So I'm making a campaign that I'll be running with some friends once it's done. I've got the core concept down and the objectives they need to complete, as well as the results of them succeeding or failing in those objectives. However there's still a heck of a lot more details to fill in.
I have a co-writer who I've been brainstorming ideas with but I figured I'd put up my concepts so far up here and see if anyone had any ideas to expand on it. I figure with a whole community of other players and gamemasters there ought to be some ideas I wouldn't have thought of on my own, and if there's a chance I can make my end result a better module for my players, it's worth the effort
Anyone is also free to use these concepts for themselves, though if you actually want to play this module you may want to wait until I've made a working version of the adventure and have everything organized and whatnot. If you want to take the concepts and go in a different direction though then be my guest
Alright then, without further ado, let's start laying out what I've got here
Plot hook - At the beginning of the fall, a certain habitat (name to be determined) vanished without a trace from its location in the asteroid belt. The habitat was once the technological hub of the solar system, all of the most renowned scientists lived there, and most advances in scientific fields occurred there. The habitat itself had been formed through an unrivaled marvel of engineering, selectively crashing specific asteroids together to form larger ones, eventually forming a small dwarf planet that the habitat was then built on and inside of.
Due to it's advanced technology and accumulation of humanity's greatest minds, this habitat was one of the first places transhumanity looked to when The Fall began, only to discover it was mysteriously missing. Nobody knows where it went or how it went there, though the general consensus is that the TITANS must have had something to do with it, the prevailing theory being that it was devoured by a nanoswarm in a preemptive strike to destroy transhumanity's greatest hope before the war began.
Now, 10 years after the fall (or however many years you set your campaign in after the fall) Firewall has detected the missing habitat in the outermost reaches of the solar system. The players are sent to investigate with the following objectives
1) discover why the habitat disappeared in the first place
2) discover why the habitat has now suddenly reappeared
3) recover as much technology from the habitat as possible, despite 10 years having passed since the fall, the technology on the habitat is still leagues more advanced than most of transhumanity's tech, if nothing else, the blueprints for the system of thrusters and calculations required to make a dwarf planet out of asteroids is of great interest
The Truth, and The Twist - Upon landing on the habitat, the PCs will discover most buildings and areas are largely inaccessible due to power having been cut from most of the habitat. Naturally they will need to head to the primary power station to turn the power back on so they can continue their mission, but in doing so they inadvertently open Pandora's box and activate the greatest X-risk transhumanity has faced since the TITANS themselves
The reason the habitat disappeared in the first place was indeed due to the TITANS, but not because they wished to destroy it. The habitat was taken over by a TITAN and the inhabitants were either killed or turned into exsurgents. The habitat was then removed from the solar system by the very thrusters that had formed it, enhanced by strange alien technology that was presumably of TITAN origin.
Once safely outside of the area where transhumanity could detect it, the TITAN set it's army of exsurgents to work. The habitat was gradually transformed into a battleship of unprecedented scale. The TITANS knew they would have no trouble taking Earth, however purging transhumanity from their space colonies would prove more difficult, as getting themselves or their creations onto the colonies would be greatly hindered by the vastness of space. Transhumanity was on high alert, and any normal vessel they sent to carry their creations or to establish a link to hack the habitat would be blown to dust long before reaching an effective range to invade. This dwarf planet sized battleship was the answer to this issue, as no defense system in existence would be able to stand before it.
The process of transforming the habitat into the ship was going smoothly, until the TITANS all vanished, including the one on the habitat in question. The exsurgents, without their master around to direct them, obediently continued their assigned tasks, and automated systems continued construction as best they could.
5 years after construction began, the ship was mostly functional, but far from complete. With the TITAN gone however, the automated systems began to fail, and construction began to slow to a halt. Over the next 5 years about 3/4ths of the exsurgent population died off for one reason or another. The remaining 25% survived by evolving into a bio-mechanical xenomorph lifeform linked to the ship's systems, and entering a low power hibernation state. Construction continued for another 2 years after their hibernation began, making the ship combat ready and fully constructing the engines for its return, at which point an error in one of the systems cut the power and fully stopped all further construction.
And so the ship remained in the very outskirts of the solar system, destined to drift there for eternity. That is until one of the following trigger events occurred (choose based on your personal preference)
1) A hapless explorer stumbled across the ship, and accidentally activated the return protocols for the ship to begin flying back towards transhumanity to 'invade'
2) An automatic system had been programmed to initiate the return protocols after a certain amount of time or under some other conditions that recently came about, thus beginning it's flight back into detection range
The rest of this I'm attaching in a word document because it's very long for the format of this forum and I don't want to overwhelm people. I'll make one document laying out the general outline of the mission objectives as they stand now and what happens within them, how things play out if the PCs succeed/fail, etc...
I'll create a separate document including some other features that wouldn't have made sense to go into while explaining the plot.
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