Author: Derek Gour

We had session 2 of Night Witches tonight and it was a blast! Only got through 3 of the missions but so much drama! The rolls went unnaturally badly all night so every NPC we sent into the air ended up dead, the ladies were interrogated by NKVD on several occasions, planes were damaged, everyone ended up in hospital, some had to return from enemy territory and they got busted trying to participate in an illicit party – ratted out by one of the zealot PCs. They did actually blow up most of what they were supposed to and they did rack up mission points during the days, but there’s only so much you can do when the dice come up snake eyes.

We are switching GMs next time, which is bittersweet for me because I’m just starting to get into the groove, but I’m going to have so much fun playing a fresh character next week.

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.