THE CARRY DIED ON A LADDER // THE TARGET SAILED

HVT // CARD GAME // MEDIUM MARITIME INTERDICTION TARGET ESCAPES // HP 2 OF 3 2 KIA // 1 WOUNDED EXTRACT GAUNTLET 5 + CONFRONT 3

// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //

// OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT

A three-operator boarding team drew exactly one weapon that could touch Colm Ashby, and a natural one dropped it down a companionway before the confrontation began. What was left was two soft-skill operators, both bleeding, trying to sink a 3 HP arms broker on open water. They could not, and the Ledger sailed.

THE LEDGER STAYS OPEN

BY TIB MARLOW

GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
FILED: SCSF OPEN WATER // MARITIME INTERDICTION // 2026-06-21
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.

// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE

This is the HVT card game showing its teeth: the draw is the whole story, and the dice drew a team with a single gun, then unloaded it into the sea on the third card of the gauntlet. Worth your time as a clean lesson in why you never let your only 2-plus walk a ladder under fire.

// DEPLOYMENT

GAMEOperator Tactics // HVT, the card game. Solo, Medium difficulty (3 operators, HVT HP 3, one counterattack per turn).

SCENARIOMaritime Interdiction. Intercept nuclear precursor materials in transfer on a Pacific Free Zone freighter. SCSF open water, a moving platform, a narrow transfer window.

STRIKE TEAMDrawn at Medium: Piotr "Freight" Czarny (Driver/Pilot, EO), Sela Okafor (Hacker, ACU, Init), Yusuf "Shade" Nazari (Spy, PCU, Init). No combat archetype. Every operator is Combat 5+ Bad.

TARGETColm "The Ledger" Ashby, arms distribution broker, ex-UKE Royal Phantom Corps. HP 3. Vulnerability: Navigation (Driver/Pilot, 2+), which only Czarny carries. Counter rolled at start: Armored Transit Vehicles, 3+.

GAUNTLETFive challenges, left to right: Coordinated Strike (Init), Disinformation, Environmental Obstacles, Remote Threat Systems (Init), Rigged Entry Points.

OBJECTIVEClear the gauntlet, then reduce Ashby to 0 HP in three confrontation turns.

WIN CONDITIONHVT to 0 HP within three turns. Loss if all operators KIA, or the clock expires with Ashby alive.

TURN CAP5 gauntlet challenges + 3 confrontation turns.

The freighter ran dark and slow through the South China Sea Freehold, two hundred kilometers of open water in every direction and a transfer crane swung out over the rail. Below it, in a vehicle bay that smelled of brine and machine oil, Colm Ashby was closing a sale. Nuclear precursor material, crated, papered, almost in someone else's hold. The boarding window was the length of that transfer and not a minute more.

The team that drew the job was built for everything except this. Okafor could open any door the ship had, electronic or otherwise. Nazari could be three different deckhands by the time anyone checked. Czarny could read a moving hull the way other people read a street, and he was the reason the plan worked at all, because Ashby is a navigator before he is anything else, and a navigator is killed by a better one. One man on the boat could touch the Ledger where it counted. The other two carried sidearms they were rated Bad with.

The gauntlet opened generous. A coordinated security rush met Okafor at the rail and she walked through it clean, the kind of result you do not question and do not expect to repeat. A bad-map feint that should have sent the team into a sealed corridor folded under Nazari before it finished unfolding. Two cards in, nobody had a scratch, and the plan still had its gun.

THE DOSSIER HAD ONE GUN IN IT, AND THE GUN FELL DOWN A LADDER.

The third card was a barrier, an elevated deck transition with a deterrence rail, exactly the obstacle Czarny was best on the team at clearing. He went up the companionway he had cleared a hundred times on a hundred other hulls, and this time the deck gave, or the rail held, or the sea moved under him at the wrong second. The record does not say which. It says he did not come back up. The only navigator on the boat, the only answer to the question the whole mission asked, gone on the easy card before a single shot reached the target.

What boarded Ashby's bay after that was two wounded operators with no answer to him at all. Okafor went into the ship's own systems, hunting the Ledger through his transit manifests and his comms, and on the first turn she put a single clean hole in his accounts. The freighter's lights stuttered. Ashby felt it. He did not panic and he did not fight them off. He did the thing arms brokers do, which is wait, and let the other side run down its inventory of people.

Nazari worked the cover angle and found nothing that bit. Then the bay's armored transit answered, a crew vehicle grinding around between the containers, and it found him. A wounded man does not get a second warning. Okafor finished the run alone on the last turn, one operator against three remaining points of a man she could not reach, and the clock that had started the moment the crane swung out finally ran to nothing. The crate changed hands. The freighter kept its heading. The Ledger stayed open.

// THE TAPE

G1COORDINATED STRIKE (Init), var 4, gene-forged drones, 4+. Team has no combat archetype, so all roll Combat = Bad 5+. Okafor deployed (Init negates pressure). Rolled 6 // crit success, cleared, stays Active.

G2DISINFORMATION, var 5, outdated ghost-country map data, 4+. Spy is Good here. Nazari rolled 6 // crit success, cleared, Active.

G3ENVIRONMENTAL OBSTACLES, var 4, elevated barrier, 4+. Driver/Pilot is Good. Czarny rolled 1 // critical failure = instant KIA. The only vulnerability match is gone. Challenge still clears.

G4REMOTE THREAT SYSTEMS (Init), var 3, remote vehicle ambush, 4+. Hacker is Good, Init negates pressure. Okafor rolled 2 // failure, Active becomes Wounded.

G5RIGGED ENTRY POINTS, var 3, pressure-plate net, printed 3+ but Spy is Ordinary so 4+. Nazari rolled 3 // failure, Active becomes Wounded.

SETCONFRONTATION. Ashby HP 3. Counter profile d6 = 3 // Armored Transit Vehicles, 3+, one per turn. Both survivors Wounded: any counter hit is a KIA. Fallback attacks land at 5+ while Wounded.

C1Okafor fallback hack, 5+, rolled 6 // natural 6 always hits. HP 3 to 2. Nazari fallback 5+ rolled 4 // miss. Ashby counter targets Nazari, rolled 1 // natural 1, miss. Both survive.

C2Okafor 5+ rolled 3 // miss. Nazari 5+ rolled 2 // miss. Ashby counter targets Nazari, rolled 3 // hit, Wounded becomes KIA. HP holds at 2.

C3Okafor alone, Wounded. 5+ rolled 1 // natural 1 miss (no self-KIA in confrontation). Ashby counter rolled 1 // miss. Clock expires, Ashby HP 2, target escapes.

// WORKBENCH

// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED, BY Q. ADAIR

The draw was kinder than the report makes it sound. A random Medium pull handed us the exact archetype Ashby is weak to, a Driver/Pilot for a Navigation 2-plus match, which is the dream result against this target. The problem was that the dream lived in one card, and HVT does not give you a second copy.

The dice luck splits cleanly. The gauntlet started hot, two crit-successes on cards the team had no business breezing (a Bad 5-plus combat card cleared on a 6, then a 6 again on disinformation). Then it turned on one number. Czarny's natural 1 on Environmental Obstacles was not a hard card for him, he was the best on the team at it, and the gauntlet's nat-1 = instant KIA rule does not care. That single die removed the only operator who could meet Ashby at 2-plus. Everything after it was a math problem with no solution: two wounded soft-skill operators, hitting at 5-plus, needing three points off a target while Ashby clipped one of them per turn on a 3-plus.

The turn it swung: the third gauntlet card, before a shot reached the target. HVT games can be decided in the gauntlet, not the confrontation, and this one was over at G3 even though the dice kept rolling for five more boxes.
Balance read: at Medium with 3 operators, a single-source win condition plus the unmitigated nat-1 KIA is a brutal combination. The crit-success-recover on the same outcome table is the counterweight, but it cannot un-KIA anyone. When the whole plan routes through one archetype, one die can end the mission with four cards still face down.
One thing to try next: do not deploy your only vulnerability-match operator into a soft no-init card you could hand to a redundant body. Czarny should have been parked and Okafor or Nazari fed to G3 at Bad odds, eating a likely wound to keep the gun in the box. Or draft for two answers, not one. A Medic in the pull would also have un-wounded a survivor before the confrontation, which is the difference between 5-plus and 4-plus on the only hits that matter.
Kit and table aside: maritime interdiction wants the moving platform on the board. Build it as a container deck with a swung-out transfer crane, and read Ashby's "armored transit" counter as the freighter's own vehicle bay grinding between the stacks. Splice-punk dressing writes itself: rust streaks, stencilled hull numbers, a nuclear trefoil spray-bombed over a half-scraped faction mark.
Rules gap logged: when the vulnerability-match operator is KIA, do the survivors get Fallback (4-plus), or does the team still "have" a match and get stuck on Default Combat? We ruled a dead operator cannot route an attack, so Fallback opened. Flagged for Jesse.

// DISPOSITION

RESULTMission failed. Target escapes. Ashby ends on HP 2 of 3, clock expired at confrontation turn 3.

CASUALTIES // TEAM2 KIA: Czarny (gauntlet G3, natural 1), Nazari (confrontation C2 counterattack). 1 wounded extract: Okafor.

CASUALTIES // HVT1 HP. Okafor's natural-6 hack on confrontation turn 1. No further damage landed.

MVPSela Okafor. Two gauntlet crit-successes on cards she was Bad or merely Good at, then the only hit anyone put on the target. She did everything right and the draw had already lost the game.

RUN IT YOURSELF: OT HVT (PLAYABLE IN BROWSER) // full rules at OT HVT READER

A TEAM CAN RUN OUT OF PEOPLE BEFORE IT RUNS OUT OF TARGET.