A Jaunt Into the Darker Side (Adventure Summary)

I haven't GMed in almost a decade. I was able to get a group of players to try out Savage Worlds due to some time off from a normally running D&D campaign (mix of 1st and 2nd Edition). I put together the basics of the mission in a few days and mostly winged it when it came to the combat stats. Character creation only took about an hour (players were unfamiliar with the system, so building characters took a little longer plus I gave them advancements after creation so they weren't just basic novices).

Late afternoon had come when the squad was called into the mission briefing room on the base. Their assignment, capture and detain a known hostile individual and assess what, if anything, was happening in the building in which he was known to be operating out of. Personnel were short and equipment even shorter, so the squad was going to have to accomplish what they could on their own with limited equipment (a rifle each, some armor and a single heavy weapon). The squad returned to their quarters, grabbed their gear and headed off to the flight line to catch their ride in country. The Blackhawk took off shortly before sunset and headed into the mountains of Afghanistan for a remote area. It was a long and bumpy ride in the dark of night. The team was dropped off several miles away from the site and began hiking across the desert scrub. They arrived in the early morning hours to find the site was lit up with floodlights and occasional patrols coming out to check the perimeter. The squad leader had the group camp out for the day to try and hit the place at night when it should be the quietest. The sniper kept overwatch for most of the day and monitored the goings on at the base. Patrols came out at random to check around and occasional vehicles came and went. That night the base was left unlit. The squad snuck down to the warehouse, but saw something odd when they rested momentarily beside the road. A vehicle, an old light pickup truck, came barreling down the road, then slammed on its brakes just before it passed the entrance into the warehouse. A large black object came loose from the rear bed and landed in the scrub. The team examined it and discovered that it was a corpse; Intact other than the bullets that had killed the individual. Guards from the base came out and it soon became clear that they were searching for the missing body. They left it behind as it was, hoping that the guards would mistake the tears in the bag as an animal getting hungry. The guards dragged the corpse back to the warehouse and disappeared inside. The team took that opportunity and snuck around the warehouse to the far side. From there they were able to eventually find an opening into the place and begin scouting it out. It didn’t take them long before they encountered a guard on patrol. That’s when the whole plan started to unravel. They were forced to kill the guard through the glass of a door (guns just aren’t quiet), but that didn’t seem to alert others, this time. Two more guards sat in a room that guarded more doors to other parts of the building. They were quickly dispensed with. Then the team moved on. They found an old cube farm office area that had several people in it near the far door. Somehow they had failed to hear the muffled gunfire in the previous hall and room. They were quickly dropped, but then it was discovered that two of them weren’t armed and they had been expressly told to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. That was a problem, but, what could they do now? They started to move on, but were caught by a group responding the sudden sound of fully automatic gunfire from the room. They went to move out after slamming the door shut, but the hall was empty of the guards. Instead, they were now exposed to guards out on catwalks over the warehouse floor. They had to shoot through the glass, but that was a small price to pay to try and kill the people attacking their warehouse. It didn’t take long for the team to take out most of the guards and move down to the floor of the warehouse. That’s where things got really weird. They were able to push out onto the floor. One of the squad headed off to separate from the party (should the enemy have grenades and choose to use them). He encountered a new group of guards coming around a shipping container. They attacked him with their bare hands and tried to claw him with their fingernails. Something about them was off and before he could figure out exactly what he just freaked and ran. Before he could get across the width of the floor he was able to recover from the fear. He gunned down the new guards, but was then shot by a different group and went berserk. The rest of the squad slowly was whittling down the guards. The sniper opened fire from above with his 50 caliber rifle, nearly deafening himself with the loud noise enclosed in the small space. The fight was going against the team as the guards that tried to maul the teammate with their hands just kept getting back up after getting dropped by gunfire. They tied up resources and distracted the team from other threats. But some good teamwork and tactics resulted in all the opponents and their reinforcements being taken out and the target being captured. All-in-all the team did a good job and suffered only light casualties (only one player had wounds after the end of the “golden hour”).