Now for something that has been long overdue: The Actual Play report of the last session of our Shell Shock in Gaza game.

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but other stuff have been climbing over it in my priority hierarchy (mainly getting back to my dissertation work and creating my Little Game Chef game To Elysion). And as the session was the final one in our game, I didn't have a forced deadline of writing it before the next session. My apologies, here it comes at last.

A Palestinian man looks out towards destroyed Hamas government buildings following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2008. Photo by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi (CC-licensed, attribution, share alike)

Preparation

We had decided that we'd play one more session as we had had some fun. The players' preferences for the session were to do something a bit different this time as well as to deepen the inter-personal issues in the squad. We also talked about how this session would mark the end of the campaign for the player characters.

The Situation

We agreed that the characters would have been on a leave for about a fortnight before being called back to action. In the meantime, Lewandowski's niece had been hurt badly in the missile strikes. I introduced this to tie Lewandowski more strongly to the Israeli cause. The player characters' group had been briefed for their mission which was to find an entrance to the Hamas' tunnels west of Gaza city. They were to interrogate  Gazan civilians and anyone not co-operating were to be treated as a Hamas collaborator.

I also set up so that one NPC of the PC's group, Epstein, would not return from the leave. Sergeant baruch was told only that he had hurt himself during the leave. He was replaced by another soldier. The new guy made some noise about killing and terrorizing Gazans in the transport to the area, irritating Spielberg and Baruch and drawing interest from private Humboldt.