PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: MAELBY BARRAGE // FRISIAN TIDAL COAST
FILING_DATE: 2026-06-26
RESULT: SKID DOWN // ALL OUT // T5
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-06-26
崩
OPERATOR TACTICS // THREAT RESPONSE // RECONSTRUCTED
NOT THEIR
WAR
SPRING TIDE // SKID DOWN // ZERO WOUNDS
THREAT RESPONSE
SOLO COUNTDOWN
SKID DESTROYED
5-ROUND SEAL
ZERO WOUNDS
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // THREAT RESPONSE
A three-operator splice had five rounds to blow a NAF reprocessing skid in a flooding barrage vault before the spring tide sealed the only road back. The plan was a quiet job and the dice turned it into a brawl of natural ones. In the end the cracked roof did the killing, the pressed-labor garrison decided the fight was not theirs, and everyone made the causeway on the buzzer.
NOT THEIR WAR
BY QUILL ADAIR
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // THREAT RESPONSE
FILED: MAELBY BARRAGE // FRISIAN TIDAL COAST // 2026-06-26
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. A demolition run where the breacher fumbled both his charges, the last failsafe went on a radio, and the splice still won because a shell-cracked roof did the job the explosives would not, is exactly the kind of fight I keep this desk open for. Read it for the moment the pressed locals heard the shooting and went back to their work.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Threat Response (solo Mission Builder countdown)
SCENARIOOperation Spring Tide. Sabotage a NAF deniable reprocessing skid buried in the control vault of the drowned Maelby Barrage, Frisian tidal coast. Night, heavy weather, rising flood.
OPERATORSKEEL / Breacher-Demolitions (baseline). WADE / Infiltrator, gene-forged otter-stock (no flood penalty, Ghost). GULLY / Medic (baseline). 2 Failsafe, Heat 0.
THREATNAF deniable garrison, motivation COERCED (pressed local labor): 2 Grunt, 1 Soldier, 1 entrenched Veteran "the Bailiff", commander Inspector Halloran Reeve. Start Unaware.
TABLESeaward water line (insertion) // wrecked jetty + causeway (approach) // control house vault (objective) // open sluice apron (kill) // landward causeway (extraction). Complication: shell-cracked roof, a loud blast buries whoever is inside.
OBJECTIVEDestroy the skid (2 demolition charges, then detonate). Secondary: recover 3 intel markers before the blow.
WIN CONDITIONSkid destroyed and operators clear of the causeway before the spring-tide surge seals it at the end of Round 5.
TURN CAP5 rounds (Mission Modifier: Spring Tide hard window). The tide does not negotiate.
Rain came off the North Sea sideways and the flats were already going under when the splice slid out of the water at the foot of the barrage. Three of them. Keel, who carried the charges and not much else worth saying out loud. Wade, otter-forged, who treated the rising flood like a hallway. Gully, the medic, who spent the whole night hoping he would have nothing to do.
The job was a NAF reprocessing skid, buried in the control house at the head of a half-drowned tidal barrage on the Frisian coast. Blow it, get out. The catch was the tide. A spring tide under a storm was coming up the channel, and at the top of the water it would close the causeway, the one road back to the mainland. Five rounds on the clock, no more. Stall and you drown standing in the vault you came to wreck.
Wade went first, the way the water let her, invisible against the current. She read the building before anyone else was exposed. Reeve, the NAF inspector, at a console with his hand drifting toward a radio. The Bailiff, a dug-in veteran foreman, at the north firing slit with his back to the room, watching the wrong direction. Two local men on the apron with rifles they plainly did not want, and a NAF soldier minding them. Pressed labor. Coerced. The kind of garrison that guards a thing because the alternative is worse, and not because anyone in it believes.
THE LOCALS HEARD THE SHOOTING AND DECIDED IT WASN'T THEIR WAR
Then the room woke up. Reeve felt the draft off the open hatch and reached for the handset, and a transmission would have brought the whole NAF response down the channel and started the skid bleeding containment into the surge. Wade hit him from nowhere. The first strike was perfect and still not enough, because a man with one breath left in him does not fall to one knife. So the splice spent a failsafe to keep his hand off the radio, and then spent the second one a round later for the same reason, because the inspector would not die and would not stop reaching.
That was the night, really. The plan was quiet and the dice were loud. Keel got the first charge onto the skid clean and then could not seat the second to save his life, fouling it once in the floodwater and again on the retry. The Bailiff, for his part, fired twice and hit nothing, jamming his rifle on the first attempt and lurching out of his own cover on the second. By the fourth round both demolition men, the saboteur and the guard, had spent their turns failing at the one thing each of them was supposed to be good at.
What carried it was the water and the ceiling. Wade does not feel the flood, so when Keel's hands failed her she went under and set the second charge herself at the coupling no one else could reach, and the sea handed it back seated and true. Keel blew it from the hatch. The roof was shell-cracked from some earlier war and everyone in the room knew it, and a loud enough blast was always going to bring it down. It came down on the skid and on the two men still inside who thought the skid was worth standing over. The inspector and his foreman went under their own roof.
Out on the apron the local men heard the building come apart and did the sensible thing. They did nothing. They had rolled to stay out of it the round before and they stayed out of it now, and once their overseers were buried there was no one left to make them die for a skid. The splice crossed the causeway in the trough between two waves with the water at their knees and the seal closing on the gap behind them. Nobody on Keel's side took a scratch.
// THE TAPE
T1Silent insert, squad priority 2-1. WADE establishes Stealth (TACT 3) and lifts the Approach intel, D20 14 = weapons cache (2 frags + an EMP), secondary 1/3. KEEL up the jetty undetected (grunt detect 4, needs 5+). Ambient SITREP 5 drifts the jetty grunt away. Garrison Unaware.
T2Enemy priority 3-2 (GULLY to 1 action). WADE Ghost into the vault (TACT 2), Field Read (OPINT 2) marks both charge points and banks 1 Tempo. KEEL + GULLY to the seaward wall, undetected (detect 2). Climax D6 = 1, Sealed Orders: the skid is remote-armed and Reeve goes for the radio. Event 1-2 Enemy/Minor, patrol drift (d6 6) bends the soldier away.
T3Squad priority 5-2. WADE surprise strike on Reeve = NATURAL 6, Mortal Wound, drives him to his last box (Cornered). Failsafe #1 forces him to skip, no transmit. KEEL plants charge 1 of 2 (TACT 3 +1). Bailiff returns fire = NATURAL 1, jam. Outside crew detect roll 1, stays Unaware. Event 2-1 Terrain/Minor, flood reaches the vault floor.
T4Enemy priority 3-1 (WADE to 1 action). WADE vs Reeve opposed Fight = DOUBLE NATURAL 1, wash, no wound, both fumble. Failsafe #2 spent to deny the transmit again. KEEL charge 2 = NATURAL 1, fail + jam (still 1/2). Bailiff clears, fires = NATURAL 1 again, goes Exposed. GULLY lifts the vault marker (D20 7), secondary 2/3. Outside crew roll 1, stay put. Event 6-2 Opportunity/Minor: a storm trough coming, +1 to the causeway.
T5Enemy priority 5-4 (GULLY to 1 action). WADE places the underwater charge 2 of 2 = NATURAL 6. KEEL detonates from the hatch (TACT 4). Cracked roof collapses onto the skid: Reeve and the Bailiff both Out of Action, their Threat-Phase shots (a Bailiff 6 among them) pre-empted by the collapse. Outside crew never engage. Extraction on the trough: KEEL 3, GULLY 3, both +1, WADE otter-auto. All three clear before the seal. Event 4-5 Pressure/Major Clock Compression, no effect (seal clock already running).
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
The dice were a horror show and the result came out clean, which tells you the decisions did the work. Count the natural ones. Keel fumbled both his charges. The Bailiff fumbled three rolls running. The pivotal opposed Fight in round four came up one-and-one for a dead wash. On raw dice this was a losing night. What saved it was that the splice never bet the whole mission on a single roll it could route around.
It swung in round five, and it swung on a build choice made in round one. Keel is the demolitions operator and Keel could not place the second charge to save the op. Wade could, because otter-stock ignores the flood and the second charge point had gone underwater, so the thing that was a difficulty penalty for the breacher was no penalty at all for the infiltrator. Putting the charge in the hands of the operator the terrain favored, instead of the operator whose name is on the job, was the whole game.
Balance read: the COERCED motivation and the cracked-roof complication carried this scenario and both are keepers. A pressed-labor garrison rolling to stay out of the fight twice is not the system breaking, it is the system telling the truth about who actually fights for NAF on a contested coast. And the unstable-structure complication is the rare one that becomes a weapon instead of a tax. The brief handed me a roof that kills anyone inside a loud blast, then handed me two enemies who would not leave the room. The demolition that buried them was the cleanest line on the board.
The failsafe spend is the cautionary tale. Both tokens went to the same problem, a commander who would not die and would not stop reaching for a radio, and the book's own warning about burning failsafe every other round was earned in full. Part of why is that a one-Mortal-Wound commander does not sit well on the HVT escalation ladder, which assumes two boxes: Reeve hit Cornered on the natural 6 and then could not be finished cleanly, so the radio stayed a live threat for three rounds.
- DICE: roughly ten natural 1s against four natural 6s. A genuinely cursed table the plan absorbed.
- SWING TURN: R5, Wade's underwater charge after Keel failed the same placement twice.
- KEEPERS: Coerced garrison morale, and the cracked-roof complication that became the kill.
- NEXT TIME: let the infiltrator carry a charge from insertion so the water route is plan A, not the desperation move.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTOPERATOR WIN. Skid destroyed, all three operators extracted T5 on the seal. Reeve never transmitted, no NAF response called. Secondary 2 of 3 intel (one marker short of the blow), Heat +1.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORSNone. Zero wounds across the splice (black-ops clean).
CASUALTIES // GARRISONInspector Reeve (commander) and the Bailiff (veteran) Out of Action under the collapsed roof. 2 Grunt + 1 Soldier unengaged, leaderless on the apron.
MVPWADE, otter-forged Infiltrator. Ghost entry, the Field Read that marked the charges, the natural-6 Mortal Wound that started Reeve unraveling, and the natural-6 underwater charge that actually won it.
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT SOLO RULES // THREAT RESPONSE, MISSION BUILDER COUNTDOWN.
THE BUILDING THEY GUARDED CAME DOWN ON THE TWO MEN WHO STILL BELIEVED IN IT