Orbital Cold War Sessions on Says Who

Freefalling Orbital Cold War - Session 3

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We shifted to thinking about things in weeks rather than days, at least for this session. We might change things later. Things felt a little loose in the timeline in regards to the time taken for various tasks, which was not bad, but felt a little odd given the premise of technical things. More notes on expected time frame for those tasks might be useful: potentially can work on a few small things instead of one big one?

Quite a few troubles triggered this time, of which the most serious was an escalation of the Cold War, but at least in Unity Base we have not had any actual news. The escalation of this is going to be very interesting. Troubles in general are a nice part of the Freefallers ruleset so far, being something that brings in some chaos and uncertainty.

The technical part of things continues to be good fun: solving a problem by looking at what might be the cause. Solving these things is also the way to gain XP, which gains new skills or focuses the skills into specialities which gives a +1 to a narrow example of the skill’s use.

The way that we continue to solve technical problems fairly handily while things go to hell around us is a fun game loop. I am looking forward to seeing what goes wrong as these things and get worse despite our efforts.

The NPCs are also coming more into focus, which is a nice thing to have happen. Sammy has got names and speciality of all the permanent members of Unity Base (I assume that we might still get visitors from nearby bases) and this is going to be useful to have interactions and partners for specific tasks. Some sort of way to have the NPCs doing stuff in the background (or describing them) might still be worth looking into, especially for some of the science questions, where not many of the PCs are actually engaging with that aspect, being more support and maintenance staff.

Geologising

The Soviet geologists (Teresa Wagner (PC) and Rimantas Stankevičius) headed out to the impact crater with Jan Pettersson (PC), one of the NATO security officers in case they run into NATO troops or similar situations as the last session. The goal will be to drill some samples near the satellite crash site.

Jan gets a call regarding further divorce paperwork that needs to be done. This is all on the record. There is some minor discussion about this being unprofessional, along with Superman chat and geology talk.

At the crash site, can start setting up the drill rig. Some minor design challenges, but not too complicated. Some slow initial tests but there is something wrong with the extraction. Able to overcome this with brute force and get the samples needed.

Wagner gets a call from The Promotion Committee, routed through the base. This does not seem to be good news, the scenarios are suggesting someone else is the lead in each case: they seem to have already made up their minds that some else is getting the promotion. Jan does some prying, but Wagner is (obviously) not happy about being passed over for people she considers less competent than she would be. Appreciates Jan’s sympathising.

CO2 Scrubbers

Jean-Jacques intends to take a look at the CO2 scrubbing filter that caught fire from last time. The intent is to see if this is a systemic issue or just a freak accident. Chemical analysis of the stuff that seems to have caught fire shows trace amounts of a lithium compound - this probably comes from the LiOH that is part of the scrubber.

This LiOH might be coming from the intake filter or something. The filter will need to be taken apart to check if things can be installed incorrectly or otherwise. During this, Jean-Jacques starts to feel light-headed and insecure about all the screws being removed and so on. There is clearly something wrong here - Desjardin has a dissociative episode or something (this is his “Other Side” Trouble) while Agramonte helps with the disassembly. Agramonte does not mention it though.

Investigation shows that the fitting over the intake could ablate away, dropping fragments into the filter. Alternatively ablative elements in the air (such as dust and such) could do the same. Both could lead to lithium being passed through, creating a potential fire risk. Jean-Jacques writes up his findings and bounces it over to the maintenance engineers to decide whether to add complexity and ineffiecency by having additional prefilters or whether to have a higher maintenance burden by clearing out any gathered lithium and cleaning the separator more often - this is outside his wheelhouse.

MOBEV Repairs

Agramonte and Sanchez are repairing the MOBEV (MOBile ExcaVator) arm, which is in pieces: the last person failed to fix it. The head tried to eat some people - it needs repairs. Some of the joints in the arm are seized and not working correctly. Sanchez forces it a bit, but seems like something is inhibiting movement at specific points.

The bearing in the arm has been ground up by an off-balance load or something. Will need to be disassembled and put back together correctly or a new one will need to be machined. Sanchez decides to machine a new one, with a slightly thicker design that should work better.

Agramonte taking the head apart finds that a bunch of the pins have been damaged. They can be replaced with no major hassles.

The arm is repaired. Sanchez does not mention that the design has been changed with his newly machined part (because it is potentially patentable). Agramonte does some additional work to determine how the pins failed. Looks like it was operator error, trying to force the head into material that was too hard to handle.

Drama on the Base

Over lunch, suddenly everyone stops talking while Desjardin, Agramonte and Sanchez are writing up reports. Unnatural silence in the cafeteria, almost like mourning. The news broadcast is off, just a test card. East Germany, West Germany and the Soviets have had some “kinetic action”, but no one is saying any details. SOP is that groups do not engage in partisan politics, outside of keeping up with the news, but Reinhold Fritz, a West German physicist is clearly in a bad mental state because his family is in West Berlin. Chemerkin, one of the Soviet comms specialists is the one who broke the news, which is still unofficial.

Fritz still owes some theoretical physics to Desjardin, who uses it as a distraction, while making an offer to listen to anything that Fritz may want to say. Not overly helpful, and is not really willing to open up to Desjardin, despite the offer being there.

Chemerkin says that he got the news today, but that the event happened three days ago, but no one is saying anything useful. His sources at the various Soviet bases are equally in the dark about it all. The Americans on the base also seemed not to know anything. Both sides seem to be hiding something from the folks on the moon, which is maybe a good sign?

Freefalling Orbital Cold War - Session 2

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fairly straightforward session. The troubles that keep building triggered a few times: We needed to deal with an intensification of the Cold War (the USAF and some Soviet soldiers arguing over a weapon test in no-man’s land between bases), we had an issue with one of the vehicles, and a personal Trouble. This all worked quite nicely, and having the players make the choice of which one of a few gives control over pacing, or lets more appropriate things happen.

Looking forward to how these escalate.

This is something that I am quite liking about Freefallers so far, but it will be interesting to see how this translates to other settings: for this campaign, all troubles increment once per day. For a longer campaign, or one with a longer cycle (actions over weeks) this would obviously need to be changed. I am looking forward to Sammy’s advice for this, since I think that it will be quite important for how the game is meant to run.

The other big question that comes to mind is how someone who is not Sammy would run the technical challenges. These are where the campaign is shining for me, so far. While there are a couple of posts on running technical SF things, one needs to have enough of a handle for what sort of things can go wrong, so how Sammy is able to download their brain’s contents into another referee’s brain instead is going to be interesting to see.

Session Notes

Satellite is early end of life, needs to be picked up and find some interesting rocks.
Agramonte checks out for snakes in science 4.
- Seems to be from multiple places
- Uses some light paper to see where things are pushed by are currents.
- Finds a pair of leaks (boo! boo!) due to micrometeorite passing through opposite walls.
- Computer in here also has a problem of some kind, will need repair.

The Satellite Expedition

Supposed to be some military exercises in the area, so we need to be careful
Route is between Soviet and USAF bases
Cold War trouble triggers! dramatic sting
Big plume of regolith shooting up just over horizon as we exit the crater.
Is in the direction we are travelling or will want to travel.
Plume has some debris in it - rover or spacecraft?
Getting closer: seems to be a MOLAB
- Missing fuel-cell trailer
- Walls curled inward - hit by something
- Near to us is a USAF astronaut and a cosmonaut - both armed, but shouting at each other (over radio)
- If anyone else is looking, we can not see them
  - Jean-Jacques can see some additional glints and things to the east, heavy equipment to the west
- Exploded MOLAB seems to be a dummy - target practice
- Argument is between Majór Peshkov (Soviet) and Maj. Anderson (USAF)
- Managed to broker a compromise that the USAF will be clearer about the area being used for testing to avoid danger to bystanders
Came across some solar panels on the way, but left them in place
At crater, is a large chunk of propulsion system and hopefully central computer
- Might still have some propellant - not sure if compressed air or hypergolic
- Computer is main goal, but would be good to have everything else as well
- Sanchez is able to remove hydrazine fuel system without getting into trouble
  - Not much left, so mostly safe
  - Able to get the computer free
One way back, something breaks: smoke in the cabin
- An extasy of fumbling, getting suits on
- Agramonte starts pulling open the life support
  - Finds some embers in a filter - smouldering for unknown reason
  - Smothers the flames, letting Sanchez and Jean-Jacques take a look
    - Seems to be covered with a combustible substance of some kind, eventually ignited
      - Might have been some explosive residue from the USAF test?
      - Could also lithium hydroxide in the fitler, lithium separated out and ignited
        
        Might need some additional checking - good to know for the future

Freefalling Orbital Cold War - Session 1

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recently Sammy, of Scattered Amusement Machine/TrashedTabletop fame, has been running an Orbital Cold War campaign, using an early but complete enough version of Freefallers. I missed the first session, but joined the second one. My PC is Jean-Jacques Desjardins, a ~~Canadian~~Quebecois mission specialist at Unity Base. Chargen was pretty painless: assign some attributes, assign some skills based on the role (mission specialist, security officer, lunar scientist, that sort of thing), choose a trouble and a couple of things like that. No hassles here if you are comfortable with RPGs in general.

Mission Day’s Recap:

At the morning briefing a few things are highlighted as needing attention. The PCs all choose something to work on, and Jean-Jacques finds himself paired up with Alejandro Sanchez to follow-up on anomalous temperature spikes in the SNAP: Unity Base’s nuclear reactor. A couple of folks worked on it yesterday, but the installation of sunshields for some of the components has not fixed the issue, so we need to take a closer look. On inspecting it, we find that there are three points that need a look, all on different cooling loops. The conclusion is that we need to take the reactor down for a shift to inspect those loops and see if there is something wrong with those. That might affect some of the science programmes, so we do a less invasive fix for now and then go to inform the science leads that we might need to reduce power for a few hours.

Jean-Jacques talks to Reinhold Fritz, one of the western scientists. He has no issue, but asks a bunch of questions about it, since he has done some theoretical work on these reactors. Jean-Jacques provides the answers: from past experience, Fritz will come back with something nuts that has an even chance of being completely unhinged and useless or being some brilliant left-field solution. We can live with that, so we will see what he comes up with.
Sanchez goes to talk to Bryan Floyd, the US science lead. The shutdown is going to throw his schedule out for the week, but he will work around it, so good enough.
Both of us meet up to talk to the other Soviet science lead, who is also 2IC for Unity Base: Anastasia Volkova She keeps irregular hours, but is sleeping on her desk, with a Soviet computer doing some long-running process. We supply her a battery and go deal with the cooling loops.

One of the anomalies seems to be due to excess insolation, so we extend the sunshields to include that. The other two loops have some sort of sediment in them, which is weird: the system should be closed. We bag a sample for analysis and then lower the operating temperature slightly, reducing the power output by a small amount. This is not enough to be a problem, but we should probably get to the bottom of this.

With that, our workshift is over, and Jean-Jacques goes to sit in silence for a bit in one of the storerooms. While doing that and getting his daily does of existential angst about how little is between him and a messy death, Anastasia Volkova comes in without noticing him. She appears to be looking for something, but is surprised when investigating one of the storage boxes. She leaves quickly. Jean-Jacques pokes his nose in and sees a box of explosive bolts that have been tampered with. All explosives are not verboten in the residential parts of Unity Base, so there is something seriously wrong here.

Thinking quickly he decides that there are three cases:

This is a Soviet plot that she knows about
This is a Soviet plot that she does not know about
This is a US/NATO plot

In case 1, she would not be surprised, so it is probably not that. In case 3, things are bad, but she will probably want to find out what is going on. In case 2, things are really bad, so she will definitely want to find out what is happening.

Jean-Jacques decides that she can be trusted, since this is a threat to everyone, potentially. Leaving the room he bumps into her standing in the corridor in thought almost immediately and confesses that he saw her and saw the explosives. Running her through the reasoning above, she asks him to keep an eye on the room while she goes and does an inventory of the explosive storage: if they are missing then that should show up, but there is probably space there for safe storage at least. She comes back shortly after and removes the explosive bolts. They agree that the base commander (an American) will need to be told, but otherwise Jean-Jacques agrees to keep the news secret for now.

Thus endeth Jean-Jacques Desjardins’ day.

The other PCs did their own things: vacc suit maintenance, drill rig set-up, negotiation re: allowable input devices for the Tetris tournament, sleeping off a strained shoulder, making a Cuban sandwich with smuggled pork, possibly plotting to blow up the base at the behest of the US Air Force, the usual.

Thoughts and Notes:

The core procedural loop of this focused on the technical problems is quite strong:

A morning meeting where the current problems are outlined and the PCs can choose what they will work on
Each pair of PCs goes off to handle their thing (this is mostly a time limitation, more than anything else)
Leisure period which is a little more freeform and will probably lead to interpersonal drama and advancing background problems.

(This fairly rigid structure seems pretty solid for potential play-by-post games, taking a shift per day or something, incidentally.)

The technical problems are multi-step and potentially complex. Other PCs put together a diamond drill rig (which had a very poor set of instructions) and did some maintenance on the space suits (which are in two sets, Soviet and NASA/ESA, and only limited non-interchangeable spares are available). The drill rig is now ready, but it took a shift to assemble it all and the testing still needs to be done to ensure no mistakes were made. The suits have some issues, but none of them are critical (yet), so that maintenance is also mostly done, especially if a solution for the Soviet gloves and the strange wear patterns on the NASA/ESA suits can be found. The temperature of the SNAP reactor is hopefully under control for now, but we need to figure out what the cause of the sedimentation is. We also have other issues that were not handled today: Science 4 has a strange hissing noise¹, the mobile excavator’s arm is malfunctioning, some solar panels need replacement, there is a satellite that crashed nearby that needs investigation.

The interesting part of this comes from the fact that there is always something that will need doing, and not all of it is immediately urgent, but it might become so, and in the context of a lunar base something becoming immediately urgent is probably a really bad thing: if the temperature anomalies in the SNAP reactor are not resolved, then who knows what the result will be? if the space suits become unusable, then we can not do any outside work. If the hissing in Science 4 is not addressed will we all be eaten by snakes? On top of this, there are science objectives from mission control, and this particular campaign has the added potential pressure of that fuss in Kuwait (or somewhere else) starting something between the USSR and the USA and her allies.

Even after just a couple of sessions, the campaign is a great example of how tension builds up. This is helped by a few “trouble tracks” that are increasing:

The Cold War will throw politics into the joint base
Something will break
Various personal problems will rear up

None of these have triggered yet, but they will, and the nice routine of mission>downtime>sleep>repeat might break down somewhat then. The PCs all have various other things going on as well: Jean-Jacques has those explosives, Jan Petersson is conniving with the nearby US Air Force base, Ernesto Rodriguez (the flight surgeon) has seen some shit and it is getting to him….

Fixing problems is not something easy, it is the meat of the game. Each of the problems have multiple steps and multiple approaches. As Sammy’s blogpost says, problems are not always going to be solvable completley. In this session, the vaccsuit maintenance was a great example: there are spares for most of these parts, but if they are already worn, how long will the spares last? Might it be better to jury-rig a repair for now, and hope that they do not fail catastrophically soon in order to stretch those spares out for longer? The decision today was to replace the gloves of one of the Soviet suits and attempt a repair on the other two. For the US suits they are being left for now, and the problem bounced back to the boffins on Earth to see if there is a reason why they are showing weird wear patterns before replacements are put on that show the same weird thing and more parts are ruined. Are these the correct choices? We hope so, but have no real way to know for sure.

Likewise, the SNAP is now giving a little less power, but should be running at more nominal temperatures for the time being. We for sure want to get to the bottom of the issue, but for now we might be able to focus on the snake infestation in Science 4 instead, since the reactor is not critical (well, it is, because it is a working nuclear reactor, but the point stands). So is the best use of someone’s time to analyse the sediments from the coolant loops, or to get a grabby claw and deal with the snakes? I guess we will find out that we got it wrong when one of the two problems explodes (either into nuclear fire or a ball of, presumably flash-frozen, snakes). One consideration is what NPCs are doing. In theory, some problems should be solved, or partially solved, by the NPCs doing similar things to the PCs. So maybe one of them will do the sediment analysis? We should be so lucky….

A quick note: problem-solving like this requires a referee to have a solid idea of what might be done and what leads to what: other players, with the same problem with the reactor as myself and Sanchez’s player set up sunshields, which only helped partially to control the temperature. Much like any investigation, there needs to be enough to dig into by the players. We happened to notice that the positions of the over-heating components were on three of the four coolant loops, so comparing the four loops to see if the one behaving was different seemed like a decent step. If we had not noticed that, then perhaps we would have noticed that the sunshields were not optimally placed and that insolation was still getting to the components, or that the coolant pressure was lower than it should be, or a number of other things.

This investigation and constraint is the crux of a “technical SF” campaign: there is never enough time (or all of the resources) to handle everything, so you handle what you can, and hope that you made the right calls when you made them.

Jean-Jacques’ current theory, which has not been disproved, is that someone has smuggled in a bunch of snakes. ↩︎