The End

After their initial investigation of the world of Terminus in the previous session of our Deepnight Revelation campaign, the players turn their sights on the Pyramids in the world’s main city. The plan last week at been to investigate some more of the world’s ruins and maybe talk to some of the locals. However, it is decided to go straight for what is probably the heart of the fungal entity.

They had asked Dr Nekuna and Trennance to investigate ways of causing mass destruction. Dr Nekuna is the long term ‘named NPC’ who the players have turned to for outlandish physics (his portrait looked a little bit like Baltar from the BSG reboot, so his personality got set early on). Trennance is a Darrian who survived the Deepnight Endeavour. The Darrian’s have a reputation of blowing up stars.

My plan had been for Dr Nekuna to come up with a plan to destroy the entire system, but I was planning on leaving that until later. Given the way the player’s conversation was going, I decided to bring the details forward, so Nekuna shared his report:

With a way to destroy the entire star system, the players were on board. They had some nukes in the ship’s stores, as well as a few nuclear warheads that they had borrowed from the Solomani ships. The plan would be that a small team would head down to the surface, see what was in the Pyramids, and the Deepnight would begin the process of upsetting the singularity shell. They even agreed to have the Droyne AI plugged into the ship’s jump computer.

They could also use the nukes to hit some of the infected spots on the planet, and maybe take a pocket nuke down into the pyramids. They had no idea what was going to be in the pyramid, but every pyramid they had explored during the campaign has had something interesting in it.

From what had been a relatively cautious hands-off exploration, and suddenly begun accelerating. The players didn’t trust the planet (one theory was that the whole planet was the Entity, and the beings on its surface were merely it’s hands). Every planet the Fungus Entity had touched had been wiped out, so this thing was dangerous. So they had been cautious. Really cautious.

But now they had a plan.

So there was a bit of a ‘shopping’ moment, where four brave heroes were selected and they stacked up on battledress, plasma jets, pocket nukes and chocolate (in case of diplomacy). The four chosen were not informed of the plan to destabilise the shell of singularities, in case whatever was down there was telepathic (this was considered a high probability).

Dr Rusasa a xenobiologist, Niamh McCabe a survivor of Candling station and a mechanic, Khadashi the group’s usual mine detector, and Saashbag who had read the manual on how to do pretty much everything suited up and headed down to the surface.

They landed their boat in the plaza outside the pyramids in the dead of night, and headed up the steps into the building at the top. There was a single person there, who was promptly stunned as he was waking up. Their were some offerings on tables, and stairs down. So they went down. Down down to Fungus Town.

Eventually they reached a large room, the tall ceiling supported by pillars and lots of side rooms off along the walls. Tentacles had pushed themselves up out of the floor, wrapping themselves around the pillars, and stretched out across the ceiling.

This seemed all very much like the Entity in full bloom.

As they considered what to do, a thought crossed their minds – “Who?”

So, the big question I had to answer was how much the Entity knew about the intruders into its domain. Did it even know that they were there? I had decided that at this point it didn’t. The Entity is a massive distributed consciousness, so possibly some parts of it did, but they hadn’t yet fully informed other parts. The Entity knew that something had upset the gravitic shell which protected it from the outside universe. But wasn’t quite sure what yet.

Once the intruders started talking to the locals, then it would start picking up on things. It would eventually find the Deepnight Revelation and the crew aboard that. The citizens of Rainshadow lived on a part of the planet where the Entity wasn’t present, so wasn’t in contact with those citizens. The somewhat cautious approach of the players was now working in their favour. They hadn’t really found out much about what was hear, but also hadn’t given out any information.

At this point though, with the intruders standing right in front of one of the major nodes of the Entity, it couldn’t help but notice. And so it began to use telepathy to speak to them. Reading their minds would take time, so it couldn’t just rip everything out of their heads right from the start.

My decision at this point was to speed things along, and give the players most of the information available. The Entity was old, it was older than the galaxy and had watched the galaxy form. It had lived and died countless times until it had learned to stop consuming all life available on its world. It let people live here so that it had other minds to talk to. It had built the gravitic shell around itself to escape time, to wait until there were others to talk to.

It’s own self, now, could co-exist with others. It would like to co-exist with others. It wanted to make friends.

Whilst Khadashi did most of the talking, Saashbag fiddled with the pocket nuke. Maybe the Entity was friendly. Maybe it could be trusted. Maybe it just wanted to eat the entire galaxy. They made their excuses and left. Leaving behind a suitcase.

By the time that the nuke exploded, they were back in their boat and heading spaceward. “Why do you hurt me? I want to be friends”. The telepathic reach of the Entity was now enough to find them and talk to them over much larger distances.

Something hit their ship. Not the shockwave – that hadn’t reached them yet. Maybe a clumsy attempt at a telekinetic strike?

The Deepnight Revelation by this point was accelerating around the inside of the gravitic shell, the Droyne gravity protection device ripping the singularities out of their orbits, causing disruption. By now, the Entity was noticing what was going on, and turned its attention to trying to fix the shell.

The four heroes managed a hot landing into a Deepnight docking bay, wrecking their boat and damaging the bay in the process.

A few days passed, until the Entity was very obviously failing to control the shell. A few attempts were made to make telekinetic attacks against the ship. Some telepathic suggestions reached out to the crew, but they had implemented a buddy system to be on the look out for strange behaviour. A few people were confined to quarters before they could do any harm.

I made some “Mission Resolution” checks behind the scenes, and the crew did pretty well, so I didn’t see any need to drag things out with failure. The players had thought things through about how to handle telepathic attacks, so again I wasn’t going to allow that to mess up their plans.

So the Deepnight Revelation now had a collapsing shell of singularities behind it, and many singularities were heading inwards towards the central star. The Droyne AI saw an opportunity, a point in space and time ahead of them where a jump would be …. if not safe, then possibly survivable.

They jumped.

The entry into jump space was anything but smooth, but the ship hadn’t been destroyed. The next seven days were spent making repairs to the ship, and ensuring that everyone was okay.

And then another day passed.

And another.

After nine days they were still in jump space. Word was put out that everything was okay, this was just a side effect of jumping in a region with a high time dilation. Whether anyone believed this is unknown.

After 12 days in jump, the ship finally emerged, crashing into normal space with warnings blaring and crew hurled around. There were bruises, broken arms but no deaths. The ship though was in a poor state.

As navigation systems started to slowly come back online, they realised they couldn’t identify any nearby stars. This was obviously a miss-jump, but at least they were still alive.

Scanning for known pulsars, they identified some matches. Except that they were all in the same direction. Looking out the window they could see the Milky Way galaxy – all of it, spread out before them. They were viewing it from the outside.

They have arrived in a star system which as a yellowish star and a habitable looking world. The Deepnight’s jump drive is non-functional, it’s m-drive is barely working and the fusion plant is putting out limited power. But they still have functioning jump capable scout ships, a competent crew and a world to start with.

And that, was the conclusion to the campaign.

Except… I provided a scene to show them what happened back in Voidshore.

The singularities collapsed into the star, causing a massive coronal mass ejection. Singularities collided, causing a total core collapse followed by multiple supernova explosions on top of each other. The planet, the Entity and the people that lived on the world were obliterated.

The explosion reached the nearby binary star and the Fungus infected world that orbited it. They vapourised in moments. Years later, the explosion would rip through the nearby star systems, wiping out the civilisations that inhabited them. In decades, the entire sector would be sterilised or destroyed.

I hadn’t expected the campaign to end this session, but was expecting at least one more session. However, I’m not complaining. Once it appeared that the players had decided what they wanted to do, I let them get on with it, and moved things forwards towards a conclusion.

I’ll do a final post, reviewing how the entire campaign went. But for now, I’m relieved that it is over. But that’s a feeling I always get at the end of a campaign – wanting things to wrap up because I’m starting to get other ideas in my head about what I want to run next. There were a few points towards the end where I was worried about where things were going, but things came together and I think we reached a satisfying conclusion.