Sweep One - Pinpoint vs Borik

Now that I've put it into context (here and here) I can share with you the following pages from my GM's notes for Continuum.

-5236 - March 20th at 12:00 noon - Central Europe - Geminid - Vadistokli Arkun
Mentor corner in the european lowlands at the foot of the Russian Steppe. midst of the Midwives crisis - all leveller mothers birth twins. Playlist: Fantasy Exciting

About the twins: This is the time of the Midwives Crisis. There’s an entire century where, for unknown reasons, every leveller child born is a twin. Antedessertium is suspected, but we don’t know to what ends. It does lead to starvation and genetic bottlenecking in some areas.

About the hands: A couple times per year they are attacked by “the hand-takers”, fierce nomadic horsemen who kidnap villagers. Their leader, named Borik, removes a hand from each captive, cauterizes and bandages the stump, and then sets them loose near the village. Ervyin doesn’t understand why. Borik appears to be a spanner, as some of the handless ones have witnessed him span.

In the middle of the night, you are awoken by sound of horses and screaming. There are horsemen attacking, carrying torches and axes. Many have mummified hands on leather thongs around thier necks. An apprentice observation roll (can’t be done without skill) notes Borik is Brock.

Izzie will leave it up to the pcs whether or not to fight, but if they do, she will coordinate the attack as an Isolate vs Borik as he rides to the village in the dark.

The PCs chose to fight. Here's prep notes relevant to it:

series of thatched-roof huts on a hillside with palisade around them.

riders on horses assaulting, throwing torches over the walls.

izzy: “Quick, we need to act before we know much about them - and before they can breach the walls. Everybody span level, to the place in the middle of the pallisade maze where we first met the local corner.”

Once there: “You’re choice - our options are we can fight or we can flee.
Brock probably doesn’t know we’re here, or his first action would have been to frag us all. We have the element of surprise, and I can coordinate our efforts. If we plan to battle him, now seems a very strong opportunity.
On the other hand, his being unaware of us gives us a window to escape without his ever knowing we were here.

If we’re going to fight Brock, we need to frag him hard to drive him away. And we need to do it while he still doesn’t know we’re here. A single decisive strike. We want the frag to hit him right about the time we spanned out from.”

Jobs to be fulfilled:

1. Scout the next morning for horse tracks, general direction they came from. ("Pinpoint" tactic based on survival or observation, difficulty is just novice)
2. Gather resources and weapons, possibly assemble booby-traps. Pick an outdoors place from your life, but go there in the level time. Tell no one where you’re going, and return here once you’ve armed yourself and are ready for the fight. (Survival and acumen rolls)
3. Span down to an hour before we arrived - find our host, and ask him for further info on the hand-takers: where they come from, territory covered, time frame they attack during, their rough overall numbers, anything more he can tell us about Brock, find out if they know Dale, etc. Span back here when you’ve pinpointed that data, or if he won’t give you the info without a self-fragging gemini. Don’t reveal our immediate danger - tell him we’re coming back from Atlantis, and wish to solve his dilema before we return to our own time. He was obviously not expecting an attack when we first met him, if we let on what’s happening now, we’ll frag him and ourselves. (Pinpoint via some social skill).
4. “Remember - one span away, one span back, nothing in between. We need to keep us all in the same sweep so if we get fragged we’ll all feel it at once and be able to deal with it as a group.”

Turns out it was a good decision.