Diamond Scatter

Our previous session of Deepnight Revelation ended with the discovery of a bronze age civilisation on a world that was likely to get overrun by a higher tech civilisation the PCs had just given jump drive technology to. It was still decided not to do anything about this – partly from not caring, partly from it not really being practical, and partly because it was felt the higher tech civilisation wouldn’t colonise and overrun a planet home to a lower tech one. Admittedly, some of the social scientists thought this last one was a very funny joke when one of the PCs raised it.

But it was decided to go down and talk to them. A group of nomadic Amiyetians were located, and a small ship’s boat was sent down to say yellow. They were hearding nerfs – a type of cow like animal with a bad smell – and it took them a while to discover why their nerfs were being spooked. When they finally looked up, they spotted the hovering space craft. Surprised, but not particularly scared because they had no idea what to make of it.

Shiiguma, a scout pilot with a high jack-of-all-trades, seems to be taking the lead in a lot of the away missions at the moment, and she was first down to the planet. After some communication difficulties, they did a trade of nerf milk for cheese. The nerf milk was disgusting, and the Amiyetians hated the cheese. The dried nerf meat though was delicious, though smelled awful.

Since another team had been landed on the other side of the world to start collecting supplies, they were instructed to grab some nerfs.

Eventually Shiiguma was invited to the nomad’s encampment, where there was much talking and singing. She got to make a Carouse check, which went badly, so the locals started drifting away. After the initial excitement of finding someone new, who seemed to come from the sky, it turned out she really wasn’t that interesting.

The next day the boat headed to one of the towns, in order to trade at the market. The reception there was slightly more aggressive, but in the end they managed to get some trading done. They got some nice artistic carvings, spices and dried meats.

From there, it was time to leave and continue on their journey. I didn’t have a huge amount planned for this session – mostly it was going to be a relatively quick travel into the Diamond Scatter sector, with a few sights to see on the way and some light crew based stuff.

A question was asked about Monty – the newly discovered telepath who cropped up last session. This was fortuitous since I did have something planned for him. He had recently started playing cards, and also become a lot more active in terms of relationships with women. This was going to be a problem, but since the players asked about it before it became one, they managed to intervene and tone things down a bit.

Before leaving Kaalin Ulterior sector, they discovered a Sokarian type planet – a tidally locked hot jupiter with silicate clouds that were raining rocks. Fortunately there was another gas giant in the system that they could refuel from.

The scientists wanted to spend some time here to take readings. This also delayed their jump until the near year – it was time to celebrate the beginning of year 1113. All the characters got 1xp to spend as part of the celebration.

After that, they jumped into Kaalin Citerior sector, which was just going to be a quick hop cross the corner of the sub sector A. I’ve added another feature to my map to allow me to set colours on star systems. This was needed for working out the extent of star faring polities, but is also useful for showing where the Deepnight is going, and where it has been. It was a quick hack, so just sets a colour to set the hex to. A proper fix would have had meaningful properties (such as allegiance, whether a place had been visited flags, etc), but I didn’t have time for that.

There were three systems to visit here, most of which were pretty standard. Dinamabe at 0203 had a jovian world with copper in its upper atmosphere, giving it green cloud bands, and also green flashes of lightning on the night side.

After that though, it was a jump into Diamond Scatter sector. This was also time to give another handout about how the ship was doing. As I’ve been doing recently, these are written as entries in the ship’s onboard lifestyle magazine – Into the Deep – which is maintained by one of the NPCs. As apposed to the Exciting Voyages of the It’s A Sex Thing, which is maintained by the players and a lot less serious in tone.

The Into the Deep article I’ll put at the end of this post.

It was also time to give Zanobia some rolls on waking up their passenger they had put into a cold berth some years ago, due to dietary restrictions. She had been rescued from Goblin’s Planet, and forgotten about by everyone (myself included). Teeka was woken and was fit and healthy. It was another excuse for a party to welcome a new crew member.

The first couple of systems in this sector were relatively straight forward, but on reaching Esodjit at 2407 things became more interesting. The system was filled with debris – lots of asteroids and comets in the system on highly elliptical orbits, many outside the plane of the ecliptic. The gas giant there were planning on refuelling also had a very strong magnetic field – probably too dangerous to approach. Fortunately there were two other gas giants here.

All three gas worlds were within the jump mask of the star (it was a small, red dwarf system). On approach to the new refuelling destination, they detected a large asteroid that was on collision course with the Jovian, though it should hit far from where the refuelling would take place. The ship sent out probes to watch as they refuelled.

The images they got, of an asteroid exploding deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant, were impressive. What was more impressive, was that an hour later a swarm of leviathan space-whales can tearing out of the atmosphere and headed to deep space. There were about four or five dozen of them – space faring creatures they had encountered before, but there were no records of them ever having been seen in such numbers.

This was a suitable time to call a halt to things, so we did.

Whilst I give myself time to work at the next big event in the campaign (the conclusion to the Near Side of Yonder chapter), I think there’s going to be some smaller encounters and ship board activities. I don’t plan anything major for the next couple of sectors, so it should be a relatively fast journey in terms of sessions.