With Fever Dreaming Marlinko (the
first Dunes stretch goal adventure) going through proofing, Anthony's
Cali Dunes manuscript going through its first round of
comments/edits (so excited), and the Misty Isles of the Eld
getting all playtested and written, I finally feel like I have
some mental room to juggle some other things.
And those things as a palate cleanser
point away from D&D and toward my old love Classic Traveller. The
following is one of the hooks from my new Tuesday mini-campaign
shared here because I hear sharing is caring. (My past Traveller house rules, variants and mini-campaign whoha can be seen here.)
The Adventure Hook
The Cerny Vlk, the
subsector-famous Boloerium (a paraterraformed asteroid-vessel used
for intra-system travel, see library data below) dedicated to
preserving pre-uplift wolf stock--and manned by a cooperative of
self-styled “lycanthropes”--has gone “dark” according to
months-old reports from The Grange. That wild and wooly system
of micro-republics hunkered down on trojan-point planetoids has
produced a not-too surprisingly conflicting range of hotly-contested
salvage claims. Putting hard credits where their vacc-suited
comm-boxes are, the system's two fiestiest polities, Cockyagne
and Hayduke, are reportedly both offering 500,000 CR
bounties to a crack “salvage and rescue team” for in-hand
repossession of the outbound ship.
Cylinder Interior (click to enlarge). Scale is 250 meters per hex. Map "north" and "south" wrap around. |
Library Data: the Cerny Vlk
Boloerium
Like most boloeriums, the CV is
dual-roled as asteroid space habitats and intra-space vessel. The CV
was constructed under the auspices of the Vlk Foundation, a
philo-bolo (collective doubling as a non-profit charity), six decades
ago for service in the Grange system. The foundation's terse
bullet-pointed mission statement blandly refers to “pre-uplift
conservation” and “maintaining the green fire of wild abandon
that burns away the blandishments and corruption of hypermediated
civilized life” as the Foundation's guiding vision.
The habitat's interior is a hollow
cylinder 6 kilometers long with the long sides sloping upwards
precipitously for a “height” of 1 kilometer.
The central space is dominated by an
artificial lighting and weather system that simulates cloud cover
that cycles randomly between a fine rain, partly cloudy and partly
sunny conditions on a twice “daily” cycle. The ten hour “night
period” is experienced universally across the interior when the
“sunline” lighting is reduced to a low blue-gelled hue. Internal
temperatures are set to range between a low of 45-60 and a high of
55-75 Fahrenheit.
Internally the CV underwent an
extension biome renovation two decades ago, the old patchwork of 114
micro-biomes was replaced with two larger more continuous biome zones
(and two sub-zones) to reflect a change in program direction by the
Vlk Foundation:
1. Tundra. A large rolling plains like
space punctuated by moody dark grey spray-foam rock formations.
Contains xeno-caribou and giant jackalope herds for game.
2. Tanglewald. A dense twin-canopy
bramble forest that is in fact a single rhizomatic macro-organism.
3. The Boreal Forest. Massive
black-trunked conifers and large ferns cloned from ancient primordal
amber tower over this micro-biome. Houses the White Lodge, a
“Future-Past Age” spiritual healing center complete with enema
kivas and healing lasers.
4. The Lake. Freshwater lake complete
with paddle boat rental, tea pavillion and prediluvian megafauna.
The habitat in perpetual spin (assisted
by the Forward Unit) creating internal gravity set at 0.8.
The CV is also set on a perpetual
intra-system vector between the grange points hitting all of the
major asteroids on the route in a slow annual route. It is impossible
under the current Cantonment level of advancement (TL 13) to build
power plants and jump systems large enough to be used on a Boloerium.
External structures include:
1. The Forward Unit or “Spinner”.
The original complex set up at the aft of the asteroid to excavate
the asteroid and importantly to to create its original spin with
chemical propulsion systems (and which today serve as an emergency or
correction system).
2. The Main Gate. An exterior complex
of docking gates, observation decks, warehouses, schlocky gift shops
and elevators to the interior.
3. The Pleasure Dome. A domed space to
use “party as a verb.” Includes a small personal airlock and all
the space mollusk tripdust one can hope for. Defenestrations are
purely optional.
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