Tomb

In the previous session, the Deepnight Revelation had reached the system of Nicar, only a few parsecs from the black hole which was the remnant of a super nova explosion 800,000 years ago. There were signs of life on this world, and the scientists were keen to investigate. This is another of the campaign ‘set pieces’, so spoilers ahead.

Whilst preparing for this week, I was planning ahead for an upcoming scenario. This required something I hadn’t done in a while, which was setting up line of sight effects on the Roll20 maps. However, for some reason I couldn’t get things to work. Possibly I’ve gone insane, but I’m certain there used to be a keyboard shortcut for moving things to the lighting layer. There was no sign of that, and walls I was placing were having no effect.

Roll20 was also being slow and lagging, which was really annoying me. Over the past few months things have been randomly breaking, both in my scripts and the character sheet. Since I haven’t changed anything, I guess it’s been down to random changes in the back end.

I’ve been planning on moving to FoundryVTT in a month or so, since things aren’t quite ready. But I decided to go ahead and make the move in this session. Getting the map setup in Foundry didn’t take too long, and the main characters were already ported. I just needed to setup some journal entries and stat up some battledress for them (not that they’d need it, but they might want it).

So the first part of the session was spent talking everyone through the new interface. Things went smoothly, and everyone seemed happy with how things worked.

Shiiguma and Khadashi led a team down towards the planet. There was one spot which had a high concentration of metals in the water just off the shore, so they headed there first. Here they found ruins of what turned out to be an ancient vault. A long buried road, and the rust shadows of ancient vehicles. There were the collapsed remains of missile silos nearby (at least, the radioactive residue seemed to imply that this was what they were). Very little had survived, most things having decayed to the point of non-existence. Plastics were still present, half buried rusted metals and some buried skeletal remains of whatever people had lived here.

All huddled together trying to survive. The last fragments of a dead species.

— Zanobia

It took the Travellers some time to figure what it was they had discovered. They were originally thinking it was some kind of meson weapon emplacement before settling on the truth. Other groups across the planet had found the remains of cities – unusual layers of rock, metal and plastics were all that was left of what had possibly been a TL6-8 civilisation.

The flora here was also unusual. Though it was quite extensive, it lacked diversity. It seemed that only a few species of plants had taken back control of the land after it had been wiped clean by the super nova explosion 800,000 years ago. Animals were present, but nothing larger than rodents.

Khadashi and Zanobia got a call from Dr Nekuna to meet him on the planet’s moon. He had a surprise for them. Or at least for Zanobia.

Up on the moon there were the remains of a lunar settlement. A couple of small huts, probably not meant for anything other than temporary accommodation. Zanobia was most pleased with Dr Nekuna, calling him the person who gives her the right sort of present.

Inside there was a space suited corpse, some calculating machines and basic artefacts. Next to the calculating machines were some boxes of cards, which had lots of small holes in them. This caused Nekuma to revise his estimate of their tech level downwards.

Inside the suit was a humanoid corpse. About 1.5m tall, skinny with an elongated head. She prepared the corpse for retrieval, and they took what they could of the rest of the artefacts.

The mood aboard the Deepnight Revelation was quite sombre, with everyone showing interest in what had been brought back. More items to display in their museum.

It was a relatively short session this week. As well as the distraction of switching VTT platforms, two of us weren’t feeling great so we had an early finish. But all things considered it went well.