PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: EURASIAN STEPPE // GRID 4-FOXTROT, RELAY SIX
FILING_DATE: 2026-07-19
RESULT: SPECIMEN DOWN // T5
██ █ ████ ███ █
███ ████ ██ █████
BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-07-19
狩
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
SECOND
LITTER
HUNT 01, REOPENED // VEPR FEROX // SAME BLOODLINE
BIG GAME // HUNT 01, REOPENED
RELAY SIX // SUBSTRATE POST
SPECIMEN DOWN // CONFIRMED
RELAY INTEGRITY // HELD
OPERATOR // 2 FW LEFT
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
Six weeks ago Grouse killed a Vepr Ferox alpha on the Eurasian steppe and let its Grunt-tier juvenile scatter into the grass rather than spend a round chasing it down. Grown to Veteran tier and carrying a temper the old file never wrote up, it found BAFO's Relay Six on its own. This time the contract came with her name already on it, and this time she went back to close what she'd left open.
SECOND LITTER
BY TIB MARLOW
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: EURASIAN STEPPE // GRID 4-FOXTROT, RELAY SIX // 2026-07-19
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. Six weeks ago I ran Grouse's Iron Grass kill and called the juvenile that scattered a loose end, not a loss. BAFO apparently disagreed, because the moment something started testing the fences at Relay Six they pulled her contract first, ahead of anyone else on the roster. She went back alone, on purpose, turned down a Medic the desk offered her twice. This is the closest this desk has come to watching an operator finish a sentence she started in June. It doesn't finish as clean as she wanted it to — read to the end before you decide how clean "clean" gets to mean around here.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts (solo)
SCENARIOHunt 01 "Iron Grass," second deployment // BAFO Contract 447-F, reissued // Eurasian contested zone, Grid 4-Foxtrot, Relay Six substrate-monitoring post
OPERATOREske Lund, callsign Grouse. Gene-forged veteran contractor, BAFO Rank 3, solo by her own request — the desk offered backup twice and she turned it down both times. Handler Kestrel, remote. Full health, 3 FW / 2 MW.
SPECIMENVepr Ferox, Veteran tier, matured from the Grunt-tier juvenile that scattered at Iron Grass. AR 2, Adaptive Hide, Territorial, plus a trait the June file never had cause to write: Orphan Aggression (FIGHT +1 when isolated from a sounder).
TABLERelay Six's exposed antenna hill, three approach lanes, the same ferrite moss belt from Iron Grass grown in thicker, one access road on an EO patrol clock, a containment shed BAFO wants standing at the end of this.
OBJECTIVESpecimen Out of Action before the shed's monitoring gear takes structural damage. Plate-proof recovery optional — BAFO wants the relay this time, not the trophy.
WIN CONDITIONSpecimen Out of Action with the shed intact. Loss on operator down or shed integrity at zero.
TURN CAPClimax fires at Threat Phase 6 at the latest.
BAFO's contract came in flagged for her by name, which almost never happens on a re-issue. Grouse read it twice before she understood why: something was walking Relay Six's outer fence at night, leaving the same tusk-drag pattern the Iron Grass alpha used to mark territory it hadn't earned yet. Kestrel pulled the growth curves on Vepr Ferox and put it plainly over comms — six weeks is enough time for a Grunt-tier juvenile to test Veteran, if it had a reason to grow up fast. Losing its mother to a long gun on the steppe counts as a reason.
The desk offered her a Medic twice. She turned it down twice. Kestrel didn't argue the second time, just noted for the record that Grouse was choosing to finish this one the way she'd started it — alone, with a rifle, on the same grass. That is either discipline or penance, and the file doesn't have a box for telling the two apart.
The old anatomy read from Iron Grass was half a gift and half a trap. The plate seam she'd mapped on the mother had moved on the offspring, grown in at a different angle the way scar tissue never quite matches the animal it came from. What carried over clean was the behavior: the same hesitation before a charge, the same tell in the ears before it committed. Grouse had spent six weeks studying a boar that no longer existed, and it turned out to matter less than she'd feared. She still knew how it thought.
What she didn't know, because nobody could have told her, was what losing that mother had actually done to it.
SHE STUDIED A BOAR THAT NO LONGER EXISTED. IT MATTERED LESS THAN SHE FEARED.
Orphan Aggression isn't in any BAFO file — Kestrel coined the term live, over comms, the first time the Vepr broke cover early instead of holding for a clean charge lane the way a Territorial specimen is supposed to. It came at the shed straight through the ferrite belt, plate first, and put a dent in the relay housing before Grouse had finished her first Read. A boar that grew up without a sounder to answer to had apparently stopped waiting for good odds.
The opening exchange went the way Iron Grass's did: her plate-seam shot landed clean and the Adaptive Hide ate it anyway, first hit of the round, same trick, same animal underneath the new growth. The follow-up connected where the old file said the soft line used to be and found scar tissue instead — glancing, wasted. The charge came in on schedule. She planted the way she had in June, took the gore across the same ribs, and put a round through what she guessed was the new soft line on pure instinct rather than intel. It worked. Two boxes gone before the shed integrity meter had dropped past its first quarter, and for one round it looked like this was going to be the shorter fight.
It wasn't. The Vepr recovered the lane, came in again without waiting for its own charge cooldown to reset — another thing the June file said it shouldn't be able to do — and put Grouse down to her last flesh-wound box for the second hunt running. No Tempo token in reserve this time; she'd spent it on the approach checks instead of holding it back, the one real difference in doctrine between the operator who went in cold in June and the one who went in certain in July. She stood anyway, fired the throwaway round to feed the hide on purpose this time instead of by accident, and put the kill shot exactly where the scar tissue told her the new soft line actually was. The Vepr folded four meters short of the shed door.
She cut nothing for proof. BAFO didn't ask for it, and there wasn't much dignity left in the carcass to justify the trouble. What she did instead, on her own time, was walk the den the drag marks led back to — and found two divergent scent-and-print trails splitting off from the same nest scrape, only one of which led to Relay Six. Kestrel logged it without comment. Grouse didn't either. The report BAFO gets says the contract is closed. The one Kestrel filed privately says it's open until somebody finds where the second set of tracks went.
// THE TAPE
PREThe Read 4, 6 (solo DC 3+), both good but the plate-seam data flagged stale (specimen regrown since June). Approach obstacles 2 / 6 / 4, one failure on the ferrite belt — alerted the specimen one phase early. No Tempo banked; held in reserve was overruled by the desk's insistence on a fast approach.
T1Vepr breaks cover early (Orphan Aggression, house-ruled: skips its own Territorial hold-and-charge setup). Lost priority 2 vs 4. Plate-seam shot nat 6 crit, eaten by Adaptive Hide. Soft-line shot 3, glances off regrown scar tissue, no damage. Charge lands, Grouse GUTS 5 holds her feet, takes the gore (Vepr FIGHT 4+1 Orphan Aggression) for 1 FW.
T2Grouse fires on instinct at the new soft line 5, hits for 2 FW — Vepr 3 FW to 1 FW. Shed integrity ticks down 1 (stray round through the housing). Vepr recharges without its cooldown (second Orphan Aggression trigger), FIGHT 5 connects, Grouse to her last FW box.
T3No Tempo in reserve to reroll. Throwaway shot 4, hits, feeds the hide on purpose. Soft-line kill shot 6, clean hit for 2 FW. Vepr Out of Action, four meters short of the shed door.
T4EO patrol clock checked 5, no contact. Shed integrity holds at 3/4. Grouse walks the den off-contract; TRACK check 6, finds a second scent-and-print trail splitting from the nest scrape before the specimen's route to Relay Six. Logged privately, not on the BAFO closure report.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
This one's a case study in what happens when you run the same specimen bloodline twice with six in-fiction weeks between deployments. Nothing in the Big Game Hunts rules as written accounts for a specimen aging up mid-campaign, so we house-ruled two things going in: a full tier promotion (Grunt to Veteran, matching the alpha's original stat line minus one point of AR for the animal still being young) and Orphan Aggression, a one-off trait that lets the specimen skip its Territorial hold-and-charge setup and re-trigger a charge without paying its normal cooldown, twice, before reverting to standard behavior. Both rulings are logged to the backlog as scenario-specific, not baseline.
- The turn it swung: T2, when the Vepr recharged its trait a second time and put Grouse on her last box with no Tempo banked. That's the cost of spending your one token on the approach instead of holding it for the fight — a defensible call given the failed ferrite check, but it meant round three had to land clean with no safety net, and it did.
- Declined backup, tested: BAFO offered Grouse a Medic twice and she said no both times. Run solo, the math is unforgiving — one bad Approach roll costs you the Tempo you'd otherwise hold for the kill shot, and there's no one to patch a flesh wound between rounds. It worked this time. A one-box margin either way and this report reads very differently.
- Balance read: a Veteran-with-house-rule specimen carrying a re-triggering charge is meaningfully harder than a stock Veteran. If you're running a "the one that got away comes back bigger" scenario at your own table, cap the re-trigger at once, not twice — two re-triggers on top of Adaptive Hide is close to the edge of fair against a solo operator with no support.
- One thing to try next time: stale anatomy data should probably cost something explicit rather than just flavor. We ran the plate-seam miss as pure narrative color; a cleaner rule would tax the first Read-based attack of the fight with a flat penalty when the operator's intel predates a specimen's tier change, then let it clear once a hit lands and confirms the new profile.
- Kit and terrain aside: the EO patrol clock never fired and the shed held at three-quarters integrity, which is the actual win condition BAFO cared about. The trophy-hunt framing from Iron Grass is gone here on purpose — this contract was never about the tusk-plate.
Rulings this run, logged to the same backlog as Iron Grass: specimen tier promotion between deployments needs an actual table, not a GM eyeball; a house-ruled trait that lets a specimen skip its own setup step is powerful enough that it should probably cost the specimen something too, not just the operator; and TRACK checks made after a contract's win condition is already met need an explicit ruling on whether they're diegetic-only or can surface a hookable follow-up thread. We ruled the latter, obviously.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTConfirmed kill. Hunt 01, second deployment, cleared on Threat Phase 5. Shed integrity held at three-quarters; BAFO's win condition satisfied in full.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORGrouse took 2 FW across two rounds, ended the hunt on her last flesh-wound box before recovering to 2 FW at debrief. No mortal wounds.
CASUALTIES // SPECIMEN SIDEVepr Ferox, second-generation, killed via soft-line hit. No secondary specimen engaged at Relay Six — but a second scent trail from the same den was logged off the books.
MVPThe instinct call on round two — a soft-line shot placed on behavioral memory instead of stale anatomy data, fired before the Read confirmed the new profile. It was right.
SHE CLOSED THE CONTRACT. SHE DIDN'T CLOSE THE DEN.