Footsteps of a Civilisation
This session of our Deepnight campaign mostly came down to navigation. That and archaeology. The world they had arrived at supported life, though the land was completely barren. All the life lived in the oceans. To complicate matters, much of it was poisonous. That didn’t matter much, when it could be thrown into the food processors, reconstituted, and turned into something edible.
The ship’s food processors were now struggling to turn basic organic matter into something that people wanted to eat. But poisonous fish wasn’t an issue.
The barren land turned out to be a bit more interesting than originally thought. A long time ago, there had been a civilisation here. They had built cities, roads, cars, planes and nuclear reactors. And then, sometime around 400,000 years ago, they had died off. 150,000 years after that, the system had passed through a dust cloud, which covered the rocky worlds with a blanket of dust, and cut down the amount of sunlight. This lead to an ice age on the world, which wiped out all land based life.
Though there is a haze of dust in the system still, it now mostly resides further out. When the Deepnight arrived, and the scouts put down on the surface of the world to test for potential food in the seas (fish, huge jellies, and other things), they discovered tell-tale regular patterns in the ground with their Lidar and other scanning tools. The shapes of cities could be made out, with roads connecting them.
So the crew decided to put down here for a while, and investigate the place. When an estimate of 400,000 years was made for the cities, the archaeologists were very interested since that put the civilisation earlier than the Ancients. There was very little to find though – mostly just shapes in the rock, and the tell-tale signs of metals and plastics.
Eventually fossils were found. There was no sign of massive destruction. Plant and animal life continued after the cities vanished, then these were wiped out by the glaciers. A few clues to the civilisation were found, but not much. Fossils of humanoids were discovered, but their density in the cities seemed low. There were grave sites, and junk yards, and sprawling cities which must have contained tends of millions of people, but the numbers of people who left fossils within the city was low.
Eventually an underground bunker was discovered. This had preserved some things in more detail, including some carvings of hairy humanoids with long arms and long snouts that hung down from their faces like an elephant’s trunk. A few remains were found, but assuming this was a military base the population was low. There were signs of plastic and glass wrapped around the faces of the dead. Not so much masks, but more like goggles. There were rusted hints of cans and plastic wrappers.
Raix manages to get a full skeleton for her museum about the ship.
Had the people of this world plugged themselves into virtual realities, or uploaded themselves, as their world fell apart? Maybe a huge population crash in the final decades, as the civilisation went out with a quiet whisper. They had maybe predated the Ancients, but in the end had come to nothing.
From here though, the Deepnight wanted to get to Draytsirv and the colony world of the Droyne. However, the navigators were taking a look at what their sensors were telling them, and finding difficulties with the proposed route.
They were following the route that the Droyne had taken. The Droyne had only had a J-2 drive, but seemed to have had fuel tanks for 5 parsecs of fuel. A couple of the routes it had taken were 5 parsecs between refuelling stops. From what the astrogators could see, there really weren’t anything to refuel from between these points. This led to a discussion about just how much the Deepnight needed to get to Draytsirv.
Given it was known that the Twiglets were in the area, they also didn’t want to jump to a world where there was no quick way out again. And Draytsirv didn’t appear to have a gas giant.
My map, as usual, has been randomly generated using my own software, which has turned out to be really useful for running Deepnight Revelation. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine running this campaign without some software to automate the map generation. For most Imperium based campaigns, there is always the Traveller Map to fall back on, or at least the printed poster maps from Mongoose and others.
For generating dozens of sectors, where each system will only be used once, it sounds like it would be a stupendous amount of work. Especially when you’d also have to track how much information the players have about each system. My own map tool does the latter as well – only showing information that the Deepnight has scanned. Clicking on a world brings up more detailed information, the accuracy of which depends on how deeply the system has been scanned. Bigger planets, and those around brighter stars, are easier to get data on than smaller worlds or those around dim stars.
I’ve placed Draytsirv in a difficult to reach location. It’s mostly random, with some fiddling when I wanted a specific layout of star systems. There are fewer habitable worlds in these sectors, which is making finding supplies harder. Though they’ve never come anywhere close to running out of food. I don’t think they’ve ever fallen below even half supplies.
The last system they get to in this session is Eboyse, a system with a gas giant and very habitable world. The crew are suspicious that the world hasn’t been inhabited by something, and that’s actually a good question. It has a high amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would be why the Droyne never colonised it. But why not the Twiglets?
I have some ideas about the lack of Twiglets (other than I hadn’t done detailed planning for this system), but I have until next session to refine my ideas.
Some of the systems near Draytsirv show possibilities of being useful for refuelling. Uheka (listed above) has a small body at 2 AU from its star. Given the star is a K8, the small world is probably an ice world. Refuelling would be more complicated than using a gas giant, but not outside the bounds of possibility. Other systems might have oort clouds or icy rings. It’s possible the small body is part of an icy ring. As the Deepnight Revelation gets closer, it may pick up more information that allows the crew to refine their plans.
