I ran the Night Witches Pashkovskaya Nocturne one-shot this weekend. John Powell, Jamie Fristrom, and Clayton Grey were our Soviet airwomen. I had a ton of fun with it but it wasn’t frictionless for us.
Here are the TLDR reax: Character creation took a long time and generated material we didn’t use … duty station questions + Pashkovskaya threats + mission descriptions were marvellous premise / situation generators that launched us with very few bumps … “What did you do last mission” is a fantastic kicker … Players were not war nerds or plane nerds and had some trouble fictionalizing the mission, would like to see the game help out there a bit more … mission pool was not explained or exposed outside of the move sheet, which meant we flew without it — might be helpful to prompt it. …. the special moves were missing from the reference sheets, a source of some confusion.
The detail dump:
* Setup for me + 3 pilots took 3x the estimated 30mins. Note that I was the only one who had played the game, but others had read the rules. I made a character too, which was a good suggestion.
* I did a safety thing where I passed each player a card with BRUTAL VIOLENCE, MISOGYNY, and HOMOPHOBIA written on it. Players were free to anonymously strike off anything they didn’t want to see. We excluded brutal, bloody violence. We had one character who fought through a 2-harm foot wound and another character who was 3-harm burned when she was trapped in her plane after landing.
* We really would have appreciated the role definitions on the character sheets so we didn’t have to refer back and forth to the rules to help the players choose their playbooks.
* The oath is cool.
* We asked followup questions about advances, marks, and from the Final Questions list, using this to flesh out the wartime experience of the characters. The Regard advances also prompted further discussion. We generated way more material here than we could use in a single session. Given time to muck with this, I would develop some one-shot Night Witches playbooks that require less assembly and have a pre-redacted set of marks.
* “What did you on the last mission” kicker is wonderful. The players emerged with two damaged planes which made the daytime tense. Nice work there.
* The duty station questions, combined with the Pashkovskaya threats, were a marvellous bit of premise and threat generation. The unreasonable demand was a day mission — a round-the-clock effort intending to impress General Igor, who was arriving to witness it.
The other threat, the day cabbage labour, sent Irina away to harvest cabbages. The Komsonol kids working the fields were super impressed by her badassitude and she stayed for an extra hour to tell them war stories .. but then the shitty motorcycle she borrowed for the mission wouldn’t start and she had to walk back. She missed the mission! Not only that, but she ran across a German intruder team that was setting up to derail a train full of crated PO-2’s. They succeeded, and when the NKVD showed up to investigate, she gave herself up, described what she saw, deuced her Interview roll and was instantly arrested as a saboteur. I made my moves a lot harder than they would be in a campaign, I think.
* The bombing mission went spectacularly well with a boxcar attack run and people were pumped!
* We didn’t have time to play another day, so I had the NKVD grab the Zealot section commander and ask her why she had failed to figure out that she had a wrecker in her outfit. They told her to come clean about all the other wreckers she knew about. She truthfully said she didn’t know any. Her Luck roll was 4. Super hard move here: the entire section was arrested.
Our epilogue was General Igor wondering why 2 Squadron was missing an entire section during the day mission he had ordered.
* I was confused when I didn’t find the special interview and the behind enemy lines moves on the reference sheets.
* Briefing move was cool. We used mission D, the fuel dump one. The Zealot section commander decided on the suicidal approach that the mission specifically discourages. I liked how the game elements combined to help her make that decision.
* The Section / airplane sheet is great. Maybe add a line to the Damaged checkbox to indicate the nature of the damage.
* The setup doesn’t explain or emphasize Mission Pool at all and I neglected to point out opportunities to gain it. That’s a prompt that could be in the one-shot document. Our poor Section flew without any pool at all but thanks to some killer rolls they didn’t miss it too much.
* One player found the attack bits disatisfying because he wasn’t super up on how to fictionize beyond what the rules gave him, because he wasn’t familiar with planes.
I told him that a) I trusted his character was a skilled pilot, and whatever he said about the PO-2 would be true, he didn’t have to worry about saying something unrealistic and losing his plane because of it and that b) I needed to do a better job of laying down detail around the attack — scenery, moonlight, other planes, Germans fighters, flak, the details of the target, the water nearby, etc so that we’d have some details to riff on.
Helping players to fictionalize plane missions could really help the game — perhaps write a choice-of-approach move into each mission. When you fly directly through the Krymskaya flak, all planes Take Fire but carry +1 forward to the Attack Run. When you circle Krymskaya looking for an opening, roll +Luck. On a 7+ you find an opening. On a 9- you waste fuel flitting to-and-from so you’ll have to Wheels Down when you get back to base.
* Some confusion on the Honour and Pride advance; the advance grants a medal and a +1 to Medals, but can it be used to gain regimental honours which grant nothing but pride? Use of the word “pride” in the advance title and in “Don’t count for +Medals, but count for pride” was somewhat confusing to one play.
* The Stats line on the character sheet is still ridiculously small and hard to read.
