The Blackreef Syndic, in the person of a mid-level Admin named Joan Alice, offers Chad Solo a freelance gig.

In exchange for his service and discretion, our solo #Traveller gets toplisted for a job as Engineer on the next outbound freighter.

What's the job?
(Poll to follow.) What we know is that Blackreef was up to something they didn't want public, and they need Chad to go with seven other thugs to recover some of Blackreef's lost property.

One of their smaller transports ran into trouble 1,100 miles out of Blackreef Station and lost contact.

Imagine:
A group of buds sitting around the fire on a chilly night.
Their charges have settled in for the night, and they gaze down a mountain valley to the bright, warm lights of a small village. It looks warm down there.
But it's nice here, too, in it's own way.
Hard, honest work, with hard, honest troubles. 
Not like the worries down there.
They talk of money problems.
Pressure from the wife to live beyond their means.
Will it be a good year for the price of wool?

Orcs versus Crusaders in a bigger battle of Chainmail.

Clockwise from the upper left:

ORCS
Heavy Horse
Heavy Foot
Light Horse

HUMANS
Heavy Foot
Light Horse
Archers
Heavy Horse A 300 point battle using vanilla Chainmail and 2mm figures.
Each base represents four figures in a more reasonable scale.
The orc figures are actually wolves, but same difference.

With equal parts foot and horse in the fight, this became a sweeping engagement.

Competitive vs. Co-operative wargames.

Do I really have to choose?

Most games these days are presented as a binary choice, but something tells me there is a lot of room in between those poles for interesting game-play. These are the bad guys from the TV show "24".
Our plucky hero, Jack Bauer, was forced to work with each of them at times.
Even knowing they were opposed to his goals, he found himself co-operating with them in the short term to achieve a long term goal.