Twiglets

Our Deepnight Revelation campaign continues as the away team prepare to scout out the logging camp and nearby mound on Wildwood. They know some strange creatures have attacked and killed the workers there, and that the place has now been abandoned by humans. The It’s A Sex Thing has gone down with its crew, and they are going to play it safe and send it a probe to perform a scan of the area and see what’s there.

The probe is sent in low, and they start performing density scans of the mound. The scans reveal an egg shaped object beneath the ground, which itself seems to have internal structure. It’s equivalent in size to a 4,000t starship. It’s hull seems to be fractured in several places.

It was then that the probe suddenly reported a lot of errors, and quickly and quietly crashed into the trees. The long distant view from the Sex Thing showed some some of ballistic attack from within the woods. The last images of the probe showed a large rhino sized creature which had its back covered in porcupine-like spines. These had been fired at the probe, bringing it down.

The crew decide to name the large creature a Rhinopine.

Keeping well back, they monitor the movement of several creatures, which they decide to call Twiglets, move to where the probe was crashed, pick it up, and take it back to the top of the mound. It is pushed down through a hatch and vanishes beneath the ground.

Examining what data they have, it is determined that:

• It has a hull-like material similar to what the “War Ent” had.
• It has internal structures, some are large empty volumes, others are higher density and look to be complicated.
• There is a dense point under the big tree at the top of the mound, which seems to be connected by rope-like structures to both the thing underneath, and to other trees in the region.

There are maybe a couple of dozen of the Twiglets moving around patrolling the hill. Their patrol patterns are either a very clever random pattern, or completely haphazard with little or no tactical planning. There are also at least two of the Rhinopines.

The Deepnight Revelation does a planetary scan for other similar sites, and this seems to be the largest. There are three others though, in the same area of the planet. Given the low water coverage, it would be quite easy for the creatures to get to the other locations by simple walking.

By this point Khadashi is making terrible puns, so Dr Rusasa mentions that she’s accidentally spilled some biological contaminant. Khadashi, being a Vilani and taking disease seriously, runs off to find an environment suit.

The Sex Thing heads around to the logging camp, which seems to be currently safe, and they collect some samples from the trees there. There are bits of human bodies (an odd foot, or blood stains), but the main corpses seem to have been taken. Dr Rusasa does some examination of the wood, and determines that some of the trees seem to have a form of nervous system running up through them. Almost as if they were being used as sensors.

Having lost the main probe, they send in a flybot to have a look around. It can’t tell much, but finds a passage down into the mound which eventually leads to the buried object itself. It does seem to be some form of spacecraft, now crashed and broken. There are signs that it tried to fix itself, but ultimately failed. There are piles of human corpses inside the hull of the bioship, but the small bot can’t go much further without the crew losing contact with it.

Deciding that this region is too dangerous to examine for now, and also deciding that they don’t want to simply burn it all from a high altitude, the Sex Thing heads off to examine the other sites. They seem dead compared to the original, with a few fossilised remains and signs of the blood petals growing everywhere.

The crew request a new drone, and are sent one down which has “Please Don’t Lose Me” stencilled on the side.

At one place there is a well preserved specimen of what seems to be a brain, though made of wood, with lots of dense rope like appendages reaching out to nearby trees. It seems to be dried out and dead. They take it aboard the ship, along with a dead Twiglet. Both the specimens seem to contain evidence of high resistance to the Entity.

The searching and researching has by now taken almost a week. As they are finishing off their examination of the new samples, the Deepnight sends through an alert that a new ship has just jumped into the system. It is a 20,000t ship, calling itself the CSS Illustrious.

Captain Lainge of the Illustrious broadcasts a message to all ships in the system, stating that the system is now under its protection, and that ships should prepare to provide information upon request.

The adventure as written seems to assume that the players will take the train to the site, and explore it on foot. I’m not sure why they’d do that, when they have a ship and remote sensing capability. I suppose the world could have laws restricting spacecraft landing wherever they want. Given the nature of the situation, it also seems likely that the local government would give permission anyway in order to facilitate a more capable group of outsiders to investigate.

Though the players haven’t finished fully exploring the main site, now seemed like a good time to have the Commonwealth turn up with their warship. It also seemed like a good way to end the session. Again, I think I’m going to play things slightly differently to how it is described in the adventure, given the events of the previous few sessions. Not too much differently, but Captain Lainge is going to be coming in with a bit more information than is assumed, and he’s not stupid. More on this next session.