Con-031 Mortimer's Cross 1

Background introduction:

This was the 31st game/operation from The Fight School Contact!, and my second time at the site. The first being a bootcamp where Dean ran all the players through a basic training schedule so that we would not muzzle sweep people, how to set up an all round defence, and basic patrolling and response to enemy contact drills.

We play out of a former secret nuclear bunker, which was built in the middle of farmland that has extensive woodland areas. Most of or games are therefore set in a woodland setting, with various degrees of undergrowth according to the time of year and how much use from a paintball site has trampled said undergrowth.

At this point in the game's campaign the structure of the chain-of-command was still evolving. Originally, the game had been less military and more corporation orientated, but the outcome of this was that the games had become very paranoid, and missions described as being a bit like the lawless wild West. In short the plot wasn't really advancing.

As a result there was a complicated chain-of-command that was conditional on the enemies response to us. I would be in command if they were friendly, but if a firefight broke out then the military characters would take over. I was playing a civilian character by the name of Dr. Ash, with a nominal non-line rank of Captain.

CON-031- MC1

Mission:

Our task was for United Nation Stargate Gate Command (UNSGC) team to make recon patrol of the planet. This was a morning mission and we started at 10.14 hundred hours, with our return scheduled for 11.01 hundred hours.

Orders:

Do not to initiate hostile actions, and see if we can make a friendly contact.

AAR:

The scenario involved going through the Contact! version of a stargate to a planet that that had been imaginatively titled P298, which meant it had been the the 298th planet discovered by the Contact! stargate program.

We did a recon patrol of the woods, which basically took us around in a large circle to see what we could find, or meet. As we were coming back to the stargate entry point we met a Non-Player Character (NPC), and after some faffing over who should be in command (was it a firefight scenario?), I ended up taking control of the situation. The military characters in our game were just itching for a fight and a bit twitchy around the NPC.

The NPC was played by one of the plot team minions, and he was pretty good at presenting a very panicked individual, being the sole survivor of another team that were hostile to his side. He described the hostiles as "Them", but saw us as part of the problem, not the solution, because as far as he was concerned we were just as bad as we were killing his people too. Not only that we would take them back to Earth, never to be seen again.

Anyway, "Them" were hostiles who were worse than us, because they appeared to be unstoppable killing machines. I decided that it would be useful to let him go, as it might serve as the basis for building up mutual trust with our offworld opponents.

Summary:

Our offworld opponents, code name Type One's (T1) were now embroiled with another hostile offworld faction who were clearly a dangerous force to be reckoned with.