Night Witches Session 1 (of 3) ended inauspiciously with unlucky Rufina dead in a crash from a training exercise, the Lt hospitalised, and another plane shot down at Voronezh, though Sgt Lisa landed to rescue the unconscious Katya and co-pilot Anya was awarded a Medal of Valour for leading a German Tiger tank away from the downed planes and into the Red Army’s guns.
(I’m running 3 consecutive slots at Conception 2015 with 4 players to see how the campaign rules work. Started with the Engels aerodrome duty station)
Session 2 (of 3) Night Witches Tarn Gordnaya Duty Station.
As the Soviets begin to slow the Hitlerite aggressors, things really deepened on the personal front and became awesome. Sweetheart to the 58th Motor Rifle regiment and Angel of Vornezh, Anya used her growing chest of medals and sweet heart status to steal Maj. Popovs personal fighter from the chauvinistic brother squadron. CO and Party stalwart SLT Tanya found herself falling for the quiet and gentle care of Vera, her only ally in a section that hates her. Lisa’s hooliganism and drinking reached epic defiance levels, saved only by her unrivalled success in leading Attack runs, even as she drank to ignore her unrequited protective feelings a for 18 year old Katya. But then came. Some brutal missions, a supposed cake run turning to disaster as Anya’s copilot Natalya is decapitated by AA, the plane not making it home and crashing, leaving the pinup girl Anya alive but horribly burned like Two-Face. A brutal Advance mission was somehow succeeded with 2 planes (and Anya, on 3 harm Tempting Fate to leave the hospital and fly the mission, and they went West on the 5th mission to avoid certain ruin on the 6th.
Pashkovskaya (Station 3) saw more conflict between female and male pilots escalating from scrounging theft, to a slap, to a punch, to a beating to a deadly gunshot that saved a beaten Katya, but left the returned Anya holding a smoking pistol having shot a male private for assaulting Katya. Other squabbles with an ever drinker Lisa and the morose new trainee Yevvie and malicious reporting to the Politruk further fractured the unit, until a Nazi counterattack threatened to overrun the airfield, and only a desperate sacrifice by Capt. Tanya and her lover Vera saw their biplane flown into the cockpit of a Juncker transport, disrupting the assault and ending the threat of the elite parachutists about to blitzkrieg them.
Many have been marked (3-6 each) and many harmed with about 7 advances at the end of Session 2 with 3 dead NPC’s (Unlucky Rufina, Ukranian Natalya and known homosexual Vera) and 1 dead PC (Tanya who’d embraced death early when it became clear her lover Vera wouldn’t survive), another PC scarred for life and another with a drinking problem and NKVD self-criticism and public confession of unpatriotic dereliction of duty through drunkeness ordered. Anya,the burned former sweetheart is now Senior Lt. and CO.
Session 3 of 3 Night Witches.
Things settled down a bit, with an interesting early Move West by Stephen Elves to alternate Duty Station 4 and advancing to 1944. He also became GM, giving up the hideously scarred Angel of Vornezh (aka Angel of Death after the fate of 2 co pilots) and I took the ace Nat, who became CO as everyone else avoided promotion and the burden of leadership.
I straightened up the units slovenly dress discipline, inspired our drunk with patriotic fervour, but got landed with the majors incompetent daughter Tamara (who we couldn’t easily kill)& and this led to me moving Katya out of her favoured Lucky plane 207. This led her to plot for ways to be promoted over my head so she could take command and take back her beloved plane. Liza dealt with her unrequited love for Katya and replaced morose Russian fatalism with so e patriotism. Young intellectual Yezzie revealed some Party ties as she arranged for replacing the regimental major (Tamaras mother) after Tamara nearly killed her with friendly fire. We were becoming skilled enough that most missions went fairly easy (combined with a lot of double 6 results on Stephens Soviet sickle and hammer dice). Though the finale mission did end with a dead Irina (NPC) from flak and Tamara trying to crash our plane into Yevvies- ending as I took control, doing a barrel turn to fly upside down and have the incompetent Tamara to fall to her death- later denounced in the debriefing (and affirmed by the rest of the unit) that Tamara had suffered from moral cowardice after the arrest of her traitor mother and had jumped! Walking a way for a fiery crash, ace Nat, now under the command of Yevvie Travelled West – and transferred out of the unit, back to her beloved fighter regiment and we ended the game there.
Overall people liked the mix of war story and personal drama, the Day/Night dichotomy worked well. We had reached Station 5 after 3 four hour sessions so it’s a campaign you could complete in 4 sessions, or 5 max. The power for a player to become GM is ground breaking (“Russians do like their coups and Revolutions” said one player) is startlingly original ground to break. The lethality can be a bit swingy and snowballs- when things are good and pilots skilled, then you can do a mission with 2 dice rolls and 10 minutes- but when the failure cascade starts and isn’t nipped in the bud by a lucky roll or move then it can cascade into multi-PC killing disaster!
Still an excellent game with much to recommend it for intense, short campaign play! My thanks to Ben, Nick, Helen and the other Steve E. For a great and compelling set of characters and action.
Thanks for this great actual play write-up! I hope we can quote you on some of that when we officially release the game!
Yep, that’s fine