Appendices
A: Investigations: High-risk detective work
B: Special Reconnaissance: Physical surveillance in hostile conditions
C: Military Intervention: Direct action in support of allied military activities
D: Military Assistance: Train, lead, advise and inspire allied military and/or security forces
E: Stability Actions: Ensure that a vulnerable polity, individual, or process thrives by engaging with threats on its behalf
F: Counterconspiracy: Social infiltration and undercover proactive security
G: Counteroccult: Hunt strange creatures, assassinate occultists, minimize the fallout of occult catastrophes, counter malign entities, and safeguard items and places of cosmic provenance
H: Influence Operations: Persuade, influence, subvert and deceive under delicate and/or hostile circumstances
I: Extractions: Recover personnel and assets from hostile forces and other dangerous situations
J: Civil Relief: Prevent atrocities, relieve suffering in cut-off areas, and set up systems of sustenance and protection for people who are under threat of deprivation and violence
Contract Index
Assault
Building
Stygodrome (MIAB1S)
Medusa (MIAB2M)
Sociable Weaver (MIAB3SW)
Defensive Works
Immune System (MIADW1IS)
Hidden Garden (MIADW2HS)
Machilocation (MIADW3M)
Headquarters
Red Tape (MIAH1RT)
Storming the Gates of Heaven (MIAH2STGOH)
Union Busting (MIAH3UB)
Infrastructure Locus
Sparagmos (MIAIL1S)
Tears of Stone (MIAIL2TOS)
Bridge to the Underworld (MIAIL3BOTU)
Position
Apotropaios (MIAP1A)
The Thousand Candle Stone (MIAP2TTCS)
There Goes the Neighborhood (MIAP3TGTN)
Stronghold
Carceri (MIAS1C)
Fantasy Castle (MIAS2FC)
Rats in the Attic (MIAS3RITA)
Deny
Access
The Quivering Field (MIDenA1TQF)
Sungullet (MIDenA2S)
Nilotic Metallurgy (MIDenA3NM)
Food
Kykeon (MIDenF1K)
Autochthons’ Ambrosia (MIDenF2AA)
Casus Belli Sui Generis (MIDenF3CBSG)
Intelligence
Polymetis (MIDenI1P)
Concupiscence (MIDenI2C)
The Baying Gate of the Hades Shades (MIDenI3TBGOTHS)
Linkup
Purification of the Vessels (MIDenL1POTV)
An Epidemic of Mortal Bullfinch (MIDenL2AEOMB)
A Fulminating Chasm of Bones (MIDenL3AFCOB)
Plunder
Synthema (MIDenP1S)
Felix Culpa (MIDenP2FC)
A Solemn and Brilliant Field (MIDenP3ASABF)
Victory
Epopteia (MIDenV1E)
Hybris (MIDenV2H)
Askoliasmos (MIDenV3A)
Destroy
Convoy
Man-Portable (MIDesC1MP)
Grand Tour (MIDesC2GT)
Shyships (MIDesC3S)
Production Capability
Pistonguts (MIDesPC1P)
The Nursery (MIDesPC2TN)
The Means of Production (MIDesPC3TMOP)
Supply Dump
Cornucopia (MIDesSD1C)
Hydrocarbon Trap (MIDesSD2HT)
House of Mercy (MIDesSD3HOM)
Motor Pool
The Blood Curlers (MIDesMP1TBC)
Carmageddon (MIDesMP2C)
BattleBots (MIDesMP3B)
RGO
Vertical Envelopment (MIDesRGO1VE)
A Hard Rain (MIDesRGO2AHR)
Income Inequality (MIDesRGO3II)
Ship
Firepower of That Magnitude (MIDesS1FOTM)
Galleon of Galleries (MIDesS2GOG)
Manymoorage Harbor (MIDesS3MH)
Disrupt
Army Movement
Tendrils of the Styx (MIDisAM1TOTS)
Secret Plans (MIDisAM2SP)
When the Stones Gave Suck to Bacchanals (MIDisAM3WTSGSTB)
Barbarian Invasion
The Snake-Girt Swampfawns (MIDisBI1TSGF)
The Putricate (MIDisBI2TP)
Primitive Allies (MIDisBI3PA)
Genocide
Felimorphs (MIDisG1F)
Red Mana (MIDisG2RM)
A Loud Assembly (MIDisG3ALA)
Intelligence Operation
Velvet Glove, Iron Hand (MIDisIO1VGIH)
To Batten the Black-Feathered Wound-Bird (MIDisIO2TBTBFWB)
Pursuit Force (MIDisIO3PF)
- Seek & Destroy
Violence For Profit (MIDis-S&D[VFP])
Supply Lines
Burlaki (MIDisSL1B)
Traditional Ways (MIDisSL2TW)
A High Communion (MIDisSL3AHC)
Kill or Capture
Arms Dealer
Underworld Trade (MIKOCAD1UT)
Colonel Mustard (MIKOCAD2CM)
Things to Come (MIKOCAD3TTC)
Leader
Black Prince (MIKOCAL1BP)
Hetairoi (MIKOCAL2H)
The Man in the High Tower (MIKOCAL3TMITHT)
Provocateur
Keres Basilinna (MIKOCAP1KB)
Devil’s Advocate (MIKOCAP2DA)
A Warm Welcome (MIKOCAP3AWW)
Reavers
Horsemen of the Apocalypse (MIKOCAR1HOTA)
Just Desserts (MIKOCAR2JD)
Great Company (MIKOCAR3GC)
Spies
Grasping a Snake (MIKOCAS1GAS)
Delousing (MIKOCAS2D)
Whispering Walls (MIKOCAS3WW)
Sabotage
Effort
Nautiloid Program (MISE1NP)
Infrastructure
Hermaion (MISI1H)
Aphros (MISI2A)
Gammy Knee (MISI3GK)
Production
A Mutilated Whale-Roarer (MISP1AMWR)
Sondergötter (MISP2S)
Slaughter Tapping (MISP3ST)
Assault
Building
Stygodrome (MIAB1S): This place is a small town and military base built into the upper walls of a vast cavern of unknown depth. It is crisscrossed by mighty sky tunnels that stand between the sky and the infinite cavern. This place is used to mount expeditions into the absolute underworld. Strange artifacts from those who dwell beneath have been brought back to this place, and rival nations fear that soon a discovery will be made that will upset the balance of power on earth. They are correct; such a discovery has already been made. Luckily, it requires materials inaccessible to surfaces to replicate, but such a use of this artifact could nonetheless upset the world order. Earthquake device, psychoresonator (neurologic specializer capable of shifting a whole community’s mental specialization to a dangerous extreme of openness to the degree of psychological dissolution, crippling rigid-mindedness, polycriminal disagreeableness or defenseless agreeableness, society-collapsing introversion, murderous and suicidal neuroticism, or manic and fatally impulsive positive emotion), molecular narcotizer (makes all metal in a square-mile radius highly radioactive), quarkspore transceiver (connects all local moss, lichen and algae to the fungal layer near the core of the earth, granting them a suite of electromagnetopsionic characteristics and a general ambivalence towards lifeforms that live near the sun, which the deep fungal layer would prefer to the core of the earth.
Medusa (MIAB2M): The enemy’s radiotelegraphy nerve center is a bizarre facility distributed between several nearby brick or concrete buildings. The highest are now accessible only by airplanes landing on their roofs; this is one means of ingress, as is climbing across the wires which have been strung between the tower tops like cobwebs. An entity is forming, distributed through the radiotelegraphy stations and is informed by their constant communication, fed clipped communiques and warlike information. It will seek to assist the party in killing its handlers through miscommunication, power surges and the control of lifts and lights, but will then turn on the party at the moment it deems most deadly.
Sociable Weaver (MIAB3SW): The walls have been knocked out of this concrete office building and now artillery and AA guns bristle from every floor, making organized troop movements IVO the tower extremely hazardous. A giant electromagnetic bombard has been rigged up in what used to be the central elevator shaft of this tower, and it can fire giant steel casks of explosives which are kept in the fortified, hardened motorcar garage in the foundations of this building. These are currently the most powerful explosive weapon on earth, and several napalm and thermobaric rounds have recently been constructed.
Defensive Works
Immune System (MIADW1IS): A venous network of trenches and tunnels leading to camouflaged artillery points and radiotelegraphy stations in the stony valley. This is a deadly place because artillery stations can fire over the far valley ridge onto nearby battlefield, *and* because the firepower of a whole valley wall can be directed upon a fallen point on the opposite valley wall in a few minutes if word can get to a radiotelegraphy station. As such, should the party go loud in taking out a station, they will need to finish the enemy and move on within d4 minutes, after which it will be disintegrated by 155mm shells from across the valley.
Hidden Garden (MIADW2HS): This is a hilled field undermined with tunnels and pits. Mortar positions have been built at a few of the hilltops, each with a crown of thorns of sandbags and machine guns. The valley can be sectionally collapsed when tanks and trucks pass overhead. When this place reaches its maximum collapse, it will be like a great chasm studded with columns of earth that once stood at the heart of the hills. Slats will be pulled away from these columns, revealing the pillboxes within. All that remains of the surface are a few stony walkways between the mortar positions at the apex of the columns.
Machilocation (MIADW3M): This is a vertical maze of fortified corridors leading up a cliffside, zig-zagging and intersticing one another; all are filled with ramps down which bombs can be bowled, hot oil poured, dangerous animals released, and there are murderholes through which these things can be deployed. Sheets of metal with firing loops can be pulled out to block the way, and at the very apex of this death ladder is a battle tank that can make a blazing descent when all else fails.
Headquarters
Red Tape (MIAH1RT): The target is a hillside den where all administrative work is done by brutal tribal auxiliaries. They are extraordinarily pissed off to have had this kind of work foisted on them but don’t dare defect on the only sure thing they’ve ever had; interlopers are likely to be attacked with giant industrial staplers, pruning-shear sized scissors, makeshift inkbombs, springwhips and razor-sharp Bowie knife-sized paper cutters in addition to whatever rude shotguns, torpedo mortars, flechette staves and fishhook grenades that the tribesmen have armed themselves with.
Storming the Gates of Heaven (MIAH2STGOH): You’re going to clean out a debauched officer’s club filled with prostitutes, drug dealers, black marketeers and their bodyguards, who all have a powerful vested interest in making sure their high-ranking clientele go unmurdered. They are the only real defense besides the officers themselves, who have located this place away from prying eyes in a remote chateau / castle / casino / country house / dacha / tree fort / giant yacht / giant firelit stone head
Union Busting (MIAH3UB): You are to root out a secret intelligence facility located somewhere totally inconspicuous like a school, a fine restaurant or a medical clinic with the intelligence coordinators posing as the staff. As soon as the assault begins, the intelligencers drop the pretence (to the horror of those using the site’s services) and prepare to repel assailants and make their escape from the area. They often have a number of relevant spy-weapons to deploy: 5’ ruler longswords, rolling pin grenade launchers and overclocked EKGs, to reference the above examples.
Infrastructure Locus
Sparagmos (MIAIL1S): Carry in satchel charges and tear up the enemy’s central railroad complex. It is encircled by armored artillery trains like a wagon train, but in its guts it is filled with royal luxury trains and richly-laden cargo trains awaiting their disgorgement across the occupied territories like ringworms of molten gold. You are authorized to carry out anything you please, but don’t overburden yourself because trainloads of enemy infantry and tanks will probably steam for the complex as soon as you launch your attack (unless you can take out the railyard’s multiple radiotelegraphy stations before they get the word out).
Note that this place is active and mundane trains come and go constantly.
Tears of Stone (MIAIL2TOS): You are to sabotage an underground water control facility. It consists of vast cisterns over a spidering complex of ramped tunnels and sudden chasms. Prone to rushing blasts of water and flooded rooms and sections in case of bomb damage. It cannot be predicted where gunfire will break open hidden reserves of water (often superheated or freezing but for their constant movement); it cannot be predicted where shattered places will suddenly open into vast underworld cavern complexes laden with Stygian seas from which manifold forms may ascend the walls and into the sodden complex.
Bridge to the Underworld (MIAIL3BOTU): A Giant bridge with interior struts, abutment pillboxes, and defensive positions around the river beneath it. The guts of this place were used for all kinds of things by the civil populace before its takeover by the occupying force, and some no doubt remain; its absolute reaches remain unexplored by the soldiery, for they are of unsavory, unlucky, unholy and numinous provenance to those who are unwelcome.
Position
Apotropaios (MIAP1A): The enemy has retained a cell of gravitic occultists who have somehow constructed a device that pushes against the advance of enemies. Only those who oppose the enemy faction and their occult allies will be affected. However, it will never quite push you backwards, only hinder your movement towards it. The effect becomes stronger the closer you come.
The occultists do not take the field to fight but will fight in defense of the device; they are able to spontaneously and locally control gravity in their immediate environment, can may use this as a weapon or an aid to the use of firearms, grenades, flamethrowers etc.
Get close enough to this device to plant a bomb next to it. You will be fighting like mad to cross those last few feet.
Where the enemy has placed the device depends upon its shape.
Pillar: (1) At the heart of a trench-and-bunker network / (2) In the stately, built-up center of a town /(3) Inside a stone stelae in triple-canopy jungle.
Orb: (1) Hilltop / (2) Underwater in a pool at the heart of a facility / (3) Inside a heavily-armored plane
The Thousand Candle Stone (MIAP2TTCS): Seize a hilltop shrine crucial to opposing forces. There is an entity dwelling in the shrine who will make itself known at its leisure to those who have won its interest in battle or debate. It may have reward, punishment and/or tests for those who have disturbed the boredom of its worship should they wish to gain its blessing (or escape).
There Goes the Neighborhood (MIAP3TGTN): Attempt to clear (but just massively disrupt if you can) a hilly suburban neighborhood that’s been emptied of its population and turned exclusively into a logistics/barracking hub. Each house has a unique layout and they range from 1-4 stories with 1-2 story basements; some have small but thick and winding gardens.
Stronghold
Carceri (MIAS1C): This island prison rock has no civil population and no access except by boat or heavily-guarded bridge if the GM is inclined. There are patrol boats and an airplane hangar cut into the upper levels. The prison has been cut into the Fnaturally-jagged volcanic rock. It is filled with prisoners of varying stripes who may be inclined to help either those who occupy the place or the party). Beneath the surface there is a half-flooded cavern complex where the prisoners are periodically, submarine chamber (potentially with submarines as hulks for prisoners, or simply as a delivery method), a panopticon, or just a traditional prison with hidden recesses and wings abandoned by the guards. Prisoner categories: pacifists, murderous psychopaths who are competent liars, morphine addicts, inwardly-loyal gangsters, captured mercenaries, foreign POWs, wealthy and bewildered white-collar criminals, foreign nobility, mercurial burglars
Fantasy Castle (MIAS2FC): The torture chambers, murderholes, ouiblettes and gong pits of this medieval castle are all perfectly active. Soldiers will fire from between crenellations, the resident commander (perhaps a feudal noble!) holds court in a throne room, and there is a drawbridge with portcullis. The main defensive innovations are the antiaircaft guns, the mortars on the motte, and the electrified moat.
Rats in the Attic (MIAS3RITA): The national capitol you’ve been seconded to assault is a sprawling palace set in a vast and mysterious constructed landscape with statue gardens, or a giant, stately and strongly-built Neuschwanstein, or a giant royal pleasure barge that is theoretically seaworthy but has never been moved from the lake where it rests. Insertion via land would be impossible given the siege, so you’ll be parachuted onto the capitol’s vast property.
Deny
Access
The Quivering Field (MIDenA1TQF): A region of crystalline salt flats; bouquets of gleaming shards under the bright blue vault darkening at its apex. Ruminants bowing their heads while they emerge from the primeval, tinder-littered flower-fallen forest. The Pillars of Flavor. The whitespotted deer stands beneath the body of the elk where lichenfur falls upon her youthdewed back; he licks the great saltspire with the tongue of a golden retriever, she dapples her gleaming behemoth with a flittering tongue scarcely seen beneath the rags of the broadhorn’s neck. The enemy covets this place; their leaders long to spring between the saltshards upon destriers with lance in hand to run down the semibovine scarce ones who have flown their forest coop to celebrate their sodium bounty. Then speared corpses will be split, sunned and salted upon the flat where they died. Prevent this sporting resupply.
Sungullet (MIDenA2S): The sun beams into or glares down the furrowed esophagus of this sun-blessed cavern like an all-cleansing tonsillectomist. Here the mosses grow, the flowers which face one way in one half, the other way in the other. There are nutritious mushrooms, truffles, and waterlogged wet lichens. It is beloved by squirrels and snow hares. This is a fertile place for a redoubt, and for a pass in the mountains. The enemy would dearly love to establish a presence in this sylvan place. Make that impossible. (The mountain has a voice here but will only speak at night, when all is still; he wishes to breathe the wind, and not to be obstructed by bunkers and portcullis, but he will not swallow unless driven to great anger. He loves starlight but can see it no more due to old avalanches)
Nilotic Metallurgy (MIDenA3NM): A strait of steel-scything crocodiles. A trick of evolutionary fate has given them sinews of steel (a simile) and orthoferric teeth (this is literal), so that wooden boats stand no chance of passing and steel ships will have holes ripped in them in short order. Once a hole has been torn, these flash-camouflaged crocodiles slither throughout the ship with the rising of the waters (blending in with the burbling tide) to shred sailors and passers by with a speed and comprehensiveness to shame their Nilotic ancestors. Now the enemy has devised a means of passing this fatal place: fast motorboats that the crocodiles will not struggle to catch, for they are languid until prey is nigh. Find a way to prevent the enemy safely utilizing this strait.
Food
Kykeon (MIDenF1K): They will not cooperate without spices. Officers, nobles, allies all are brought to the tables by burbling bouillabaisse, runners of riz brûlée redolent with cinnamon Asprigs, saffron-clad jambalaya, juniper crepes and jasmine custard. The spice must flow or the war shall cease, and should there be peace then the spice will go. The river-brimming spice paddies, delicate flavor-flowers quivering in only the gentlest breezes, groves of sprig and sproutling. All these must be denied to the enemy.
Autochthons’ Ambrosia (MIDenF2AA): A bakery to end all hunger. A vast complex of a wild highland sect. Their amber waves of grain a fur of the complex, rich black breadbasket soil spread across the roofs. Grain elevators, watermills and windmills, a great machine that rotates like a vast orrery several miles in circumference, spun by the rivers and sped by steam engines over baking fires. Inside, the conveyor belts fed by coal and gasoline send loaves and uncut baguette logs whirling through the guts of this place like platelets. The inhabitants bake. That is what they do. That is their raison d'être. They need no rationale besides the purpose of industry. Their bread is sold abroad. It is enough. Now the enemy has begun to seize this place. At first their foragers collected a percentage of the pancreator’s output. Now they have taken roost and residence where the scribes note output and mark the ascending chart lines. Several of the bakers have been killed. Still production goes on unabated. What will they do? They have gone about their business and their business alone for generations. This is where you come in. Before the enemy can take root in this place for all time.
Casus Belli Sui Generis (MIDenF3CBSG): A war for a restaurant. It is not a large war, and the defenders are not powerful. The dictatorial over world of the invading forces has lost his personal chef, who has sought freedom in a state more convivial to culinary enterprise. He has found his nirvana and he has declared that he will continue to operate his restaurant in the place where he stands come hell or high water. This is suitable to the dictator. He needs only seize this tower and his gourmand voyages will resume once more. The city is under siege. Strike teams (fast attack, slow and armored, hidden and dangerous) perforate the defensive lines and infiltrate town to open weak ways to the tower. Some conspire to seize the tower proper; perhaps an accord could be forced with the dictator’s state gaining only extraterritoriality at the tower. But he is content laying the whole state under the yoke should he gain back his hedonizing servant, whom he loves. His Helen neath the apron.
Intelligence
Polymetis (MIDenI1P): A counting room of strange mechanisms in the walls discovered beneath a howling gorge. Mechanical levers and runic letter arrays protrude from rude rock and behind the lines can be heard grinding probabilistic entrapment systems of kabbalistic provenance. This is a xenostygian transition system abandoned after mysterious outputs; only scraps of the final delivery written in this place written on tablets of powdered seashell and unknown bone. Now the enemy has discovered this place and yoked savants unto the controls; their half-spoken inputs and portentous readings are passed up to the enemy high command and already they are disposing their forces for a new deep defense of improbable places. What will happen once their sigilistic arrangements have reached an apogee of coordinated movement? The client would rather not find out.
Concupiscence (MIDenI2C): The whores are in the enemy’s pockets. The men are in love. War has made them mad for maidenflesh. They are marrying these mercenaries in droves and exchanging state secrets for syphilis. Those who will not smash are stilettoed. The brothels spring up everywhere. They are pilgrimage points for ladies of loose repute from across the continent and the ten thousand isles. It is said there are women from Glossolalia and the Grave of the Sorcerers. It is unknown if this is true as no four-armed whore has been reported to the intelligencers of our allies (though perhaps she has seduced four of them at once), but in any case the situation must come to an end. It is reputed that the women of the enemy’s royal family have subcontracted this great sexual agglomeration; princesses become procurers, marchionesses gone matron, with the Queen the high matriarch of maidenheads. The situation has become intolerable; our allies’ finest general has recently turned from his cause for his inamorata, a brothel-princess turned hinterland bandit chieftain; find a way to stop this situation or our allies will be overthrown by a sexual revolution.
The Baying Gate of the Hades Shades (MIDenI3TBGOTHS): The enemy has enlisted a vast bloodhound kennel to produce manhunters for their antipartisan effort. These bloodhounds have been crossbred with wolves and the enemy rides on horseback behind bands of them; needless to say the hounds tear runaways limb from limb, usually after a mere one or two are shot. Put a stop to this practice, but be cautious, for the region around the kennel has no shortage of these bloodwolves available.
Linkup
Purification of the Vessels (MIDenL1POTV): An enemy tank force is awaiting its chance to make a final drive into an enemy city-state, but dare not advance without screening infantry cover. The infantry are preparing to cross a great bog and are assembling canoes, watershoes, water buffalo dromedaries. If the infantry reach the tanks, the city will likely fall; if they are delayed indefinitely, the commander of the tank army is likely to order a risky attack or simply break off the siege lest reinforcements envelop his column. Make sure this doesn’t happen.
An Epidemic of Mortal Bullfinch (MIDenL2AEOMB): A glider army is assembling on the slopes of Mount Copious. Their design is to launch all at once and outflank the enemy army locked in combat with their allies in the Tarragona Riverlands. Their engineers are felling the nearby woods and bringing in herds and hunted game for leather. Eighty gliders are ready, and when there are a hundred and twenty, whole battalions of men will swoop down off the peak of the mountain and deliver a sudden deathblow to the embattled foe. Make sure this doesn’t happen or mitigate it to the degree that you can.
A Fulminating Chasm of Bones (MIDenL3AFCOB): The enemy Royal Family and the Royal Guard are holed up in a cavern complex of unknown depth. Allied forces have the place blocked off and are attempting to starve out the fugitive warband. A column of machine gun equipped armored cars are making their way across the narrow trails of the mountain passes to break the siege of the royals. You must ensure that the armored cars do not reach the siegeworks before the capitulation of the Queen and her forces.
Unknown to the allies, the Royal Family have been contacted by an entity that has put them in touch with a xenostygian civilization; already a cadre of xenostygian special forces have arrived to safeguard and advise the enemy Queen, and the rest of the army (super heavy plate armor infantry) are making a laborious ascent (their armor has to be transported separately by belaying boys). Should the besieging forces be caught between the Royal Guard with their xenostygian backers and the relief column it would spell disaster.
Plunder
Synthema (MIDenP1S): The enemy is advancing upon the Tombs of Karendar. Their goal is to obliterate all records of the kings and high priests there so as to win legitimacy for the current claimants of their land. Mercenary archaeologists, explosives experts and tribal allies are moving in advance of the main force, and should they enact their designs this precious relic which contains such a repository of mankind’s inheritance will be destroyed in service of despotism. Stop this from happening (and disarm as many traps as possible) until a detachment of Troutbridge Marines can arrive with a deputation of University staff to secure the Tombs and study the artifacts and sarcophagi of Karendar.
Felix Culpa (MIDenP2FC): The vast summer palace of the client’s kingdom contains the resplendent Crown Jewels; they hang in a room lost in one of its manifold wings. These jewels represent several years of this kingdom’s GDP. The trouble is that the summer palace has over a thousand rooms and halls of every description and provenance, and there is no publicly available information about where the jewels might be hidden. The light garrison (which was not permitted into the palace proper) was quickly overwhelmed by the enemy, who are now progressing with great difficulty and fruitfulness through the labyrinthine palace. Infiltrate the palace and secure the Crown Jewels before the enemy can locate them. Alas, given the embattled state of the allied royal family, we will not be able to provide you with the whereabouts of the jewels.
You are authorized to keep any other treasures *besides* the Crown Jewels.
A Solemn and Brilliant Field (MIDenP3ASABF): An enemy communique has been intercepted, copied and passed on ordering a force of intelligencers to infiltrate the museum isle of Vendelsgarde. From there they are to enter the Medieval Arms Museum and secure the Sword of Saint Swerdan, which belongs to the regalia of legitimacy in their kingdom. There will be little opposition to a usurpation of the crown should a potentate be belted with the Saint’s Sword, and so this team of intelligencers must be countered. The first problem is that the local staff and guards are to be paid off with bribes there is little chance that they will refuse; they will abandon the Medieval Arms Museum the night of the theft, so you will be all that stands between the team and the Sword. The second problem is that no firearms are permitted on the island by the Museological Patriarchs; you will have to seek armament within the museum, for however bribed the guards might be, our contract does not charter you to kill them. Luckily, the rival intruders will face similar circumstances; they can bribe the staff to let them in, but they cannot bribe them to allow them onto their sovereign soil armed with weapons that might facilitate a takeover of the Patriarchs’ precious patrimony. The Patriarchs have been informed of all this but they move slowly and the robbery is tomorrow night; perhaps they have been influenced in some way, as well.
Victory
Epopteia (MIDenV1E): The enemy is fighting in service of an unknown entity to which they have built an enormous bonfire that burns with the wooden wreckage of a ruined city. They say a great face can be seen in the flames; they say that when they win their current war, they will march their every captive into the absolute embers of the bonfire, and then their armies will follow suit. What will emerge is not known, but they are nearing the point of having enough captives one way or another to complete this fell ritual. Prevent this from happening however you must; stop their victory, free their captives, destroy their bonfire or defeat their entity, or whatever you feel you must do.
Hybris (MIDenV2H): The enemy’s final victory is at hand. Now they will assemble the hereditary relics of all the polities they have laid under debellatio and create a regalia of armor, jewels and weaponry to transform their dictator into a murderer king of unstoppable effect in single combat (the coin of the realm in their land; no challengers will defeat him, and so the rule of his cruel house shall become hereditary). Prevent this ceremony from taking place, and if it does take place, find some way of deposing him.
Askoliasmos (MIDenV3A): The Miner Militia of Tombquarry is engaged in a desperate hinterland standoff with the enemy. The miners are hardy pack animals but totally unskilled in the art of war; should the enemy win out, they are likely to enslave what miners remain and seize their gold mine to fund further warfare abroad. So far the miners have mostly been skirmishing with conscripts from a city-state subordinate to the enemy, but now a company of professionals led by a master aristocratic sniper are traveling to put an end to this back-and-forth. Ensure that the enemy does not acquire these gold mines.
Destroy
Convoy
Man-Portable (MIDesC1MP): The enemy is traversing mountain passes using teams of localsherpas who are both excellent climbers and capable of bearing extreme loads without complaint. Those guides who are neutral carry supplies; those who are ideologically aligned with the enemy carry machine guns, mortars, and small field guns atop their packs, operated by enemy troops, making for highly mobile and adjustable (if not completely stable) firing platforms.
Grand Tour (MIDesC2GT): The country here is rough but the enemy has found a means of supply congenial to his needs and to the environment he faces: droves of bicycles laden with supplies in saddlebags. Bicyclists carrying SMGs slung under the arm screen the convoy proper, traveling up into the hills and forests around the path, while transporters push the heady-laden bicycles up the road. The transporters sling rifles, and a few bicycles at the heart of the transport have wagons with heavy weapons. Naturally, this is all very quiet.
Shyships (MIDesC3S): The enemy has a surfeit of ironclads and has repurposed many of them into armored freighters, which he ships up the rivers alongside swarms of small commandeered fishing vessels, even canoes, which are used to transport lightweights supplies and to present the enemy with an overwhelming number of individually-armed targets. These ironclads have been equipped with a devious function: should they be attacked by armor-piercing weapons or boarders, they are capable of disgorging air in their bilges and sinking to the bottom of the river to outwait the attack. When the danger is likely to have passed, they extend a hose to somewhere near the surface (never right above the ironclad) and begin to take in fresh air.
Production Capability
Pistonguts (MIDesPC1P): This naval arsenal has been 90% automated by mad genius; you must destroy the central mechanism, deep in the earth among the expanding underground coal furnaces.
The Nursery (MIDesPC2TN): The enemy is in possession of an unusual artillery shell foundry; all kinds of strange ammunition is in the works here and likely to be released by havoc (scorpions, lice, poison gas, superglue, strange and dangerous plants, some of the creatures in the City-State post).
The Means of Production (MIDesPC3TMOP): The enemy has been inducing our allies to surrender using communiques delivered from a flying printing press (it uses an integral wind turbine to power the press). Small bounty for the plane’s destruction; much higher bounty to conduct a leaflet mission and/or deliver the plane to the client. Hard as fuck to fly due to weight and construction.
Supply Dump
Cornucopia (MIDesSD1C): More food of quantity and variety never before seen by the players; they will likely be fighting battles up giant mountains of bananas, throwing grenades across walls of paper-wrapped chocolate bricks, fighting through forest of hanging hams, struggling on catwalks over vats of maple syrup boiling to carmelize.
Hydrocarbon Trap (MIDesSD2HT): Crude oil, kerosene, gasoline, coal dust, and chopped wood, all in a vast agglomeration of piping, cisterns, pits and towers. The place is segmented through with concrete walls so as to prevent the destruction of one cluster from destroying everything.
House of Mercy (MIDesSD3HOM): Pills, tinctures, syringes, gauze, thermometers and narcotics of every description, laden through a city of marked or unmarked tents. There’s a bonus per ton if you can somehow get this shit out of here. Be careful, as explosions may carry out syringes or billow narcotized smoke on the wind.
Motor Pool
The Blood Curlers (MIDesMP1TBC): The enemy has built pyramidal runways and filled them with airplanes of every function and description: interceptors, dive-bombers, photographic scout planes, flame strafers, electrocablers, luxury transports, nine-winged enneaplane flying boats kept on long manmade canals. The cheap dogfighter planes are located on the open, showroom-style lowest floors so that their swiveling machine guns can be employed on ground troops; the exotic, experimental planes mounting thermal, electromagnetic or light wave weapons are spirited away in the highest bays, which have hangar doors like bank vaults.
Carmageddon (MIDesMP2C): The enemy has commandeered a great, labyrinthine racetrack (complete with skyways and tunnels) as a motor pool for his land vehicles. One can walk along the walls lining the intricately interwoven track to view the races; now this function is moribund and the walls play host to sentries and inspectors. The track contains a vast assortment of motorized vehicles, from little jeeps and motorbikes to five-ton trucks to race cars and limousines reserved for officers and dignitaries. Some are kept near the access-controlled box office entrance; many more are parked here and there in the depths of the racetrack labyrinth.
BattleBots (MIDesMP3B): A former pit mine has been turned into a repository for tanks, tractors and recovery vehicles of every kind: bulldozers, dredgers, mobile cranes, minesweepers, mobile bridges. The vehicles are speckled throughout the environment, here and there between the tents and fuel dumps of the crews and repairers associated with each vehicle. Travel here and disable as many of their vehicles as possible. The best way to destroy them since they’re so spread out might be to seize some vehicles of your own and use them to flip enemies down the slopes or push them into fuel dumps and mineshafts. Be warned: this place is light on guards but the engineers and drivers have spirit and are likely to come after you in their own utility vehicles, so get ready to rumble!
RGO
Vertical Envelopment (MIDesRGO1VE): The trees of Saltpeter Wood are the largest and oldest in the world. Many are a thousand feet high, though most are only as wide as a house. The enemy is financing his war effort in part by garnishing this exotic and extraordinarily remote region for its wood; travel there, belay up the trees and clear the enemy’s heavily-armed lumberjacks off the geographic bark of these tower-trees, but be warned that the enemy is likely to have carved disguised citadels here and there inside the trees that they’re operating on.
A Hard Rain (MIDesRGO2AHR): The enemy has set up a massive oil rig [ (1) in the hinterlands / (2) in a heavily-fished sea coast region / (3) bestride a city]. Whatever way you destroy this place, flaming oil is probably going to spray over the local region for some time before the subsurface pressurization systems peter out (this may cause wildfires, infernos in settled areas, and the spread of debilitating smoke), though there’s no need to make that too explicit to the party ahead of time.
Income Inequality (MIDesRGO3II): The enemy operates a mining latifundia filled with brutalized chattel slaves and POWs. The garrison and staff live in a face-meltingly opulent manor directly above the minel, but also have logistics centers and fastnesses within the mine itself. These are similarly lavish despite being interspersed with sickening shantytowns and execution gullies.
Ship
Firepower of that Magnitude (MIDesS1FOTM): The enemy has constructed a heavily armored artillery monitor: a vast thing bristling with massive naval guns intended to standoff entire fleets at the cost of near immobility. To destroy this thing you must reach its central bilge and activate its scuttling sequence, but this will leave you scarce time to escape. If an exterior vent is destroyed, there is a path that a fighter-bomber could conceivably navigate through the cloistered utility channels of the monitor to deliver a round directly into the bilge, but this would require a masterful feat of piloting, especially if one was being pursued by desperate defensive fighters from the local port and the monitor’s hangars. Carries tractor harpoons to prevent blockade runners from clearing the local port.
Galleon of Galleries (MIDesS2GOG): The Philopolemos Gloriosum is a vast, resplendent battleship trimmed in gold, with a conning tower like a stargazer’s observatory, a command cabin like a metropolitan theater, the main deck like a hanging garden and the gun batteries like drawing rooms well apportioned with bookshelves and table service. This giant warship manor is not only a mighty naval implement, it is also an affront to all rival nations. That is not to say they would not welcome her being taken a prize…
Manymoorage Harbor (MIDesS3MH): This seawalled harbor contains lots and lots of ships are sheltered in little wharves (made of concrete, wood or sheet metal) in and around many little islands in a bay. Island hopping and boat-to-boat combat will be necessary unless this is carried out with utter subterfuge.
Disrupt
Army Movement
Tendrils of the Styx (MIDisAM1TOTS): An enemy tank force is navigating a river complex; trucks and tanks on hundreds of pontoon rafts are being towed by tugboats and riverine ironclads. River spirits are slipping their way into the vehicles like parasites and should there be a battle, they will drown the crews, seize control of the vehicles and use them to wreak as much havoc as possible on any and all humans in the region. This is partly due to revenge for the diesel in the rivers, but also pure racial hatred. They will move the surviving tanks to rivers and float down them like boats, buoyed by the spirits within, firing on any signs of humanity along the way. Spirits in destroyed tanks and trucks are killed.
Secret Plans (MIDisAM2SP): An enemy motor force is outflanking the allied front through a vast forest. The commander is taking his time and stopping periodically. It turns out that he’s siphoning off some of his supplies to the local villages, who are in need due to the war. He grew up reading about this region and has great affection for it despite its current depressed state.
When the Stones Gave Suck to Bacchanals (MIDisAM3WTSGSTB): The enemy’s tribal allies are crossing a mountain range with a few elite alpine officers from their allied city-state. There are entities in these mountains whom the tribesmen’s ancestors made fell pacts with in ages of legend. These obligations have been passed down through the generations, and the tribesmen hope that these entities will not call on them (and that they will not need to call on the entities), but it is becoming more likely as the alpine officers lead them ever nearer those ancient crags of synthesis and coalescence.
Barbarian Invasion
The Snake-Girt Swampfawns (MIDisBI1TSGF): The foe are painted swamp-people capable of living just under the water almost anywhere. They specialize in grabbing the limb of a foe and then death-rolling to dislocate and/or break it; they’re great at this both underwater and on the land, and they can jump a stunning distance both from the water and from a standing crouch.
They know how to camouflage themselves with the slime from any kind of swamp, marsh, bog and fen, including in bright, primary colors.
The Putricate (MIDisBI2TP): The invaders are from the jungle hives and utilize a form of snapping stag-centipede as weapons, both as a form of short-range bladed melee whip that bites like a pair of pruning shears and deployed from atlatls. The fecal beads of these centipedes are lined with filaments of incendiary phosphate; they use this as a deleterious fuel, and also fire it from matchlock blunderbusses, from which they can blast 12’ jets of what amounts to white phosphorus. These burning filaments will also embed in the bodies of those directly in the way of the blast.
Primitive Allies (MIDisBI3PA): These people live one with the monkeys of their home forests and can rely on their monkeys to perform simple tasks for them. As such, these barbarians can manage complex machinery like tanks by monkeys trained by rote to load shells in exchange for mungo berries, carry and adjust the bipods of antitank rifles, and carry wounded monkeys to causality collection points using litters. The monkeys are vicious and clever and if they get into your position they are likely to pull the pins on your grenades, undo your web gear, pull your nose and ears and generally wreak havoc while their human leaders rush in to bayonet you.
Genocide
Felimorphs (MIDisG1F): Giant predatory cats with chameleon pelts are being released into the populated area of the afflicted population by special cage-tanks. They are marvelous ambush predators and are rapidly pruning the local population, taking out shepherd boys and their flocks, dropping on lumberjacks and hunters sent to shoot them, devouring farmers who go to the woodline to piss and devouring young lovers who sneak out at night. These creatures have been going into local cavern complexes and large industrial facilities to breed; if they are allowed to multiply, a responding force is likely to face hundreds of them pouring from the woodwork, walkways and ceilings, climbing up the corridors towards you along every wall at once, and then it’s game over man, game over!
Red Mana (MIDisG2RM): This is a war conducted by napalm; fat planes like winged cigars are drifting over population centers, farms and rivers, dropping incendiary packages and sheets of annihilating napalm. The planes are emerging from hidden airfields supplied by yak-driven carts of the destroying oil.
A Loud Assembly (MIDisG3ALA): This is a complete population overwrite. Everyone in the population of a foreign state is migrating into the target region like some kind of bloody gold rush; they come, kill anyone they find and seize whatever they place, staking their claims against latecomers who must proceed further into the blighted land and face what remains of the local military and civil resistance. The invading military seizes the infrastructure and palaces; they plan to become the nobles and ruling class in general of this “new” state. The invader militias are totally unskilled but very numerous.
Intelligence Operation
Velvet Glove, Iron Hand (MIDisIO1VGIH): Handlers are embedding in the local populations and creating confidential informants everywhere, from the street sweepers to the excise officials. Anyone could be in the lavish pocket of the enemy; anyone could be induced by bribery or blackmail to attack the party. Trucks may swerve to run them over. Carnival fruitsellers may slip handler-sourced hand grenades into watermelons ostensibly filled with rum. Beware the barber.
To Batten the Black-Feathered Wound-Bird (MIDisIO2TBTBFWB): Black reconnaissance planes and hot air balloons are directing nefarious activities throughout the region; the locals have no real AA, and so the raids, thievery and kidnappings continue. Disturbingly, if these black airplanes are fired upon or otherwise impacted, they are revealed to be spectral.
Pursuit Force (MIDisIO3PF): Bold scouts are making high-speed motorcar surveys of the dispositions of local forces, static defenses and civil conditions. They also ride motorbikes as lancers across the woody ridges. Someone needs to take to the high roads and high places in even faster vehicles and deal with these speed demon interlopers once and for all.
- Seek & Destroy
Violence For Profit (MIDis-S&D[VFP]): Quite simple. There’s one manifestation to speak of: roam the battlefield and destroy or capture enemy materiel, facilities and personnel, with a bounty for each confirmed victory.
Supply Lines
Burlaki (MIDisSL1B): There are rivers and canals where benighted laborers are paid to haul barges upriver by straps wrapped around their midsections; centipedal trains of hollow-eyed men and women tramping across the land with vast rafts or disabled ships trailing at an offset behind them. They are shepherded by combat riverboats and troupes of cuirassiers and dragoons.
Traditional Ways (MIDisSL2TW): The swampy terrain of this region is very unconducive to transit, but the enemy has found a way. They have subcontracted the job of shipping to their tribal allies, who provide them droves of water buffaloes to move war material (artillery shells, gasoline, food, medicine, pay etc) through the bogs, fens and mangrove swamps. Here’s how a supply run works: 1-30 water buffalo escorted by a core of professional city-state troops (stormtroopers, alpinists, rangers or marines, for example, even lancers, cuirassiers and dragoons mounted on water buffalo), with a force of screening tribal allies moving before the patrol through the treetops or underwater; in any case, concealed and not to engage before the city-state troops do. They are experts at forcing enemies out of cover with brittle snake pots filled with kraits and water moccasins (which they shake like magic eight balls before dropping); they carry these pots in bandoliers like large grenades, or hang them as bolas from their belts.
A High Communion (MIDisSL3AHC): Supply is conducted by the enemy’s force almost exclusively using nine-winged enneaplanes; huge-bodied planes that must either land in water (oftentimes wooden canals are constructed for the purpose of providing an enneaplane landing strip). The contractor wants to secure crash sites for the purposes of seizing their supplies (enneaplanes often make controlled crash-landings due to their wing count), but the enemy keeps fast-attack QRFs on retainer to secure the sites themselves. Thus anyone attempting to safeguard an enneaplane crash site is likely to encounter [ (1) one or more trundling armored cars / (2) dragoons with bolt-action rifles and breastplates / (3) motorbike mortar marines / (4) wild tribal auxiliaries on horseback carrying lances and revolvers].
Shoot down these planes and then fight off oncomers until friendly supply forces can arrive. Roll from the above list to determine who shows up to a response situation.
Kill or Capture
Arms Dealer
Underworld Trade (MIKOCAD1UT): This pale, perceptive man peddles strange, novel, non-replicable weapons (sonic, directed-thermobaric, parasitic); the dealer is a cryptostygian, but this isn’t noted on the contract.
Colonel Mustard (MIKOCAD2CM): This rogue officer and his entourage of deserters engage in mustard gas trafficking; wherever he stays he rigs with this shit, to which he has somehow become immune (he has a shifting lavender polytope tattooed across his tongue).
Things to Come (MIKOCAD3TTC): He is a tinkerer; his bodyguards are equipped with deadly fully-automatic infantry rifles, which (as a supplementary capability) can fire miniaturized armor-piercing rifle grenades prepared by the tinkerer. These rifles will gradually degrade to the point of non-functionality without his personal care and the little rifle grenades cannot be replicated by known material science, but his arsenal will be a blast while it lasts.
Leader
Black Prince (MIKOCAL1BP): The sole heir to an ancient king, Prince Finratha is heartless and highly Leffective. He leads a blood-soaked chevauchee across the land with his vast corps of cavalry: dragoons, lancers, machine pistol cuirassiers, and plunder wagons carrying deployable mortars and anti-tank rifles over the wheels.
Hetairoi (MIKOCAL2H): A heroic general who travels embedded with a [tank company / jaeger company, paratrooper company / demolancer company / fleet of armored river flameboats] who will go wherever he goes and fight fanatically as long as he leads them.
The Man in the High Tower (MIKOCAL3TMITHT): An occultist dictator who can see from every window of his tower-palace at once, is metaphysically the queen of the insects and rivers despite being a man, and is willing to drown his whole land in rain if his generals cannot stop the intruders.
Note: I wanted to call this “Strongmana Politics”
Provocateur
Keres Basilinna (MIKOCAP1KB): A temptress mocks the nation into war. Their cultural sense of honor (quite heartfelt) will not allow them to relent from this path. A gang of knights, who fight as super heavy infantry or tank commanders, have made themselves her servants (along with their squires and yeomen) and taken up her cause. They compete to protect and impress her. The nation fears them and wilts beneath her haughty laugh, witnessed or reported in the papers.
Devil’s Advocate (MIKOCAP2DA): A propagandist who was born in the defending nation in the conflict (ie not from the force you’re acting against) is bitterly tearing apart and dividing the opinion in his homeland at the moment of its greatest peril.
A Warm Welcome (MIKOCAP3AWW): A prophet whose proclamations give the enemy disturbing predictive ability; he has predicted many details of your arrival, for example, and an army company with a beaten ambush zone and artillery on standby will be waiting for you (even if it’s at the airport).
Reavers
Horsemen of the Apocalypse (MIKOCAR1HOTA): The 1st Gas Grenadier Cuirassiers have become a totally uncontrolled military force; they have been allowed to loot the region as payment for their service and are descending into utter depravity and barbarism. They are heavily armed but often drunk. Annihilate these gas demons.
Just Desserts (MIKOCAR2JD): These bandits began as a civil defense force, but have now transitioned to extortion and the taking of comfort women in exchange for their ‘heroism.’ They believe their own bullshit, and many unprincipled young people are flocking to their banner under this justification.
Great Company (MIKOCAR3GC): Disperse or destroy this deserter-turned-mercenary company who have absconded with tanks, fighter-bombers and field guns.
Spies
Grasping a Snake (MIKOCAS1GAS): An urban guerilla force is having a problem with a state assassination squad and need you to take the pressure off, permanently. If you don’t get them all in one fell swoop they’re likely to become very dangerous. Arson, bombs, poisons (incl gas), wild animals, runaway cars, dropped objects, paid-off killers from the local populace (watch your informants and domestics).
Delousing (MIKOCAS2D): The client has a problem with domestic informants: corrupt military and intelligence officers who will use their network to try to get rid of you. The intelligence officers know many of your tactics as an experienced skull-and-dagger man.
Whispering Walls (MIKOCAS3WW): A wiretap squad have placed listening devices all throughout the city, and they are aware of the party’s impending mission. They live inside the walls of various decrepit buildings. Eliminate them but beware their ingenious electroshock traps. They are also perfectly willing and able to collapse a building on the party if given sufficient warning.
Sabotage
Effort
Nautiloid Program (MISE1NP): Enemy deep-sea scientists are near to perfecting a nautiloid capable of long-range undersea travel as they reverse-engineer a xenoabyssal stygobarque that crashed into one of their secret submarine bays. The mysterious, bone-pale crew is wasting away in captivity, deprived of their native foods (thermophile vent lichen and trilobite), but a deadly rescue still may come for these wayward underworlders. That said, while such an attack may coincide with the party’s intrusion (and will the fearsome xenoabyssal alpinist strike team make a distinction between surfacewordlers?), it will not remove the danger of a fully armed and operational nautiloid outstation, a mothership for a submarine fleet and undersea invasion force, a weapon to surpass Mineral Gauge.
Infrastructure
Hermaion (MISI1H): You are to fatally sabotage a volcano power facility. Mustafar-like platforms straddle the lava and chambers built near to it use water to power steam engines that generate power. The flowing water is also used to cool the facility and should it be cut off, the struts and cables that hold up the facility will gradually melt, possibly leading to the facility falling sideways into the lava and gradually sinking. It is crisscrossed by a few metal strips so that this place can be used as a hidden airbase, but AA guns in a crown of thorns around the rim of the volcano will fire on any unexpected flight.
Aphros (MISI2A): You are to knock out fortified locks hidden in a long fjord. They are roofed with concrete and thus cannot be effectively bombarded via naval gunfire. Highly inaccessible except by its fortified entry and exit points; the climb down the loose, jagged rocks from the ridges up above would be very dangerous.
Gammy Knee (MISI3GK): You are to take out an oil pipeline which pokes above the ground only at a mountaintop; otherwise it is totally subsurface in the glacial mountain and secured by a permanent garrison in a series of ice caverns and castles.
Production
A Mutilated Whale-Roarer (MISP1AMWR): Their naval expeditionary forces are supplied with food by a vast whale slaughterhouse; whales are towed onto an island segmented by rocky ridges, where they are butchered and frozen in the caves of the island’s central cavern. The problem is that the closer to the beach one comes, the warmer it gets, and the island butchering staff (who work on shantytown sawmills to cut up the whales) can’t work fast enough to divvy up the whales into their ice caves before the whales begin to bloat with dangerous gas. As such, a certain percentage of the whales will violently explode in an onslaught of superpressurized gas when pierced (this is dangerous, well-paying work) on one of the rickety sawmills, or by bullets. Polar bears periodically migrate to this place like flotillas of little icebergs, and run a berserk rampage of epic feasting before being thrown back into the sea by the island’s security forces (usually at great hazard among the backalleys formed by the whale corpses and their skin-and-bone scaffolding).
Sondergötter (MISP2S): The highly-erratic, unstable and unpredictably-loaded artillery shells of this state are produced by their eccentric tribal allies in a vast, megalithic, palisaded consecration ground. Empty shells are placed into the earth like tubers and gradually filled and loaded with gunpowder, charms, phosphates, amber beads and such. Then they are ritually born between the thighs of women who sit around them while the priests pull them forth, consecrating, baptizing, naming and anointing each shell with lubricant and sealant around the joinery. They are brought to an initiation ground in a dark, terrifying, alligator-filled swamp at the recessed heart of this place (bracketed above by ramps and flying walkways of stone laid as if by the hands of giants), where they are left on their own for several days. Some are swallowed by alligators. Those that remain after several days are fished out by tribesmen from the walkways above and carried to a holy site where a fire that never dies is piled high with tarwood. The artillery shells are ritually painted, appended with their final traditional titles, and finally receive their mark of maturation: the screwing-on of the warhead, after which they are placed on carts of acacia or bamboo and sent on to their next adventure.
Slaughter Tapping (MISP3ST): This is a forest of unusual rubber trees that begin to manifest their useful form early in their life-cycle, so that the trees are more or less a form of stiff, fibrous rubber themselves. Pushing one’s way through this forest is a challenge, but with practice one can leap from tree to tree, letting their momentum bend the tree, jumping off again in a new direction as they bounce back to their initial position. As such, invaders might find themselves exchanging sword blows or gunfire midair as they and their foe leap and/or are flung between the trees. It is necessary to learn to do this, because as soon as somebody does they can outdistance their pursuers in moments. At the center of this forest is a production facility where rubber tires and machine parts are produced; should this facility be bombed, it will scatter huge quantities of rubber in unusual shapes throughout the forest, creating odd springboard platforms, obstacle tunnels and pile-points of rubber to bounce across on the way out.
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