Warden' Log #2 - Spoilers for Dead Planet
With the Red Sun Alpha's computer systems now fully functional, the crew successfully wakes their marine, Private Carl, from cryosleep. He is disoriented and confused at first - as always happens after waking from the icy slumber - but he soon comes to grips with the challenges they are facing.
The crew has decided to dock and board the nearby ship. It still pulses with strange energy that seems to be sustaining its power, and they determine it has arrived here only weeks before they. Some of the crew hopes to find other drifters to ally with. Others fear the same.
AKT-0 runs the proper scans and determines the ship's atmosphere is breathable, and Elijah successfully docks the ship, finally getting close enough to read the ships name: Alexis.
The crew enters the Alexis with caution, and they are greeted by flickering blue lights - the emergency illumination system - and skittering beneath the floors away from them and under a wall. Elijah makes a call out on his shortwave comms. He hears nothing in return.
Exploration begins, and the first room the crew finds is the crew chief's quarters. The chief is dead, and Dr. McKraken thinks he's been this way about three weeks. The odor is strong, so they rifle through his belongings looking for clues, snatch a few trinkets, and move on.
They find a mildly damaged life support unit and a dented airlock.
They open it.
A menagerie of crawling, clicking things shred each other on the floor of this science lab. Like slime-covered roaches the size of house cats, the fight to the death and cannibalize their dead. They don't notice the party, so AKT-0 closes the airlock.
Private Carl wants to rush back in and squash them. He has been learning a new form of martial arts he discovered on his ancient media drive. He carries a zettabyte flash drive on his belt with many visual media from humanity's past.
His low ammunition supply inhibits him.
AKT-0 wants to get in so she can access the ship's computer and search for errors and navigation data.
The four decide together to wait for the noise to die down and kill the one that remains. Shouldn't be much of a fight.
10 minutes pass, and the fervor on the other side of the door finally grinds to halt with on final sickening squish. The airlock opens. There is one crawler left. There are no bodies.
Carl fires a couple rounds and AKT-0 decommissions the bug with her trusty crowbar.
They examine the room, but unfortunately the computer systems in this room have been destroyed, presumably by whatever burst through the vent.
The party heads back to where they entered from and heads the other direction, having exhausted all the apparent options in the previous direction.
Down this long hallway they find a ladder that leads to the other levels of the ship, and two airlocks. One on the left and one on the right.
Elijah uses his locator to determine the source of the strange energy. It is in the room directly left of them.
The crew believes that this strange energy could be emanating from a functioning jumpdrive that is not in containment - its energy not being directed to a ship.
They open the airlock and see the dreadful relic made of twisted metal.
IF YOU ARE ONE OF MY PLAYERS, DO NOT READ:
I decided to shake up the relic a little after an initial mistake. I forgot the part about the corpses touching it and kneeling around it (WHICH I THINK IS SUPER COOL), and I want to up the ante on this relic, and as you'll see the crew finds away to remove the relic from the ship after it opens to release the Alpha Gaunt while they are in the room. This will remove a lot of the suspense from the rest of the ship crawl, so I am going to have the relic keep returning to its spot in the cargo hold, and gathering more of the ships corpses to it each time.
See, the way I am running the module, the Alexis is on low power because of the energy of the relic, so now that the crew has removed it, power will quickly drain from the ship. They will notice this when they access the computers. However, at some point the power will start rising again, and they will hear doors opening and closing, footsteps on other levels, etc. These are the corpses being drawn to the relic.
This will create a cool puzzle that I haven't determined the solution for yet.
How do they get rid of the relic for good?
OK PLAYERS COME BACK.
As they investigate the cargo hold, discovering its skeleton lasercutter suits, construction vehicles, and dig equipment,
Black tentacles spring forth from the glowing monument.
A fissure opens like a white hot burn in the atmosphere.
And shambles forth the Alpha Gaunt.
Corpses flair and click their jaws.
The relics tentacles caress the walls and floor threatening to take the party in their terrible embrace.
An ear splitting scream comes from a gape in the Alpha Gaunt - a mouth where a collarbone should be, and hundreds of solid rods of what looks like graphite where a head should be. Leather skin and six dripping claws.
AKT-0 keels over unresponsive, and Dr. McKraken rushes the android out the room, desperately trying to reboot.
The pilot and the marine stay to fight the monster.
Carl fires a few impotent rounds before the Gaunt lifts him into the air and drains his mind and body of their will and capacity to live.
Elijah rushes to a skeleton lasercutter suit and mounts up.
Carl sprays the monster with bullets.
The Gaunt takes his gun and throws it away.
Elijah fires the laser cutters in short bursts, trying to avoid damaging the ship's hull.
Carl throws grenade after grenade down the dreadful gape, screaming frantically for help.
At last, when Carl's mind and body were almost completely deteriorated, the beast is filleted by laser and falls to the ground, but not before its mere presence sends the marine into hallucinatory delusions.
More gaunt creatures pour through the portal, most of them killed by Carl and Elijah, who was stomping on them with the skeleton suit. One of them - a crawler - is tranquilized by the doctor who plans to study it on their ship.
Seeing that this relic is a gate for dangerous and mind-breaking things, the crew decides to rid themselves of it. The others leave, and Elijah attaches his skeleton walker to the floor with its high-powered magboots. He opens the cargo door, and all the contents of the cargo hold are thrust into space, the relic spilling bits of flesh and shattered sanity as it floats away.
Elijah, Carl, McKraken, and AKT-0 regroup in the hallway.
They are all pretty shaken up, but they want to keep moving and find the command center of the ship so they can figure out what is going on. As they see it, retreating to the ship will just prolong the inevitable.
They head up the ladder to the top floor.
Carl pokes his head out of the chute and finds more crawlers - some of these dripping with acid that hisses and squeals as it corrodes the floor.
He throws a grenade (leaving him with on one) to the left where there are more.
Meat flies overhead as the rest of the crawlers scurry to the other side of this hallway closed off by an airlock at each end.
Carl unloads a magazine, reducing their numbers to two.
He sees his moment.
Carl bursts from the ladder and runs toward the crawlers. He wants to put the ancient martial arts he has been studying to the test.
He lifts one of the house-cat-sized bugs by the head and puts it in a head lock at his shoulder, its torso hanging over his back. It is still disoriented by the blast. He falls to the ground, slamming its head against his shoulder as he shouts, "R.K.O. out of nowhere!". The other he shoves between his legs, proceeding to flip its body up to eye level and slamming it against the ground.
A textbook Batista Bomb.
End of Warden's Log #2
The crew has decided to dock and board the nearby ship. It still pulses with strange energy that seems to be sustaining its power, and they determine it has arrived here only weeks before they. Some of the crew hopes to find other drifters to ally with. Others fear the same.
AKT-0 runs the proper scans and determines the ship's atmosphere is breathable, and Elijah successfully docks the ship, finally getting close enough to read the ships name: Alexis.
The crew enters the Alexis with caution, and they are greeted by flickering blue lights - the emergency illumination system - and skittering beneath the floors away from them and under a wall. Elijah makes a call out on his shortwave comms. He hears nothing in return.
Exploration begins, and the first room the crew finds is the crew chief's quarters. The chief is dead, and Dr. McKraken thinks he's been this way about three weeks. The odor is strong, so they rifle through his belongings looking for clues, snatch a few trinkets, and move on.
They find a mildly damaged life support unit and a dented airlock.
They open it.
A menagerie of crawling, clicking things shred each other on the floor of this science lab. Like slime-covered roaches the size of house cats, the fight to the death and cannibalize their dead. They don't notice the party, so AKT-0 closes the airlock.
Private Carl wants to rush back in and squash them. He has been learning a new form of martial arts he discovered on his ancient media drive. He carries a zettabyte flash drive on his belt with many visual media from humanity's past.
His low ammunition supply inhibits him.
AKT-0 wants to get in so she can access the ship's computer and search for errors and navigation data.
The four decide together to wait for the noise to die down and kill the one that remains. Shouldn't be much of a fight.
10 minutes pass, and the fervor on the other side of the door finally grinds to halt with on final sickening squish. The airlock opens. There is one crawler left. There are no bodies.
Carl fires a couple rounds and AKT-0 decommissions the bug with her trusty crowbar.
They examine the room, but unfortunately the computer systems in this room have been destroyed, presumably by whatever burst through the vent.
The party heads back to where they entered from and heads the other direction, having exhausted all the apparent options in the previous direction.
Down this long hallway they find a ladder that leads to the other levels of the ship, and two airlocks. One on the left and one on the right.
Elijah uses his locator to determine the source of the strange energy. It is in the room directly left of them.
The crew believes that this strange energy could be emanating from a functioning jumpdrive that is not in containment - its energy not being directed to a ship.
They open the airlock and see the dreadful relic made of twisted metal.
IF YOU ARE ONE OF MY PLAYERS, DO NOT READ:
I decided to shake up the relic a little after an initial mistake. I forgot the part about the corpses touching it and kneeling around it (WHICH I THINK IS SUPER COOL), and I want to up the ante on this relic, and as you'll see the crew finds away to remove the relic from the ship after it opens to release the Alpha Gaunt while they are in the room. This will remove a lot of the suspense from the rest of the ship crawl, so I am going to have the relic keep returning to its spot in the cargo hold, and gathering more of the ships corpses to it each time.
See, the way I am running the module, the Alexis is on low power because of the energy of the relic, so now that the crew has removed it, power will quickly drain from the ship. They will notice this when they access the computers. However, at some point the power will start rising again, and they will hear doors opening and closing, footsteps on other levels, etc. These are the corpses being drawn to the relic.
This will create a cool puzzle that I haven't determined the solution for yet.
How do they get rid of the relic for good?
OK PLAYERS COME BACK.
As they investigate the cargo hold, discovering its skeleton lasercutter suits, construction vehicles, and dig equipment,
Black tentacles spring forth from the glowing monument.
A fissure opens like a white hot burn in the atmosphere.
And shambles forth the Alpha Gaunt.
Corpses flair and click their jaws.
The relics tentacles caress the walls and floor threatening to take the party in their terrible embrace.
An ear splitting scream comes from a gape in the Alpha Gaunt - a mouth where a collarbone should be, and hundreds of solid rods of what looks like graphite where a head should be. Leather skin and six dripping claws.
AKT-0 keels over unresponsive, and Dr. McKraken rushes the android out the room, desperately trying to reboot.
The pilot and the marine stay to fight the monster.
Carl fires a few impotent rounds before the Gaunt lifts him into the air and drains his mind and body of their will and capacity to live.
Elijah rushes to a skeleton lasercutter suit and mounts up.
Carl sprays the monster with bullets.
The Gaunt takes his gun and throws it away.
Elijah fires the laser cutters in short bursts, trying to avoid damaging the ship's hull.
Carl throws grenade after grenade down the dreadful gape, screaming frantically for help.
At last, when Carl's mind and body were almost completely deteriorated, the beast is filleted by laser and falls to the ground, but not before its mere presence sends the marine into hallucinatory delusions.
More gaunt creatures pour through the portal, most of them killed by Carl and Elijah, who was stomping on them with the skeleton suit. One of them - a crawler - is tranquilized by the doctor who plans to study it on their ship.
Seeing that this relic is a gate for dangerous and mind-breaking things, the crew decides to rid themselves of it. The others leave, and Elijah attaches his skeleton walker to the floor with its high-powered magboots. He opens the cargo door, and all the contents of the cargo hold are thrust into space, the relic spilling bits of flesh and shattered sanity as it floats away.
Elijah, Carl, McKraken, and AKT-0 regroup in the hallway.
They are all pretty shaken up, but they want to keep moving and find the command center of the ship so they can figure out what is going on. As they see it, retreating to the ship will just prolong the inevitable.
They head up the ladder to the top floor.
Carl pokes his head out of the chute and finds more crawlers - some of these dripping with acid that hisses and squeals as it corrodes the floor.
He throws a grenade (leaving him with on one) to the left where there are more.
Meat flies overhead as the rest of the crawlers scurry to the other side of this hallway closed off by an airlock at each end.
Carl unloads a magazine, reducing their numbers to two.
He sees his moment.
Carl bursts from the ladder and runs toward the crawlers. He wants to put the ancient martial arts he has been studying to the test.
He lifts one of the house-cat-sized bugs by the head and puts it in a head lock at his shoulder, its torso hanging over his back. It is still disoriented by the blast. He falls to the ground, slamming its head against his shoulder as he shouts, "R.K.O. out of nowhere!". The other he shoves between his legs, proceeding to flip its body up to eye level and slamming it against the ground.
A textbook Batista Bomb.
End of Warden's Log #2
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