The Bioship

In this session of Deepnight Revelation, I started with another issue of the ship board magazine, Into the Deep. This was to recap some of what had happened recently, and also an in-game excuse to remind everyone what the mission was after last week’s realisation that nobody could remember. I also dug out some of the original handouts from the Roll20 campaign (which is where the adventure started) and imported them into FoundryVTT.

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Into the Deep Magazine: 1117-157

Atlantis sector has turned out to be an exciting mix of polities, some of which have been more friendly than others. Most of the crew were able to take advantage of the, ah, entertainments available at Tradeport. Some even brought back some souveniers which required a trip to Medbay. You know who you are.

It was all ended with a rather exciting series of events which we won’t go into, though there are plenty of video reports floating around on the ship’s net if anyone hasn’t already seen them.

The more interesting meeting though has been with the Federated Commonwealth of Homeworlds. More on them later.

Ship Status

It turns out that the ship’s particle beam spinal mount is fully functional, and capable of hitting targets below the officially recommended size. Though it was a shock at the time, the crew pulled together amazingly well after such a long period of time in space. It goes to show that however annoying they are, the training regimes enforced by Sir Alize Vanaadi and Lt Jana Irekia have paid off.

The victory isn’t necessarily something to be celebrated, given that so many died due to the actions of one rather foolish individual. But it proves that we can be confident in our abilities to protect our home.

As far as eveything else goes, the ship is doing well. There continue to be problems, but they are minor. Except for those in corridor 217 where they are still waiting for the air conditioning to allow them a good night’s sleep.

Friends and Enemies

The Federated Commonwealth of Homeworlds

Our meeting with the CSS Illustrious turned out much better than we had hoped. The Commonwealth seem to be willing to share information and discuss cooperation, and don’t (at least yet) seem to be trying to steal our ship.

They have a democratic government, that seems to be based (at least partly) around the concept of cooperation. The possibility of sharing technology with them has been raised, which would undoubtably make them more willing to be our friends.

The Grand Republic

We haven’t had any direct dealings with the Grand Republic, so can’t comment too much on how they will react to us. Most of what we’ve heard is that they are a Military Dictatorship who aren’t very flexible in terms of their friends. Until we meet them, we won’t know for sure.

The Biologicals

We first encountered the Biologicals several months ago. They seem to be a type of animal/plant hybrid (though my biologist friend insists that this description doesn’t make sense for alien ecosystems. He proceeded to use lots of long words that I didn’t understand, so I’m sticking to my animal/plant terminology). Whatever they are, they seem capable of growing bodies for themselves, from humanoids to war machines to spacecraft.

I’ve been told that the information that has been provided by the crew of the CSS Illustrious is providing our biology team a lot of good research material. The Commonwealth consider them to be dangerous adverseries, though we haven’t managed to figure out how to talk to them yet so have no idea what their goals or needs are.

Navigation

Our next planned destination is point FSN-X. This is three sectors distant, and over the far side of both the Commonwealth and the Grand Republic. It is a pulsar (so should keep our Physicists busy).

This raises the question of how to get to FSN-X. Some people on the navigation team have raised the question of whether it needs to be visited or not, though the physics team would very much like to keep it on our itinery.

The issue is that getting there efficiently requires travelling through either the Commonwealth or the Grand Republic. This would mean spending several months within a large polity with a strong military capability. Even if we consider either or both to be friendly now, can we trust things to remain that way for the entire journey?

FSN-X

What is this FSN-X that the physicists are so interested in? To be honest, it’s just a random navigation point which doesn’t have any importance to the larger mission. However, it is a pulsar, and potentially of great scientific value.

Point FSN-X puts us within about 150 parsecs of VS-X, or Terminus Point, right on the edge of the spiral arm. This is our final destination.

VS-X

Also termed Point Terminus, this is the final destination of the Deepnight Revelation. There are powerful radio signals coming from this point, which match the frequency described in the Droyne writings that were found in the Nebula and at Point XF-1402/Canding Station.

Though the Deepnight is considerably closer, our sensors are much less effective than what is available back in the Imperium, so we haven’t been able to determine much more about this point that we already know. Best guesses is that it may consist of multiple point sources – possibly neutron stars. This is being raised as a reason for visiting FSN-X, since it will give us more practical data about how the Deepnight handles close to such objects.

To the unknown person who sent around the text file written by some unknown Terran author from around -2500, yes, thank you. I may be a cook, but I do know how tides work.

This is our destination, and the entire point of the mission. Is the Entity still here, or is this from where it originated? Are there going to be things to find and explore, or will it all be a big waste of time?

If the Entity is there, our primary orders are to… what? Destroy it? Maybe, but if it’s infected an entire planet that may not be possible. Talk to it? It didn’t seem to be interested in there last time we encountered it. Study it? Possibly, though that may be dangerous.

In Other News

Over the past few months a few things have happened.

• Jack Griffiths and Monty Jackson were both killed in a fight on Tradeport. Their bodies were returned to the ship and given a proper space burial.
• The child that came from the Droyne life pod on Nisakhe has died. It seemed to have been having difficulty surviving outside of the Droyne life support system and suffered a brain hemorrhage.
• A large amount of data has appeared on the internal ship’s network. It seems to have originated from Tradeport. It’s mostly private date from citizens and companies, ranging from pornographic to complicated financial and social data. Jonai Batten on the social science team has taken it upon himself to organise a massive data dive to investigate the social lives of ‘alien’ humans. Responsibility for the data hack seems to be pointing at Ingaal Goh, one of the technical hands.
• Some drugs have turned up on the ship, probably from Tradeport. Small packets and pills turn up in the most surprising locations, and nobody is sure who is leaving them around. They seem safe, though can take someone out of it for a few hours.

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It turns out that the mission is approximately two years behind schedule. As a software developer, I have to say that this actually seems to be quite good going to be only two years behind on an eight year estimate. Especially given the number of unknowns there were in the expedition.

The players are wanting to head to the Dual Alliance, though their mission plan is to head to FSN-X. To be honest, I have no idea where the Dual Alliance is located. I haven’t been able to find any location mentioned in the campaign book, but have an idea that it’s vaguely Rimward from the Republic and the Commonwealth. I’ve put it to the Spinward/Rimward side of the Commonwealth, but this is the wrong direction if the ship wants to head to FSN-X.

Though I don’t think it really matters where it is, I have a nagging suspicion that I’m missing something and that I’ll make an assumption that turns out to be incompatible with something I read later.

Back to the game… the two crews agree to team up to investigate the crashed bioship on Wildwood. It’s still buried under the mound near the logging camp. There is a brain case near the top of the mound, and a number if Twiglets patrolling around the region, along with a couple of (currently dormant) Rhinopines.

The Deepnight finds some crew members who have mining expertise, and plan to make use of a couple of their advanced scouts to blast the Twiglets using the ship pulse lasers, and then to dig through the side of the mound into the ship.

A group of Deepnight security staff, along with some marines from the Illustrious, are dropped off at the logging camp to cause a distraction. Starting up the machinery there, some of the Twiglets head over to investigate. Prepared for them, the marines and security team (along with Khadashi) make short work of them. At this point I don’t play out the combat, just assume that the humans will win. I let Khadashi make a Gun Combat skill check to see how well he does compared to the rest of the team – quite well as it turns out.

As more of the Twiglets head over towards the logging camp, the scouts start blasting them with their ship lasers. They did seek permission from the planetary government before doing this, which was good given that starship weapons do ten times damage and have a blast radius of 10m when fired at ground targets. The scout armour was also sufficient to be able to ignore any of the attacks that even the Rhinopines could throw at them. Once again, I didn’t see any point making dice rolls for this, and simply narrated their victory.

They removed the last of the Twiglets from the top of the mound using a sandcaster from one of the scouts, and proceeded to remove the brain case. Once it was disconnected, the remaining Twiglets seemed to lose interest in defending it.

It was now possible to get down into the mound through the top entrance – no need to blast large holes (though the surface of the area was looking like it had suffered a massive artillery strike). Getting into the body of the bioship was more challenging than fighting the Twiglets on the surface.

There were no corridors – just twisting branches of material that needed to be clambered over and around to get anywhere. The few Twiglets still left inside the ship were in their element here, and were able to put up a stiff resistance. Two of the security staff were badly wounded, and one of the marines from the Illustrious was killed.

Eventually though the wreck was made safe. Inside, there were large open spaces that looked like fuel tanks, and complicated dense regions which looked like organic versions of jump drives, power plants and manoeuvre drives. A hole was eventually dug out of the side of the mound, and these items lifted out. The jump drive ended up mostly disintegrating as it was lifted out, but enough was left to study.

With the task completed, it was time to decide what to do next. Examining the bioship parts was going to take weeks or months of study, so would mostly be done in jump space.

The crew of the Deepnight Revelation had a plan to head to Opadajo/1434 where there was an Ancient artefact. From there, they would head back Spinward towards Abyrezuky/0130 where all contact had been lost with the system there (previously it was a TL 12 civilisation with a class A starport). The CSS Illustrious had also heard about the problem there, and was planning to investigate themselves.

By the end of the session, it looked like the plan was for the Deepnight to meet up with the Illustrious near to Abyrezuky. The Deepnight has Jump-4, the Illustrious only Jump-2, so it may be able to get to the first destination and onto the second by the time the Illustrious gets to the second.

There is also an agreement to swap crew. The Captain of the Illustrious is willing to loan an officer, who can act as a guide, and also possibly pass on information to the Commonwealth if the two ships fail to meet up.

This session was another chance for the players to do some decent planning. The adventure has given them several spacecraft with decent army and multiple turret weapons, and yet it expects them to get involved in fair fights. There will be plenty of opportunities later for the fights to be fairer, so I didn’t see any reason to take their easy victories away from them at this stage.

The next couple of events are part of my own background filler, and then we’ll move through the Commonwealth (probably) towards point FSN-X. I should probably read up on the next parts of the campaign before then, to remind myself what’s going to be happening.