in the second half of the twentieth century, while the great powers

compete for military supremacy on the world stage, a team of misfit

mercenaries has begun to chart the edges of seven sprawling
conspiracies. as the mercenaries' awareness of the capabilities of
these organizations grows, so too do the stakes for their missions.

and when a chance raid on a CYCLOPS server facility unearths a trove

of buried intel, FIST will gain access to…

REACH
Recon Encounter Archives of Complex Hostiles

a supplement pack (by richard kelly) for FIST (by b. everett dutton)

sourcebook for FIST located at [Link]

Writing, Design, Layout, Editing, Publishing - richard kelly

Additional Design - b. everett dutton

Artwork - "Military armor vest", "Arethusa military boat", "NASA

exploration Rover vehicle vector clip art", "NASA Mars orbiter vector
image", "Alyssum", "Dragon Beast Silhouette By InspiredImages", "Beast
man", "Odd devil", "Vintage mythical monster", "Vintage mythical
monster illustration", "Sheep meat parts vector drawing", "Internal
intestines", "Astronomy drawing" all public domain by OpenClipart on
[Link]

Based On - FIST by b. everett dutton

FIST is CC BY 3.0 US b. everett dutton

REACH is CC BY 3.0 US richard kelly, and produced with permission by

b. everett dutton

CW
Blood, cannibalism, violence, parasitism, and the occult, all in a pulp
thriller context.

1
 Table Of Contents

Internal CYCLOPS Statement Regarding The Trondheim Server

Incident 3
Faction: The Twelve Holy Splinters Of Ascalon 4
Assets: 5
Operations: 5
Faction: The Ministry Of The Interior 6
Assets: 7
Operations: 7
Faction: Sangre-La 8
Assets: 9
Operations: 9
Faction: Working Group 31 10
Assets: 11
Operations: 11
Faction: Horizon Shale Consolidated 12
Assets: 14
Operations: 14
Faction: Mano Di 15
Assets: 16
Operations: 16
Faction: K.A.S.A. Pharmaceuticals And Biomedical Advancement 18
Assets: 19
Operations: 19

2
 Internal CYCLOPS Statement
Regarding The Trondheim Server
Incident
While the circumstances of the November attack are still being
investigated, the following information concerning the Trondheim
server incident is considered to be current and reliable.

● FIST did not have prior knowledge of our operations in the region.

● Their intrusion into the depths of the parking garage was

precipitated by a chase with a metabiologcal, designate:
VARKOLAK.

● Their looting of the archives and subsequent escape with

restricted information was enthusiastic, but superficial.

● Forty two minutes and sixteen seconds following the raid,

protocol COBALT SERAPH was invoked and the site was sterilized.
Its burning remains are not believed to be an active exposure
risk, and all involved personnel have received their terminal
debrief.

While our analysts cannot promise that there will be no repercussions

from this breach, the material that FIST made off with does not appear
to be a threat to our supremacy.

It is therefore our recommendation, corroborated by the findings of

POLYPHEMUS, that we use this event as a wake-up call to take a stronger
role in steering's FIST's behavior.

Since they are still in the dark about most of the truths of this world,
they should make for a dependable catspaw.

With that in mind, compiled here is an overview of the forces that FIST
may have learned about from the Trondheim breach, cross-referenced with
their assets and operational histories.

Our hope is that this document becomes the beginning of a conversation,

and that its contents are used to guide near-future policy.

3
 Faction: The Twelve Holy Splinters
Of Ascalon
Named for the occult artifact incorrectly associated with the
historical Saint George of Cappadocia, Ascalon is a modern mercenary
company with a history of operations in northern Europe, central
Africa, and Mongolia.

Despite their name, any mythology they might surround themselves with
is a fabrication. There are no legends pointing to twelve specific
splinters from Saint George's lance, and the Holy Splinters' apparent
goals and history of operations are only distantly connected to
Christian theology.

That connection is, of course, through dragons.

Specifically, Ascalon kills them.

The seven Forgotten Dragons that dwell within humanity's collective

subconscious are fully beyond Ascalon's reach, but their young are not.
A two-or-three-decades-hibernated cub can reach sizes approaching a
main battle tank, and a proper adolescent dragon is only a little
smaller than a commercial airliner. Add to this the dragon young's
maneuverability, durability, and steel-liquifying breath, and Ascalon
faces the potential of severe casualties in every engagement.

Which is why they don't leave room for error.

When an Ascalon operation successfully excavates and kills a dragon,

they swarm like ants over the corpse, slowly taking it apart with
angle-grinders and carbide hacksaws. Each piece sells for a small
fortune to private bidders and military-occult manufacturers, and
Ascalon in turn pumps that money back into R&D, producing man-portable
futuretech weaponry at a pace that would make a Pentagon budget
committee blush.

Their hallmark devices are exosuits, so-called "Mobile Armor", but they
flirt with nuclear and electromagnetic advancements as well. This
sometimes makes them tempting targets for poachers, so before beginning
a dragon hunt their common practice is to kill every living being in
the vicinity.

Currently, Ascalon seems to have no real objective or scope beyond the

systematic butchering of dragons, but this makes them a prime candidate
for ongoing observation. After all, if they run out of corporeal
dragons, they may decide to go after one of the Forgotten---and
POLYPHEMUS has some troubling projections as to how that might turn
out.

4
Assets:

ASCALON FOOTSOLDIER (3 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1d6 DAMAGE)

ASCALON AUTONOMOUS DRONE (3 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, FLYING)

EXOSUIT HALBERDIER (8 HP, 3 ARMOR, 1d6+2 DAMAGE, CAN BARGE THROUGH

WALLS)

AMPHIBIOUS ARMOR GERONTIUS (24 HP, 5 ARMOR, 2D6 DAMAGE, CAN WALK
THROUGH HOUSES)

MOBILE WEAPONS PLATFORM POLIKRONYA (35 HP, 4 ARMOR, 1D6+6 DAMAGE,

SPAWNS DRONES, BUILT-IN ELECTRONIC WARFARE SUITE)

Operations:

● An archaeological dig in Icaria, Greece, goes dark. Hellenic Navy

vessels are spotted in the waters off the island, performing
"maneuvers" while bright flashes and indescribable sounds
punctuate the night. A wounded civilian manages to make it out of
cellphone-jamming range and places a call for help, but the call
is dismissed as a hoax after they start babbling about knights
and dragons.

● A cargo ship in the Strait Of Malacca has been taken over by

pirates using rail-rifles and other technology well outside of
their usual purchasing power. Unfortunately, the cargo ship is
carrying material of strategic importance to the Royal Australian
Navy, who show up to intervene at roughly the same time Ascalon
exotroops come to re-collect their stolen weapons. The crew of
the stolen ship is caught in the middle.

● The population of London falls comatose for three days in what

will later be referred to as the Stricken Summer. Exosuited
soldiers move through the silent streets, setting up small signal
repeater towers, and fortifying positions against a threat they
seem to expect will come from the sky.

5
Faction: The Ministry Of The Interior
It is an known fact that there are active and transmitting cthonic
netherworlds gateways in the Mammoth Cave, Lechuguilla, and Holloch
cave systems. These sites are actively monitored by us for exactly this
reason, and when a subterranean deity breaches the surface world, it
is safely killed, suppressed, or black-bagged and handed over to R&D.

Unfortunately, the netherworlds are not the only places that deep cave
systems can connect to.

In '88, our operative assigned to supervise Vietnam's government was

discovered to have been replaced by a non-mammalian sapiens species.
The impostor had eaten the actual assigned operative, likely some time
in '85, and assumed their role perfectly.

The fugitive creature successfully evaded summary capture by CYCLOPS

agents, disappearing into the Hang Son Doong cave system three days
later. A systematic search of the caves employing both mundane and
extraordinary means eventually found a passageway into a vast complex
of pre-human ruins, which in turn led to a series of tunnels---almost
like highways---branching off in various directions and heading down.

Since then, the following details about the underground sapiens

civilization have been broadly verified:

● The cave-dwellers are omnivorous, and they absorb the memories of

their prey. They can thus pass on whole skillsets and languages
by eating their own dead.

● The cave-dwellers are neither warm nor cold-blooded. Instead they

must bask in the vicinity of occult energy sources.

● The cave-dwellers use SORCERY TYPE C, and are vulnerable to

particle emissions on that same wavelength.

● The cave-dwellers do not resent the age of mammals any more than
we resent the continued existence of ants.

Surface encounters with these creatures are rare, but at least two have
rated as low-level MAMMON CLASS EVENTS. Our recommended response to an
Agarthan sighting is therefore minimum two Extraordinary Weapons And
Means teams, and prophylactic memory-wipes and screenings for every
civilian in a ten mile radius. Anything short of overwhelming force
would be unforgivably incautious.

6
Assets:

AGARTHAN WORMDOG (6 HP, 2 ARMOR, 1D6+2 DAMAGE)

AGARTHAN INFILTRATOR (5 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, MAY SHAPESHIFT WHEN

CONSUMING FLESH)

AGARTHAN REMEMBRANCER (11 HP, 2 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, MAY SHAPESHIFT

WHEN CONSUMING FLESH, MILLENNIA OF ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE, DOES NOT TAKE
DAMAGE FROM FIRST TWO HITS IN AN ENGAGEMENT)

AGARTHAN LEECH-WYVERN (23 HP, 3 ARMOR, 1D6+4 DAMAGE, FLYING, ACID SPIT)

AGARTHAN CULL-LEADER (25 HP, 2 ARMOR, 1D6+5 DAMAGE, MAY SHAPESHIFT WHEN
CONSUMING FLESH, MAY SHIFT DAMAGE ONTO FOLLOWERS, RITUAL EARTHQUAKE
MAGICS)

Operations:

● A small town in New York state vanishes from satellite view,

replaced with a flat, scab-like plane of churned earth. The town
has been abducted, buildings and all, and taken beneath the earth.

● A firefight erupts at the Beijing Museum Of Natural History, where

a new dinosaur skeleton is currently on display. The event makes
international news not because hostages are taken, but because
one of the hostages is eaten.

● Seismic activity around the Yellowstone supervolcano indicates

that, in spite of predicted geological patterns, it is waking from
its dormancy early. There has also been a recent string of
disappearances in the area, with one missing hiker actually
showing up at their house for a few minutes to gather supplies
before vanishing again.

7
 Faction: Sangre-La
The future of 3029 is a paradise.

A thousand years from now, we have won and reality is in an orderly

configuration. Antithetical forces are globally suppressed. Blood-magic
is safe and commercially available. Human civilization is stronger than
ever before.

So, of course, the us of 3029 had all the resources they needed to
perfect time travel and attempt to civilize the past.

They often claim to be working in our interests, so it must be said

here as bluntly as possible: Sangre-La agents are not our allies. They
will not guide us towards a better future. The moment they arrived
here, the timelines diverged, preventing their future from ever
happening.

They are merely terrorists, attempting to colonize our reality with an

imperfect imitation of their own.

Structurally, Sangre-La has extremely limited command personnel, and

so it operates in a cell-based structure. Individual groups are given
virtually no intelligence as to one another, and they are assigned
broad missions with absolute discretion given as to how they choose to
fulfill their objectives.

Worse, Sangre-La agents are incredibly good at sacrifice-based local

reality manipulations, and tangling with them directly is difficult and
costly, but leaving them be also has a considerable price.

Unopposed, a Sangre-La cell will dramatically accelerate the technology

of a region, passing out knowledge and techniques that are extremely
disruptive to our measures for global control. Sangre-La commonly uses
this tech dispersal as a gesture of goodwill, so when the time comes
for someone to bleed for their cause, they usually have willing
volunteers.

The only bright side in all of this is that Sangre-La also shares our
enemies. They spend much of their time fighting other forces and
factions, and we most commonly spot their agents when one of their
tussles spills over into public view.

Still, it must be repeated that Sangre-La are not our allies, and any
personnel attempting to argue otherwise should be considered
compromised, for the safety of our ongoing mission.

8
Assets:

BLOOD HOMUNCULUS (2 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, SILENCES/SUFFOCATES BY

CLIMBING INTO VICTIM'S LUNGS)

BLOOD GOLEM (16 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, MAY NOT TAKE MORE THAN 6
DAMAGE AT A TIME FROM BLUNT/PIERCING ATTACKS)

HYPERTECH BLOODMAGE FROM A DEAD FUTURE (8 HP, 2 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE,

SUMMONS BLOOD HOMUNCULI)

PHLEBOTOMIC ASSET HANDLER (13 HP, 3 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, SUMMONS BLOOD
GOLEMS, SUMMONS A THRASHING SANGUINE PROTOPLASM ON DEATH)

THRASHING SANGUINE PROTOPLASM (25 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6+6 DAMAGE, ENGULFS

VICTIMS, MAY NOT TAKE MORE THAN 6 DAMAGE AT A TIME FROM BLUNT/PIERCING
ATTACKS)

Operations:

● A utopian cult based out of the western United States has recently
inducted a string of CEOs of emergent tech companies. The
companies in question handle satellite launches, broadcast
communication, and algorithm-driven reactive psychological
counseling. A CEO's husband makes a plea for a formal
investigation of the cult, and then vanishes.

● Every person in a small town in Bolivia is spontaneously cured of

all illnesses, and ceases to age. People from neighboring
communities, however, begin to age at an accelerated rate, and
the area of effect continues widening.

● The Swiss countryside descends into chaos as a crawling creature

made of blood abducts and consumes a series of workers.

9
 Faction: Working Group 31
When an empire dissolves, the pieces it leaves behind often linger like
ghost stories---told and retold, until eventually nothing in them
resembles the source.

From 1932 to 1991, Working Group 31 operated under Soviet authority.

It began its life as an Experimental Design Bureau, but continued after
the formal collapse of that system as an adjunct to intelligence work.

Within Group 31, certain metabiologicals (designate: VARKOLAK) were

obtained, studied, and propagated---as were procedures for their
subdual and control. The extreme speed and durability of designate:
VARKOLAK made them appealing for intelligence work---particularly
surveillance and assassination. However, their basic instincts proved
difficult to compete with, and they had no innate social processes that
could enable them to form a bond with their handlers.

Still, Group 31 persisted, and eventually they developed a regime of

psychedelic doping, meditation, and extreme physical deprivation that
could allow a handler to synchronize with a designate: VARKOLAK's
mental state and override it, piloting the creature like a drone.

Of course, this was when the Soviet Union dissolved, and Group 31 was
left in the wind.

Unlike other covert assets, Group 31 was never reabsorbed by the

Russian Federation's intelligence apparati, nor was it acquired by
organized crime. It continued its work independently, driven by
scientific determination more than party loyalty, self-funding through
the occasional abduction, blackmail attempt, or subcontracted wetwork
assignment.

In its present state, Group 31 is an incredible intelligence asset, but

also a destabilizing force in northern eurasia. Its agents work for the
highest bidder, their payments funneled back to the Group for R&D
spending, but the core Group has no real goals beyond expanding its
understanding of how to use designate: VARKOLAK in ops work.

In a way, it might be compared to the rogue taskforce FIST, but without

their stultifying idealism.

It is our recommendation that it be considered for future problem-

solving.

10
Assets:

VARKOLAK HANDLER (3 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, MAY FALL UNCONSCIOUS TO

BEGIN PILOTING A NEARBY VARKOLAK)

HYPNOTICALLY-CONDITIONED SLEEPER HITMAN ON AN INFUSION OF 2% VARKOLAK

HAEMOFLUID (6 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, MAY VOLUNTARILY TAKE UP TO 5
DAMAGE TO DEAL + THAT MUCH DAMAGE ON AN ATTACK)

TRAINED VARKOLAK (16 HP, 2 ARMOR, 1D6+2 DAMAGE, IGNORES VICTIM'S ARMOR,
MAY IMMEDIATELY EXIT A SCENE AFTER BEING ATTACKED AND DAMAGED, BECOMES
AN OMNICIDAL BERSERKER IF THE HANDLER PILOTING IT IS KILLED OR RENDERED
UNCONSCIOUS)

UNTRAINED PRIMORDIAL VARKOLAK (25 HP, 3 ARMOR, 1D6+3 DAMAGE, IGNORES

VICTIM'S ARMOR, ALWAYS EITHER DORMANT OR AN OMNICIDAL PREDATOR)

ENTITY ZERO (32 HP, 4 ARMOR, 1D6+4 DAMAGE, IGNORES VICTIM'S ARMOR,
PASSIVELY SIPHONS 1 HP FROM ALL NEARBY BIOLOGICALS EVERY FIVE SECONDS)

Operations:

● Locals near an old Soviet nuclear science city are posting online
about supposed encounters with vampires. Some of these encounters
are accompanied by video evidence, which appears staged, but then
the livestock mutilations begin, and the locals begin to
disappear.

● A prominent metals recycling firm has never had much competition,

but its only business rival is now falling victim to a strange
series of on-the-job deaths and catastrophic workplace accidents.
This could be discounted as a skirmish between rival mafia families
if it weren't for the unusual tracks at each scene.

● An invitation to a meeting with a Saint Petersburg intelligence

broker turns out to be a trap, and now the ballet theater is
swarming with both mafia gunmen and things that run on all fours
and reek of the slaughterhouse.

11
Faction: Horizon Shale Consolidated
It is unknown whether there are any remaining members of the board that
have not been infected by ABYSSAL PHENOMENON 43, but standard practice
is to treat all controlling elements of Horizon Shale as corrupted.

The outbreak started in '77 during an oil drilling operation in the

Gulf of Mexico. Alongside crude oil and natural gas, crews extracted a
primitive organism from their tertiary well. The organism acclimated
very quickly to the lower pressure environment on the surface, and
immediately colonized several members of the crew. Those crewmembers
grew whiplike tendrils and infected the rest, eventually resulting in
the destruction of the rig, the well, and the precipitation of an
environmentally significant undersea gusher.

Because this was not an especially unique incident, we perhaps did not
pay it sufficient attention. As such, when sealife in the surrounding
area became secondary hosts to the parasite, that was not on our radar.
Nor were the US-government-funded conservation efforts, initiated by
Horizon Shale, to investigate the environmental impact of the breached
well on the local ecology.

Secondary sources suggest that the dive team that carried the parasite
back to Horizon leadership did so intentionally, and under orders. It
is possible Horizon meant to study and develop an antidote to it,
likely to avoid negative press if it ever reached the mainland, but
they were insufficiently cautious. It broke containment with all the
ease of a toddler climbing over a baby-gate, and we were forced to
intervene, sterilizing their satellite office in Saudi Arabia with three
members from an Extraordinary Means team.

Incorrectly, we assumed this had put an end to the problem, but since
then ABYSSAL PHENOMENON 43 has been busy.

Unlike other notable ABYSSAL PHENOMENA numbers, 43's parasite does not
appear to have any collective will or swarm-intelligence. Instead, the
crude instinctual drive of each parasite seems to synch up with the
crude instinctual drive of every other parasite in a way that resembles
conscious coordination, but isn't.

Furthermore, inhabitation by ABYSSAL PHENOMENON 43 does not take away

the host's capacity for thought and independent action. Often, the
parasite leaves them in control of their shared body for long periods
of time, only "taking the wheel" when it judges the circumstances right
for infecting another being.

12
Infection is done through long, whiplike tendrils that emerge from the
host's gastric region, and stab into the victim's skin. They then
inject hundreds of microscopic eggs, which hatch and quickly begin
killing one another. During the few days following the inoculation, the
new host feels violently ill and often displays a pronounced reddening
of one or both eyes. After this period, only one parasite remains, and
it attaches itself to the outside of the stomach and extrudes highly
conductive "puppet wires" into the spine.

From studying this pathology, it feels reasonable to assume that

Horizon Shale is in a state of cooperation with the parasite. It does
not monitor their communications, nor prevent them from speaking, and
it would have been trivial for them to call for help. But they haven't.

Whether driven by fear or malice, their ultimate goal is to infect as

many people as they can---all without alerting the powers that be and
triggering a tactical purge of their command structure.

This objective causes them to work slowly, which is in our favor. As

long as they are only contaminating isolated communities, we can keep
them under surveillance and we can preserve our resources for more
immediate problems.

If we have reason to believe they are attempting a mass outbreak, you

will be the first to know.

13
Assets:

SINGLE PHENOMENON 43 PARASITE, WITHOUT HOST (1 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE,

INFECTS VICTIM IF IT PIERCES THEIR ARMOR)

PHENOMENON 43 HOST, CANINE (1 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, INFECTS VICTIM

IF IT PIERCES THEIR ARMOR, DISCHARGES A PARASITE WHEN KILLED)

PHENOMENON 43 HOST, HUMAN (3 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, INFECTS VICTIM

IF IT PIERCES THEIR ARMOR, DISCHARGES A PARASITE WHEN KILLED)

PHENOMENON 43 HOST, BROOD COLONY (16 HP, 2 ARMOR, 1D6+2 DAMAGE, INFECTS
VICTIM IF IT PIERCES THEIR ARMOR, DISCHARGES RATHER A LOT OF PARASITES
WHEN KILLED)

PHENOMENON 43 HOST, LABORATORY-IMPROVED APOCALYPSE DEVICE (32 HP, 0

ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, INFECTS VICTIM IF THEY BREATHE THE SURROUNDING
ATMOSPHERE WITHOUT FILTRATION, DISCHARGES A VERITABLE TIDAL WAVE OF OF
PARASITES WHEN KILLED)

Operations:

● A small coastal town in Florida, at the peak of tourist season,

experiences an unusual disease outbreak. The disease's spread
seems to coincide with an ecological survey of a nearby oil
freighter's sunken wreck---although the town's mayor seems mostly
concerned with trying to keep the beaches open.

● A series of unusual animal attacks in Yoho national park, Canada,

leads to a hiker being airlifted to a hospital in Calgary. A few
minutes from arrival, the helicopter crashes into a neighboring
residential building, and in the following three days PHENOMENON
43 spreads across the surrounding city block.

● Ground-penetrating imaging reveals a considerable laboratory

complex beneath Horizon Shale's London offices. The potential
disruption to CYCLOPS operations that this could represent forces
an unusual countermeasure. FIST is tipped off to the facility's
existence.

14
 Faction: Mano Di
Originating as a guild of Tuscan clockmakers in 1560, Mano Di quickly
became entangled in Vatican politics through a series of prominent
gifts to the church. At the same time, their individual views lay
slightly out of step with orthodoxy, and the intent of these gifts was
eventually revealed to be an attempt at persuasion: Mano Di wanted the
Vatican to formally embrace the idea of machina mundi, the universe
being a massive clockwork machine, and reject all other interpretations
of cosmic structure as heretical.

Needless to say, this failed---but the church never officially brushed

off Mano Di's persistence and continued benefitting from its gifts. No
effort was made to disband or persecute the guild, and eventually the
aggressively generous clockmakers sank back into obscurity.

Unfortunately, this also precipitated a change in Mano Di's operational

practices.

Faced with the reality that the church wasn't listening, and troubled
by the volume of knowledge and skill that senior clockmakers took with
them when they died, Mano Di privately began turning its efforts to a
project that would both prove the viability of a clockwork universe and
prevent their greatest assets from slowly draining away into the grave.

Their first automata walked under its own power later that year.

Mechanical movement was a simple obstacle, easily conquered.

Perception, pattern-recognition, and intuition were harder, but the
clockmakers were undeterred. Rather than try to mechanically program
behavior through springs and gears, they found a workaround. They
consulted with a witch from Messina, and she shared a certain series
of symbols that could attune an object to the will of the universe.
Carved into the mainspring, the symbols apparently allowed automata to
move under the universe's power and at the universe's discretion.

It also allowed the automata to slaughter the original clockmakers of

Mano Di.

Intelligence is murky about what happened after, but the automata seem
to have kept a low profile for over a century afterwards. They built
more of their own, and they made several unexplained leaps in
manufacturing sophistication during that time. Some models developed
porcelain masks and movement inefficiencies to better mimic human
bodies. Others gained halting, singsong, music-box voices.

By and large, they showed no significant interest in the rest of Tuscany

until the mid-1700s, when they burned a town to the ground and flayed
all of the villagers.

15
In the time since then, that sort of extreme focus and unpredictability
has become their defining characteristic.

The automata's manufacturing capabilities are very advanced---stronger

than our own in many regards---and they can perfectly emulate a human
being as long as they aren't x-ray scanned or sent through a metal
detector. However, the automata don't always choose to remain in cover,
even when cover would be to their advantage. Some commit wild spree
killings, compromising positions they had held safely for decades.
Others simply behave strangely at inappropriate times, drawing
attention to sensitive Mano Di operations and allowing us to intervene.

What the automata truly want is unclear---if they even want anything
at all---and it is a common theory over in sig ops that either their
initial construction was flawed, or that the deep will of the universe
is stupid and random.

Ultimately though, they are dangerous. We have no reason to believe

they represent a significant threat to our governance, but that could
change in a moment, and it is safer to keep opposing them than to risk
their operation gaining ground.

16
Assets:

CRYING PORCELAIN CHILD (3 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, JUMPS SURPRISING

DISTANCES)

SLEEPER BRASSWORK (8 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, APPEARS HUMAN)

UNFOLDING CLOCKMAKER (14 HP, 2 ARMOR, 2D6+1 DAMAGE, APPEARS HUMAN)

ACCELERATED KILLER (10 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, APPEARS HUMAN, ACTS
TWICE FOR EVERY PLAYER ACTION)

ANTIKYTHERA ANGEL (28 HP, 3 ARMOR, 1D6+2 DAMAGE, ACTS TWICE FOR EVERY
PLAYER ACTION)

Operations:

● A famous novelist hosts a writing retreat at his gothic estate in

the countryside. Within a day he has been murdered and his estate
has reached out to hire FIST as investigators. Everyone at the
estate, including the dead novelist and the local police, is a
sleeper automata.

● A former nuclear testing town on the west coast of the USA is now
fully populated, with the locals wearing products and using
clothing that look like a snapshot from the 1950s. A group of
teens travel to the town to film a documentary for a social media
channel, and their skins are found several miles away.

● A senator unfolds into a glistening mess of knives on national

television, then flees into the greater Washington DC area,
prompting both a covert manhunt and a comprehensive hypnotic
reconditioning effort for huge swathes of the public.

17
 Faction: K.A.S.A. Pharmaceuticals
And Biomedical Advancement
It's rare that our analysts get to use the term 'adorable' in an official
report, but Kasa Pharm is a very small fish in a very big ocean, and it
doesn't know it.

Run by a reclusive circle of industrialists, Kasa bills itself publicly

as a leader in the race to cure humanity's worst illnesses---although
it never wins. Kasa has produced exactly one first-in-class drug, no
best-in-class medications, and only a handful of seldom-used generics
in its hundreds years of history as a corporation.

By all accounts, it should have been bought out and taken over long
ago, but its real business is military bioengineering.

Kasa sells designer lifeforms to governments and private bidders. Often

these organisms are custom-built and sold in small lots, but
occasionally Kasa loans out groups of scientists and engineers to help
countries or companies set up their own monster fabrication processes.

Kasa seldom deals in anything smaller than a flea---as they rightly

recognize that several major nations would stomp them flat if they ever
lost containment of a designer plague---but the fact that that's what
they're worried about is disappointing proof of their naivete.

They do contribute to the instability of some regions, and their

escaped lab creatures do sometimes create problems for local law
enforcement or game wardens, but even on their best days they're only
one bad move away from making their operations just a little too
visible and getting swatted off of the board by an actual player.

Our official recommendation is to treat them as a 'feeder fish', using

their assets strictly as ops training.

18
Assets:

UNDYING SOLDIER (6 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, SHAMBLING, RECOVERS FROM

DEATH UNLESS BURNED)

LOYAL SPIDER (8 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+1 DAMAGE, CAMOUFLAGE, RELATIVE

PERSONALITY OF A BIG DOG)

ENHANCED ALLIGATOR (18 HP, 1 ARMOR, 1D6+2 DAMAGE, SURMERGES AFTER

STRIKING)

KUDZU INCUBATOR (23 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6 DAMAGE, HEALS 2 HP AFTER EACH
PLAYER ACTION, SPAWNS UNDYING SOLDIERS)

KASA FOUNDER (1 HP, 0 ARMOR, 1D6-1 DAMAGE, NUCLEAR LAUNCH ORDER ON A

DEADMAN'S SWITCH)

Operations:

● A Kasa lab in Malaysia suffers a containment failure, tainting

the surrounding lowland forest with mutagenic compounds. CYCLOPS
reluctantly dispatches a cleanup crew.

● Courting new clients, Kasa hosts a trade show in Malta. As these

events have a history of getting out of hand, FIST is tipped off
and given a small financial incentive to investigate.

● A Kasa founder goes public, threatening a doomsday scenario if

the nations of the world do not pay an annual portion of their
GDP in tribute. Several major factions immediately end up in a
shooting war with each other, fighting over the corpse of the
company.

19