Moon Base Anot

The Deepnight Revelation had just entered a new sector, so it was time to provide another edition of Into the Deep Magazine. In-game, this is something put together by the crew as part of a community building exercise. Out of game, it’s a way for me to hand some potential plot threads to the players and give some personality to the other crew members.

I had meant to provide it before they reached the first star system, but it wasn’t quite ready last session. So I handed it out this time instead. The date is now 1112-247, which puts them about 5 years into the mission.

There was discussion about repainting of the ship, which caused one player to start calculating what the heat output of the ship would be – despite being told that it was magic tech and trying to bring real world physics into something like this wouldn’t be relevant. It kept him happy for a while though.

In the end they decided to have a competition to come up with a paint scheme for the hull. Repainting the ship could be combined with a hull safety check, EVA training and punishment duty. Since the ship would probably need repainting in a regular basis, they could even have a different theme each year.

Teaching Yip, their alien avian, to read and write was also on Zanobia’s agenda. Yip and Ashza, the child of Shandra, seemed to be getting on very well, and had even invented their own language for communicating with each other.

Once background things had been discussed, it was time to get back to where they were. Jumping into the Anot system, they had detected a small abandoned base on the asteroid moon of the third planet. They sent in their (now repaired) lovely contact bot, which reported back that the outer hull of the base had been compromised long ago with micro-meteorites. There was no sign of power of any kind, though there were electrical systems here – so no apparent sign of the superconductor plague.

It cut a whole through the airlock on the landing bay, and went down for a closer look. There was a teardrop shaped craft there, similar in style to those used by the octopods. There was also signs written in their language.

So Khadashi and Shiiguma headed down in person, making their way deeper into the base. It was deserted, but it seemed to have been a biological research centre. There were large eggs in incubation chambers – cracked and the liquid boiled away. Inside were skeletons of small plesiosaurs.

There were skeletons of the large herd beasts here, in what looked like a biodome. Locked away in a shelter was a large pile of octopod skeletons. They looked like they had died huddled together. There were also signs that some other octopods had gone insane or violent, and had caused physical damage and been locked up.

Basically, this had been a small base of the octopod species, but they had been killed by something. Down on the planet, there wasn’t much life on land. The grasses had an unusual chemistry, which wasn’t compatible with human life. There were a few starving herd beasts, but little else inland.

Along the shores of the oceans were herd beast bones, as well as eggs. They found plesiosaurs laying eggs on the beaches, and living in the oceans. A recent nest of eggs showed footprints of a quadruped walking away from it.

This was a planet where the octopods had tried to setup their food animals, but had either failed, or hadn’t had time to finish their work before they had been killed. The mission team took what samples they could, but it wasn’t a place to resupply.

The next scheduled event in the official campaign is still some way off, so I need to decide how much I want to fit in between now and then. Once the players leave this region, I don’t currently have any events prepared, so I need to sit down and come up with something. There probably need to be some interesting societies and scientific anomalies to investigate. I’d also like to have reasons to flesh out more of the crew. However, I do expect to skip over a lot of star systems rather than visit each one individually.