DAY 4 – APRIL 21st 2000
PRASZKA, POLAND – NIGHT
The group doesn’t cross the roadblock/checkpoint, but it’s instead ordered to follow one of the town’s soldiers who lead them along the small river about a hundred meters east of the roadblock. He is a tall, thin man in his fifties with a thick grey and brown beard. ALEX lingers just for a few seconds, enough to hear the young man talking into the portable radio.
“Tell CJA they have agreed”
The group is instructed to keep their hands up and form a single file, with one soldier leading them and two more behind them. They reach a pedestrian bridge with its central part missing. A female soldier from the other side brings a couple of wooden planks and sets them so they span the missing section and they all cross the river. The planks are then quickly removed. They proceed east skirting the main still inhabited section of town, and then through some industrial courtyard, South for about half a kilometer along one of the roads and finally a few hundred meters West.
The northern part of the town is relatively intact, no major collapses or craters can be seen. All window glasses have been smashed and concrete and asphalt are cracked and littered with holes (a common sight in war-ravaged Poland). Nature is reclaiming whatever it can with patches of grass and small plants sprouting from odd places. All cars appear to have been stripped down for any salvageable part and their carcasses have been carefully piled to create barricades or defensive positions, to block some paths or slow down upcoming vehicles in others. They can still hear the occasional shot being fired somewhere West.
They manage to see some barricades on the intersecting roads: they are made of bricks, rubble, trucks, planks, metal sheets and a variety of other materials. Some span building to building blocking the entirety of the road, others form narrow passages guarded by sentinels. At times their guide has to stop and trade passwords with a patrol before being authorized to proceed. In one occasion a town soldier approaches the odd column, “prisoners?” he asks. “Nah, guests” replies the guide stroking his beard.
Their destination in in the southern – and most damaged – part of the town. It’s a garage area, made of rows and rows of single-story rectangular buildings each divided into a number of garage units. Some portions have collapsed and all the units have been opened with some even missing their doors. The paved passages are partially covered in rubbles and grass, with some broken down car here and there to complete the picture. In the fading light their guide smiles revealing two rows of perfectly white teeth.
“Your hotel for the night” he says in English, “choose any room you want”.
He then proceeds to leave with the other soldiers before stopping and turning “don’t leave the area, we will keep an eye on you” he says gesturing at a five-story blocky building 100 meters North.
“Also, the woods to the South are mined, so don’t go for a walk in the trees, okay?”
WITH the EYES of the REFEREE [click to expand]
The woods aren’t actually mined, so we have a opposite PERSUASION roll. The guide [EMP C and PERSUASION D] rolls with +1 for having his guest tour what appears to be a well defended town. He’s speaking English, so LED – having the highest combination of EMP and PERSUASION – rolls against him:
- The guide rolls [D8+D8] = 0 SUCCESSES
No need to roll for LED, he knows the guide is bluffing (and he’s bad at it).
LED nods, knowing there’s no mine whatsoever in the woods.
“In the morning we’ll come find you” concludes the guide before departing with his fellow townsmen.
Once they are alone, ALEX turns to his comrades “so, what’s everybody thinking?”
“This is a bad place for spending the night” says DONNA looking around.
“This is a good place to ambush us” says NASCAR.
“You know” says LED “when you gestured at me back at the roadblock, I thought you meant they weren’t letting us in and that we needed to try at the next town over”
PREPARATIONS
It takes about thirty minutes of scouting and exploring to realize that ‘Garage Hotel’ has no other guests. Also, every single unit has had its door pried open – or removed altogether – and everything has been picked clean, including the rusty husks of cars that litter the place. Across the road towards the town are a few single-family houses, in the direction of the river the terrain is mostly open with a partially destroyed fence delimiting the area and a dirt tray coming from the main road that follows the river. On the opposite side is a wooden area which would be a good way to leave the area unnoticed, something to keep in mind. Finally, opposite the town is an industrial area of some kind with a single hangar-like building that’s looming over the garage area. The group can see broken windows and holes in the walls, but nothing more in the dim light. There’s a fence separating the industrial area, but there’s several holes large enough for someone to pass through with ease.
At this point, the group is expecting some surprise visit during the night and decides to prepare accordingly: they set a fire in a garage that is occupied by a rusted broken-down car, which they push out of the garage and in front of it so to create the impression that someone has barricaded himself into the unit.
WITH the EYES of the REFEREE [click to expand]
LED rolls for SURVIVAL to get a fire going and gets 1 success.
Nobody is sleeping. NASCAR and ALEX have already slept a shift for the day, while LED and DONNA will be sleep deprived in the morning.
The group splits as shown in the map below:
- NASCAR covers the decoy campfire
- ALEX (who has gotten his hunting rifle back) is in a nearby unit with a hole in its back wall, so he can move from his unit to the opposite one on the block
- DONNA and LED are on the same row of units, at opposite corners of the intersection
Final preparations include:
- NASCAR’s grenades are distributed so that each player has 1 and LED has 2
- NASCAR and DONNA leave their backpacks in the unoccupied unit at the intersection
WITH the EYES of the REFEREE [click to expand]
I prepared a map for Garage Hotel, based on a real location in Praszka, Poland. You can see how the players are setting up, and their field of view (last image): as long as no strangers are in sight, I assume the players will stay at the edge of their unit peeking out.
FINAL COMMENTS
The players are in, well, not really…
They made it to the opposite edge of town; they have been instructed to wait and almost tricked into thinking there where mines on their best way out.
By now, they know there’s something else going on…