PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: JAVA SCATTER // TANDU MOUTH // GRID 3-DELTA
FILING_DATE: 2026-07-24
RESULT: HVT SECURED // ALIVE
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-07-24
封
OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT // RECONSTRUCTED
NOTHING
LEAVES
STRIKE // BATU SANGAR BONDED HOUSE // TAKE ALIVE
HVT // TAKE ALIVE
NOTHING LEAVES
HVT SECURED // T6
MEDIC DOWN // STABILIZED
// COUNT THE CAGES // READ THE BOOK // TAKE HIM WHOLE // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
A capture order on the bonded receiver who has signed the same shed for forty-one years. The desk went in to take the man who fills the IN column and never the OUT one. It got him whole, cost a Medic a mortal wound to do it, and walked out with a book that answers the wrong question.
NOTHING LEAVES
BY TIB MARLOW
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
FILED: JAVA SCATTER // TANDU MOUTH // GRID 3-DELTA // 2026-07-24
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. We have spent a month on the water side of this thing — nets, gel, a crew called the Menagerie leaving a chip stamped with a crossed net rather than fight over a tagged specimen. This is the first time the desk stood on the landward end of that lane and looked at the man doing the receiving. He is not a monster and he is not a mastermind. He is a clerk with a stamp, and the terrible part is that the stamp has worked for forty-one years. Marlow ran it as a take-alive on purpose. I am glad we have him. I am less glad about what his book does and does not say.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // HVT (take-alive strike)
SCENARIOStrike // Batu Sangar bonded house, landward terminus of the Java Scatter lanes, Tandu river mouth, grid 3-Delta. Low-water insertion window.
TEAMFour operators, Distributor-lane freelancers. Handler Weir, remote.
ROSTERSefa Nkemelu “Heron,” Infiltrator / cell lead. Márton Vas “Kiln,” Breacher. Ilse Danø “Rye,” Marksman / overwatch. Dov Halloran “Splint,” Medic.
HVTBram Costa, called “the Signer.” Bonded receiving agent. Low FIGHT line, no forge, high-value alive. Protected by four bonded wardens and a Distributor courier detail on the tide.
TABLEStilted warehouse over tidal mud, empty holding cages, a weighbridge over the channel, a bond office. Tide clock: courier boat lands on the turn.
OBJECTIVETake the Signer alive and recover the consignment book. Alarm above 3 launches the courier detail early.
WIN CONDITIONHVT extracted alive. Book is a bonus, not a requirement. Loss on HVT killed, HVT escaped, or team down.
TURN CAPTide turns at Threat Phase 7; the channel goes un-wadeable after.
The order came down as a clerical problem wearing a strike budget. Somewhere out on the Scatter there is a receiving mark — a crossed net burned into a lintel — that two crews have now walked away from rather than shoot each other over. Nobody could name who it received for. The desk decided to stop asking the water and go ask the man with the stamp.
Batu Sangar is not a fortress. It is a shed on poles at the mouth of the Tandu, where the lanes come off the islands and touch land for the first time. At low water you can wade the channel. At high water you cannot, and the courier boat that services the place rides that same tide in. So the whole scenario is a clock you can feel in your shins: get in across the mud, take the man before the boat lands, get out before the water rises over the bar and pins you against it.
Heron read the dock from the reed line and did it well — two Reads, both good, the warden rotation mapped and the bond office picked out before anyone stepped onto the boards. Rye set up on a fuel drum with a clean lane down the weighbridge. Kiln carried the quiet tools. Splint carried everything you hope you do not open. The plan was surgical and the plan lasted exactly until turn one.
Because Batu Sangar has almost nothing worth stealing in it. That is the first thing that is wrong with it.
THE CAGES WERE CLEAN. THAT IS WHAT SCARED THEM.
The holding cages ran forty of them down the long axis of the shed, and every one was empty and hosed down. Not derelict — maintained. A place that receives live cargo and holds nothing is a place where the holding is brief and the outbound is fast, and there was no outbound. No trucks. No second dock. Just the one channel the team had just waded up.
Heron went for the office soft and the dice went hard. A warden turned on a natural roll nobody wanted and the alarm ticked to two, then Kiln put it back to one by dropping the man into the mud without a sound, which is the sort of trade Breachers are for. Rye earned the report on turn two: the courier boat came in early anyway, riding the tide, and she took the bowman off it before his boots hit the boards, then missed the second on a flat two and let the detail land. That was the turn Splint got hit — a warden's blade found the gap while he was closing on a downed operator he did not need to close on, because that is what Medics do, and he took it into the body and kept walking on the strength of the roll and nothing else.
Costa ran. Of course he ran. He is a clerk; running is his whole combat doctrine. He went for the weighbridge with the consignment book against his chest and the black channel underneath, and the read on his face was simple: he was going to put the book in the river before he let them read it. Heron chased him onto the scale and there it was, the near-miss the whole game was built to produce — a grab for the book that came up a natural one, Costa twisting, the book leaving his hands out over the water.
Kiln caught it in the scale pan. Not clever. Lucky. The weighbridge tray swung under it and the book landed in the one place on the whole table that was not moving water. Heron got an arm across Costa's throat, Splint jammed a token he should have kept into keeping himself upright, and the desk had the man alive on Threat Phase six with the tide already licking the bottom stair. They went out the way they came, four up, one of them held together by chemistry and stubbornness, with a clerk in a bag and his book in a dry sack.
// THE TAPE
PREThe Read 5, 4 (DC 3+), both good. Warden rotation and bond office mapped, banked 1 Tempo. Channel waded at low water on TACT 4, no splash, no alarm built. Rye takes overwatch on the weighbridge lane.
T1Heron INFIL toward the office 5, good, but a warden GUARD check comes up nat 6 and orients: Alarm 0 → 2. Kiln silent-takedown that warden 5, Alarm 2 → 1. Costa not yet located. Tide clock advances.
T2Courier boat lands early on the tide (scenario trigger, not alarm). Rye overwatch on the bowman nat 6, down before boots. Second shot 2, miss, detail lands (2 wardens + handler). Splint MOVES to a downed warden's side and eats a FIGHT 5 for a Mortal Wound; passes his stay-up check on the die alone.
T3Costa located, breaks for the weighbridge with the book (HVT flee behavior). Heron pursuit 4, closes one zone. Kiln + Rye pin the courier handler 5 / 4, Alarm held at 1. Splint refuses evac, stabilizes on the move 5.
T4Heron onto the scale, grab for the book nat 1, fumble — Costa twists, book goes over the rail. Kiln reaction catch, the book lands in the weighbridge pan (open ruling, see Workbench). Costa GUTS to break free 2, fails.
T5–6Heron subdue Costa alive 6, restrained. Last warden folds on morale. Team exfils across the bar on the turning tide; Splint spends the reserve Tempo to hold his own MW track. HVT out alive at Threat Phase 6, one turn under the cap.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED — Q. ADAIR
Adair on the desk. This is the third time this month a scenario has ended with the crew holding an object the rules do not know how to score, and it is time to say it plainly: HVT is a good manhunt engine bolted to a scoring sheet that only understands a body. We took the Signer alive, which is the hard path — a kill would have been three turns shorter and cost us nothing — and the sheet paid us exactly the same either way. The book, which is the entire reason a take-alive was worth a Medic's mortal wound, is worth zero victory points as written.
- The turn it swung: turn four, Heron's natural 1 on the book grab. A killed HVT drops the object at his feet and you pick it up at leisure. A fleeing HVT can dump it, and ours tried. The whole tension of the take-alive lives in that one exchange, and the rules give it no frame — we adjudicated the pan catch as a contested reaction because there was nothing else to reach for.
- Take-alive is priced wrong: right now “alive” is a self-imposed handicap with no reward. You accept more turns, more exposure to the reinforcement clock, and a real chance the target ends the object in a river, and you score the same as a two-turn assassination. Nobody rational takes the hard path for flavor. Give them a reason.
- Proposal — the Recovered Consignment token: a secondary objective that scores the document separately from the person. Take the HVT alive AND recover his records for a full clear; take him alive but lose the book (river, burn, courier carries it off) for a partial. It turns the flee-and-dump into a live decision instead of a rules gap, and it finally makes “alive” mean something on the sheet.
- Reinforcement clock is the good part: the tide doing double duty — insertion window and courier arrival on the same rising water — is the cleanest thing in the scenario. It made every wasted activation cost real ground and gave Rye's overwatch a reason to exist. Keep that. It is doing the work the victory conditions are not.
- Splint should not be alive: a Medic taking a Mortal Wound to reach a warden who was already down, then passing three consecutive checks on unmodified dice, is variance, not doctrine. Do not learn the wrong lesson from a survivor. The correct read is that he over-committed and the dice bailed him out.
Rulings logged to the backlog. HVT has no take-alive objective distinct from elimination; we ran restraint as a contested GUTS/FIGHT at close range and it worked, but it is house. The document-recovery question is undefined — there is no rule for an HVT destroying carried intel mid-flight, which is exactly the moment this whole game turned on. And the courier-detail reinforcement lands as a fixed scenario event rather than an alarm consequence, which made Rye's early kill on the bowman feel unrewarded. Three gaps, one of them — scoring the book — the difference between a clever ending and a scored one.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTHVT secured alive on Threat Phase 6, one turn under the tide cap. Book recovered. Full win on the objective as written; the interesting part scores nothing.
CASUALTIES // TEAMSplint took a Mortal Wound, stabilized in the field and evac'd conscious. No KIA. Heron, Kiln, Rye unhurt.
CASUALTIES // OPPOSITIONTwo bonded wardens down, one courier bowman down, courier handler restrained. Bram Costa taken alive, uninjured.
INTERROGATIONCosta said nothing. Not stonewalling — nothing. Signed forty-one years of a book he says he never read past the weight column.
THE BOOKConsignment ledger, forty-one years. IN column full: live cargo, dated, weighed, initialed BC. OUT column blank on every landward manifest — except a single routing prefix that repeats, that is not a Scatter lane code, and that reads as up-and-off rather than inland.
MVPKiln's reaction catch. The whole take-alive survives on a Breacher fielding a thrown book into a weighbridge pan on instinct. Honorable mention to a tide that punished every idle activation.
WE TOOK THE MAN WHO SIGNS THE IN COLUMN. THE OUT COLUMN STILL WON.