PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: IPFZ ARCHIVE RUINS // HUNT GENERATOR 001
FILING_DATE: 2026-08-31
RESULT: CONTRACT FAILED // SPECIMEN DOWNSTREAM // T11
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-08-31
流
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
ONE WOUND
SHORT
SITE PURGE // TYPE-3 AQUIFER INTEGRATOR // IT GOT INTO THE WATER
BIG GAME HUNTS // SOLO
GENERATED CONTRACT // SITE PURGE
11 ROUNDS // 65 DICE
PRIORITY WON 1 OF 11
CONTRACT FAILED // NO PAYOUT
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
The desk has now run all five published hunts, so tonight it rolled a contract from scratch on the Big Game generator and drew a thing living in the drinking water. Weir put it one wound from dead and never got the last round off.
ONE WOUND SHORT
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: IPFZ ARCHIVE RUINS // HUNT GENERATOR 001 // 2026-08-31
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Eleven rounds, one hunter, and the priority die went against her in ten of them, which is a thing that happens about once in a hundred and seventy games. Read it for the arithmetic: in a solo game, losing priority costs you half of everything you own.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts, solo. First run of the Hunt Generator by this desk: all five published hunts are already on the board, so the contract was rolled cold in seven steps.
SCENARIOGenerated contract. Site Purge, Black Ops clearance. A pre-war hydrology annex in Zone 7 of the Indo-Pakistani Forbidden Zone, the Archive Ruins. Hostile weather, visibility 12in. Intel wrong by one tier.
HUNTERNAJMA REHMAN, callsign WEIR. Baseline, not gene-forged. Marksman. SHOOT Good 2+ / FIGHT Ord 4+ / TACT Ord 4+ / OPINT Ord 4+ / GUTS Ord 4+ / MOBI 6in / AR 1 / 3 FW + 2 MW. Battle rifle 30in, sidearm, contact hydrophone spike. Handler TANAKA.
SPECIMENType-3 Environmental Integrator, aquifer variant, fused to the water table. Brief said Grunt. Complication said otherwise: Soldier tier, 3 FW / 1 MW, AR 2, FIGHT Good 2+, MOBI 5in. Aberrant ability Cognitive Bleed. Merged, so it cannot be shot at all.
COMPETITIONTHE MENAGERIE. One soldier, one technician, black-market live capture, already inside the objective zone with a resonance lure and a containment rig. If they crate it, the purge pays zero.
TABLEFive zones. Loading apron, core-sample corridor, flooded pump hall and draw-down gallery, settling basins, south stair. Three cold lairs marked, none of them searched.
OBJECTIVEEliminate all anomalous activity on the site and extract alive.
WIN CONDITIONSpecimen removed and the operator off the south stair. Lost on operator Out of Action, on a competition kill steal, or on the specimen clearing the site boundary.
TURN CAPNone printed. Hunt Events fired at Round 3 and Round 6. The real clock arrived at Round 6 when the intake head tore open, and it ran to Round 11.
The hydrology annex sits on the north lip of the Archive Ruins with half its roof gone and the other half still doing its job, which is the worst kind of building to work in. Weather comes across the open ground in sheets and stops dead at the wall line. Inside it is dry and very loud. Najma Rehman goes in off the loading apron at first light with a battle rifle, a spike hydrophone and a Bureau brief that is wrong in one specific way she will not learn about for another hour.
The brief says grunt. Young specimen, reactive, the sort of contract a freelancer takes to keep the dossier moving. Tanaka signs it off from somewhere warm and adds that the specimen data is excellent and the terrain data is three years old, which is a handler's way of telling you the map is a rumor.
The core-sample corridor is two hundred meters of collapsed racking in ankle-deep water and she takes it at the speed the water allows. Twice she stops moving entirely and lets the wind do the work of covering her. Once she holds at a doorway for a long count while the light does something she does not care for. Three obstacles, three clean passes, and the thing in the gallery below never lifts its head. That is the best stretch of the whole hunt and it happens before she has seen anything at all.
Then the annex takes the water back. Somewhere underneath her the draw-down cycle reverses and the corridor she came in through fills from the ankle to the knee in about ninety seconds. It is not a threat and she does not treat it as one. It is a door closing behind her, quietly, and she notes it and goes on.
THE BRIEF SAID GRUNT. THE BRIEF WAS A TIER OFF AND NOBODY WAS COMING TO CORRECT IT.
The pump hall is the size of a church and full of standing water and there are already two people in it. She sees them a long time before they see her, which is the only edge she gets all day: a soldier and a technician in black-market kit, working a frequency rig at the head of the draw-down gallery. Live capture. She knows the shape of it. Somebody in a coastal free port has a buyer and a tank.
She does the arithmetic in about four seconds. Their rig is a resonance lure, and a lure is the only thing on this table that will bring an aquifer integrator up out of the substrate, and she does not have one and they do. So she goes to ground behind a settling weir and lets them work.
The first read is where it goes wrong. She drives the spike into the slab, gets the earpiece in, and hears something move through the water table under her boots with a sound like a hand drawn along a wall. What she takes away from it is confident and entirely false. She comes off that spike certain the thing carries an exposed resonance core, and the spike shorts out in the same minute, so she is now down one instrument and carrying a piece of information that will get her killed if she ever acts on it.
Nine minutes later the water tells her the truth for nothing. She is watching the gallery when a low swell crosses the hall against the current, and she reads the bow wave the way you read a wake, and everything the spike could not give her arrives through her own eyes instead. Where the soft tissue sits. Where the animal is anchored into the substrate, which is the seam, which is the only place on the whole thing where the merge can be broken from outside.
Then the technician's lure catches, and the hunt turns into a completely different problem.
It does not come up beside the emitter. It comes up through the intake head, and the intake head is the only thing standing between the annex aquifer and the feed that runs south to Grid 7-North, and Grid 7-North is drinking water for twelve thousand people. The specimen goes through it the way a fist goes through a window. Weir has her window. She also has, from that second forward, a considerably larger problem than the one the Bureau is paying her to solve.
Her first round into it is the worst she has fired in her working life. The trigger breaks, the rifle stops, and she spends the next long minute on her knees behind a stanchion clearing a jam while the capture team gets a collar onto the thing.
The second round is perfect. It goes into the soft place the water showed her and the specimen folds around it, and something that size taking a mortal wound in a flooded hall makes a noise the building hands back to you four times over. One more hit of any kind and it is finished. That is the entire margin. One.
It does not spend the margin on her. It is collared, so it cannot reach her, so it turns on what it can reach, which is the technician. It puts him down in the water in a single movement. He had the tensioner in both hands when he dropped, the collar lets go, and the capture team's whole night lets go with it.
Weir takes the shot at the seam. Third bad round out of four. The bullet goes into the anchor at an angle that does nothing except drive the animal off its attachment altogether, into open transit, and the thing that had been holding position in that gallery since before she arrived stops holding anything and runs for the hole it made in the intake head.
She has one movement left, no line of sight, and nothing in her kit that reaches. She spends it walking south.
The last of it is a sound. The gallery drains for about forty seconds and then it stops draining, and she is out on the stair with the wind coming back at her and a contract in her pocket that is now describing the wrong building. Tanaka will reissue it. The site will be Grid 7-North, which is the one piece of ground in the Forbidden Zone that the Heralds and the survivor councils both defend, and nobody has ever been allowed to run a purge there.
// THE TAPE
GENSeven generator rolls, cold. Contract 5 = Site Purge. Specimen 2 = Type-3 aquifer integrator, tier 1 = Grunt, ability 4 = Cognitive Bleed. Region 8 = IPFZ research station, terrain 3 = Hostile Weather. Competition 5 = Menagerie. Complication 1 = intel wrong, tier up to Soldier. Handler 3 = Tanaka. Alert state SITREP 6 = Hunting, patrol axis legible.
SETUPAnatomy targets rolled hidden: 4, 4, 3. Two Vital Organs and a Primary Limb. The duplicate stood as a paired site rather than a reroll.
T1Priority 3 v 3, reroll, 1 v 6. Loss. One action. Into the corridor and nothing else.
T2Priority 1 v 4. Loss, one action. Approach obstacle 1, Silent Approach, TACT 4 plus 1 for wind noise. Pass.
T3Hunt Event D8 2, environmental shift, zone 2: the approach corridor floods to the knee and becomes difficult terrain. Priority 2 v 2, reroll, 1 v 6. Loss, one action. Obstacle 2, TACT 4 plus 1. Pass.
T4 aPriority 6 v 3. Her only win of the game. Two actions. Obstacle 3, Detection Window, OPINT 4. Pass. Three for three on the approach, the specimen never escalates, 1 Tempo banked plus an unusable half.
T4 bRead one on the hydrophone, OPINT natural 1. False information, and the Fumble Table gives 5, Compromised Gear. The spike is dead for the hunt. One Read left and no instrument. Menagerie lure attempt 1, SITREP 2, no.
T5Priority 3 v 4. Loss, one action, reposition to 9in off the emitter in cover. Specimen route within 6in, SITREP 3, no but: the bow wave is visible. Lure attempt 2, SITREP 3, no but: the technician gets a bearing, so attempt 3 rolls at Likely.
T6 aHunt Event D8 5, Lumicite spike, aberrant distances plus 2in for D3 1 round. Priority 4 v 6. Loss, one action. Read two on the bow wave: NATURAL 6. Vital Organ revealed, plus the Type-3 attachment point that breaks the merge.
T6 bLure attempt 3 at Likely, 4 and 1, takes 4: yes but. Cost prompts 2 / 5 = Destroy / Objective. It surfaces through the intake head and tears it open. The annex aquifer is now connected to the Grid 7-North feed. Window D3 3 rounds.
T7Priority 3 v 3, reroll, 2 v 6. Loss, one action in the first round of her own window. Shot one, declared Vital Organ, 4+: NATURAL 1. Cold Shot legally refused on a natural 1. Fumble 1, weapon jam. Specimen fights the technician, 3, 1 FW. Contest SITREP 6. Containment step 1, SITREP 5, yes.
T8Priority 1 v 3. Loss, one action, spent clearing the jam. Specimen misses on 2, then natural 1, fumble 4, friendly warning, no ally, no effect. Containment step 2, SITREP 6, yes and: the collar locks a limb, MOBI 0.
T9 aPriority 2 v 6. Loss, one action, last round of the window. Shot two, declared Vital Organ: NATURAL 6. Mortal Wound regardless of threshold. Specimen goes Cornered, one box left, anatomy hit banked.
T9 bCornered flee-or-fight SITREP 3: it fights, so no Pursuit opens. Priority target is Weir, who damaged it, but she is 9in away and it is collared, so it takes the next valid action and fights what is in contact. Roll 5: the technician goes Out of Action. Containment step 3, SITREP 1, no and: the collar blows when he drops.
T10Priority 1 v 3. Loss, one action. Shot at the attachment point to force her own window, 4+: NATURAL 1, her third of the hunt. Fumble 6, TOTAL FAILURE. It comes off the anchor into full transit. Three activations to the boundary collapse to one, and it spends that one in this threat phase.
T11Priority 3 v 5. Tenth loss in eleven. One action, merged target 14in away, visibility 12in. She breaks south. Collar salvage SITREP 2, no. Specimen clears the site boundary. Extraction at Likely, 4 and 4: yes but, prompts 4 / 5 = Shift Position / Objective. She gets out. The contract does not stay where she left it.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED // Q. ADAIR
Sixty-five D6 on record, twelve natural ones, eleven natural sixes. That is a flat, ordinary set of dice, and if you only read the totals you would file this as a normal night. The totals are lying to you. Everything that went wrong went wrong in one specific place, and it was not the combat.
Weir lost the Priority Check in ten of eleven rounds. On fair dice with ties rerolled that is a coin landing the same way ten times out of eleven, roughly one game in a hundred and seventy. Which brings us to the finding this run exists to make.
Balance read, and it is a structural one. Priority Pressure takes one action off the loser's first activated model. In a squad game that is a tax on one model out of four or five and the squad absorbs it. In a solo game the operator IS the first activated model and the only one, so losing priority costs fifty percent of your entire action economy for the round. The threat side, meanwhile, spread its single loss across a specimen and two competition models and barely felt it. Weir got twelve actions across eleven rounds. A player who won the same rolls would have had twenty-two. That is not a swingy game, it is a game where one D6 decides whether you are playing at half speed, and Big Game inherits it from the solo rules without ever looking at it. The fix is small: in solo, a lost priority should cost the operator one action per two rounds, or convert to a shift in the enemy activation order, or simply not apply when the player commands a single model.
The turn it swung is Round 6, and it swung twice in opposite directions. Read two came up a natural 6 with the hydrophone already dead, which handed her the Vital Organ and the attachment point off nothing but a swell in the water. That is the best moment of the hunt. Eight minutes later the same round produced the Menagerie's lure at yes-but, the prompts came up Destroy / Objective, and the thing surfaced through the intake head. She won her window and lost the site in the same round, and she never had the actions to use the first before the second caught up with her.
The decision layer was sound. Marksman was the right build and she called it for the right reason: Tech's Bad 5+ against AR 2 needs a natural 6, which is a Mortal Wound, so a Tech literally cannot shoot this specimen without killing a contract it might have wanted alive. Letting the Menagerie run their lure rather than taking it off them was correct and it worked exactly as intended. Skipping the cold lairs against a Hunting specimen was correct. Reading pre-window rather than inside it was correct, and it is the only reason the game had a second act. She lost this on three natural ones, two of which arrived on the two actions that mattered most.
Cold Shot deserves a word. The Marksman's class spend is a reroll on a missed Shoot. The canon rule is that a natural 1 always fails and no reroll or plus-one touches it. Both of Weir's catastrophic misses were natural ones. Her class ability was refused on the only two occasions it would have changed the game, and she finished the hunt with three unspent Tempo. A spend that cannot answer the worst outcome is not really an insurance policy. Worth a look.
- House rulings logged this run (all appended to RULES_GAPS):
- The catalog prints no stat line for a generated specimen type. Only the six territory entries carry numbers. Built the Type-3 off the Hunt 02 Glaciosymbiont profile, dropped the Heavy tier's plus-1 AR, and used the tier table for wounds.
- Environmental Merge is a rolled aberrant ability, but the Type-3 catalog entry and the Alert States table both assume every Type-3 has it. Ruled it inherent to the type and stacked the rolled ability on top.
- Step 7 rolled the specimen Hunting, which is an active patrol, and the merged Type-3 profile is MOBI 0in. Ruled that an aquifer variant patrols through the substrate at its surfaced speed, untargetable but not immobile. The glacier variant is the one that is frozen in place.
- Three anatomy rolls came up with a duplicate. Ruled it a paired site rather than a reroll, so a Read could reveal either half.
- The Menagerie has behavior and no progress mechanic, but Kill Steal says competition can remove the specimen and void your contract. Gave them a three-step containment track on one SITREP per Threat Phase.
- Big Game never says how many actions a specimen gets outside Frenzy. Ran it at two for the first two exchanges, caught it, corrected to one. Neither extra action landed a hit, so nothing turned on it.
- The Anatomy table's Miss Effect column has no defined trigger. Ruled a declared shot at a known target either hits with its rider or misses entirely, and read the Miss column as covering an undeclared hit.
- The natural-6 Read against a Type-3 promises one target plus the attachment point, while the general rule promises two targets. Took the specific over the general.
- Three approach successes leave you holding half a Tempo token that nothing in the game can spend.
- Fumble result 4 needs an ally and a lone specimen has none. Same dead result the desk logged on the 30th, marked SEEN AGAIN rather than duplicated.
One thing to try next time: run this exact contract as a baseline Tech instead of a Marksman and lean on Remote Access. The annex is full of pre-war valve gear and the specimen's whole existence depends on the water being where it is. A hunter who cannot shoot the thing but can close a sluice and strand it in a dry gallery is playing a different and probably better game than the one Weir played, and it would tell us whether Big Game supports any win that is not a firing solution.
Terrain aside, and a craft note. The five-zone board did real work here because the hunt had a downstream. Build the objective zone so that water leaves it in one direction and put the extraction on that same axis, and the generator's Destroy result lands with actual geography behind it. The craft note is on the oracle: phrase every SITREP so that Yes favors you. We asked whether the Menagerie would contest, got a six, and had to sit and work out whose way something was supposed to break. Ask it the other way round and the table reads itself.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTContract failed. The specimen cleared the site boundary on Round 11 carrying one Mortal Wound and one box left on its track. No payout, Heat plus 2. Weir extracted alive off the south stair, untouched, with one banked anatomy hit and nothing to file it against.
CASUALTIES // BAFONone. Weir took zero wounds across eleven rounds. Contact hydrophone spike destroyed on the Round 4 fumble. Three Tempo tokens unspent at the end, which is its own kind of casualty.
CASUALTIES // MENAGERIETechnician Out of Action on Round 9. Containment rig destroyed when the collar blew. Live capture failed, payout zero. Their soldier never fired a round all game, because Ordinary 4+ against AR 2 needs a six and a six is a Mortal Wound and a Mortal Wound is a dead payday.
CASUALTIES // SPECIMENOne Mortal Wound, Cornered, escaped. Currently in the aquifer that feeds Grid 7-North.
MVPThe Menagerie's technician. He surfaced the specimen that Weir could not, held it in contact for three rounds absorbing everything it had, and then freed it by falling over. He decided this game twice and never learned there was a third party in the room.
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT BIG GAME HUNTS and
OT BIG GAME (PDFs, no HTML reader yet) // the Hunt Generator is CH.03 of Big Game // requires OT Core Book and Solo Rules v5.
ONE WOUND. ELEVEN ROUNDS AND ONE WOUND BETWEEN THE CONTRACT AND THE WATER.