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.
The Action
This session was about rules of conduct in regards to Gazan civilians. There were a couple of key scenes which re-enforced that: Sgt. Baruch interrogating a traumatized head of a family who had laid his wife and children, shot by IDF, on the bed of his apartment. The new guy and Lewandowski chasing two Gazan girls who had fleed the group and bringing them back to be interrogated. Sgt. Baruch hitting the new guy in the face and nearly killing him with his bare hands in rage (and frustration?) when he found out the new guy hit one of the girls with his rifle and was ready to do more to get them to talk (this was after Baruch had roughed up the widower to make him talk).
After these powerful scenes the action concluded with the group checking out the entrance to the tunnels and being ambushed by a couple of Hamas gunmen guarding it. Sgt. Baruch was wounded by a mine in the entrance and Cpl. Spielberg couldn't keep his calm but ordered the group to retreat towards the entrance in the cellars. Lewandowski got all of the Hamas gunmen, but only after Spielberg's Guilt had led to Raanan getting a deadly bullet to his chest.
The Aftermath
Special forces entered the area shortly after and the player's group was relieved. They were transported back to the barracks (an to the hospital and cemetery respectively).
Afterwards, they found out that Epstein had broken into the office of an Israeli general the night before and had tried to kill him and then failed to kill himself. He was now facing court martial and potentially very grave consequences. Baruch went to see him but as they didn't see eye to eye and Epstein was bordering on madness Matti saw no reason for Baruch to try to help Epstein. We also talked about if Baruch would be court-martialed but decided that as Spielberg wouldn't blame him for all the mishaps during the mission, he would walk.
We envisioned that the player characters would not face very much success during the rest of their military careers, though. Baruch would be sent to teach IDF 'exchange' soldiers, Spielberg would be sent to take care of an inventory in some far-away garrison and Lewandowski would enjoy a new career as a transport truck driver.
Conclusions
Another solid session of Shell Shock. The conflict and trauma mechanics worked in our favor in this session too. I had prepared two major hooks for this session, the new guy and the fate of Epstein. The new guy was thought to put some flavor to the mission itself and I thought that if the players would want some after-mission stuff the Epstein situation would be a good place to start.
The new guy hook worked well as in particular Matti got irritated about the character's sick attitude and constant maneuvering to turn the PC's group into a bunch of mindless ruffians. Lewandowski got into the action a bit as well, even though this hook too played better towards the officers.
This leads me to our most prevalent complaint about our game. Shell Shock seemed to provide conflict between the sergeant and xcorporal straight on, but the player of private seemed to have much less spotlight. This is something we think we could have planned for, but is still in our mind very much a feature of Shell Shock, so maybe players should be advised to take that into consideration when planning games and sessions.
As for the my planned Epstein hook not providing so much action in game I think it was all right for this session as we had already played a long while before I was able to introduce the situation. If the players would have been less interested in the mission part of the session we could have played with the Epstein case a bit more. It was good to be prepared for that.
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