Nisakhe

In our previous session, the Deepnight Revelation had come across the system of Nisakhe, where two homonid species had been discovered. There were some signs of advanced technology, and also definite evidence of Droyne involvement.

After trying to sneak around for a bit, it was decided to meet with the Priestesses of the temple at the Great Pyramid. So Zanobia and Khadashi floated down on their grav belts whilst wearing vaccsuits, straight into the temple compound from the Sex Thing.

Needless to say, they caused a bit of a stir. The women of the temple weren’t sure how to react. The High Priestess handles things better. Zanobia speaks in Oynprith, saying “I am a far Traveller”. The High Priestess responds back, asking if she is from “Grandfather”. She seems to have an understanding of star travel. The priestess introduces herself as Amaya, and there is also Talliena, who is a young girl who also has the gift of Memory. Zanobia really wants to get hold of their DNA.

When they light up the Sex Thing (which is hovering high above the city at this point) to demonstrate their capability, the entire city wakes up and comes out to take a look. This requires Amaya to calm everyone down, and let them know it’s just a visit by messengers from their gods. But it’s all in hand, and nothing to worry about. Everybody is convinced though that the Travellers are from the stars, and that they have the power of the ancient gods.

Amaya is aware that the Travellers aren’t actually the gods though, since they don’t have the right number of limbs. Zanobia doesn’t try to pretend to be a god, or directly related to them, but assumptions can be made. The priestesses seem to remember things from long ago, as well as having the ability to speak the Droyne language. They understand things that a TL 1 civilisation definitely shouldn’t. They know that the Droyne (their gods) brought them here, and then left – but don’t know the reason for leaving. They were expected to return, but never did.

The priestesses are provided with a cheese and tomato sandwich, which they don’t like, and chocolate, which they love. After some conversation, it is agreed to allow the Travellers to try and enter the Pyramid. It apparently stores things left behind when the Ancients left.

I wasn’t expecting anything to go horribly wrong here, unless the Travellers did something very stupid. It’s a relatively peaceful culture, which is on good terms with their gods. Though I didn’t need to, I ran the entry into the Pyramid as a bit of a dungeon crawl. Partly because it’s fun to let the players move around and explore a map, and partly to try out how the multi-level stuff works in Foundry. I’ve tried using it before, and found it very difficult to get working. It seems to be better now however.

You can add multiple map layers onto a scene, each with their own walls and lighting. You can then add areas which automatically move the tokens onto a different layer when the token enters it.

It handles stairs between two different layers (so you move up and down a layer), and also elevators which pop up a dialog which asks the player which level they want to go to. I have plans for doing starship deck plans with this at some point, which is why I wanted to try it out here.

Exploring the Pyramid, the Travellers found an anti-matter reactor down at the bottom of the structure, which was still functional. The science team were very interested in this, though they’re unlikely to be able to build their own one even after taking a look at the one here. I made a reference back to information they found left behind by Droyne several years back in the campaign, where the Droyne and left 2001-style artefacts to help boost a civilisation. Together this this info, they might be able to build a reactor when they get back to the Imperium – with a the help of a TL 15 culture and several billion credits of research.

There were also some containers which turned out to be stasis pods containing embryos. Opening them up broke the stasis field, but again something the science team were very interested in. Inside was an artificial womb, but the embryo seemed human and was about six months developed. With the stasis field and power cut, they had to rush them back to the ship to keep them alive.

There were carvings on some walls which seemed to indicate a space battle between Droyne and starships of an alien design which looked like snail shells. There was even a snail shell, which seemed organic, possibly it belong to an alien of some kind.

Finally, they found what appeared to be guns. They were the size of bulky heavy rifles, but had no controls on them. The barrel was solid, with no obvious way for a projectile to be fired out of it. They took a couple, but haven’t yet figured out how to use them yet. There were several concerns about not pointing them at people, and also not pointing them at the local sun – just in case. I did think about making they lazy guns, but decided against it.

I think this session went well, with a lot of finding out information and getting hold of some ‘toys’ to play with later. Nothing too overpowered (though if they do find out how to work the guns, it could be interesting) or game breaking. The stasis pods might be the most interesting thing they could abuse, but they’re small enough that they shouldn’t be too much of a problem.