Author: Michael Sands

After missing a session, my Monday crew were back at Pashkovskaya today. We had a few disasters, had to perform in a talent show (it was a total disaster), and finished off the duty station with mission C.

This week our daytime misadventures went from bad to worse, and only scrambling for that final mission saved us from facing some nasty consequences. My pilot Galya blew up her hand with some illicit munitions (she didn’t know about them – spoils of previous scrounging), Vera was malingering in the infirmary and ran into a keen young doctor with lots of treatments he wanted to try out. Everyone else was working on this stupid show we had to put on. Then we screwed that up, in front of the Lt General too.

Galya also saved the life of our mechanic, hit by debris from a failed wheels down roll. That was a bit of a turning point for her, from “everything is fucked and we’re all going to die” to “maybe some of us will make it through”. I guess time will tell if that’s optimism or pessimism.

We lost Captain Liza Vorapeyeva to flak on that last mission, although it was otherwise successful. She’d been there from the beginning, and from being hated by the others had finally gotten some respect from those under her command, so it was quite a loss.

Our replacements have all hardened into natural-born Soviet airwomen now, although rather fatalistic and traumatized with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how our new squadron commander handles things (in fact, one character might take the promotion to Major advance, which would be… interesting).

We’re also switching GM again, to Liza’s player now that she’s no longer with us. 

My Monday crew just finished our second session at Pashkoskaya. It was a pretty smooth time overall, with a few difficult (mainly interpersonal) moments. 

My new airwoman Galya has made the crucial realisation that she can cope with this after all, although she needed to be humiliated by our fierce armorer on the way. 

The rivalry between our two highest ranked airwomen came to a head when the acting leader (Valya M) passed over command back to the Leza (who had been delayed arriving at the station). Leza immediately laid all the blame for the two MIA and presumed dead aircrew on Valya, and most of the section beat a hasty retreat as the two of them had that out. A tense truce was the outcome, but I;m not sure how long it will last.

Other dealings around the airfield were fraught as well – several of us are now having to live with the consequences of bad calls with people over the past few sessions/game months.

We had a bit of a discussion about plans for the Monday crew after we finished, and everyone is pretty keen to play through the war before we try anything else. Cool!

This evening’s game was grim. Our first airwoman dead, my pilot Hanna. She went down in a shootout with Nazis rather than be captured. Her navigator is still lost behind lines. 

That followed some fairly crazy hijinks as we tried to fit in to the new airfield, making it hit a bit harder. 

As the rest of the section tried to deal with the loss, the two of us with missing characters made up new airwomen – totally green pilots just out of training. The veterans gave them a tough introduction to the unit.

I forgot to do a writeup for our last game, oops.

We’re done with Trud Gornyaka now. Our last two missions there (including one of the nasty ones) went super well, it was totally unexpected and awesome. 

Of course, without planes to repair during the day we got ourselves into plenty of other trouble. There were mechanics to be calmed down after the wrecked and damaged planes of the last session, an informal interview (with the character concerned suddenly “called away” – player will be GM for the next duty station).

We had time to do the initial setup for Pashkovskaya. Looks like that is going to be crazy, we’ve set ourselves up for a lot of conflict with the 218th, beyond the already significant baseline anger.

Last Monday we played another session at Trud Gornyaka.

The first mission had some very bad rolls and ended up with two airwomen hospitalised and lots of damaged planes. It felt like the rest of the session was catch up from that – there wasn’t much socialising beyond what was needed to get the airwomen and planes back in action (although this did lead to lots of confessions as part of reaching out moves).

As we prepared for the final mission of the session, our section leader went to ask a favour from Major Roskova – and missed the act up roll totally. As a reward for the section’s keen attitude, they got to fly one of the especially tough missions that night (the rail crossing). This mission went much better than the first, with a successful hit on the target. We lost a plane coming back (failed wheels down on a damaged crate) but the characters are all okay.

Next time, I think the squadron commander may have a little something to say about the section’s rather bad record losing planes…