Flyover Country: Chapter 8

"Investigation" by Maxime BiBi

Continued from Chapter 7.

* * *

Faisal Rao, director of the Sokhna office of GeOpis, is as good as his word. The PCs have a big-wheeled all-terrain transporter at their disposal, plus a cover identity that'll get them within mere kilometers of Nana Malik's estate before they have to get sneaky about it. They've loaded a bunch of weaponry, too, including a sniper rifle. They suit up: Light armor, filter masks for the sometimes-unpleasant atmosphere, and hooded jackets or ponchos for protection against acid rain and ashfall.

Krissa has used her precognitive Oracle ability to scout things out. The path of least resistance, an old service road to the west, seems to lead to an ambush; Krissa had a searing vision of the transporter being ripped open by an anti-vehicle laser and the crew sheltering, pinned down, behind a cyclopean hunk of concrete by the desolate roadside.

They resolve to take a different approach: They'll drive out to a GeOpis monitoring station near the edge of the restricted area, drop in on the scientists there, and then maneuver down into the tangle of ravines and volcanic hotspots between the station and the abandoned suburb; there's another old road through there. Much of it has collapsed in seisms or been buried by landslides, but some tunneled segments appear to be intact, and taking this route will obscure the PCs' movements from any observers.

Along the way, as they exit one of the tunnel sections, they're hailed by radio. The man claims to have been ambushed and stranded out here; he says he's a homesteader who was trying to squat in one of the abandoned estates, but was run off by bandits. Mistrustful, the crew refuses to meet him, but they do promise to drop some supplies for him if he's still there when they return to the city. They pass a smaller ATV, carved apart by a heavy laser like the one in Krissa's vision, which partially corroborates the stranger's story, but the players remain divided about whether to help—maybe he's in league with the bandits. Maybe the ATV belonged to somebody he killed.

* * *

The suburb is on a long, fairly smooth slope that rises gradually to a soft ridgeline in the north and east. To the west, it sinks a little farther to a dry riverbed and then rises across much rougher terrain toward a higher, more jagged ridge. To the south are the tangle of ravines, pocked with fumaroles and scarred by landslides and ashfall, that the PCs have just traversed. High points several kilometers away are visible to the west, but sightlines in the other directions are much shorter. They pass a few other houses on their way to Malik's, and a few more are partially visible off to the southeast and northwest—the grounds were arranged so that each estate was invisible to the others, but with the vegetation that screened them from one another reduced to desiccated stubble and a few charred tree trunks, the illusion is broken. Still, it's a pretty isolated spot.

Mustang and Krissa disembark to scout ahead on foot; while they observe the Malik estate, and the rest of the crew trains the transporter's limited sensors on it, they are hailed yet again. This time, their interlocutor is a middle-aged woman, and she's up front about ambushing them: Her team, she says, have a rocket launcher trained on the PCs' transporter, so no funny business. They don't want any trouble, she explains, and aren't trying to hold the PCs up—she wants their help, in fact. She just doesn't want to negotiate from a position of weakness. The players, of course, don't like this; Mustang and Krissa promptly begin stealthily maneuvering for a firing position. The rest of the crew, however, follow the woman's instructions and emerge, hands in the air, from the transporter.

The woman, who introduces herself as Lorena, and her team, five in total, are also here to loot the Malik estate. They approached on foot, and their technician tried to interface with the security system and shut it down. She thinks she managed to isolate it from the regional network, but in the process, she alerted a veritable swarm of security bots to their presence. They disabled a few of the machines, but one of their number was badly injured, and they beat a retreat. They don't have a medic, unfortunately, and their comrade will die if he doesn't get assistance soon. Do the PCs have any medical expertise? Any stims? They can offer weapons in trade, and they're willing to cooperate in a renewed attack on the house. Time is of the essence, after all—they're pretty sure they cut the house's system off without tripping any alarms, but who knows. Security might already be on the way. And there are bandits around.

The PCs are always ready to wheel and deal. How many rocket launchers do these guys have? Can they get one? Two rockets to go with it? Scratch that—make it three. Lorena is amenable. And they have a shopping list, Sarai explains. There are five things they need from the house. “Six, actually,” says Krissa. She's used her Oracle power again, imagining a future where they take all the loot for themselves and get the pieces appraised, so she knows that there's one painting in Malik's collection more valuable than any of the items Stephanidis sent them for. That, too, is fine with Lorena; there should be plenty to go around.

Krissa takes the injured man, Sunil, into the transporter to work her biopsionic magic away from prying eyes. She doesn't merely stabilize him but gets him on his feet again—Lorena's group probably suspects the use of a pretech cosmetic—and the two parties team up for the heist. Lorena throws the still-tender Sunil's arm over her shoulder and helps him limp his way toward their group's transporter, which they parked in a hollow nearby, out of sight from the house and most of the surrounding area. The other three squeeze in and ride along with the PCs.

* * *

The house itself is grand in an austere, rectilinear way. It's just two stories with a basement, but its footprint is huge. It faces south, so the transporter is approaching the front. There, the lower level is nearly flush with the ground—the driveway slopes down only slightly to two big garage doors that open straight into the basement. The first floor stands at ground level on the northern side but is well above grade to the south and must be approached via a long staircase. There's a first-floor deck around the west side and southwest corner, and a second-floor deck on the north and east sides. The two aboveground levels are clad in a durable glass-like polymer, wrapping most of the space in floor-to-ceiling windows, and a few more private areas in translucent panels. The security bots, canny enough to avoid being picked off from range, have retreated into the house.

BQ drives right up to the house's garage entrance; the six PCs, supplemented with a little NPC firepower, rush in and make short work of the remaining bots. The two groups begin their inventory of the house, and the PCs realize that the three NPCs who came along with them are little more than kids—19, maybe 20 years old. There's plenty of stuff for their group: Sixteen notable ceramic pieces, four more major paintings and a host of lesser ones, a couple of big sculptures, a pretty nice wine collection, and more.

All of the pre-Scream objects and alien artifacts Stephanidis wanted are here too, proudly displayed in vitrines in a small gallery: a collection of bronze and electrum implements that look like darts and scalpels; a levitating force plate and control glove; a toy composed of 26 miniature cubes that can be rotated, nine at a time, around three different axes (like a Rubik's cube, but with a uniform metal finish), with each configuration causing the device to play a different tune; a shifari polearm and an ornate shifari breastplate; and some bony-looking bits and pieces of betaal manufacture. BQ immediately starts smashing and grabbing. The three kids start stacking up paintings and vases in the garage, waiting for their group's transporter to pull up. Outside, not far from the house, there's an explosion.

It's the bandits from Krissa's earlier vision, and the anti-vehicle laser mounted on their armored car has just obliterated Lorena, Sunil, and their vehicle. The players' transporter, parked right up against the lowest level of the house, is sheltered from the armored car by a berm, but the car is coming down the slope to the west and maneuvering for a clear shot. It's over a kilometer away, out of range of nearly all of the PCs' weapons. Mustang grabs her new rocket launcher and slips outside to take a shot at the armored car from behind the berm; Batias takes his sniper rifle out on the second-story deck to try to cover her from any dismounted bandits. Two dismounted bandits who have approached the house from the north duly draw a bead on him; one sends a mag rifle round ripping through his meager armor, taking a (non-essential) chunk of him with it. He falls prone, getting out of their line of sight.

Mustang's first shot at the armored car connects squarely with the vehicle but fails to disable or destroy it; her second rocket is a near miss. Good thing they bartered for three of these! Heavy laser blasts spray dirt, dust, and chunks of concrete all around. Mustang heaves the launcher over her makeshift parapet a third time, aims carefully, fires…and blows the car to smithereens.

With help from the three young NPCs, the others have all this while been shoving everything they can into the transporter's cargo hold. There's a heated but brief debate about whether to dispatch the two bandits to the north so that they can finish looting the place at their leisure, but pragmatic heads prevail: There might be more bandits, and at any rate the two who have Batias pinned down are firing from cover with weapons that slightly outrange, and significantly outclass, the laser rifles that represent the crew's best long-range weapons (other than the sniper rifle trapped on the deck upstairs with Batias). Besides, they've got a lot of valuable loot already, there's only so much room for it, and with the bandits' vehicle knocked out, the transporter represents a distinct advantage mobility advantage. They should just leave.

Unwilling to retreat back into the house, whether out of fear of being perforated while fumbling with the door or for other, less explicable reasons, Batias insists that he will rappel down from the deck, run around the west side of the house, and hop aboard the transporter there. Nobody can persuade him otherwise, and nobody's willing to go and physically get him, or get into a shootout with the bandits for the sake of covering his withdrawal, so off he goes. Unsurprisingly, he gets shot again, and hurt pretty badly this time, but he manages to lurch to his way into cover around the side of the house, stumble to the transporter, and submit to Krissa's healing touch.

The PCs don't forget to stop and drop off some supplies and a spare oxygen tank for the guy who claimed to be a stranded homesteader…but Batias, ever mistrustful, shoots the oxygen tank from the back ramp of the transporter as they drive away, destroying it and probably damaging the supplies. The guy was in cahoots with the bandits! He's sure of it!

They pass by the GeOpis monitoring station on their way out of the restricted area and pay the scientists another visit, passing around a couple nice bottles of liquor and thanking them for their assistance, assuring them that Director Rao will be glad to hear they were so helpful. Their return to Sokhna is otherwise uneventful.

* * *

This was the first proper adventure I mapped out and planned after the construction-site caper back on Morrow, and it was a nice change of pace after a bunch of free-form wandering and improvised social encounters. I drew up a simple map of the area, rolled up some hazards and potential complications (bandits, rival looters, a stranded civilian—yeah, he really was just an innocent squatter—some scientists, a security post to the east that never came into play), showed the players potential routes they could take to and from the estate, and let them loose.

It worked out pretty well! Their hostile and mistrustful natures nearly got the better of them (a loud minority really wanted to counter-ambush the other looters) but they ended up doing a good job tempering their classic TTRPG player greed and bloodlust with pragmatism. The bandits were formidable, armed with much better equipment than the PCs had at this point (mag rifles and an anti-vehicle laser) and attacking from advantageous positions. I'm not entirely sure how the PCs would've fared if one of the looters' rocket launchers hadn't ended up in the hands of a warrior-class PC. But I'm certain they'd have figured something out!

Next: Chapter 9. 

Flyover Country: Faction Turn 2 & News Roundup

Celistic Concept Art by Maxim Revin

The pace of the first faction turn, with only one day separating each action from the next, worked fine to kick off the campaign but was never going to be sustainable in the long run. It didn't make sense with the game mechanics—Capital Fleets conceivably could bounce around the map going six hexes in a few days—and it would've meant a flood of background news too fast for the players to keep up with. Plus, it was a little too rigid.

My solution: roll a d4 after each faction's move and have that many days pass before the next one. A full faction turn could still conceivably happen in a week, but it could be as long as 24 days, and the average will be 15. It seemed, when I decided on this, that big cycles of astro-political events lasting about two weeks would work well with the pace of play; the PCs could make a whole 10-day interstellar voyage and not arrive at their destination feeling that history had passed them by while they cruised (or hurtled, or howled) through metaspace. As it happened, BQ's superlative piloting skills ended up drastically shortening the PCs' travel times, but this pace has worked nicely nevertheless.

So what's been happening across the Sector while the PCs cut a swath of criminal mayhem and destruction rude behavior and disorderly conduct across the Commonwealth of Free Worlds? (Consult this handy-dandy map as an aide-memoire.)

* * *

I rolled for faction order and my d4-day gaps in between actions for the second turn. The dice decreed that the Morrovian Milieu would act first (followed by a one-day break), then the Commonwealth (plus three days), the New Terran Empire (plus one day), the Aureus Meridian (plus two days), the Kyran Directory (plus three days), and finally Seneschal Systems (plus a four-day break until the beginning of turn three). A 20-day turn, pretty close to the anticipated average.

The Milieu's starting goal was Inside Enemy Territory: “Have a number of stealthed assets on worlds with other planetary governments equal to your Cunning score.” (Their Secretive tag gives all of their assets stealth, so this seemed like a layup.) Accordingly, they choose to use their existing assets' abilities. Their new Harvesters gain them one extra FacCred (on top of their base income of three), and their Freighter Contract comes home to Morrow. They now have three stealthed assets in the Betharan system; when the Commonwealth accomplish their goal of annexing the planet, the Milieu will immediately be 75% of the way toward their own goal. If they buy a fourth asset next turn, they'll have all their ducks in a row—it seems like the leading families of the Milieu are unanimously betting on accommodating themselves to regime change rather than maneuvering to keep Morrow independent.

The Commonwealth draw their substantial income, including a little extra from Party Machines, and pay the burdensome maintenance on their mighty Capital Fleets. They too will use their assets, moving Capital Fleets and Tripwire Cells to Betharan (paying a FacCred for the latter with Extended Theater) and the slower Space Marines to Usil. At the end of the next turn, Morrow will join the Commonwealth, and the Commonwealth will have achieved their faction goal. The players witness these movements firsthand, as Commonwealth warships head toward Morrow and begin establishing a defensive perimeter and intelligence operations, but they get a short news bulletin too:

In regional news, IPBC reports that advance elements of the Commonwealth Militia Navy are on their way to Betharan alongside representatives from the Ministry of External Relations. The task force, led by the battlecruisers Justice and Unity, will assess the security situation in the system and establish a formal embassy with the Pan-Morrovian Government as the process of Morrow's accession to the Commonwealth begins.

Next door to Betharan, in Penrose, the NTE find themselves in a precarious situation. Their Blockade Fleets don't have enough strength to knock out the Meridian's Demagogues, and those Demagogues and the Lawyers working alongside them pose a serious threat to the Fleets. Discretion, the NTE commander decides, is the better part of valor; the Blockade Fleets pull back to Arktos (Postech Industry in Tovuz also delivers an extra FacCred to the faction). These developments are days old at this point in the campaign—the PCs are on Opis, preparing to loot Nana Malik's country house—but because they took place three systems distant, the news is still a couple days away:

The latest development in the Penrose Crisis indicates a temporary lull in the violence, but portends a serious escalation to come: NTE forces have withdrawn from the system, returning to their bases in Arktos. They cite an untenable security situation on Temenos and the hostility of the “puppet regime” on Delphi, claiming that agents of the Meridian have launched an “undeclared war” against the Empire and vowing to respond in kind. Munda and Juma will reportedly move to a war footing, with the Archon promising to bolster the fleet and “root out the terrorists and saboteurs who infest Penrose.”

The Meridian's position in Penrose, by contrast, looks strong; they decide to press their advantage against the NTE, using their Covert Transit Net to move Psychic Assassins from Mondrian to Arktos in pursuit of the retreating Blockade Fleets. The NTE's Pirates faction tag imposes a one-FacCred tax on this movement; presumably, the Meridian's special operatives have arrived incognito via “smugglers and gray-market freighter captains,” but the latter still had to pay the usual fees and duties on whatever their registered cargo was. This, of course, would not seem to be newsworthy.

The Directory are nearly unassailable on their own territory (at least so long as the Commonwealth's Capital Fleets don't get involved), now have overwhelming superiority over Seneschal in Istanu, and even have a pretext for taking action against them—however thin a pretext “their Commodities Brokers tried to get our Lobbyists pushed out of Penrose” might be. They have everything to gain by attacking, and very little to lose…so they attack, and we finally have some real action on this turn. Kyran Venture Capital drops the Seneschal Base of Influence to three hit points, and the Directory's Strike Fleets easily finish it off, destroying the BoI and dealing a punishing 15 points of damage to the Seneschal faction (this brings the Directory one-sixth of the way to their goal).

What does an attack by Venture Capital and Strike Fleets on an undefended BoI look like? There are probably a few different ways to explain it, or at least a few different ways to order the events, but I think what makes the most sense is an all-out economic, legal, and administrative attack on Seneschal's operations and local subsidiaries—a wave of hostile takeovers, essentially—followed by an “anti-terror” campaign to knock out whatever actual (minor) military assets Seneschal had in the system and any locals sympathetic to Seneschal or hostile to their new Kyran overlords. As with events in Penrose, this has already happened by the time the PCs roll out into the hills beyond Sokhna, but the news is a few days away from Usil:

Conflicting stories are emerging from the Istanu system.

Per AKN, a number of Salafaian enterprises heretofore controlled by Khabaran corporations were recently acquired, in a routine and legal manner, by a Magonian venture-capital outfit; upon taking possession of these companies' operations, however, the new owners were reportedly subjected to a campaign of sabotage, intimidation, and terror by Khabaran mercenaries and stay-behind elements of Seneschal's security division. Local forces of the Kyran Armada had no choice but to intervene and disperse these hostile operatives in order to safeguard the life and property of the civilian population. The Directory's highest local authority, Lord Proprietor Ibrahim Smith of Seven Miracles Station, issued a statement condemning the violence. “Cloak-and-dagger operations carried out by private security contractors may be business as usual on Khabara,” he said, “but they will not be tolerated within the Directory's sphere of influence.”

In contrast, Durian News+ reports that the contested acquisitions—a coordinated wave of hostile takeovers—were illegal under Khabaran law; the Magonian “corporate raiders” acted surreptitiously via straw buyers who were not properly registered as agents of a foreign power. In accordance with the law and the directives of their supervisors, the staff of the enterprises in question refused to turn over their assets and operations. Far from being directed at criminals or saboteurs, the intervention by the Kyran Armada was to force the hands of these employees, who were merely fulfilling their duties to their rightful parent companies. The Khabaran Corporate Council decries the “brazen treachery” of the Armada and “repudiates any attempt by the Kyran Directory to extend its so-called sphere of influence into Istanu.”

Seneschal are in a tricky position. The wolves are suddenly at the door, right next to their home system, but their outlying Bases of Influence represent a major liability. Losing either the BoI on Mosylon or the one in Penrose would be fatal, causing the entire faction to collapse. There's nothing to do about Mosylon other than remain on the Commonwealth's good side; it seems improbable that the Directory or any other hostile faction would be able to march all the way across Commonwealth space without meeting lethal resistance. Penrose, though, is a real hornet's nest. If Seneschal pull their Commodities Brokers back to Khabara to shore up the homeworld's defenses, its Penrose BoI is at the mercy of the other factions. The Directory's Lobbyists can't damage it, but what if the Meridian pivot from their skirmish with the NTE to kick Seneschal while they're down?

Seneschal don't have a lot of firepower at home—only the Counterintel Units are even capable of attacking or counterattacking—but they do have a lot of hit points the Kyrans would have to chew through to get at the main BoI, giving Seneschal time to raise more combat units. The company decides to hold its ground in Penrose; rather than launching a preemptive attack on the Meridian, the Commodities Brokers will try again to knock out the Kyran Lobbyists. This time, they succeed handily (this brings Seneschal one-fifth of the way to their goal). This news will arrive several days behind the previous two reports (it actually hasn't even happened yet while the PCs are in Sohkna):

The violence in Penrose has abated, at least for the time being, but the war of words continues. Reversing a position it had defended in official statements just two weeks ago, the Delphean regime abruptly expelled all lobbyists representing Kyran corporations, including representatives of AKHI itself, from Mosa City. Shortly thereafter, Mariam Demir, the Armorers' Company delegate to the Temenoan Guild Council, voted to break the Council's weeks-long deadlock on the same matter: Kyran representatives will no longer be welcome at Council chambers. Spokespersons for Seneschal Systems and the New Terran Empire welcomed this development; the Kyran Directory lodged a protest regarding the “unfair and unequal” treatment of its representatives in comparison to those of Khabaran enterprises, while Eparch Yun Saeed, the Aureus Meridian's highest-ranking cleric on Delphi, blasted the “naked graft” they claim has set these developments in motion.

And that does it for the second faction turn. The third will kick off on the 24th, but the PCs have a bunch of adventuring to do (or I have a bunch to recap, anyway) before we get there.

* * *

Amid all the faction news, I also dropped in some other items. Some were related to the PCs' backstories, some were related to the crew's jobs (or potential future work), and others were just a little set dressing. This one, for instance, which I actually shared while the PCs were still on Morrow, was mostly establishing info to set the scene on Opis, but it also related to events on Morrow and introduced the Commonwealth's legislature to the players (which might soon be relevant, given that they're about to loot an MPA's house):

Opis: PMG has received word that, following the successful evacuation of Faraskur earlier this week, debate in the Popular Assembly has turned once again to the matter of emigration. MPAs from the New Workers' Party and the Opisian Brotherhood have jointly proposed a fixed timetable for evacuating settlements in Red and Orange zones, arguing that a proactive strategy will be safer and ultimately more economical than waiting to respond to catastrophes like the Faraskur ashfall. Representatives from all four independent Rustamese parties and Jewel of Kazina spoke in opposition. Unity Party MPAs have yet not indicated their position. Other topics up for debate in the CPA in recent days have included the annexation of Morrow, in favor of which a consensus seems to be forming, and a formal end to the century-old State of Emergency, with MPAs from various minority parties still bitterly divided about whether the post-Emergency Militia should be reconstituted as a standing military, reduced in size, disbanded entirely, or otherwise.

This one, delivered around the same time, was basically pure fluff:

On Khabara, the Trilune Journal reports that public-relations agencies Zephyr and OSG have released dramatically divergent statements regarding the recent violence in Rio Claro. Zephyr claims that an accident at a Vaalbara Chemicals laboratory led to the release of an experimental gaseous psychoactive agent, driving several hundred Vaalbara employees and otherwise uninvolved civilians temporarily violently insane. OSG counters that the damage to the Vaalbara lab was the result of an attack by operatives from an unidentified PMC, and that most or all of the subsequent civilian casualties in the district were incurred by these mercenaries as they effected their escape from Vaalbara security by laying down a “reckless” volume of suppressive fire. A spokesperson for the KWC Bureau of Investigation promised a swift, unbiased investigation into these claims.

Amid the faction news above came some “Hey, remember that stuff you did a few sessions ago? It's still important!” reminders, plus a reference to an NPC from Mustang's past who might become important to the PCs way, way in the future:

In a public broadcast from their capital, Narawad, the Sylvan government calls on Prince Armand of Konyr to lay down arms. “The recognition of the People's Republic of Konyr by the Provisional Pan-Morrovian Government, and the recent invitation from the Commonwealth for the PPMG to form a permanent federal state and ratify the Commonwealth Charter,” says Narawad, “make it clear that the so-called Principality of Konyr is an illegitimate government, and furthermore that the continuance of the royalist insurrection threatens the stability and long-term prosperity of the entire planet.” The Sylvans invite Armand to abdicate, offer assurances of full amnesty for him and his enlisted troops, and guarantee fair trials to those of his officers accused of crimes and atrocities during the recent fighting. If he does not surrender, they warn, “it may be incumbent on the Republic of Sylva to conduct a police action to disperse the insurrectionists” in advance of the anticipated Pan-Morrovian Constitutional Convention.

In lighter news, from Alzuhr: Mere weeks after the conclusion of their grueling five-planet Avalanche of Annihilation tour, Kingsley is back in the studio working on the follow-up to Interred in Hyperborean Permafrost. Industry watchers hint at conflict in Kingsley's camp, however, with their producers pushing for them to double down on the melodic sound of smash hit “Crypts of Eternal Winter,” whereas the legendarily temperamental artist is reportedly determined to return to the grittier, more challenging sound of earlier albums like Banners on the Horizon and Cimmerian Desolation.

This was all probably a little too much, a little too fast, but I do think the players got a few things out of it, and it's all fun to write (reading these bulletins aloud in an old-timey newscaster voice helps on both counts). Slowing the pace of news alerts in sessions past this point in the campaign has helped them absorb a bit more of the worldbuilding and factional-conflict stuff, I think.

Run River

"Alien Construct Interior" by Alan Dickinson

 

I didn't really stick with the whole Lore 24 thing last year, but the meta-setting I was fleshing out there continues to rattle around in my head. The basic idea, again, is a distant future where an Orange Catholic sort of taboo against “thinking machines” and other wickedness precludes transhumanism, artificial general intelligence, and advanced computer technology in general. No artificial gravity or FTL travel either—or at least none that humans can control. As long as we're willing to stick to one solar system (or can have fun with years-long time jumps as characters blast their way from star to star at high subluminal speeds), we've got the makings of some old-fashioned (and obviously very Dune-flavored) space adventures.

If we need to break those rules and do a little FTL travel, though, it ought to be strange and to obey inscrutable rules that the humans in the setting can't understand. To meet this need, I came up with “barises,” ancient or alien vehicles that superluminally follow a semi-mappable set of routes called “the River.” Inspo for what the vessels, and the journeys, might be like comes from Indrapramit Das, Dan Simmons, Alastair Reynolds, and above all Gene Wolfe—the ship from The Urth of the New Sun is the main referent here. You want to climb aboard a freaky, possibly demonic, contraption that uses paracausal space magic to violate the laws of physics? Have some tables to roll on!

* * *

What is the exterior form of this baris?

1. A tower of some impervious material that stands at the center of a great stone circle on a windswept plain.
2. An orb of ancient metal, its pitted surface carved or stamped with obscure symbols.
3. A gleaming doorway that stands shimmering in the open, with no visible means of support.
4. A cylinder or oblong peppered with blisters and antennae, looking rather like a conventional starship.
5. A sinuous nautiloid shell seemingly carved from opalescent stone.
6. A tree-like organic form with gnarled roots and wide-reaching branches.
7. A fractal concatenation of luminous crystals in myriad bright colors.
8. Something like a bird or a seed pod or a primitive oceangoing ship: a graceful body amid a fluttering storm of sails.

What is the nature of its coming and going?

1. Imperceptible. From one moment to the next, it is simply there, out of nowhere. Just as suddenly, it is gone again.
2. It seems to condense from an infinitely diffuse cloud of particles, then dissolve again into dust when it departs.
3. It appears as a single minute point, unfurls itself to its full size, then retracts again into a minuscule singularity.
4. It warps in from an infinite distance and compresses itself into a comprehensible size, then stretches away again to infinity.
5. It arrives with a tremendous flash of light and heat and, if in an atmosphere, a deafening roar. It leaves with similar spectacle.
6. As the hour of its coming approaches, it begins to be visible from the corner of one's eye. After its going, its echo fades away.
7. It crashes in and out of our reality like a wave, its facets spilling together and breaking apart until they resolve into stillness.
8. Light warps and bends around the space where it will soon appear or has just departed. A void awaits it, or remembers it.

What is the interior structure made of?

1. Rough stone. Some pocked and porous, some ridged and folded, some hard and glossy as glass.
2. Naked metal. Ribs, struts, columns, beams, decking. Uniform or variegated. Riveted or welded or seamless.
3. Raw concrete. Monolithic, soaring. Surfaces polished smooth, ridged, or dimpled.
4. Conventional space-age polymers and ceramics. Stark white or cheerily colorful. Smooth curved planes or tessellated tiles and panels.
5. Wood. Forced into molds or planed into lumber or gnarled, tangled, and free. Living or dead, bleached or stained.
6. Other, stranger organic compounds. Chitin, bone, flesh. Oozing, pulsing, trembling, respiring.
7. It's unclear. Parts of the structure seem to be invisible or are not connected to one another.
8. Roll d6 twice and combine the results.

How is the interior decorated?

1. It's inlaid with gold and other precious metals and stones.
2. Heavy fabric is draped everywhere: curtains, banners, tented ceilings.
3. There are windows—or other portals—everywhere you look.
4. Lamps and lanterns gleam from every corner and hang from every ceiling.
5. Murals or graffiti cover every plausible surface.
6. Holographic displays blink and glow throughout the space.
7. Greenery sprouts from planters, fountains, wall hangings, or the structure itself.
8. Art and handicrafts—pottery, weavings, paintings, carvings—are displayed throughout.
9. It's not. The corridors and public spaces are starkly unadorned.
10. Roll d8 twice and combine the results.

How is the interior organized?

1. A rigid, easy-to-follow grid system.
2. A haphazard maze of twisting, turning corridors.
3. A living tangle of passages and chambers that regularly restructure and reorganize themselves.
4. Impossible topology. You can never come to the same place by the same route. Retracing your steps only gets you more lost.
5. A vast hollow space containing a number of substructures (roll d4 for each if you want them to have different styles).
6. One giant chamber or seemingly boundless plain. Functional spaces are tents, dugouts, towers.

What sounds do you hear inside?

1. Constant dripping. Water—or some other liquid—condenses everywhere or flows through the walls.
2. Howling wind. Violent air currents run through pipes, ventilation shafts, or the corridors themselves.
3. Beeping, blooping, humming, crackling. Noisy electronic machinery is all around you.
4. Chimes, bells, gongs. Slow, ringing musical tones, resonating from nearby instruments or arriving from a great distance.
5. Voices. The cheerful hubbub of a busy throng or the eerie whispers of mysterious persons forever out of sight.
6. Creaking, groaning, rumbling. The entire structure strains under unfathomable pressures or bends to reshape itself.
7. None. It's eerily silent apart from you, or something seems to muffle even the sounds you make.
8. Roll d6 twice and combine the results.

What odors do you smell inside?

1. Blood, sweat, and piss. The stuff of animal life.
2. Fragrant smoke. Incense, burning wood, well-cooked food.
3. Bright vegetal scents. Perfume or cut grass, citrus or pine.
4. Damp and rot. Wet earth, wet stone.
5. Rust, dust, and dry decay. Stale old air.
6. Acrid vapors. Electrical fires, chemical burns.
7. Something cloying, artificially sweet, unsettling.
8. Oil, grease, ink, paint, solvent. The factory floor.
9. None. It's strangely sterile.
10. Roll d8 twice and combine the results. Maybe a whiff of one amid the constant presence of the other.

What is your berth like?

1. Small but cozy. You wake unusually refreshed after each “night's” sleep.
2. Spacious but uncomfortable. A bare warehouse for you and your luggage.
3. Unimpeachably luxurious. Like staying in a fine hotel.
4. Awkwardly repurposed. Clearly used to be a kitchen, a bathroom, a lounge, a morgue, or something alien.
5. Pleasant but peculiar. Perhaps not meant for somebody of your size or general anatomy.
6. Uncanny. You never feel entirely comfortable or completely alone. Strange dreams disturb your rest.
7. A tiny slot for your body, not much bigger than a casket.
8. A common lodging, shared with several other passengers. Roll d6 for the general vibe.

How easy is it to find your way around?

1. No matter how complicated the layout may be, you somehow always know where you are and how to get where you're going.
2. It can be confusing, but there is excellent signage always within sight to help you reorient yourself.
3. You need some kind of tool or mnemonic device to keep track of your movements. A map, a compass, a skein of thread.
4. Whether you can manage on your own or not, crew members are always available and willing to assist you.
5. It's practically impossible, even with assistance, and you get hopelessly lost if you stray far from your berth.
6. Variable. Some routes are easy to learn; others elude simple understanding.

What is the nature of the crew?

1. Humans or epihumans who look more or less like you.
2. Humans or epihumans who have some novel aspect: green skin, three eyes, tails.
3. Machines with familiar forms: humanoid robots, hovering drones, and the like.
4. Humanoid beings, whether parahuman or alien or machine, with demonic aspects.
5. A hodgepodge of humans, epihumans, aliens, and machines.
6. Beings of unclear form and uncertain nature. Glowing points of light, flickering shadows, ghostly voices.

How restricted are your movements?

1. You have the run of the ship. You could go meet the Captain…if you could find the bridge.
2. Many areas are passively closed off, but they are not impossible to enter.
3. Many areas are forbidden to you, and firmly sealed or actively guarded by the crew.
4. You cannot go anywhere outside your quarters without an escort from the crew.

What areas might you find if you go exploring?

1. An area so cold you cannot explore it without a suit. The crew either guard it zealously or superstitiously avoid it.
2. A bay full of strange instruments or weapons which seem to protrude out through the hull. You do not recognize them.
3. A garden of surpassing beauty and tranquility, full of pleasant sights, sounds, and smells.
4. An abattoir of some kind, where unfamiliar animals are being drained of unfamiliar ichor.
5. A shrine or temple, scattered or piled high with offerings. If you wait long enough, you might meet a votary.
6. Some kind of barracks or storage area or gathering place for the crew. You may be unwelcome here.
7. An arena or theater of some sort—risers encircling a platform. Perhaps a fight takes place, or a dance, or a lecture.
8. An ossuary or crypt. Honored remains tucked into niches or stacked in great mountains of urns.
9. A titanic cargo hold, crisscrossed by catwalks and piled high with exotic wares.
10. A map room or observatory crowded with charts, projectors, armillary spheres, or holographic displays.
11. A dark alley or ravine or cul-de-sac, abandoned and overgrown, a dump for detritus. One being's trash…
12. An area so hot you cannot explore it without a suit. Enormous machines pump lambent molten metal.

What notable persons are among the passengers?

1. An imperial noble, traveling incognito with the smallest of retinues.
2. An arrogant arms merchant, gloating over the size and value of the cache he's brought aboard.
3. A jittery courier, never more than a few steps away from their coterie of heavily armed guards.
4. A troika of Continuum commissars in pursuit of a dangerous renegade, uncomfortable about being on a baris.
5. A troupe of performers, happy to entertain their fellow travelers with their arts.
6. A murderer, perhaps. Bodies keep appearing; passengers keep disappearing. A serial killer? An assassin?
7. An individual sealed up in a bulky, archaic space suit. They seem to be human, but refuse to shed the suit.
8. Itinerants of the Condolent Inquiry, eager to teach the Litany of Solace to those fellow travelers who do not know it.
9. A whole community of refugees or other migrants with all their worldly belongings, including livestock.
10. An esteemed scholar, assistants in tow, determined to study the vessel and its crew.
11. A surpassingly beautiful person clothed in elaborate finery who claims, discreetly, to be the true Emperor.
12. A flock of mystery cultists or other sectarians, their number diminishing day by day as the voyage goes on.
13. An old hand who claims to have sailed this route a dozen times or more and to know all the ship's secrets.
14. A band of hijackers or mutineers, plotting somehow to take control of the baris.
15. A group of travelers gone native, now permanent residents of the baris, offering services to newcomers.
16. Acolytes of the Benthic Lance, investigating some tenuous rumor or ambiguous prophecy.
17. A hunted android, desperately hoping the River will carry them to safe harbor among the Recusant Worlds.
18. An inconspicuous hooded figure whose features remain forever obscure. An Outsider traveling the Pale? An Arbiter?
19. A haughty individual who clatters about the baris mounted on a horse or other riding animal.
20. Who knows? You hardly meet any other passengers in all your days aboard.

How do you pay your way?

1. It's all arranged with a broker beforehand. You use the local currency at your point of departure.
2. A terminal aboard the baris accepts a dizzyingly wide range of currencies and in-kind payments.
3. You must bring a certain quantity of (extra) trade goods along, to be left behind in the hold.
4. A crew member comes to your berth and presents a personalized receipt; the demands vary widely.
5. You are expected to provide some service or perform some labor for the Captain or crew during the voyage.
6. You don't. You don't seem to, anyway, at least before or during the voyage.

A Reckoning

A couple weeks ago, as we all tried to distract ourselves from the inaugural sword of Damocles, a prompt went around Bluesky, inviting people to share their “most millennial complaint.” Moira Donegan answered the call: “Playing video games is not cool,” she declared, “and it was a mistake to elevate this anti-social pastime that mostly involves engaging in solitary fantasies of domination and violence into a respectable hobby.”

Predictably, Donegan got dragged for this. Kim Kelly got dragged for agreeing with her. Many people insisted that this was, in fact, a boomer complaint, not a millennial one (Donegan acknowledged that possibility herself). Many other people called her an idiot, ignorant, uneducated, a loser. Some people, rather perversely, called her a sexist. A few attempted to ridicule her idea by analogy: Can you imagine if people talked this way about books? About literature?

I have spent many thousands of hours of my life playing videogames, but I was not one of those people. In my heart, I knew the truth: “solitary fantasies of domination and violence” might be a bit dated, but Donegan was more right than wrong.

* * *

The next day—Inauguration Day itself—Edward Ongweso Jr. dropped an essay on his Substack that was both apt for that most Damoclean of occasions and relevant to this debate about games. To begin with, he traced the contours of the gambling industry and connected it to other contemporary American enterprises that prey on the poor and nearly hopeless, desperate people hoping for one big score—buying in on the right meme coin, hitting the most improbable sportsbook parlay, literally winning the lottery. He explained what an enormous, lucrative business gambling has become, how it has eclipsed the vast market for illicit drugs. From there, he moved on to consumerism, AI, exterminism, things falling apart, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem—it's all worth reading. I got stuck on the bit about gambling, though.

Since surpassing illicit drugs in revenue, gambling has been eclipsed in its turn by an industry that stole not just its crown but its name. Before videogames grew to be a market juggernaut that generates nearly a quarter-trillion dollars a year of revenue, “gaming” was synonymous with “gambling.” This etymology isn't the only strong connection between the two businesses.

Ongweso's essay draws extensively on the work of sociologist Natasha Schüll. In her 2012 book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, she wrote about slot-machine players, whose obsessive behavior had by then come to represent the vast majority of casino revenue. Counterintuitively, she found that the experience of hitting a big jackpot didn't excite them—it frustrated them, interrupting the rhythm of their play. “What addicts them,” Schüll explained, is not the thrill of victory or the enticement of riches, but “the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play.”

In a conversation with former Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, Schüll elaborated: “What they’re playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. […] This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate [in interviews] is a desire to really lose a sense of self.”

Of the industry, she said, “It’s predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They’re not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They’re kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it’s a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don’t want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don’t see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want—in this case escape—and [to] profit from that.”

This is an apt description of slot-machine players and gambling, of course, but as Schüll alludes to with her remark about “screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in,” it might be an even more apt description of gamers and gaming. What are microtransactions and battle passes and the endless treadmill of live-service content if not revenue-extraction machines synchronized with players' desire for anesthetic escape?

For players who don't want the jackpot, who want only to keep going, to stay “in the zone,” the gaming industry now offers myriad games without lasting victory, without an endpoint, without closure. Many people have drawn connections between slot machines (and Skinner boxes) and certain types of game before—these are the perils, we hear, of F2P games, of freemium games, of mobile games, of bad games, trash that's beneath the contempt of real gamers. But the Faustian exchange of a steady flow of microtransactions for the opportunity to live in the zone forever isn't just made in trashy mobile Gacha titles anymore; it's everywhere. The bad apples have spoiled the bunch. Every game is a slot machine now. One battle royale after another, forever. One raid after another. One puzzle after another. One match after another. One content drop after another. One achievement after another. One season after another. Forever.

It's not even limited to games. People think of “gamification” as the process of making “real-world” activities more like videogames, but it's actually more a matter of making everything (including videogames) more like slot machines. What is a social media feed if not an experiential slot machine, one that rewards you, quasi-stochastically, with entertaining content? The algorithm puts just enough boring chaff (and ads) in front of you, for just long enough, that the dopamine-rush thrill of your last hit fades, and then bam, something that's just the sort of content you crave slides across your screen, and the rush is back. Over and over. Forever.

One of the reasons I started this blog at the start of last year was that I was getting sick of social media; I found myself posting to Twitter and Reddit less and less, interacting with other human beings less and less, but scrolling more and longer. Pulling the lever, waiting for something good to turn up, but really just paralyzed by that hope, that expectation, the not-quite-pleasure of having an itch and believing that it's about to be scratched. Any minute now.

One of the reasons I got into TTRPGs was that videogames were starting to feel the same way.

* * *

“But not all games are like this," you might protest. More and more of them are, of course; battle passes and games-as-service content drip-feeds and meta-progression mechanics are oozing their way into every genre, into every storied franchise (this crap has even slimed its way into Civilization now, much to my dismay), but it's true: There are some indie games, some retro games, and even the occasional rare few examples of AAA auteurism that prove the rule.

The thing is—and with apologies to the folks who love games and think that pornography is inherently, irredeemably bad and wrong—you could say the same of pornography. Porn doesn't have to come from some giant, sleazy media company. It doesn't have to be celebrated at lurid awards shows in Las Vegas or shot in some dismal corner of the Inland Empire. It doesn't have to involve human trafficking or drug abuse. It doesn't have to be violent. You can make porn with your partner or with your friends. It doesn't have to be for profit; you can distribute it for free or ask for donations. You can write fun, clever scripts, build fantastical sets, make amazing costumes, and tell interesting stories that just happen to be smutty. Or if you're not likely to do any of that yourself, you can probably find porn like that on the internet somewhere, or at least at a film festival—porn that makes you laugh, makes you think, fosters human connection, gives you new ideas.

But is that what you think of when you think of porn? Is that what anybody thinks of? Is that what you assume any significant percentage of pornography consumers are consuming? If somebody says to you, “Yeah, I love porn,” or if somebody tells you, “I can't wait to get home and watch porn until I fall asleep,” does your mind go to that Shangri-La of ethical, creative, uplifting pornography? Or do you just think, Wow. Gross.

When somebody says they're a gamer, what do you think of? We joke about the word; we love our memes. “They targeted gamers,” we chuckle. “Gamers rise up!” We explain that “Sure, I play games, but I'm not a gamer,” or “I'm a gamer, but not, you know, a hard-r gamer.” That ironic distance masks real aversion. Gamers gave us Gamergate. Gaming, especially online, means encountering puerility, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, a whole raft of antisocial behaviors. It has a whiff of sulfur about it, the perfume of the extreme right. To tar all of gaming, and everybody who enjoys videogames, with that sulfurous stigma might be unfair, but it's not entirely unfair. Yeah, there are plenty of kids and women and old folks and others who aren't of that ilk enjoying games—or if not truly enjoying them, at least experiencing a world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm—but it's those hard-r gamers who drive the discourse, they who are the face of the hobby and the drivers of the industry.

* * *

The industry has embraced, with both arms, a vision of videogames as ludicrously profitable narcotic slop. The most vocal, visible gamers—gamers as an identity group—are unpleasant reprobates, many of them Nazi fellow travelers. Are these facts enough to damn games and gaming? Probably not. Most cultural products in the profit-driven hell we inhabit are crap, after all, and practically everything has detestable, and noisy, partisans. There are still diamonds in the rough, games that make us think, that make us laugh and cry, that teach us things, that expand our horizons.

Here I have to turn from objective facts to my own fragile, anecdotal, peculiar subjectivity. For me, playing a videogame, even a game I once loved, or a game of a type I once loved, even a game that isn't precision-engineered to lull me into that world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm, now often feels palpably, uncomfortably hollow. I emerge from time spent playing a videogame like a sleeper emerges from a dream, holding on to a few rapidly fading emotions, bewildered by the dissonance between how intensely things mattered just moments ago and how pointless or incomprehensible they seem now, in the light of day. I'm left with vague memories, or just impressions, and maybe a haphazard sort of narrative that, like a dream, retains some waning interest to me but falls to boring, incoherent pieces the moment I try to explain it to somebody else.

I am a dreamer, of course. You're reading a blog (ostensibly) about TTRPGs; how could its author be anything else? I'll never be one to turn up my nose at escapism: I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a little kid, I love novels, I love movies, and I still love games. We all deserve a little escape once in a while; the real world isn't always a great place to be. But to return to that analogy raised by the angry mob on Bluesky—how would I feel if somebody dismissed novels as a disreputable, antisocial waste of time? I'd roll my eyes. Solitary, sure, but never antisocial. To read a novel is to enter into intimate discourse with another mind. It's escapism, sure—the world dissolves—but it's escapism with an endpoint, a clearly marked exit. Through the novel, we immerse ourselves in other places, other times, other lives, and then we return to our place, our time, our life richer, wiser, more thoughtful.

I might've learned a little about medieval history from Crusader Kings 2, a little about trains from Railroad Tycoon, a little about everything from Civilization, but I don't know that even those games truly enriched me. I don't think they taught me anything important about myself or anybody else. The vast majority of the videogames I've played taught me nothing at all, imparted nothing to me. There are very important exceptions, of course—I've written about a few of them here, like SOMA, Cyberpunk 2077, and above all Disco Elysium, and there are others, farther back, that meant a lot to me and changed me in meaningful ways. Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey come to mind.

In the big scheme of things, though, these games are oddities, exceptions, lightning in a bottle, relics of a bygone age. There will never be another Disco Elysium. There will never be another Planescape: Torment. There might be another Cyberpunk 2077, but it's probably a decade away, and I'm not holding my breath. For every gem, there are a thousand mindless treadmills, a thousand carbon-copy cash-ins on whatever the latest extractive fad is, a thousand software-shaped delivery vehicles for the algorithmically driven microtransaction apocalypse. We've all heard the story: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty made less money for Blizzard than a single $15 microtransaction horse in World of Warcraft. Whatever games were when you were a kid—whatever they were before that moment, before that horse buried Wings of Liberty—is dead and long, long gone.

There's still cool stuff happening in the world of videogames, of course. It's happening in spaces that are less commercial (like the whole constellation of indie games sites driven by donations and pay-what-you-want offers) or entirely noncommercial (like the beautiful community that continues to churn out world-class content for my beloved Quake nearly three decades after its release). Some of the most interesting games of the past decade have been treated with outright hostility by the industry; think of Robert Yang's long war against the homophobes at Twitch. Cool stuff still comes out of more conventional games spaces, too, often when people play games in unintended ways. Look how much more interesting a tactical shooter becomes when a streamer plays it as though his life actually matters—the live-die-repeat treadmill of gameplay gives way to something more affecting, more truly immersive, more like the empathy machine we've so often been promised games could be.

Give me empathy in videogames. Give me auteurism. I'd rather play a new Quake map—and have direct contact with somebody else's mind, their ideas, their creative spirit—than step back on the treadmill of MMOs or CCGs or MOBAs or PvPvE FPSes or whatever fresh hell the industry unleashes next. But better yet, get me off the computer. I'd rather play a board game with family than play Quake by myself. And I'd much rather play a TTRPG with friends: tell a story together, experience something new together, escape the world together without leaving it behind entirely. I don't want to dissolve the world, to annihilate it. I want to make the world richer, more enjoyable, more inhabitable. Better.

Good luck to me, right?

* * *

I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the first Trump administration, near Inman Square, where there's a cute little commercial row. It's a slice of small-town Americana in the city: no national chains, just a bunch of local small businesses, including the sorts you hardly see anywhere else anymore, like old-fashioned travel agents and mom-and-pop delis. There was a store there (I think it's still there) that sold textiles, candles, plants, cozy home goods. They were very into hygge back in 2016; there was a sign in the window for months after the election that asked, “HOW CAN HYGGE BE PART OF OUR RESISTANCE?” I always laughed.

The answer, of course, is that it can't—not really. Maybe making things hyggelig gives you a sense of control in a crazy, off-kilter world and that buoys your mental health and keeps you from falling completely and irrevocably into despair. Maybe. And maybe your Animal Crossing village or your Tears of the Kingdom contraption or your collection of Hearthstone cards does the same. But those things also anesthetize you. They remove you from the world, numb you to pain and struggle and sorrow and pity, and remove you from other people, from everybody else experiencing those things, people you might be able to help, people who might be able to help you (not entirely unlike hygge, in fact, although that's an essay for another occasion).

Yeah, you make friends playing videogames, once in a while. You see the same handles in the same lobbies, or you run into the same opponents, or you run dungeons with the same guildmates. Once in a while, a real connection is formed. People famously have gotten married to friends they made playing MMOs. But 99% of people? 99% of the time? Ships in the night. Traveling companions for a time, but not heading to the same destinations.

Videogames are not inherently antisocial, but the industry has shaped the vast majority of them, including the biggest and most popular, into something profoundly antisocial, something socially corrosive. The vast majority of players have quietly acquiesced. Even superficially “social” multiplayer games are not fostering real connection; they are offering a shared experience of quietism, no more social than slot-machine gamblers making small talk, or sitting side by side in amiable silence, as the life seeps out of them.

Are videogames a moral abomination? Have they no redeeming value at all? Should everybody quit playing them? Of course not. It's not like we'd all turn away from our screens and suddenly, in a great upwelling of solidarity and togetherness, join hands and defeat fascism with the power of love or whatever. If we didn't have videogames, we'd have other vices. We already do; everybody has vices, and there's nothing wrong with that. But we could certainly stand to be clearer-eyed about them, about what they're doing to us, about who benefits from them.

I texted my best friend (the man behind Roman Balan, for those of you following my Stars Without Number campaign, and like me a lifelong enjoyer of escapism and player of videogames) about Moira Donegan's post when I first saw it. I sent him a barrage of messages that began with “I'm probably too much of a coward to weigh in, but…” (look at me—12 days later, I've worked up the courage) and ran for nearly the length of this blog post. When I was finally done monologuing at him, he delivered a more eloquent and far more succinct summation of the whole thing. He quoted the late, great David Lynch: “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”

Flyover Country: Chapter 7

"Industrial District 2" by Andreas Rocha

Continued from Chapter 6.

* * *

BQ presents himself to Nobu Stephanidis as a fellow enthusiast of ancient artifacts and alien relics. With quiet intensity, he describes a symbol he saw in his youth on faraway, icebound Ayaz, a mysterious sigil inscribed on otherworldly material, evidence to the youth of the existence of a higher power. He's sought for more signs or remnants of his alien gods ever since—has Stephanidis ever seen such symbols?

He has, in fact—but the crafty old man won't give up valuable information for nothing. Instead, he offers a quid pro quo arrangement: He's planned a heist and needs a crew to carry it out. He'll provide the details, they'll get the goods, and if they bring back a few choice pieces he has his eye on, he'll cut them 20% and give BQ what info he has on his long-sought alien relics—and the PCs can keep whatever else they manage to grab during the operation. Our band of ne'er-do-wells, of course, jumps at the opportunity. The target is on Opis.

* * *

The Commonwealth's capital world is in some respects quite Earth-like; its orbit is at almost exactly 1 AU, its rotational period is close to 24 hours, its year is 376 days with a leap day every fourth year, it is nearly the same size as Earth, and its gravity is more than 80% of standard. The main differences are its star—the subgiant Usil, though it appears nearly six and a half times larger from the surface of Opis than Earth's sun did from our ancestral homeworld, is significantly dimmer—and the climate.

Opis had many qualities that made it an attractive terraforming candidate back in humanity's golden age, but the colonists who first settled it began with a world more like Venus than Earth, wracked by intense volcanism and shrouded in a toxic atmosphere. Undettered, they built enormous pretech terraforming engines to still the planet's seisms and purify its air. Unfortunately, this work was not complete at the time of the Scream. The engines labored on, but the talents and technology needed to maintain them were lost, and over the succeeding centuries, they have failed one after another.

Opis is now experiencing catastrophic climate change in fast forward: a runaway greenhouse effect, terrible storms, and an atmosphere difficult, and often downright dangerous, to breathe. What were forests and meadows mere decades ago are ashfields and deserts today. Crops have failed across most of the surface. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have buried entire settlements. All but the hardiest settlers have abandoned the new towns of last century and retreated into the planet's largest, oldest settlements, where overcrowding is now a serious problem.

Nearly all of the vast population (three-quarters of the Commonwealth's billion-plus citizens) is now packed into a few sprawling urban areas: paraterraformed canyons and craters, massive tower blocks sealed against the atmosphere, warrens of subsurface tunnels and chambers. Many industrial and infrastructural spaces underground and in the interiors of massive arcologies are now hived with informal housing and markets. In and around the densely populated cities, the terraforming machinery has been kept functional, or replacements have been jury-rigged, and areas of seismic stability exist. Nothing can prevent storms of dust, sand, and volcanic ash from sweeping across and sometimes into the protected areas, however.

For now, the people endure, but with every passing year, their prospects grow darker. The ever-more-intensive effort to import protein from the Karyatis system is not economically sustainable in the long run; the need to construct and maintain superfreighters, and protect their shipping lanes, is a tremendous burden on the Marjani shipyards and the Commonwealth Militia Navy. But for all its troubles, Opis remains a major center of commerce and industry. Many state-owned enterprises, including GeOpis, ComAtom, and the Interplanetary Public Broadcasting Company, are headquartered here, as are a number of prominent private companies, including Omni Armory, media giant Ad Astra, and Banik Technologies. Offworld businesses, particularly Seneschal Systems, have extensive facilities here, and Mosylon has a massive embassy complex in the city of Anchorpoint.

* * *

Nobu has his eye on a (relatively) smaller city in the southern hemisphere, Sokhna; he wants the crew to loot a country estate nearby. The area, once a pleasant wooded suburb, fell outside the zone of planetary engineering control and is in danger of being utterly destroyed by seismic or volcanic catastrophe, although thus far nothing worse has happened than a firestorm sweeping through the vegetation, some noxious air blowing through the area, and substantial ashfall. A certain ambitious young Member of the Popular Assembly, Nana Malik, was forced, along with other property owners in the area, to abandon her country house; she wasn't there at the time, and lost many objects with great sentimental—and some material—value.

Since nothing catastrophically bad has happened to the house in the months since it was quarantined, she's begun to agitate to be allowed to return and pack up some of her possessions. Although she comes from a wealthy, influential family, she's trying to maintain a squeaky-clean image as a legislator and is unwilling to bend or break the rules to get her things back (as many of her neighbors have done). Stephanidis has taken notice of her efforts, done a little research, and surmised that it's worth an expedition.

The quarantined suburb is adjacent to a restricted area that's closed to unauthorized civilians but remains staffed by security personnel, researchers, and maintenance workers; there's also some traffic through the area as construction and maintenance teams take the highway to still-operational facilities north of Sokhna. Near the city's outskirts, there's a vehicle depot, sheltered in the lee of some mountains, that serves these various purposes.

The crew will need to:

1. Get to Sokhna.
2. Find a way to either smuggle weapons and equipment off the ship or acquire gear in the city.
3. Find a low-key way to get outside the city (nearly all of which is underground) and into the restricted area.
4. Get their hands on a vehicle to drive out to the estate.
5. Pick a route that gets them to the Malik estate in reasonable time without exposing them to the security station above the highway to the east.
6. Defeat the estate's security systems and break in.
7. Load up the loot and get it back through spaceport security and off the planet somehow.

The house itself—Nobu has a pretty comprehensive trove of images—is a large two-story building with a deck on the ground floor and a wraparound balcony on the second floor; much of the structure, including the central spaces on both floors, is floor-to-ceiling “glass” (actually a very durable transparent polymer) and everything is attractively appointed, with art everywhere. There's also a substantial, much more austere basement about which Nobu has less intel; there are presumably security bots and other expert systems still defending the property.

* * *

The crew blasts off from Rustam early in the morning on the 14th and has an uneventful trip to Usil. Mustang, back in her home system for the first time in years, flirts with trying to reclaim her bygone celebrity; as the ship glides planetward, she posts a brief hello to short-form video app TannTann, then an ASMR cooking video. They touch down at Sokhna Spaceport late on the 17th, having transferred 500 credits to a helpful traffic controller to “expedite approval of their flight plan and landing clearance.”

Batias has tapped his mysteriously wide and deep network of connections to line up a meeting between Roman (presenting himself as the crew's science officer) and Faisal Rao, director of the local GeOpis office. It's nearly midnight by local time, but Rao is still at his office, so the crew heads straight there as soon as they're through starport security. Rao tries to bargain hard, but he doesn't have the best poker face—it's obvious he badly he wants what the PCs have. Centuries of climatic, seismic, and geomagnetic data from a pre-Scream facility monitoring the stability of a terraformed planet's environment, and the computer systems that produced and crunched that data? It could—as Dr. Lei's endorsement suggests, Roman points out—lead to a breakthrough in arresting the ongoing terraforming failure that threatens Opis.

Rao puts his cards on the table: The absolute limit of what he could authorize in payment on short notice would be 272,000 credits, and that would represent his department's entire budget for the year; he needs to hold on to a few thousand credits to cover expenses until the central office can reimburse him. The PCs aren't likely to get more than 270,000 credits anywhere—not without a lot of waiting and bureaucratic wrangling, at least—and maybe he can sweeten the deal for them with some in-kind assistance. Do they need access to a ground vehicle? Are there any…legal snafus he could help them smooth over?

Why yes, Roman says, there certainly are. If Rao could take them on as contractors and put together some paperwork that would allow them to move a few crates off their ship in the guise of sensitive survey equipment, and a few more crates back onto the ship in the guise of sensitive geological samples—no scans of any of this sensitive stuff permitted, please—they'd be much obliged. And they'll definitely take the ground vehicle, too. “Say no more,” says Rao. “Please.”

Mustang has backed up the data to the ship's computers, but the PCs agree to give Rao exclusive license to it for the next two years. (After that, maybe they'll take it to Munda and see if there's a buyer there too.) Handshakes all around. The deal is done, and the path to Nana Malik's estate looks a great deal clearer.

The PCs go shopping for equipment (pressure masks and outerwear for the noxious Opisian weather) and provisions (a couple cases of wine, a big jar of krill-encrusted peanuts) and debate when to launch the heist. Several of them have other business they'd like to attend to in Sokhna: Sarai and Mustang want to look up old friends; Krissa hopes to find a trained telekinetic who can teach her some exercises to help her master her fledging powers in that discipline, and her discomfort with using them. If the job goes sideways, they won't have time to do any of this while making their getaway.

But Stephanidis has stressed that time is of the essence—Malik's public statements about the valuables she left in an empty house in a deserted area will no doubt have drawn other looters and scavengers. They decide to return to the ship, assemble their gear, and prepare to roll out at dawn. Rao will have an ATV transport and secure, properly documented crates waiting for them. Early on the 18th, they set forth.

Next: Faction Turn 2 & News Roundup and Chapter 8.