Session 1 Report
We had our first session of Night Witches tonight. We ran through the training session, at Duty Station 1 – the Engels Airdrome, following along roughly with the walkthrough provided in the downloadable handouts. There were five players plus me, which is probably one too many, but we seemed to manage okay and started to get a feel for the rules and the flow.
The girls had a spectacularly bad first training run. This is the first (and only) daytime run, bombing fake targets while taking “friendly” fire from their own troops to simulate the enemy fire they can expect while on a real attack run.
The main attack run went pretty well, except that Anya, the lead pilot decided to perform an odd manoeuver to make it appear that the friendly fire had actually struck the plane – just trying to mess with the soldiers below. Then Liza, one of her wing-women, assumed her comrade was had actually been hit by friendly fire, so she got and attempted a hard landing in the marshy grass, which didn’t go well, lodging the plane in the muck. She argued with and tried to strike one of the soldiers on the ground, and she and her navigator were then unceremoniously tied up, strapped to jeeps and driven back to base.
Meanwhile, the third plane took some incidental shrapnel damage from the main bombing run explosions, tearing a hole through their rudder. So Tasha, the pilot tried to land back at base but fails horribly, completely destroying the plane and sending her navigator to the hospital with a serious head injury.
And that was just the first run.
Later, Liza and Sveta barely survived a run in with some of the men at the training facility. Liza is gaining a real reputation as a scrapper.
Their second bombing run was a great success, and they re-earned some of their credibility, but still finished their air training as some of the worst performing group of cadets the Engels training centre has ever seen. The only reason they weren’t kicked out immediately is the desperate need for air pilots due to how badly the war is going.
Our second session will be in a real combat zone, and we’re looking forward to a lot more daytime drama to go along with the night time bombing excitement.
Thanks for the AAR. I’ve read it, and can’t wait to get it on the table.
One of the goals of Duty Station one is to orient players to the day/night cycle and the necessity for building up mission pool. Hopefully they learned that. Five players is a lot, but at least that means you only have one NPC on missions. Losing a plane at Trud Gornyaka will have much more serious implications than losing one in training.
What would be the reasonable implications of losing a plane at that point?
The way it usually plays out is – lose a plane to damage or destruction, bring in your reserve. Lose your reserve, beg/borrow/steal another plane. Repair what you can, scrounge parts as needed, scrounging an entire aircraft may be impossible. Moves snowball. Adjacent units (the 218th, the 586th) have PO-2s for liaison duties…
Fail all that, fly a plane short and attract the attention of the NKVD looking for saboteurs and wreckers. The person who will be punished first is your squadron commander, then your section leader.
Great! Thanks. An undersupplied, Soviet WW2 airbase is so outside my realm of experience that it’s hard for me to imagine how these issues might play out, so that’s helpful.
I think Night Witches might be the best look at a historical subject in an RPG since Grey Ranks. I’m amazed by it.