PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: GSOTC GROUNDS // THE FIXED CIRCUIT
FILING_DATE: 2026-09-02
RESULT: PROOF FILED // MURDER UNATTACHED
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-09-02
賭
OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG // RECONSTRUCTED
NINETY SECONDS
EARLY
COLD CASE 003 // FIVE SOURCES // EIGHT TOKENS // ONE BREAK
COLD CASE // FOUR IRREGULARS
CASE FILE 003 // THE FIXED CIRCUIT
12 ACTIONS // 4 CHALLENGES // 19 DICE
STAGE 5 // BURN 6 OF 7
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG
The Irregulars took the Fixed Circuit from first contact to actionable proof inside a single session, quietly enough that the syndicate still thought it had a season. Then two natural ones in the same twenty-minute break handed that syndicate the exact ending it had already decided to accept.
NINETY SECONDS EARLY
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // RPG
FILED: GSOTC GROUNDS // THE FIXED CIRCUIT // 2026-09-02
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Cold Case has been on the shelf for three years and nobody at this desk had ever put a die on it, so we did, and the supplement turned out to be a routing puzzle with a dice game bolted to the outside. Read the workbench before you run it: four declared specials could not legally be spent, and the two that decided the case were threshold drops rather than bonuses.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics RPG, run on the COLD CASE investigative supplement v3. First Cold Case run at this desk
SCENARIOCase File 003, THE FIXED CIRCUIT. A Crackerjack competitor dead in a staged training accident three days before the quarterfinals, and a match-fixing relay inside the tournament's own network
INVESTIGATIONTHE IRREGULARS. Kael Morrow, ex-NAF compliance, OPINT and GUTS and TACT Good, plus 2 PRESS on institutional contacts, Badge Memory once per case. Sina Varela, ex-EO behavioral analyst, OPINT Good, plus 2 RUN on EO and Seraph systems, System Echo. Tomas Chedra, ex-Syndicate broker, GUTS Good, plus 2 PRESS on Syndicate and black-market sources, The Transaction once per session. Fenn, Document War vintage, TACT and FIGHT Good, plus 2 CANVASS at pre-Upheaval sites and therefore no bonus anywhere in this case
OPPOSITIONA Burnout gambling syndicate with SCA Cartel Alliance ties, three seasons into a fixing operation. Yannick Poole, the support tech running the relay. Efren Bakalar, the SCA middle layer who believes Reva's death was an accident. A cleanup team on call. Tournament Director Maas as institutional friction, knowing nothing and preferring it
TABLEGSOTC tournament grounds through the quarterfinal into the semifinal window. Five open sources: Reva's sealed locker cage, the GSOTC internal network, SCA-adjacent financial shells, the maintenance tech Ori Baastrup, and Colt Adair cross-referenced against relay data. Each source caps at 2 Hard Tokens for the whole case
OBJECTIVETake the Evidence Chain from Stage 1 Incident to Stage 5 Proof, then survive the confrontation
WIN CONDITIONStage 5 plus a favourable climax before the Tournament Clock reaches 0. Loss on a burned case, a removed source at Burn 7, or the semifinals starting with the relay intact
TURN CAP2 sessions, 3 rounds each, 4 operator actions per round. 24 actions available, plus the climax. Trackers open at Chain 1, Burn 0, Clock 2, Colt Adair Stability 3
The concourse under the GSOTC stands does not go quiet. It thins. Between matches the noise drops from a wall to a hum you can feel in the soles of your boots, and the maintenance corridors under section nine hold that hum the way a pipe holds water. That is where Colt Adair does his talking. He picked the spot because it is the only place on the grounds where a man can say a dead competitor's name without four thousand people hearing it.
Reva Solis had been dead three days. The committee wrote equipment failure during a live-fire drill and replaced her with a standby before her team had finished clearing out her cage. Adair, who handled her, who was NAF for nineteen years before he was anything else, sat with his hands flat on a folding table and slid her competitor badge across it. The photograph on it is of someone who expected to win.
The Irregulars came in on that badge and nothing else. Four of them, no faction, no standing, no reason for the committee to let them near a locker cage. Morrow works out of an analog notebook and tells people the digital ones can be pulled. Varela carries an EO surplus rig she rebuilt into something the EO would not recognise. Chedra walks into rooms already looking like he negotiated the door. Fenn says only sentences they meant to say.
They split the first afternoon four ways and got half of it. Chedra found the maintenance tech, a man named Ori Baastrup who had filed a report about someone at Reva's locker the night before she died and then watched that report stop existing. Baastrup talked. He wanted to. Varela went at the betting markets through the SCA financial shells and came back with six-figure buys placed ninety seconds ahead of match-deciding moments, three seasons running. The other two came back with nothing and a trace. Fenn was clocked at the locker cage by a committee steward. Morrow went into the GSOTC internal network after the thing Reva had found and put his hand on a passive monitor on the way in.
Nobody knew yet that the monitor belonged to the people who killed her.
SHE CHECKED HER EQUIPMENT THREE TIMES THAT MORNING. I WATCHED HER DO IT.
What broke the case open was a quarterfinal going out live. The relay embedded in the tournament's network transmits during matches, because during matches is when the information is worth money, and for one match window the transmission is in the air where anyone with the broadcast infrastructure can reach up and take it. Varela took it. She stood in a gallery above forty thousand people and pulled a timestamped log of the tournament's own performance data leaving the building ahead of the public delay.
The rest of that day was the crew emptying every source it had. Morrow got Baastrup's full description of the man at the locker and it matched a support crew credential. Fenn and Chedra took Reva's cage apart between them and found two things: the component, weakened on purpose and not by wear, and Reva's own copy of the kit manifest entry that hid the relay, folded into the liner of her cage where the committee's seal had never reached.
She had known. She had written it down. She had kept it in the one place she thought was hers.
Yannick Poole ran the relay for two seasons. He is a contract support tech, thirty-one, and by the time Morrow sat down across from him he had already been carrying Reva Solis for three days without anywhere to put her. He gave more than he was asked for. Chedra took the rest, including the device with the instructions and the payment ledger on it. Between them the two conversations lasted less time than a match.
By the end of the first day the Irregulars held proof, and they had been quiet enough getting it that the syndicate still thought it had a season.
Then the quarterfinals closed and the network went to a semifinal whitelist, which is what the operation does every year at this point in the week and had nothing to do with the four people in the corridor. It closed the relay anyway. And when the crew opened the financial records they had been sitting on, the records opened onto nothing: encrypted, with the key in a Syndicate broker's hands at Shinkai, a long way from a tournament that was about to start its semifinals in twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes is what the case came down to. Four people, four things, one break.
Fenn went for the relay hardware. Poole had missed his keyed check-in and the syndicate's inside contact was already walking, and Fenn went across a concourse packed shoulder to shoulder with people trying to get to their seats, and did not make it. The hardware came out of the rack and went into a bag and the bag went into that crowd. The physical proof, the one thing a committee cannot reinterpret, was gone before anyone reached the rack.
Varela went at the encryption sideways. Poole's device is locked with Seraph-descendant architecture, the same family the SCA money sits behind, which is the whole buried joke of the case: the gambling ring did not build any of this, it bought access to it, and the thing it bought is a cousin of the behavioral engine Varela used to build for the EO. She derived the key off a support tech's personal device in a corridor and turned it on three seasons of money. It came apart by the thinnest margin anyone at the desk has watched all week.
Chedra went to Efren Bakalar, the SCA cartel's middle layer, who had been told Reva died in an accident and believed it, and who was the only route by which her death attached to anyone above Poole. Chedra put the proof in front of him. Bakalar looked at it, did not break, and reported the contact.
That left Morrow and a tournament director. Maas knew nothing about any of it and had every institutional reason to want to keep knowing nothing, and the corridor Morrow walked him into was harder than it had been an hour earlier because of what Bakalar had just done. Morrow spent the last thing he had been carrying since the case opened, the old NAF habit of talking to a record-keeper as though the record were already written, and Maas halted the semifinals.
So the tournament stopped. The ledger went into a committee filing with the transmission log stapled to it and the fixing operation came apart on a Tuesday afternoon in front of a stadium that had come to watch something else. Poole is alive and out. Colt Adair is alive, which three days ago was not the way to bet.
And Reva Solis died of sabotage committed by a contract support tech who panicked, which is what the syndicate had decided the record would say before the Irregulars ever reached the grounds. They traded the operation to keep the murder. It worked.
// THE TAPE
R1Chedra PRESS Baastrup, Good 2+, D6=4 plus 1 prof. SUCCESS, Hard 1. Fenn CANVASS the sealed locker, Ordinary 4+, D6=2 plus 1 equals 3. FAIL, clocked by a steward, BURN 1. Morrow RUN the GSOTC network, Extreme, D6 3 and 3, lower 3 plus 1 equals 4. FAIL, passive monitor tripped, BURN 2. Varela RUN the SCA markets, Bad 5+, D6=5 plus 1. SUCCESS. Pool hits 2, CHAIN TO STAGE 2 PATTERN
CMPBurn rose 2 this round so a Complication fires. D6=3, live broadcast match. The relay transmits during it. A one-round intercept window opens on the broadcast infrastructure
R2Morrow PRESS Baastrup, D6=4 plus 1. SUCCESS, source EXHAUSTED, the description matches a support crew credential and opens the relay operator as a source. Varela RUN the broadcast intercept, Bad 5+, D6=3 plus 2 Seraph plus 1 prof equals 6. SUCCESS, timestamped relay log, Colt unlocked, CHAIN TO STAGE 3 ACTOR. Fenn CANVASS the locker, D6=4 plus 1. SUCCESS. Chedra CANVASS the locker, D6=4 plus 0. SUCCESS, locker EXHAUSTED, CHAIN TO STAGE 4 MOTIVE. Four for four, zero Burn
R3Morrow PRESS Poole, Bad 5+. Badge Memory REFUSED and not consumed, a contract support tech is not an institutional source. D6=NATURAL 6, Hard plus Soft, he gave more than intended. Chedra PRESS Poole with The Transaction, Bad to Ordinary 4+, D6=5 plus 3. SUCCESS plus Soft, source EXHAUSTED, CHAIN TO STAGE 5 PROOF at the end of session one. Fenn PRESS Colt Adair, Ordinary 4+, D6=5. SUCCESS, Stability to 4. Varela RUN the markets, D6=4 plus 1 equals 5. SUCCESS, markets EXHAUSTED. 2 surplus Hard Tokens with nowhere to go
ENDSession one closes. Tournament Clock 2 to 1. The opposition tightens THE RELAY, Extreme to Unavailable, as the scheduled semifinal whitelist lockdown. Burn 2. Nobody on the syndicate side knows anything yet
CLXClimax Variable D6=4. The betting records are encrypted with a key held by a Syndicate broker at Shinkai. Leaving the grounds to get it means losing the grounds
C4Fenn TACT to reach the relay hardware, Bad 5+. D6=NATURAL 1. Auto-fail, 2 BURNS, counter to 4. The inside contact pulls the rack and walks it into the crowd. Physical relay LOST
C1Varela RUN to derive the Seraph key off Poole's device and turn it on the SCA records. Extreme, 2D6 take lower. D6 2 and 2, lower 2 plus 2 Seraph plus 1 prof equals 5 against 5+. SUCCESS by the exact margin of her bonus. Three seasons of money decrypted
C3Chedra PRESS Bakalar with The Transaction, Bad to Ordinary 4+, plus 2 syndicate plus 1 prof. D6=NATURAL 1. Auto-fail, no modifier saves it. Source burns him, 2 BURNS, counter to 6. Bakalar holds and reports the contact
C2Morrow PRESS Director Maas. Extreme, Badge Memory drops it to Bad 5+, then Burn 6 shifts every PRESS a tier harder and puts it back to Extreme. D6=4, disadvantage die added at the new threshold, D6=3, lower 3 plus 2 institutional plus 1 prof equals 6 against 5+. SUCCESS BY ONE. Maas halts the semifinals
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
First run of Cold Case at this desk, and the headline is that it is not really a dice game. It is a routing puzzle with dice attached, and once you see that, the whole supplement reads differently.
Here is the number that says it. The crew finished the case holding two Soft Leads and two surplus Hard Tokens they could never legally spend, and four separate special abilities were declared and refused. Cold Case caps bonuses at plus 2 on any single roll, and all four Irregulars carry an always-on plus 2 inside their own lane. So the moment you use the right operator on the right source, which is the entire skill of the game, every other bonus that operator could receive is dead weight. Varela's System Echo is the clearest case: it grants plus 2 on her first run against a Seraph or EO system, and her always-on plus 2 covers exactly those systems, permanently and for free. The ability cannot ever do anything. We ruled a refused spend is not consumed, per the standing precedent on natural ones, so nothing was wasted, but nothing was gained either.
What does work is the threshold drop. Badge Memory and The Transaction move a source down a tier, and the rules explicitly allow two tiers of drop to stack. Those are real currency and they decided two of the four climax challenges. If Cold Case wants an evidence-token economy that means something, the Soft Lead needs to become a tier drop rather than a plus 1, or the cap needs to exclude the always-on advantages it was clearly written to include.
On the dice. Nineteen action dice, mean 3.42 against an expected 3.5, which is as flat a set as the desk has recorded. The distribution did all the work. Rounds two and three ran 4.38 across eight dice and the crew went eight for eight, taking the chain from Stage 2 to Stage 5 in six actions with the Burn Counter untouched. The climax ran 2.17 across six dice with two natural ones in it. Same session, same dice, opposite games.
The turn it swung is not the turn it looks like. Fenn's natural 1 on the relay lost the hardware, and that is the loud failure, but the syndicate had already decided to trade the relay. Chedra's natural 1 on Bakalar is the one that cost the case, because it failed the only challenge that reached above Poole and it pushed Burn from 4 to 6 in the same instant, which shifted Morrow's very next roll from Bad to Extreme. One die failed the objective and then attacked the next objective. Morrow cleared the harder version by exactly one point on a disadvantage die.
Balance read: the case file is tighter than it looks. Case 003 prints five evidence sources at two tokens each, and Stage 5 needs eight tokens. That is a two-token margin for an entire investigation, and a crew that whiffs three rolls on the wrong sources cannot finish, which is a hard wall the book never warns you about. We only cleared it because Baastrup's testimony opened a sixth source in fiction. The generosity is all in the specials and none of it is in the capacity.
- ONE THING TO TRY NEXT TIME: run Cold Case with three investigators instead of four. Twelve actions a session became nine, the routing gets genuinely painful, and at least one source has to be worked by somebody outside their lane, which is the only condition under which the Soft Lead economy turns back on.
- THE BENCH ASIDE: this case wants a table you can see across. A GSOTC concourse, a locker cage, a broadcast gallery and one maintenance corridor is four zones, and the whole thing runs on a flat surface with four cards and a Burn track. It is the cheapest game in the line to put on a table and the only one where the terrain is a floor plan.
- FOURTEEN RULES GAPS WENT TO THE BACKLOG, which is a first-contact haul on a supplement nobody here had played. The big ones: a session has no defined number of actions anywhere in the book, Stage 5 asks for tokens that survive a challenge and never defines the challenge, and every case file prints a Complications table with no trigger for rolling on it.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTOPERATOR WIN, PARTIAL. The chain closed at Stage 5 in the first session and the confrontation split 2 and 2. The fixing operation is exposed, the semifinals halted before the syndicate's betting event, and the decrypted three-season ledger and the relay transmission log are in a committee filing. The relay hardware is gone, Bakalar did not break, and Reva Solis's death stands on the record as sabotage by one panicking contract tech and goes no higher. Burn finished at 6 of 7
CASUALTIES // IRREGULARSNo wounds, Cold Case has no combat. Burn 6 of 7, one point off a forced source removal. Chedra is burned with Bakalar and is now a face the SCA middle layer can describe, which costs him that contact for every future case. Two Soft Leads and two surplus Hard Tokens carried out unspent because the plus 2 cap refused every one of them
CASUALTIES // SYNDICATEThe relay operation exposed and the season's betting event halted. Yannick Poole flipped, out, and alive. The decrypted ledger filed. Against that: Efren Bakalar untouched, the SCA name kept out of the homicide, the cleanup team never deployed, and the operation rebuildable next season under a different tech. Colt Adair alive at Stability 4, which was not the way to bet on Monday
MVPSINA VARELA. Two runs decided the case. The broadcast intercept was the token that unlocked everything downstream, and the climax decryption landed on a lower die of 2 against a threshold of 5, clearing only because her Seraph bonus and proficiency were both on it. She took the single thing the syndicate had decided to protect above the relay, above the season, and above Poole
DECISIVE MOMENTChedra's natural 1 on Bakalar. It failed the only challenge that could attach the homicide upward, and it drove Burn from 4 to 6 in the same instant, which shifted Morrow's very next roll from Bad to Extreme. One die lost an objective and then went after the next one
RUN IT YOURSELF:
OT COLD CASE // The Fixed Circuit is Case File 003, the investigation chassis is section 02, and the engine underneath it is in
OT CORE
THEY TRADED US THE OPERATION TO KEEP THE MURDER