Survivor

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The Deepnight Revelation comes out of jump near the gas giants of Near Side of Yonder/1821, the system named Ofoke by the astrogation crew, and the source of the distress call they’d picked up earlier.. The system primary is an L0 star – barely a red dwarf, bordering on being a brown dwarf non-star. Nevertheless, there are 7 planets in the system, two of which are habitable. The first is a mere 2.5Mkm from the primary, with a year length of 63 hours. It is covered in thick forests and is home to a wide variety of animal life. The second, a whole seven million kilometres out, is a cooler world with shallow salty seas and great mud plains where fungi and ferns grow. There is land life here, but it is mostly amphibious.

Ofoke II, a habitable paradise

The distress signal that the Deepnight had picked up is coming from the 2nd world, so whilst the ship began its refuelling, the Sex Thing is sent in to investigate. The signal beacon was located on one of the smaller island continents, and once they reached orbit the crew noticed a few obvious crash site. Some large ship had come down here, embedded into one of the forests. A long corridor of new growth trees stretched out behind it, and the broken apart remains of the ship was already being covered in vegetation. Going by the looks, the crash had happened 5-10 years ago.

There was a small encampment amongst the wreckage, but apart from a single tent most of it had fallen into disrepair. There was a small cooking fire, and an area some way off that looked like graves.

So the Sex Thing went down, hovering just above the site, and Khadashi dropped to the ground using a gravbelt. He chose to wear a vacc suit rather than full battledress this time. Apart from a couple of feathered dog-like creatures, the camp seemed empty. Calling out on suit speakers he managed to scare off the dogs, and eventually the last survivor of the crash made themselves visible.

First Contact went smoothly. The survivor was a six limbed creature, about the size of a human but with four legs and having an insect-like appearance to them. They offered Khadashi some food, but was in a state of worry that the visitor might topple over at any moment given that he only had two legs.

This was a fun session to run, and there was quite a bit of roleplaying between the crew and the alien named Akranika. There was some worry by the players that the aliens (the Alikaia) might turn out to be something like Moties, but I think they’ve stopped worrying about that. Though it would be an interesting idea to drop in at some point. The ship itself seemed to be a prototype TL 9 design, with an inefficient jump drive. It had mis-jumped to here, and hadn’t been able to get back home.

Akranika was very keen on being taken back home, and showed a lot of interest in the crew and their ship. Over the coming days, as their language translators started figuring out the language, the crew found out that the species was caste based, and Akranika was a Thinker. Other castes included Breeders, Warriors and Workers. Their society was very disjoint, with no large governments. At best they had city states, but most of their society was based around loyalty to individual Breeders.

The world of Ofoke II was a great place for the Deepnight to use for resupply and also as R&R for the crew. This time there were no problems with getting attacked by ornery herd creatures or carnivorous avians. It was also an opportunity to do further scans of the systems ahead, and Akranika was able to provide some more information about where the Alikaia major colonies were.

Systems of the Alikaia

After a week of R&R, the crew are ready to head towards the Alikaia homeworld at Alikherrnz (1327). The plan is to head to Ami, and then direct to Alikherrnz itself. They hope that they can use some of the technology at Alikherrnz to help fix some of the issues they have with the Deepnight.

The Deepnight campaign setting gives specific descriptions of the worlds of this area, but I’m mostly using my own randomly generated ones. Generating specific world types with WorldGen is a bit tricky, though I can make suggestions when creating systems. I’ve also recently added a way of renaming a system, which was trickier than it sounds. It’s not just a case of renaming the system, but also the planets in the system and any reference to planet or system names in any of the descriptive text.

Shuffling systems around, and setting populations and tech levels is still done via direct SQL database queries. It might be nice to have a UI interface at some point, but it’s not high on my priorities list.

Next session should involve making contact with the full civilisation, so hopefully diplomacy there goes just as well as it did for the individual survivor.

Samuel Penn