Cities of Rust

The Travellers have landed near to a forest on the world of Miium, where a small group of people have shot at them. Dmitry got an accurate shot back, dropping the guy with an RPG, whilst the rest of the attackers scattered into the forest.

They land their air/raft near to the edge of the forest, and catch the wounded guy who is trying to crawl away. The next thing that happens is that a burst of machinegun fire flies past their heads, fortunately missing all of them.

It turns out that I hadn’t given the right skill to the shooter, but I kept the roll as it was – next time she would probably hit.

I’d switched to using a map at this point, but given the scale of things, it was a pretty big map, and it’d taken some time to get things working right in Foundry.

The map was 6000px by 4000px, with a grid size of 20px, and a grid scale of 6m, giving a map 1.8km wide. Big enough to have ranged gun combat at more than short range.

I added an overhead tile for the forest canopy, which blocked sight of the forest whilst the player tokens were outside. The canopy tile was set to have radial vision, so tokens would cut a hole in it as they went underneath it.

I had to also set the occlusion radius on each token to get that to work. Unfortunately, by default Foundry automatically fades overhead tiles when players mouse over them, which sort of makes them not very useful. At least for this situation. I had to install Better Roofs, and use a toggle option that adds to its settings to disable the auto fade.

The final problem was the there were some huts in the woods where I’d setup walls. This blocked line of sight for players, displaying black areas within the woods. So even though they couldn’t see underneath the overhead tile, they could see where the buildings were.

I gave the walls reverse proximity, so that they could be seen through if tokens were more than 100m away. This made the walls hidden until the players got close. By that point, they would be close to being able to see under the tile.

So it turned out to be more work than I expected to get a relatively simple map working how I wanted.

The other issue with a map of this scale is that movement on foot is very slow. Even moving 18m a round, it’s not very far.

Anyway, we then had a gun fight. The player didn’t quite get the differences between the different auto modes for weapons, so did a simple burst shot with his gauss rifle the first time and missed. His target was hiding behind a tree, so had bother cover (giving armour protection, which I remembered Foundry now supports) and concealment.

She shot back, getting a hit, which was mostly absorbed by Dmitry’s armour, not quite removing all his END. As she moved to regroup with her friends, Dmitry went for a full auto, rolling three times and getting three solid hits. The first took her down, the second killed her and the third was just showing off.

Meanwhile Gan was moving up to cover the wounded guy on the ground. As well as being hurt, the guy seemed puzzled by the Travellers – they weren’t who he expected them to be.

Dr Durunarar took the air/raft up above the canopy to get a better view of what was going on. Since he didn’t have any skill in flying it, it was touch and go but managed to figure out which buttons to press to engage the auto pilot.

Meanwhile, back at the starport, Irian was chatting with Joro and Gakak. Gakak had let Irian know that Joro had shown her some parts of the city he wasn’t supposed to, and Irian wanted in on the action.

She treats them to lunch, and Joro is persuaded to lead Irian down into the regions beneath the starport. It’s a climb down narrow ladders, along dirty shafts and past old machinery.

Though the time frames weren’t quite the same, my idea had been to try and have both events narratively going on at the same time. The meeting with the outsiders, and Irian’s investigation of the city. Both would present the same information, but with a different twist to it. In my head, the rest of the group would get an abstract description of things, then Irian would get to discover the dirty reality.

It didn’t quite work as I’d intended, but I think it was close enough.

With the main shooter down, Gan and Dmitry headed back to the air/raft, taking the wounded soldier, who was called Jack, with them. Nashu filmed the whole affair, and became very interested in what Jack had to say.

They had assumed that the Travellers were Overseers, since they were the only ones who ever came out here. If an Overseer saw anyone, they’d try to hunt them down and kill them. The Overseers were from the cities, and did the will of the Tech Priests. They kept the inhabitants of the cities under tight control.

He had escaped many years ago. He’d been a mechanic in the upper levels, working on the air ducts and coolant systems. He knew several thousand people, maybe tens of thousands. Information down in the city was hard to come by.

Back at the city, Irian and Joro had a brief run in with some security guards, but managed to hide. The air was warm and humid, and the place was dirty. Lots of old machinery to squeeze past if they were avoiding the main corridors. At one point, there seemed to be a passage heading towards a region which was heavily populated. This would have been an opportunity to seem some of the social aspects of the city, but there would have been a chance of being spotted. Irian decided not to take the chance.

The away team dropped off Jack, and headed towards the sea – which had been their original excuse for coming out this way. They told Jack to find his friends and signal them with a fire at a set time when the Travellers came back, if they wanted to talk.

They found the sea, the Doctor saw some fish and Nashu took lots of pictures and film. Then they headed back. There was a smoke signal, so they landed and were soon surrounded by a group of annoyed outsiders.

One of them had been killed by Dmitry – however, they did accept that they had fired on the Travellers first, thinking that they were Overseers. She had died free, which was the most important thing.

All of them were escapees from the City. They’d heard of other cities, which were similar, but hadn’t been to them themselves.

There were hydroponic farms, which used about a million people as slaves to work them. There were the Wells, where most of the population lived.

Irian was making her way down, towards the sounds of huge fans. The air was hot and moist, and as the passage opened up, she was standing on a walk way which seemed to go a long way around. Huge fans were set in the ceiling, drawing up warm air through the centre of the chamber, and pushing cold air out around the edges. There was mist obscuring the view – the chamber was large enough to have its own weather system.

Her range finder on her goggles put the far side of the chamber at about 400m. A walkway went all the way around, but most of the chamber was a huge shaft which went down. There were walkways below, one at each level. Looking over the edge, down into darkness, but far far below there were lights. The upper levels of this shaft were mostly deserted, but maybe 500m to a kilometre down, there were lights where people were living.

The outsiders said that there were several wells, which were home to over thirty million people. Those here were all from the upper levels, where life was easier and escape was possible. Down below, pretty much everyone was treated as slaves. Working the power systems, farms and keeping the systems running.

Nashu recorded everyone’s testimonies, and there was talk about getting them off world. However, they wanted to stay. Here, there were free. They hadn’t heard of the Imperium, and though they accepted that the Travellers were not Overseers, they didn’t know anything about them. If the Imperium wanted to do something about the cities, that would be great. But they weren’t going to hold their breath.

So the Travellers headed back to the star port, and met up with Irian. Stories were shared, and it was decided that now was time to leave. Irian had also finished what needed to be done for trade, and so they headed up to their ship. As a final check, they compared some rough sketches the outsiders had given them of the layout of the city, and it was compatible with the deep sensor scans that the Big S was able to do.

So the population of the world was definitely more than the official number of 800.

The Doctor wanted to head to the system of Vlaakier next. It wasn’t on their official itinerary, but there were supposed to be some interesting aquatic lifeforms on the water world. So they made their Jump, and we ended things for the evening there.

I think the session went quite well. The combat gave them a bit of taste of what it’s like to be shot. They probably need more people to be carrying long range weapons though. Gan only has a stunner, so with Dmitry being the only shooter, they could easily get outgunned if they get into trouble.

The narrative beats I wanted to hit didn’t quite match what I was aiming for, but I think it was close enough. They got to find out what was going on from two sources. The other cities had their differences, and visiting those could have revealed those differences, but they have the information that they’ve been asked to get. Moving on at this point was probably the sensible choice.