T2K Poland Resources

[Raellus]

I stumbled across this site whilst looking for something else T2K-related.

http://www.jedmc.com/ixdd/2014/1/8/an-old-school-polish-sandbox.html

The author has taken the time and effort to create a grid map for the v1.0 starter box map of Poland and then write up all of the settlement descriptions across all of the original Poland modules with the grid coordinates for each. He also created battle maps for the Death of a Division insert, including a chart with the fate/status and Escape from Kalisz locations for each unit involved in the battle. It's all pretty kick-ass and must have taken ages to research and create. If only I'd found this years ago, it would have saved me a load of work.

[Tegyrius]

That's magnificent. Downloaded and saved for future use.

Also, small damn world. If this guy worked at WRFL in the early nineties (as mentioned in another post on that site), I only missed meeting him at UK by a couple of years.

- C.

[mpipes]

One thing I noticed that is off is the composition of the 256th Brigade. The 2-108 Calvary is a new unit. In 1996, this would have been the 1-156 Armored Bn headquartered out of Shreveport, La.

[Tombot]

"If only I'd found this years ago, it would have saved me a load of work."
Thx for sharing!

I just looove hexcrawls, and i did so many wrong ones on Escape...

[Draq]

Perfect. Thanx alot.

[Draq]

Omfg this is exactly what I've been looking for. This needs to be a thing. We should recruit this guy.

[jedo]

hey all, hope you find the doc useful. The other thing I was trying to do with the hexmap and index was to assign a Territory Type to each hex based on what was nearby in the various adventures (unless it really should be randomly rolled), to make it faster to roll for random encounters.

Btw, I posted the index to Lulu so I could have a saddle-stitched version for use at the table. Here is the private link- the price is just lulu's cost for printing.

So, mpipes, the composition for the 256th circa 1996 would be:
1-156 Armor
2-156 Infantry
3-156 Infantry
1-141 Field Artillery

Hey Tegyrius, were you involved with MSU at UK Was it still around when you where there
=Jed

[Tegyrius]

Jed, thanks so much for your work. That's an awesome resource.

I was indeed involved with the Miskies - still have my Campus Crusade for Cthulhu shirt in a box of memorabilia. I was there for the beginning of the Magic: The Gathering craze, the endless sessions of Talisman around the round table, and the last of Dave Vest's massive Battletech games. My years on campus were 93-94 and 95-96. The club is still around, though it rebadged itself as the UK Guild of Gamers a couple of years ago.

- C.

[jedo]

It sounds like we just missed each other- I was active both at RFL and in MSU from about '88 to '93, when I graduated and moved up to Cincy. I actually got involved in my first T2K campaign by following up on Mark Vest's flyer in the student center, with introduced me to the whole MSU gang.

btw, I updated the Death to a Division document on the blog post to fix the 256 composition, and clean up a couple of typos. I also posted a cleaned up version of the escape for Kalisz player handout (the intelligence brief) and links to a couple of topo maps that an (evil) ref could hand players to use as they try to navigate the sandbox.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

1944 Maps of Poland (East Prussia & Poland)

I know this is some serious thread necromancy but after reading the post about the new map resource for the Trans Caucasian theatre I was reminded of the following site and it's specifically useful for Poland, hence resurrecting this thread. I think some of you already know of it but for the newer members, it's might be useful even though the maps date from 1944.

It's one of the few sites that I've found that has free, good quality, 1/100,000 scale topo maps of some of our areas of interest and could be particularly useful for Vistula River scenarios.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/poland_100k/

Edit: and this site is worth checking as well because it has some of the maps that the Texas University site doesn't have.

http://digitalarchive.mcmaster.ca/islandora/object/macrepo%3A18813

[recon35]

Thanks for posting these. I had found the hex conversions, but didn't know about these sites. Very useful!

[StainlessSteelCynic]

You're very welcome recon35, I have a fondness for topographic maps and spend far too long on the internet looking at them!

By the way, some other information that you might find usefull is below. I lived in Poland for just over four weeks back in 2010 and I posted this info on the Yahoo Groups T2k site.
Considering how many changes that Yahoo have gone through since then, the links I had orginally posted in this forum to those pages, no longer work.
So here they are the new links however in the interests of keeping this info in an active T2k group, I'm posting it here as well.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/t2k/conversations/messages/13433

Kevin
Aug 23, 2010

G'Day all,
I'm an infrequent poster here but I've just spent the last three weeks living in Poland and while I didn't get to see every T2k related area or even get to spend a lot of time searching those T2k areas I did get to, I have a number of observations that could help a Polish campaign. I'm certainly no expert and I'm sure there's lots of other details that any Polish person could add but this should serve as a good base for further research.

1.When you get told Polish roads are either okay or bad, believe every word. Some of them are bloody nightmares of potholes and schizo efforts at patching up the holes and they patch them with everything from tar to concrete slabs to cobblestones. Sometimes you'll see all three types in the space of ten or so metres. Tar is often "thinned out" and so not enough is put onto the road to form a good solid base. During summer, these often go soft enough for the traffic to form shallow channels in the road. Rain is a nightmare for drivers as you cannot see the holes in the road and any of them might be quite deep.

2. A lot of Polish farms that are not running livestock do not have fences and if they do have a few cows or goats, they chain them to a peg so they can graze. You can literally walk off the road right into a farmer's paddock, off his land and into the next farmer's paddocks. You are likely to find a fence around his house and outbuildings however (although this is not always the case). Fruit orchards however, tend to fence off all their growing plots.

3. Land for farming is scant, everything that could be used has been. They won't get more unless they cut down some forest and often the local roads pass inbetween two or more paddocks operated by the one farm. When this occurs, you can catch the farmer driving his tractor, harvester or truck on the road to the next paddock holding up traffic for some time similar to what I have seen in other parts of rural Europe. Poland produces enough food for it's own use and doesn't appear to export much so there seems to be little impetus to increase agricultural output.

4. Sheep don't seem to be a big part of the diet, it's mostly beef, pork and chicken. I've seen all of the above on farms and even ducks and some goats but I can't recall seeing any sheep. There's also a reasonable amount of fish and chicken eggs on the menu. Meals tend to be carbohydrate heavy, lots of wheat products and green vegetables tend to be cabbage,spinach and lettuce.

Other vegetables are typically potatoes, beets, onion, capsicum (known locally as papryka), cucumber and pickle. There's others but I just can't remember them at the moment. Apples, cherries and strawberries and I think oranges are also grown but all tropical fruit is imported.
People often go out of the villages and towns to pick berries and mushrooms in the proper forests and sell them by the roadside (something they'd likely do to supplement their food in T2k no doubt).

5. There's a hell of a lot of lightly forested land spread inbetween various towns even up to the point where one town may be quite spread out because there are anything up to six or seven (and sometimes more) forested "reserves". The towns feature lots of apartment blocks so there's lots of people concentrated in one area but the town planners don't seem to want to cut down the forested areas to provide more land for housing. The apartments are tiny (I'm staying in one at the moment) - kitchen, bathroom, toilet, lounge/living area that doubles as the parent's bedroom and the one bedroom is usually reserved for the kids.

Villages are spread out a bit more and typically feature much bigger houses and while some vacant land may be between various houses, they don't have forest plots like the towns do. They are surrounded by farmland and proper forests.

6. Soviet era apartment blocks generally do not have any sort of elevator if the building is less than seven floors (I'm on the second floor, thank goodness I'm not on the sixth, the constant climb up the stairs would kill me!) And they have very little in the way of alternate entry points, it's either the front door or get in through the windows.

7. They sell beer in the corner stores, supermarkets and fuel stations! Not only beer but spirits as well. I've been in at least two petrol stations were beer was with the softdrinks & water while the spirits were behind the counter. This has been standard practice for decades. AND... they sell beer in 500ml cans and bottles. Now I know this isn't particularly important but it could be an interesting situation for PCs to find spirits in the ruins of a petrol station. (I'm from Australia so alcohol being sold in the local shop and fuel station is damned unusual to me!)

8. The summer weather is deceptive, it seems relatively cool to me (coming from Australia where I've experienced summer days of 47+ degrees C) with some days reaching into the high 20s and early 30s. However... the humidity is brutal, often at 70-95% and you can get early morning fog. It rains every so often but it doesn't last for long, often just a few hours but it buckets down and overwhelms the drains. The rain stops, clears the air and the humidity and then the sun gets its chance to get brutal. I'm drinking about 1-2 litres of water more and a few Cokes here and there, just walking around on the tourist trail than what I would back home for the same temperature.

9. Summer time in the thick forests found seperating towns from other towns, cities, farms and so on can be stifling when you walk through them. There's next to no breeze and the canopy traps the moisture so you feel like you're in a hothouse all the time. And then there's the gnats and mosquitoes and it's allegedly not a tropical country!

10. A number of town centres are of the "town square" type, this means a large square or rectangular area formed from local buildings with next to nothing except a few small buildings, kiosks or stalls around the sides or in the centre. No plants to speak of and all that concrete, brick and cobblestone reflects back the heat to make it feel 10 degrees hotter than it is.

11. I've found a few bridges around the country have fording points nearby. And I don't mean a shallow sandy driveway into the water, these are purpose made, permanent facilities with mooring points for pontoons. The one here in Fordon where I'm staying has a wide concrete roadway leading up to it that could easily fit three trucks side by side. I also found some pontoons nearby.

12. The Vistula river has ducks, fish and also mussels in it. It appears to be pretty clean and I would say probably drinkable as long as you boiled it (although I really could not guess at anything like heavy metal content and such like). It does have a problem every now and then with floating debris. Much of the river has trees or shrubs and so on growning right down to the river although where it passes through a town/city the banks are usually built up from stone, concrete or brick and so on. It's damned wide in many places and the current is quite strong from Krakow in the south to Bydgoszcz in the north (a distance of roughly 350 klicks from my rough map estimate).

13. Some towns that I visited still have working water pumps in public areas, the hand-pump type and even though some have the main handle removed they are still functional and can easily be put back into service. Krakow had a few of these in the old districts.

14. Krakow also has a church that features an artesian bore of drinking quality. It permanently fills a small pool and is accessible to the public. It's known as The Church of St. Stanislaw AKA The Church of the Rock, it's a Paulite church and monastery situated just off the bank of the Vistula almost due south of the Wawel Castle in the Kazimierz. During the events depicted in T2k I can imagine this church being a strong focal point for the locals, the first native Polish saint was a bishop of the church that stood on the site originally and there are also a number of Polish writers buried in the grounds of the newer church.
There are a few websites about the church such as http://www.sacred-destinations.com/p...aws-church.htm

15. Something else that appears to have been unknown to the GDW staff and something I haven't seen mentioned in relation to T2k, there are some small caverns beneath the Wawel castle site in Krakow. I didn't get to enter the caverns but my friend said they were smaller than what you would expect (according to the tourist blurb it's all limited access so you can't see the entirety). The current entrance is from a turret on the castle walls.
Here's some links...

http://www.cracow-life.com/poland/krakow-dragons-cave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel_Dragon

http://www.krakow-info.com/smocza.htm

The most important aspects of these caverns is that 1. there are pools of fresh water in some of them and 2. there is an exit to be found on the embankment below the castle (it's not apparently accessible to the public and it's not easily recognized these days but it's near the dragon statue below the castle walls.
Also, the crypts under the cathedral in the Wawel castle are pay to view and you cannot take photos there so I decided not to see them. I couldn't be bothered paying an extra fee to see more of the castle (the cathedral is also pay to view and I didn't check that out either - I'd seen enough of the insides of churches by that stage!)

16. Krakow has had a tram system in operation since the late 1800s, it's all electric now but for the T2k world I can imagine that horse drawn trams or at least wagons using the tram line could be easily put into use. Even perhaps alcohol engined trams
It'll be a bit of a judgement call as to what lines would be in use but this site gives some good info on the history plus a map of the current system as of 2007

http://www.zyxist.com/en/archives/20/comment-page-1

http://www.krakowpost.com/article/49 This site gives a little more info on what lines would be available for the T2k period.

With the rationing of electricity in Krakow, the electric trams aren't going to be much use but they may keep them for special occassions or emergencies. Imagine the shock of any group of indentured workers about to stage a riot when a tram turns up and disgorges dozens of ORMO troopers!
Other towns that date from the earlier 1900s or earlier have tram systems as well. Lodz has one of the longest systems in Poland that goes from Lodz to a small town nearby. Tram rails in some towns might be ripped up for rebuilding though. Trams could be put back into use by converting them to horse-drawn versions however, so ripping up the rails might be a last resort in some places.

17. Storks are quite common in northern Poland with many of them nesting in the country villages right down into central Poland. There's also a large breed of hare and also small deer to be found in the countryside.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Kevin

And a follow up by another poster

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/t2k/conversations/messages/13436

Scott David Orr
Aug 24, 2010
I'll just add a couple of things to this very good report....

Hide message history
On 8/23/2010 11:48 AM, Kevin wrote:
>
>
> 1.When you get told Polish roads are either okay or bad, believe every
> word. Some of them are bloody nightmares of potholes and schizo
> efforts at patching up the holes and they patch them with everything
> from tar to concrete slabs to cobblestones. Sometimes you'll see all
> three types in the space of ten or so metres. Tar is often "thinned
> out" and so not enough is put onto the road to form a good solid base.
> During summer, these often go soft enough for the traffic to form
> shallow channels in the road. Rain is a nightmare for drivers as you
> cannot see the holes in the road and any of them might be quite deep.
>

Poland's roads are notorious as some of the worst in Central Europe,
even by ex-Communist standards.


> 3. Land for farming is scant, everything that could be used has been.
> They won't get more unless they cut down some forest and often the
> local roads pass inbetween two or more paddocks operated by the one
> farm. When this occurs, you can catch the farmer driving his tractor,
> harvester or truck on the road to the next paddock holding up traffic
> for some time similar to what I have seen in other parts of rural
> Europe. Poland produces enough food for it's own use and doesn't
> appear to export much so there seems to be little impetus to increase
> agricultural output.
>

Unlike the rest of the Communist world, Poland, probably because of the
historical strength of the farmers' movement, never saw large-scale
collectivization, and therefore had a lot of small farmers even under
Communism. One byproduct of this is that it has a far larger proportion
of the population working in agriculture than elsewhere. If it doesn't
export more, it's probably because (I say "probably" because my info is
out of date) EU price supports in less efficient countries.


> 4. Sheep don't seem to be a big part of the diet, it's mostly beef,
> pork and chicken. I've seen all of the above on farms and even ducks
> and some goats but I can't recall seeing any sheep. There's also a
> reasonable amount of fish and chicken eggs on the menu. Meals tend to
> be carbohydrate heavy, lots of wheat products and green vegetables
> tend to be cabbage,spinach and lettuce.
>
> Other vegetables are typically potatoes, beets, onion, capsicum (known
> locally as papryka), cucumber and pickle. There's others but I just
> can't remember them at the moment. Apples, cherries and strawberries
> and I think oranges are also grown but all tropical fruit is imported.
>

I should add that traditional Polish food is /incredibly/ bland.
Even pizza (at least, when I was there 10 years ago) is just tomato
paste and cheese on a crust--no spices at all.


> 7. They sell beer in the corner stores, supermarkets and fuel
> stations! Not only beer but spirits as well. I've been in at least two
> petrol stations were beer was with the softdrinks & water while the
> spirits were behind the counter. This has been standard practice for
> decades. AND... they sell beer in 500ml cans and bottles. Now I know
> this isn't particularly important but it could be an interesting
> situation for PCs to find spirits in the ruins of a petrol station.
> (I'm from Australia so alcohol being sold in the local shop and fuel
> station is damned unusual to me!)
>

Well, I know it's like that in the U.S., too, and actually in most if
not all the other countries I've been in.


> 12. The Vistula river has ducks, fish and also mussels in it. It
> appears to be pretty clean and I would say probably drinkable as long
> as you boiled it (although I really could not guess at anything like
> heavy metal content and such like). It does have a problem every now
> and then with floating debris. Much of the river has trees or shrubs
> and so on growning right down to the river although where it passes
> through a town/city the banks are usually built up from stone,
> concrete or brick and so on. It's damned wide in many places and the
> current is quite strong from Krakow in the south to Bydgoszcz in the
> north (a distance of roughly 350 klicks from my rough map estimate).
>

I'm not sure what condition it was in in Communist times, just in case
you're playing that sort of scenario--typically, pollution dropped off
in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, not just because of
increased environmental awareness among newly empowered voters, but
because heavy industries that were unprofitable were closed down.



> 16. Krakow has had a tram system in operation since the late 1800s,
> it's all electric now but for the T2k world I can imagine that horse
> drawn trams or at least wagons using the tram line could be easily put
> into use. Even perhaps alcohol engined trams
> It'll be a bit of a judgement call as to what lines would be in use
> but this site gives some good info on the history plus a map of the
> current system as of 2007
> http://www.zyxist.com/en/archives/20/comment-page-1
> http://www.krakowpost.com/article/49 This site gives a little more
> info on what lines would be available for the T2k period.
>
> With the rationing of electricity in Krakow, the electric trams aren't
> going to be much use but they may keep them for special occassions or
> emergencies. Imagine the shock of any group of indentured workers
> about to stage a riot when a tram turns up and disgorges dozens of
> ORMO troopers!
> Other towns that date from the earlier 1900s or earlier have tram
> systems as well. Lodz has one of the longest systems in Poland that
> goes from Lodz to a small town nearby. Tram rails in some towns might
> be ripped up for rebuilding though. Trams could be put back into use
> by converting them to horse-drawn versions however, so ripping up the
> rails might be a last resort in some places.
>

In my experience, you'll find trams in every sizeable ex-Communist city
of Eastern Europe (the biggest place I've been without them, I think, is
Narva, Estonia, which has a population of 80,000). They're the fastest
mode of public transportation (since they're not inhibited by traffic)
along main travel routes in cities. Pretty much every city will have a
combination of trams, buses, and trolleybuses (buses powered by overhead
electrical cables), plus commuter trains (typically electric) for
reaching the suburbs (though I have seen one case, St. Petersburg, where
a tram line goes miles outside the city proper). Subways are typically
found only in the biggest cities.

Scott

I'd also add that Poland grows a lot of plums too and the pizza that Scott mentions, yeah it was still like that in 2010 although they did have other varities but I doubt this is of any significance for a version 1 or 2 game of Twilight (for 2013 it would be of use however).

It's worth noting too, that a number of Soviet military garrisons that formed closed cities (AKA secret cities) were sometimes on the grounds of former German military camps dating back to the late 1800s/early 1900s. On one site I visited, a large barracks building was still in use by the local townsfolk as a storage warehouse after the Soviets left the region. Originally it was a 1920s or 1930s building constructed for the Wehrmacht.

During one trip to see a castle I don't recall where, as we wandered through the bushland near the site, we stumbled across a mostly buried bunker system. It was built of concrete and appeared small and we were told that the Nazi's built it. None of the locals really knew much more about it except that it was "the Nazi bunker".
Local youths had apparently used it for a place to hang out (as evidenced by the very minor collection of trash inside, drink cans and food wrappers etc. etc.) but it was difficult to explore because the only entrace we found was a hatchway (minus the hatch) hidden by some shrubs and the room below was about one third filled with sand (from who knows where, a collapsed roof, infilling by the local council I don't know). The tunnel leading off from the room was mostly filled by sand so all we could see was that one small room

[recon35]

Wow, again, Thank you! We are preparing to do a T2K in Poland using the T2013 rules, so this is great background info.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

No problem
Now that I'm actively thinking about it, I recall some other things that could be helpful for background info.

1. Although politically communist, we know Poland refused to get rid of religion and the Catholic Church was the dominant religion. Polish people would often visit cemetaries to pay their respects to their loved ones by leaving the usual sorts of things we see in the English speaking world (flowers, toys, photos etc. etc.) but also candles.
It was common to see graveyards with lots of candles. Not enough to illuminate the place but enough that you could see points of light from a reasonable distance. I remember once seeing these points of light through a section of light woods during the early evening and not knowing what it was until my friend told me.
EDIT: There was sometimes an older woman or couple who would set up a small stand at the cemetary and sell bunches of flowers and candles so that you could buy them "on site".

The Catholic Church also tried to exert a strong influence on everyday life, they had their own television shows and it was very common to see church buildings festooned with various antenna for radio, television and mobile/cell phones (obviously the cell phones aren't of much importance for a version 1 or 2 T2k game!). Some had so many antennae that they really ruined any aesthetic appeal of the church.
EDIT: These antennae and their associated gear could be a useful source of radio equipment.

2. Many of the newer (i.e. 1960s-1980s) blocks of flats/apartments had a small general store somewhere, either as part of building complex or as a small standalone building. The place I stayed was typical of such apartment complexes - four to six blocks of apartments, anywhere from four to seven stories high, formed around a central square that was grass with playground equipment. In the central grassed area (but I've also seen them off to one side of the group of apartments, outside the central area) was a single story "general use" building, one half was a small general store and I still don't know what the other half was used for, (maintenance staff perhaps)

The general store was specifically food, drink and magazines/newspapers and also sold alcohol in small quantities. There were a number of parking areas around the apartment blocks but not enough for all residents. A number of people had to park in places away from the apartment blocks, often in secure parking that they paid a monthly fee to access (which meant they were allocated a parking spot that was theirs and theirs only). The apartment that I was staying in belonged to Anna, she owned the apartment but wasn't able to get parking next to it so she had a parking lot in secure parking area that was about 150m away from the apartment complex.
Most apartment complexes also had a collection point for trash that typically consisted of two to four rubbish skips. Everyone in the complex had to take their own household trash down to these skips.

3. You would often see Polish men, either by themselves or with one or two male friends, going to the shop in the afternoon and buying a single can/bottle of beer (sometimes two). They would then go home or go to a favourite spot and drink this one beer before going off to do whatever they planned to do for the evening. They might do this two or three evenings (or more often in some cases), it was almost a part of their weekly routine!

[James Langham]

Catholicism was so deep that the Polish Army had a chaplain's department - the only one in the Warsaw Pact.