Population

Like Zeno’s Paradox, our Deepnight Revelation campaign is gradually edging towards its conclusion. The Deepnight is in the Terminus system, exploring the worlds there and trying to understand what they have discovered.

Their next destination is the icy world they have named Nilfheim. It is a frozen world of ice and snow, with a trace atmosphere. There’s little of interest on the surface, except for some construct at one of the poles. Further investigation discovers what looks like some form of sensor array, half buried in the ice. Beneath it, is some sort of building.

So they put together a team to investigate. In Foundry VTT, I’m using a scene that shows the map of the system, which means I don’t have the usual set of character tokens easily available. It occurs to me that I could just put all the PC actor tokens on the hot bar for easy access. Why this hasn’t occurred to me before I don’t know.

Yes, I’ve only recently fixed a bug where an actor’s portrait would be properly displayed on the hot bar, but that’s because I haven’t used the feature before. So now I have all the player’s characters easily accessible to me at the bottom of the screen (or at the press of a button).

Anyway, Khadashi (hot bar 5) and Shiiguma (hot bar 7) head down to the installation, and start melting their way through the ice. What they reveal is some form of rapid-deployment habitat module that has been setup to run a sensor station.

The sensor array itself is in a bad shape, but getting down into the small habitat shows that it is made for Droyne. There is no power, but there is an advanced cold fusion generator and a computer core. Fiddling with the generator fails to get it working, but the computer core seems intact, and they get it up to the Deepnight for plugging into their DroyneGPT Kyrransk in order to try and read the data from it.

Kyyransk is able to provide a summary of that is in the sensor’s data banks. It was set up 300,000 years ago to monitor the gravitic shell, and the orbit of the singularities that make it up. It was then abandoned, but carried on working for 100,000 years before the Droyne technology failed completely.

Over that time though, it had recorded a lot of orbital data about the singularities.

• They have expanded over time, gradually increasing the diameter of the shell.
• There were ‘holes’ every few thousand years. These seem to become more regular with time, but only in as much as going from about every six thousand years originally, to every five thousand years when recording stopped.
• These ‘holes’ seem to correspond to the weakening of the shell recorded by the nearby civilisations. But their events happen every 73 years, which is a huge increase in frequency. Their records, at best, only go back a few hundred years. Sometime between 200,000 years ago, and 1,000 years ago, the frequency of holes increased dramatically.
• There are irregularities in the orbits. The orbits aren’t stable, but they mostly follow the laws of gravity. Except, sometimes, a singularity shifts in an unpredictable way. This seems to be nudging things back into place to prevent the entire shell falling apart.
• Enough information has been collected from what is inside to determine that there is a low mass, Population II star inside, being orbited by a planet which shows signs of oxygen.

It’s noted that the star outside the shell is probably also Population II, and many of the objects in the system are low in metallicity.

Population II stars are amongst the earliest stars in the universe, formed when most of the universe consisted of hydrogen, helium. I mean, most of the universe still consists of hydrogen, helium and a few contaminants, but the contaminants used to be even less common. These ‘metals’ (anything not hydrogen or helium) were created by the original supernova of the early Population II (and maybe even older Population III) stars.

If this system has a low metal content, it’s probably very old. The chance of two Population II stars meeting and falling into orbit around each other is quite low, so they probably formed together over ten billion years ago.

The general thought seems to be that if this is a prison, it is a very leaky prison. There is some concern amongst the players that the Entity has been locked away inside the gravitic shell, and that if they interfere then they will unleash it upon the galaxy. This is adding to their desire not to investigate. I think it’s fairless obvious that the campaign is pushing them towards going through the gravitic shell in order to investigate, but there is a lot of resistance to the idea.

Some of the computer models that the scientists are running suggest that the interior of the shell is probably undergoing time dilation. It could be anything from 10 times to 1,000 times depending on the parameters they set in their models. This suggests it may be more of a refuge, where whatever is inside is passing the time.

One of the scout ships is sent off to the nearby system where the third Solomani ship is waiting for them. The scout carries all the information that they’ve found to date, in case anything happens to the explorers.

The next port of call is the gas giant core. Most of its atmosphere has been stripped away, leaving a core of hydrogen ice. I was of several minds as to what to make the core of. If the system is lacking in metals, then it’s more likely just to have hydrogen and helium in the gas giant, with only low amounts of water ice. Hydrogen ice is quite rare though (and searching for it on the web turned out to be difficult, since “Hydrogen Ice” turned up pages of information about Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine cars, on both Google and Kagi. Gemini actually managed to give more on topic response), but in the end I decided to just go for hydrogen ice. It’s weird and unusual, and gave the science team a lot to investigate.

And that’s pretty much where we left the session. Things are moving slowly at this point. I think everyone is wanting to put off a decision about what to do, so we get easily distracted by side topics (such as star populations, and types of hydrogen) rather than trying to push towards a conclusion.

I really want to bring the campaign to a conclusion. Whatever happens, I will not be running the journey back home. Having run a ‘planet of the week’ for several years, it’s really not something that I want to do more of. So whatever the players decide to do, the journey home will be a ‘fade to black’ ending.

Whether they want to investigate the shell, or leave it alone, will be up to them.