Into the Abyss
The crew of the Deepnight Revelation are in the Terminus system, finishing up their exploration of the various planets there. Their final action is to try and obtain the item of high technology that has been left in the Trojan asteroids which are being used as a nest by a family of fungus infected space whales.
The orbital mechanics team has also identified several asteroids which would be suitable for using in a bombardment of the world designated as Carcosa. This is a cold garden world, but has also been infected by the fungus. The plan, is to simply destroy the world. Or at least turn its surface into molten slag. The plan will take at least a year to carry about – but the actual process of shifting a few asteroids slightly off their orbit will only take a few weeks. After that, it’s simply a case of letting gravity do its job.
To be honest, I’m not entirely certain how easy it should be to rock worlds. With infinite thrust manoeuvre drives, the difficult bit is going to be attaching a ship to an asteroid in a way that is safe and stable. The rest of it is just going to be time. How much time I haven’t worked out, but I decided to allow the players to do this given a few weeks. In a civilised system, it would be easier to stop such world destroying attempts than it would be to initiate them, so it shouldn’t be game breaking.
I made a “how well did things go” check, and the result was a text book example of how to do things.
The next thing they wanted to do was to take out the ‘space whale’ and obtain the Droyne gravity device. This would involve putting the ship into combat (something the players have always wanted to avoid). However, it wasn’t going to be dangerous. One thing that’s changed since the publishing of the Deepnight campaign, is that the new High Guard rules have changed how much damage a spinal mount does. They have gone from 1D6 x 1000 damage, to 8D6 x 1000 damage. And the Deepnight has a double sized spinal mount, which makes it a one shot, one kill against pretty much anything.
They came up with a plan to lure out the whale from the Trojan asteroids that it was lurking in, and with the Deepnight as the main offensive weapon, and the two Solomani ships flanking, it was a pretty good plan. A quite check to see how well things went, and it was another text book example. They rolled damage, killed it in a single shot, and managed to avoid the expanding cloud of fried space whale fungus.
Clearing out the smaller space whales also went smoothly.
Which gave them access to the Droyne gravity manipulation device. Cleaning it up, and figuring out what it did and how it worked would take some weeks. So the Deepnight decided to jump back to the nearby system to check in on the Solomani ship Leonard Hussey which was waiting there, and to restock on food supplies. They left behind a team of scientists on the two other Solomani vessels to study the device.
A couple of weeks later, they returned, and found that things had proceeded well. It was another text book example of success. At this point I started to get suspicious of the Roll table that I’d setup in Foundry for rolling Mission Resolution, since every single roll was giving the same result. It seemed though to have just been down to luck. ‘Trial’ rolls all got different results.
At this point, the only thing left to do is to hook the gravity shield up to the Deepnight (it wouldn’t work on the smaller ships), and head into the Gravitic Shell.
After spending the last few weeks being concerned about this course of action, the players accepted it. For a start, it wasn’t technically their decision since they weren’t in charge of the ship the Captain and Mission Commander roles were played by NPCs. Plus, I think it was realised that they needed to do this for the adventure to reach any real conclusion.
A few of the crew left to board the Solomani vessels, which would wait here for 4 weeks before heading back home. Several Solomani also moved across to the Deepnight, interested in finding out what was on the ‘other side’. The assumption was it was some Ancient, or even pre-Ancient, artefact that was controlled the shell. Something definitely worth investigating.
It was a few days before the end of 1121, so they waited until after new year, so there could be one last party. On 1122-002, the Deepnight Revelation switched on the Droyne shielding device, and started its carefully plotted course through the shell of singularities…
The journey was bumpy, and the ship suffered some shaking and stress. However, with the Droyne device red lining at how much gravity stress it could absorb, the Deepnight Revelation burst through the interior of the shell. Ahead of them was a small red star and a garden world.
As they took stock of the state of the ship, they started the scan of the world ahead of them. It seemed to be a paradise world, with no signs of fungal infection. There was a civilisation here, but no sign of technology. There was a large city on one of the continents, possibly TL 2 or 3 at most, with signs of sailing vessels long the coastlines. There were also pyramids at the larger city.
In one of the deserts, were the ruins of a large, more technologically advanced, city. There were possibly inhabitants there, but it was definitely ruined. Lots of smaller settlements covered the world, and it seemed like a peaceful haven. Maybe whoever had built this place had decided to create a hippy commune?
The initial data coming in about the state of things inside the shell was that there were no other objects in this ‘system’, and that time did seem to be running slower. Exactly how much slower would take some time to determine.
And that was where we ended things for the year. How many sessions are left for the campaign I don’t know, but my goal to get it finished before Christmas has been missed.
I am really glad though that the players decided to not resist the final part of the campaign. There can be a problem with getting D&D players to adapt to games like this, especially if they’ve been used to murder hobo games where everything is there to be killed for XP and treasure. I think it’s a less well known issue though of Cthulhu players coming to grips with games where everything is not going to immediately kill you or drive you insane if you dare to investigate.
We have started discussing my next campaign (maybe a Milieu 0, maybe set amongst the high powered nobles of Core sector), and one of the topics brought up was that it might be useful for the players to be in a position where there is someone telling them that they have to do things, even if it’s dangerous. Given the choice, they will tend to shy away from risk. So removing that choice may be the best option.
Anyway, the next session will be probably in the first week of January, where we can begin wrapping things up. I might do a technical briefing for the players before that, which I’ll post as a blog entry here, so they have a written handout of what they’ve found and the state of things.
