Adventure, Exploration of the Moon Base

Introduction:

There have been many descriptions of the moon. Since time immemorial, mankind has cast its curious gaze towards our beckoning moon and wondered, "What lies there?" Since the dawn of humanity, the moon has entranced them, a pearl of curiosity hanging tantalizingly just out of reach in the heavens. The inhabitants of Caspia often find themselves beneath the luminous gaze of their moon, affectionately named Mu, believing it to be nothing more than a desolate celestial sphere, its purpose to cast a gentle, pearly light over the world when the sun rests.

As far as most inhabitants of Caspia are concerned, the Moon of Mu is just what they see in the sky: a lifeless satellite that shines its pearly light on their world at night. But in truth the moon is far from lifeless. Yet, unbeknownst to the denizens of Caspia, their celestial companion hides a secret deep within its seemingly lifeless expanse. Not always was Mu the silent, indifferent satellite that it is thought to be today. Once upon a time, the grey wasteland served as a proving ground for the ambitious ancestors of Caspia, marking their first celestial footprints as they dared to dream beyond their home world.

Once, the satellite had been a mottled stone wasteland there the hordes of Caspian had ventured in their first infantile steps away from their birth world. The great powers had just begun to export their experience in conquest into outer space, looking forward to a solar system under their rule. They had built their colony there, testing their mettle in the pitiless cold of the void in preparation for future voyages to other planets, but as their plans had accelerated, Mu had become little more than a way station, a place to pass by on the journey to the interplanetary - and later, interstellar - deeps.

Now, hidden from view on the far side of the moon, the desolate relic of Caspia's audacious past silently watches the stars. An ancient monument, a reminder of a time when the void was new and unexplored, the failed moon base stands as an enigmatic symbol of ambition and progress, left to be consumed by the passage of time.

In this adventure, the player characters are given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to journey to Mu, to set foot on its cold, untouched surface, and to explore the abandoned lunar base that has silently watched over Caspia from afar. What secrets do its ancient halls hold? Only time will reveal the enigmatic chronicles of Caspia's celestial past.

Moon Overview:

Mu, the natural satellite of Caspia, is a large rocky body like the four inner planets, although it has an equatorial diameter of 2172 miles (3476 km), a quarter of Caspia's mass (1.81 mas ratio) and only one-sixth of Caspia’s gravity. The low gravity is not enough to hold an atmosphere, and there is no magnetic field, but also means that it is fairly easy for most orbital ships to land and take off from the surface, requiring an escape velocity of only 1.5 miles (2.37 km) per second. The low gravity is not enough to hold an atmosphere, so there was no hope to ever terraform the moon. It was created 4.5 billion years ago when a giant asteroid struck Old Earth and blasted debris into space; this debris coalesced to form this moon.

Scientific accounts put its orbital revolution at 271/3 days at a distance of 384,403 kilometers from the planet. Its bright albedo is remarkable and attributed to its surface of glassy crystalline soil. This satellite inspired poets to write of it incessantly, often in terms not faithful to astronomical fact. They frequently spoke of it in terms of silver, as “striding the night in silver shoon” or “gifting its silver smile to the still waters.”

Mu orbits Caspia at a distance of about 240,250 miles (384,400 km).

The lack of sunlight is a major problem. A typical lunar location sees a one month rotation period, which means there is two weeks of constant sunlight and two weeks of constant darkness. When there is sunlight, the surface temperature increases to boiling hot, 245 to over 400 degrees Fahrenheit. During the two weeks of night/darkness, the temperature plummets to -200 degrees below freezing. Thus, a major concern must be heat/temperature and radiation shielding during the sunlight period. A serious, related problem is an alternative source to solar energy during this long period of darkness when the solar panels were dormant.

Mu is tidally locked with Caspia, so the near side always faces Caspia and the far side always faces away. There is no “dark side of the moon,” really, as all areas get sunlight half the time, but as on The First, some deep craters near the poles are in permanent shadow. These were discovered to contain small ice deposits.The conditions at the surface of the moon are virtually indistinguishable from a hard vacuum. The surface is bombarded by solar winds (protons and electrons), radiation (250 to 500 times higher than on Caspia, 1000 times greater during a high energy solar flare), particles and fragments of rocks, including some substantial meteors. Furthermore, exposure to sunlight and lack of sun causes dramatic temperature changes from 245 degrees Fahrenheit (120 C) to -240 degrees Fahrenheit (-150 C). All of this makes living on the surface incredibly difficult. With no atmosphere to burn up incoming meteors, Mu has been an exposed target in a cosmic shooting gallery for billions of years. The Mu landscape is dominated by overlapping impact craters. They range in size from a few feet across to the giant basins that 1,400 miles wide and 7.5 miles deep on the far side, one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system. The Mu landscape varies considerably between the near and far sides. Flat maria – giant asteroid impact craters whose surfaces were later smoothed over by basalt lava flows – cover one-sixth of Luna, and are concentrated on the near side. Most of the far side and much of the near side is made up of the Mu highlands, formed from interlocking large and small craters.

The Mu surface is covered with regolith, a loose fine-grained material with two major components: dusty rock and mineral particles, and agglutinates, mineral and rock welded together by glass produced in meteor impacts. The regolith is exposed directly to the solar wind. This has seeded it with useful volatiles, including traces of both hydrogen and He-3. In addition, about half the mass of Mu rocks is made of up of oxygen, and there are also economically useful quantities of iron, aluminum, and titanium. However, Mu is incredibly dry, with the only water ice being found intermixed with regolith on the north and south poles.

The craters are another feature of the moon. There are so many of them, and they are everywhere. Some of them are just little pockmarks in the ground that one can barely put one's fist into; and they range all the way up to super-monsters whose ringwalls one could lose whole cities into.

Background:

In the hushed annals of the first millennium, during the mystifying period known as the Time of Absence, Caspia, the cradle of civilization, undertook a celestial endeavor under the divine guidance of its God-King, Caspian. With his nearly omnipotent command, he dispatched a cadre of his most faithful and dauntless subjects to the secluded reaches of the moon, a mission infused with the divine and the daring.

Their purpose was twofold, a divine mandate from the God-King himself. They were to test the boundaries of mortal resilience against the lifeless lunar terrain, a trial to ascertain if they, mere earthbound beings, could foster life in the desolate lunar expanse. Could Caspia's seeds flourish in alien soil and, in doing so, prove that the dominion of Caspian could extend beyond the confines of their home planet?

But this mission was not driven solely by earthly concerns. It bore a spiritual essence, a testament to the deep-seated reverence the people of Caspia held for their deity. Caspian's loyalists envisioned an elaborate temple, a sacred sanctum consecrated to their God-King, raised on the face of the moon. Here, in this divine shrine, the Caspianists would perform their holy rites, honoring their god who empowered them to traverse the cosmic wilderness.

In tandem with these spiritual undertakings, state-of-the-art laboratories were to be established. Within these lunar strongholds of knowledge, the brightest minds of Caspia, under Caspian's watchful eye, would push the boundaries of mortal understanding, unearthing the cosmic truths that would set the stage for humanity's eventual ascendance to the stars.

Yet, time has been an unforgiving force. Today, what once stood as a symbol of divine and mortal ambition is but a spectral monument echoing with silence. Its once vibrant corridors, that hummed with the lifeblood of Caspian's faithful, now lie deserted. The once hallowed lunar temple, consecrated to Caspian, is now a vacated sanctuary, and the cutting-edge laboratories stand lifeless. The moon base, once an emblem of Caspian's celestial command, is now a forgotten relic, barely a whisper in the annals of the God-King's vast empire. It stands as a silent testament to a chapter of celestial exploration, a fading memory of a time when divine and mortal aspirations soared in tandem toward the heavens.

Introduction:

Beyond the precipice, the landscape unfolds in stark contrast - a radiant valley bathed in unfiltered lunar sunlight rolls languidly out before them. Its crater-pocked surface gleams in the harsh, silver light, casting long shadows that accentuate the moon's desolate beauty. Yet, it is not the luminous expanse that captivates their attention; it is the colossal obscurity that lies ahead.

This darkness appears as profound as the vastness of space itself, an abyssal enigma nestled within the moon's silent folds. To the explorers, it seems as if the lunar surface has been violently excised, carved away by some cosmic hand to leave behind an insatiable void. It yawns wide, an open mouth in the visage of the moon, hinting at depths unfathomable and chilling in their emptiness.

The darkness beckons, a siren's call wrapped in foreboding silence, promising mysteries untouched by human hands. It looms like a monstrous entity, lurking unseen in the profound gloom, its dominion undisturbed and sovereign. The shadows appear to pulse with life, hiding unseen horrors that might spring upon those daring or foolish enough to trespass in their realm.

The sight of the gaping lunar abyss sends a shiver of primal fear down their spines, whispering tales of monsters that might lurk in the eternal night. Yet, it also sparks a flame of curiosity, a defiant challenge to the explorers who stand on the cusp of the unknown, caught between the urge to flee and the burning desire to delve deeper into the waiting void. It is a cosmic dare, a test of their mettle under the watchful gaze of the stars, a challenge they had journeyed across the void to accept.

The Sea of Cunning, Mare Ingenii, is a cracked basin of obsidian crossed with fissures like whip scars, filling a crater sixty miles wide, with inkblots of dark lava spilling east and west. Here is a wasteland where no living thing has ever grown, no note of any sound has ever been heard and no grain of sand has ever been stirred by any gasp of wind. Crater walls as white and pockmarked as the corpses of lepers blazes in the distance, turned to intolerable fire by the undimmed sun. The black slag of primordial lava flows forms a wrinkled carpet. The ground is shot and blistered, pocked and dinted by eons of impacts as if by mortar and gun fire.

Dawn has been a week ago, so the sun is nearing noon. Untwinkling stars are in theory visible in the deathly black sky, but the human eye cannot adjust to both extremes at once. Overhead is merely an abyssal dark that causes no vertigo, because there is nothing seen in it. There is no Earth to loom in the sky, nor would there ever be, for this is the Moon’s far side, which faces forever away from the world of mortals.

The dust on the lunar surface is predominantly virginal and any disturbance has a good chance of staying that way indefinitely. A fresh print will be visible for a long time, even if it’s on top of existing wheel and tread tracks.  The shadows are long and remorselessly black. This makes even the smallest pebble visible but can also conceal dangerous fissures and sometimes even pits. 

Encounters:

1. The adventurers stumble upon a small cluster of tiny, yellowish crystals that glint in the harsh lunar sunlight, their unnatural appearance contrasting starkly with the barren lunar terrain. These crystalline formations are actually remnants from the lunar base's earlier days - preserved urine that has been expelled and subsequently frozen over the millennia.

2. The Moonlight Window: Lying half-buried in the obsidian lunar floor, an artifact from the past awaits discovery. A transparent plastic panel with beveled edges peeks out from the dark soil, its foreign texture and appearance revealing its artificial origins. Measuring approximately two feet square with softened, rounded corners, the panel is suggestive of a component from a larger structure - perhaps an airlock door or viewport. Its once-clear surface is now scratched and clouded from countless micrometeorite impacts over the ages, resembling a battered, ancient window. It is through this 'Moonlight Window' that the base's former occupants might have peered out at the starlit void, a view now marred by the passage of time. The panel could offer clues about the design and technology used in the base, and its condition may reveal much about the challenges faced by this lunar outpost. 

3. The Whispering Antenna: Standing tall amidst the lunar desolation, a rusted metallic structure pierces the unending silence. It's an ancient communication antenna, now silent, a skeletal monument to the past echoing with forgotten messages. The equipment is corroded and battered by centuries of micrometeorite showers and harsh lunar conditions, but it stands resilient, a silent sentinel. Upon inspection, the explorers might find the remnants of encrypted data, offering cryptic snippets of the base's operational days. Can they decipher the cryptic data and unveil the base's past? Or will the whispering antenna remain an enigma?

4. The Encased Footprint: In a sudden depression of the lunar soil, encased in a clear, hardened substance, lies an ancient footprint - a poignant symbol of human presence, frozen in time. It seems that someone, in a bid to immortalize their presence on this alien landscape, had found a way to preserve their mark from lunar erosion. The sight is eerily evocative, bridging the chasm of time to connect the explorers with their distant predecessors.

5. The Silent Scribe: A piece of lunar rock, noticeably different from its surroundings, catches the explorers' attention. Upon closer examination, they realize that it's not natural but a part of a now-damaged stone monument. Carved into its surface are worn-out inscriptions, words from an ancient language that belonged to the base's original occupants. While time has eroded most of the message, some words or symbols might still be decipherable, offering hints about the people who lived here and their life on the moon.

6. The Phantom Habitat: Suddenly, a semi-translucent structure flickers into view. It's an old holographic display, surprisingly still operational, presenting a ghostly 3D map of what the base used to look like in its prime. Powering the display is a decaying but advanced power source, the technology of which could be of interest. The display flickers, unstable, and it's only a matter of time before it gives out completely. Can the team gather all the vital information before the ghost of the past fades away forever?

The Footprint: The first sign

It is then the PCs spot something. The footprints of a human being. More accurately, the shoeprints of a human being. Heading northeast, right there on the lunar regolith, like the tracks of a businessman in wet cement.  The tracks have the measured, slightly springy gait of someone familiar with lunar gravity but not with surface activity. 

The PCs follow the tracks for thirty minutes, drifting farther and farther away from the rim of the crater.

The Body:

The dark is so thick, stubborn. The shadows are long and remorselessly black. This makes even the smallest pebble visible but can also conceal dangerous fissures and sometimes even pits. You have walked a few hundred yards and are about to turn back when something ahead catches your light in an odd way.

You hasten forward, bouncing along in the low gravity as quickly as the uneven rock-strewn surface will allow, finally nearing a most extraordinary---something.

Your light falls upon it more fully.

It raises from the dusty soil, its sizable base resting mere inches from the edge of the ice sheet. Gleaming metal with an odd, pearlescent sheen glittering in the meager beam of your suit light, metal fashioned into an enormous structure of astounding complexity.

Its surface bears an intricate array of geometric shapes, all flowing from one to the next with an organic fluidity that defies any manufacturing process you could envision. It rises beyond the range of your light, disappearing into darkness some forty feet above.

You look at what you’ve found. This is it. This is the proof you’ve been searching for, ever since the dawn of civilization. No modern human built this place. No modern human even knew this place existed until now. Whatever it is—whatever it’s meant to tell you—is going to be of enormous impact back home. This changes everything. How long has this structure been here? How long has it been waiting for you to find it?

Location:

The base proper rests near an array of connected, different-sized lakes, and is linked by snaking conduits to a hundred large, blocky objects, six to eight of which rest at the shoreline of each body of water.

The Lakes:

Machines keep the lakes from freezing, and liquid water is carried into the base by underground piping, flowing from the lake, into the base, and back again, recycling over and over; a sealed system. How the liquid water can exist with no atmospheric pressure and such intense cold is a mystery. As is the origin of the ice. It was either brought with the early explorers or it was already there.

Dimensions and Layout:

The TL 10 base, to the standards of the explorers living in TL 5-6, will seem as mighty as a stronghold built for warring titans and gods, and yet is little more than a ramshackle hut compared to the colossus of the Citadel Celes and other facilities built by Caspian and his Court.

From a bird's-eye view, the lunar base unfurls as an intricate triad formation. The base's main modules, designed as formidable disks each stretching 36 meters in diameter, are arranged strategically at the corners of an equilateral triangle. This geometric configuration not only speaks of advanced planning and architectural finesse but also lends the base an air of symmetry and balance against the stark lunar backdrop. These modules, evidently forged from some form of resilient metal, stand around 13 meters tall, rising like ancient monoliths from the darkened, flattened lunar plain. The weathered exterior of these modules narrates tales of their endurance against the relentless lunar environment, standing resolute through the passage of millennia. The silent grandeur of these structures adds a sense of majesty to the desolate lunar landscape. Yet, the surface structures are merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The modules extend approximately six meters below the lunar surface, their subterranean sections veiled from cursory observation. Connecting these modules are a network of tunnels, each roughly three meters deep, creating a web of connectivity beneath the lunar crust. These subterranean pathways are the lifelines of the base, facilitating travel and communication between the disparate modules. Hidden from view is the facility's lifeblood - a formidable power plant ensconced deep within the lunar soil, alongside a network of utility shafts. These unseen parts of the base, though unseen, are crucial to its functionality, powering the advanced technology and systems that kept the base operational. The base, in its entirety, comprises six levels. Most of these levels lie underground, sheltered from the harsh lunar conditions, a testament to the innovative design that has allowed the base to endure the test of time. Each level would have served a specific purpose, housing various facilities, laboratories, and living quarters that once buzzed with life and activity. The subterranean design is a testament to the base's ingenuity, using the lunar terrain itself as a protective barrier against meteor strikes and cosmic radiation. This moon base, an architectural marvel of a bygone era, stands as a silent beacon of mankind's technological might and the unquenchable spirit of exploration that once led them to conquer the moon's barren landscapes.

As the explorers approach the moon base, what they encounter defies their understanding and expectations. This ancient base, a product of the TL 10 era, stands as an awe-inspiring testament to a time of unprecedented technological innovation and advancement. To the explorers, living in the TL 5-6 epoch, the moon base looms as mighty as a stronghold crafted for celestial titans, its alien architecture and technological marvels presenting a panorama of human capability far beyond their current reach. 

The structure itself is a combination of grandeur and decay. It spreads across the lunar landscape, an imposing citadel perched amidst desolation. Its edifice, though scarred by the passage of time and the relentless lunar environment, still reflects an architectural genius that marries form and function. The exterior is a labyrinth of towering structures, monolithic platforms, and sprawling complexes, each a marvel of engineering that challenges the explorers' understanding of their world.

Its interiors, though bearing the signs of long neglect, still pulsate with vestiges of a bygone era. The corridors wind in a maze-like pattern, leading to chambers filled with advanced technology that, to the explorers, might as well be the tools of the gods. The base's technological heart, though dormant, hints at capabilities that were once used to tame the lunar wilderness and create a thriving outpost amidst the void.

Yet, for all its grandeur and might, the base is but a mere shadow, a modest outpost, when compared to the monumental achievements of Caspian and his Court. The Citadel Celes, the jewel in Caspian's celestial crown, and the myriad other facilities erected under his divine aegis, dwarf this lunar stronghold in both scale and sophistication.

These celestial wonders, symbols of Caspian's near omnipotence, resonate with the echoes of an era when humanity reached for the stars under the watchful eye of their god. And while this base may be a forgotten footnote in that celestial journey, to the explorers, it stands as an awe-inspiring gateway to an era of human achievement that now seems as distant and alien as the moon under their feet.

KEY SYSTEMS:

Construction: The complex is made of local stone, but finely cut. Walls, floors, and ceilings are built of thick slabs of stone with metal accents; bronze and steel. All of the corridors and walls are made of heavily vented material held together by long sweeping sculpted panels. Vertical lightstrips are spaced equally along the corridors' lengths, bathing the passages with warm, inviting light when the power is turned on. The total effect is beautiful, yet oddly disturbing.

The lunar complex is a harmonious marriage of native lunar resources and technological sophistication, an architectural symphony crafted with a level of precision that echoes the technological marvels of its creators. The primary material is the local stone, hewn from the lunar surface itself, adding a raw, organic feel to the stronghold. The stone is finely cut, lending an aesthetic elegance to the otherwise austere lunar landscape, its surface smoothed and polished to an almost mirror-like sheen that sparkles under the cold lunar light.

The walls, floors, and ceilings are constructed from thick, sturdy slabs of this lunar stone. Laying testament to the impeccable craftsmanship of an ancient time, each slab fits seamlessly with its neighbor, creating a mesmerizing pattern that stretches across the base. The stone's lunar-gray hue is punctuated by metal accents, a captivating interplay of bronze and steel that subtly frames the stone and adds a modernistic edge to the base's aesthetic.

Throughout the base, the corridors and walls are an architectural marvel. Constructed from a heavily vented material, they stand testament to the base's advanced ventilation and temperature regulation systems. The material is bound together by long, sweeping panels sculpted with a meticulous eye for detail. These intricate panels add an artistic touch to the functional design, their sweeping lines and patterns telling a silent story of the civilization that once thrived here.

Illumination within the base is provided by vertical light strips, spaced equally along the lengths of the corridors. When the power surges through them, they bathe the passageways in a warm, inviting light, a stark contrast to the cold, unyielding lunar exterior. The light strips paint the stone walls with soft, soothing hues, creating a tranquil ambiance that belies the base's isolated and desolate location.

However, the base's tranquil beauty also casts an eerily disturbing undertone. The precision of its construction, the silent illumination of its corridors, and the austere perfection of its design creates an unsettling sense of otherness. It's a constant reminder of the technological prowess of a civilization now lost, the omnipresent testament of a past so advanced yet so distant, that it lends an alien quality to the base. Its beauty, while inviting, also whispers hauntingly of a time and people that were far beyond the comprehension of the explorers, infusing the base with an aura of awe and a subtle, lingering sense of dread.

It was designed and built by the same entity who put together the Citadel Celes and the various fortresses of the Great Ones. Thus it is no spartan military facility. Rather it was intended to be an oasis of culture and opulence, and was designed to last for untold ages without maintenance.

The lunar base, a tangible testament to a remarkable past, shares its lineage with some of the most prestigious architectural wonders known to mankind. It was conceived and constructed by the same masterful entity responsible for the creation of the grand Citadel Celes and the imposing fortresses of the Great Ones. This link to such illustrious structures is evident in every stone and metal accent of the base, marking it as a creation of architectural genius and artistic vision.

Far from being a rudimentary military outpost or a simple research facility, the lunar base was envisioned as something much grander. Its purpose extended beyond the practical; it was designed to be an embodiment of refinement, a sanctuary of sophistication and elegance amidst the inhospitable lunar expanse. Every corridor, every room, every architectural detail was infused with a cultural richness that harkened back to the glory days of its creators.

Opulence drips from its stone walls, echoes in its silent corridors, and reverberates in its desolate chambers. Every aspect of its construction, from the polished stone surfaces to the intricate metal accents, exudes an air of regality. Its design exhibits an exquisite attention to detail, manifesting a strong aesthetic sense alongside functional efficacy.

And yet, the base's grandeur does not compromise its longevity. Built to withstand the relentless march of time, it was designed to endure for millennia. Its advanced material science, coupled with self-sustaining and self-repairing technologies, allow it to stand tall against the harsh lunar conditions and the incessant barrage of time. Even without active maintenance, it seems to defy aging, preserving its regal demeanor against the backdrop of the barren lunar landscape.

This base, therefore, stands not just as an outpost on a lifeless satellite but as a bastion of a lost civilization's artistic prowess and technical knowledge. It is an oasis of culture and opulence, a silent witness to the grandeur of an era long past, still proudly displaying the indomitable spirit of its creators amidst the lonely expanse of the moon.

Mixed with the high-tech computer screens, finely cut stone corridors, and futuristic smart furniture there might be busts by Rodin and paintings by Picasso, the best the old world had to offer, stolen by the Death Squads of Celes during the Great War for preservation here. There are also original works of art that could only have been crafted by the the most fanatical followers of the God-King: ornate idols of famous kaiju, religious icons of the crescent moon, sacrificial daggers and ceremonial weapons.

Within the confines of this lunar base, the past and the future merge in a harmonious and beguiling blend. Amongst the high-tech holographic displays, the immaculately carved stone corridors, and the furniture that seems to intuitively adjust to its users' needs, an air of antiquity prevails. This coexistence of epochs is perhaps best illustrated by the numerous pieces of artwork scattered throughout the base.

These relics of the old world, masterpieces by legendary artists like Rodin and Picasso, have found an unlikely home in the lunar stronghold. Each bust, every painting, is a slice of humanity's cultural heritage, painstakingly preserved amidst the desolation of the lunar landscape. Stolen by the formidable Death Squads of Celes during the devastating Great War, they were meant to survive the turmoil, to act as a testament to the creative spirit of humanity that not even a war could quench.

Alongside these masterpieces from Earth's cultural past, the lunar base also showcases the unique artistic expressions of Caspian's most devoted followers. With isolation, odd talents had appeared among them, sculptors, musicians, actors.

Original works of art that could have been born only from the fanatical devotion to the God-King adorn the base. These pieces reflect a different facet of human creativity, one fuelled by religious fervor and divine adoration.

Ornate idols of famous kaiju dot the base, each one meticulously crafted to capture the terrifying grandeur of these mythical beasts. They serve as a reminder of the God-King's dominion over all life forms, mortal and mythical alike.

Religious icons of the crescent moon, a symbol closely associated with the God-King and his lunar stronghold, are displayed prominently. They serve both as decorative elements and religious symbols, their delicate craftsmanship reflecting the fervor of Caspian's followers.

Alongside these, a collection of sacrificial daggers and ceremonial weapons can be found. Crafted from precious metals and often adorned with precious gemstones, they represent the martial aspect of Caspian's rule. They are symbols of the God-King's power, a power that can protect and destroy, that can bless and curse.

The lunar base is thus a kaleidoscope of humanity's cultural evolution. Its high-tech surroundings provide a stark contrast to the relics of a bygone era and the religious artifacts of a fanatical following, creating a mesmerizing blend of the old, the new, and the eternal. It is a living museum, a monument to the timeless creative spirit of humanity that thrives even amidst the barren lunar landscape.

Power:

 The lunar base, in its heyday, drew its power from an impressive array of solar panels that stretched across the lunar landscape. These intricate networks of photovoltaic cells, designed to harness the unfiltered solar energy directly from the source, were an embodiment of the base's self-sustaining design. However, time and the unforgiving lunar conditions have not been kind to these symbols of self-sufficiency. The solar panels, once gleaming with promise under the relentless sun, now lay broken and abandoned, victims of the incessant bombardment of micrometeorites. Each meteorite, though small, carried with it the force of a bullet. Over time, they chipped away at the panels, fracturing the delicate photovoltaic cells and damaging the circuitry. The once-efficient solar arrays now resemble a shattered mosaic, their fragments sparkling deceptively under the sunlight they can no longer harness. These shattered panels stand as poignant reminders of the base's desolation. The replacements that were meant to restore the base to its former self-sustaining glory never came. The panels, like the base itself, have been abandoned, their potential and promise left to erode under the onslaught of lunar conditions. As the explorers tread the lunar landscape, the sight of the shattered solar arrays serves as a stark reminder of their mission's gravity. The restoration of power to the base is a daunting task, one that will require resourcefulness and resilience in the face of the base's decaying infrastructure and the harsh lunar environment. The broken panels, once symbols of hope and progress, now pose a significant challenge to the explorers, a hurdle that must be overcome if they are to unlock the secrets of the lunar base.

Machinery: The PCs will encounter an incredible array of support machinery during their explorations, things of chrome and steel and glass that hum and glow, filling entire rooms, carrying out their programmed functions---whatever they might be---just as they had since their creation. All seem fashioned into working art forms by methods unknown to them, with so many flowing conduits and living light displays that they cannot count them all. The machinery throughout the complex is all solid-state, very dependable, self-maintaining and immune to the ravages of age. They all have been waiting patiently for new visitors to call upon their services. Occasionally, one will react to the PC’s presence, increasing its activity as one draws near or going quiet as if in hiding.

All about the base lay devices of unknown nature and purpose. Weapons, vehicles, power units, converters, food manufactories, instruments of surgical or chemical or other forms of scientific research. Telescopes, microscopes, computers, robots— technological artifacts of a thousand purposes. Some, like the lightkey, are minute. Others, like the thousand foot space vessels, are gigantic. The extent of technological secrets discovered by the adventurers is entirely up to the GM, keeping in mind that extensive infusion of advanced technology will have a dramatic influence on his universe. One can always say that the science they encounter is beyond their understanding. And it is difficult to learn much about the equipment from the exterior, and achievement of access into interior portions generally results in the device’s destruction.

Size: Though by and large the proportions of the complex are generous, most humans will be comfortable in the furniture and with personal objects found.

Computers:  

The mainframe computer (which is the default ‘villain’ of this scenario) is considered to be a tech level 10 mainframe with Complexity of 7 and 10,000 terabytes of data storage. It can be considered a lesser cousin to the Daulphin.

The core computer runs non-sapient artificial intelligence software. It is completely machine; an artificial intelligence, a super-computer (not a living entity) that completely dominates and controls every aspect of the moonbase. Its design parameters are to function as the brain of a gigantic environmental complex that it sees as its physical body. Like a real human body, the computer brain controls and operates every aspect of its body. Thus, the super-computer controls and maintains all the "bodily" functions of the massive moon complex. It is equipped with software allowing it to operate station life support, air manufacturing, purification and circulation, temperature regulation, lighting, energy control and distribution, sewage, manufacturing, production, communications, defense, and more, are all managed quickly and efficiently by the computer. The core computer is a complete artificial intelligence, devoid of emotion, but is capable of analyzing data in a subjective way and can act on subjective logic: hunches and speculation. This is particularly important in devising strategies and tactics against an enemy.

It has a standard voice-activation interface.

The base computer has been left on standby and can only be reactivated at the core tap control room. Remote workstations are inoperative. Once the PCs reactivate the computer, environmental controls such as lighting and temperature are reset as well.

The core computer can be reprogrammed only via the main computer console in the main computer console in the core tap control room, for security reasons. Also, certain key commands can only be entered at the main control console.

The people within its body are seen as vital biological systems which it is designed to protect. But they too are part of its body and double as bacteria fighting antibodies who will join in the defense of the body to fight intruders.

In addition, the PCs may come across the functional remains of the crew's personal devices. They are like no machines the PCs are familiar with, and their purpose should be a mystery, but there are plain signs that they are designed to be operated by humans, in the form of keyboards, knobs and slides. Their energy cells have been completely worn down and corroded, even if the PCs know how to charge them.

The heart of the lunar base’s functionality lies within its central computer system, a marvel of technology at Level 10, leaps and bounds ahead of the contemporary technology available to the explorers. This advanced computer system is the epitome of technological prowess, a testament to the ingenuity of the base's ancient creators. It serves not just as an interactive repository of knowledge, but also as the primary control and coordination center for the base's various operations.

Constructed using advanced quantum processors and solid-state memory systems, this computer system possesses processing power and storage capacity that are nearly unimaginable to those from the explorers' era. It is capable of analyzing data at a speed and depth that would render any contemporary computational devices obsolete.

The computer interfaces are designed for user-friendly interaction, with a combination of holographic displays and touch-sensitive control panels. The explorers will find that the system can adapt to their language and input styles, a feature of the AI-driven adaptive user interface. This makes it possible for them to operate the advanced system despite their relatively limited technical knowledge.

But beyond these obvious functionalities, the computer holds secrets of its own. Given its advanced design and processing capabilities, it potentially holds a trove of information about the ancient civilization that constructed the base, their knowledge of science, their cultural practices, their history, and potentially, their downfall. It could offer insights into advanced technologies and methods that could revolutionize life back on Caspia.

Yet, such a treasure trove of knowledge and capability also poses its challenges. Navigating its complex functionalities will not be easy, especially given the likely differences in user interaction philosophies and the potential for ancient security protocols. It will require ingenuity, patience, and possibly a fair bit of luck for the explorers to unlock the full potential of this technological marvel.

Whether they treat it as an insurmountable obstacle or an exciting challenge, one thing is certain: the base's computer system will play a central role in the explorers' adventure on the moon. It holds the key to many of the base's mysteries and, potentially, to a brighter future for their world.

Corridors:

They are wide, able to hold three people walking side by side, and are usually 30 feet high. All are generally well-lit and the lights remains completely functional. Certain areas are lightly screened; these are sections where the lighting is very bright. White areas have full lighting, but rooms are lit only when a panel beside the door is touched. In some rooms and corridors, the lights are low or not lit due to countless lighting tracks being broken or damaged or are dimly lit and these are darkly screened. The shadows in these places are soft and fuzzy around the edges, making any furniture and fixtures appear more alien than they might actually be.

In some passages and compartments, piles of furniture, crates, and so forth form makeshift barricades. Weapons lie discarded on the floor. Strange dents, scratches, and stains mar the walls in some rooms. Equipment throughout the base has been smashed, thrown against walls, and subjected to other random acts of violence.

Doors:

Doors and hatches are either made of thinner sections and, like the entrance hatches, are coated with a friction-neutralizing film in certain parts to allow ease of operation, or from a pink, knotted wood carved with with complex and elegant patterns. There are no hinges holding any of the doors, yet they slide smoothly and silently at the slightest touch when manipulated by the jeweled plate next to them. 

Lift Shafts and Drop Tubes: These are the major means of vertical movement in the complex. Each tube is a cylinder with an opening on both sides, lined by an iridescent, smooth material. Inside are two tracks opposite each other, running down the vertical length of the shaft. Each track has a series of handles (recessed handholds) spaced eight feet apart. One of these tracks will be moving up and the other will be moving down in all tubes that are operational. Objects are simply raised or lowered by a black anti-gravity band which appears on the shaft sides at the foot of the object. The controls, a set located at each level, consist of two buttons, red for up, violet for down. Each level has a sliding hatch to seal off the opening if need be. There is an automatic safeguard to prevent crushing an individual against a hatch. The shafts have no limits on capacity, except for space considerations. They are 1.5 meters in diameter. The entrance hatches and the portion of the lift shafts (also the cargo lifts) adjoining them have an airlock capability.

As previously noted, these four devices are in different states of functioning. In those which anti-gravity still functions, the individual need only step in, float weightlessly, and grasp a passing handle to be borne in whichever direction is desired. At the top and bottom of the tube the handles fold into the wall to complete a circuit. In the non-operational tube, of course, the handles do not move at all, but they will support up to 400 pounds of weight. The tube which still functions mechanically, but which has no anti-gravity, can be used if the characters firmly grasp a handle prior to stepping into the chute; if any character attempts to step into the tube and then grasp a handle, allow a base 10% chance of success, +5% for each point of P.P. above 6. Failure equals a fall which will almost certainly prove fatal from the upper level, allowing 1D6 for each 10 feet of vertical distance fallen.

Utilities: Most rooms (90%) have a waste disposal chute, an eight by ten inch opening in the wall with a hinged door over it. On levels one through six, these all lead directly down and over to the waste recycler on the fourth level. Rooms on level four have large trash cans, most of which are never dumped.

There are also air vents near the ceilings of most (85%) rooms, leading out into the halls.

Every room, every corridor features a small, crystalline array housed in a shallow, clear glass dome some five feet across, usually mounted to the ceiling, but also can be found in corners. These are part of a base-wide security camera system.

Airlock: In order to protect the crew and passengers from a loss of atmosphere, the base has an airlock. An airlock is a set of two doors, one on the inside and one on the outside. A simple touch of a sensor place, or the flashing of a known coded light-signal will open the outer door. There is usually a symbol upon its steely face, and it is usually sealed shut and waiting for a key.

You stand before the wide door, pausing to consider the cryptic emblem etched into its cold, hardened surface. It is a deep blue insignia over two feet in height, an inverted triangle interlaced with unevenly broken lines and what appears to be a language you've never seen.

If the characters think to use the key they found on the dead moonnaught, read the following:

You walk over to the untried door and raise the device and hold it close to the black disk, watching its glittering reflection there. The proximity ignites a glow within the crystal, an ember that rapidly swells to become a brilliant, blinding white as the device comes fully to life. In response, the black disk begins to radiate as well, matching the brilliance of the crystal with an ethereal light of its own.

There is a rumble as a slumber of ages comes to an end. Lifting from the floor, the door begins to open, a rising curtain revealing a chance for life.

You take several steps back, pausing next to the others. Your heart pounding, you watch as the door continues to rise. There is only darkness beyond, and your eyes fight to adjust. Finally, the portal is fully open before you and the reverberation ceases. A deep silence fills the air.

You step forward, eyes searching the void ahead.

The sound of the rising barrier ceases, and the door stands fully open. Against a thick blackness waits beyond. Lights within the room ignite in response, welcoming you, filling your eyes with aesthetic lines and vibrant hues and a magnitude of science beyond your ken.

Starting: Once entry has been achieved, the players will want to investigate the interior of the complex, in search of its identity, its crew, the key to its operations, and any other information they can think of. Guide them through this process by describing what they encounter in each module. The following sections of the text cover the major details of the complex, and are keyed to the floor plans.

The PCs' first line of business will probably be to explore the area they've just entered. The GM should play up the darkness, asking for Perception rolls with very high difficulty numbers due to the darkness. It won't take long for the team to find the first of many bodies. Initial exploration of the seemingly deserted station should be an unsettling experience for the intruders. The dim lighting, abandoned passageways, and indications of violence are a good start.

The key to make this adventure fun is to keep the tension high and play on the players’ paranoia. Keep things as mysterious as possible while following your player’s reasoning and using it against them.

Instead of simply pointing it out to a player - 'You see a dead body' - the GM should call upon the age-old Hollywood trick of springing it on the players in true horror movie fashion. A PC that bumps an upright may dislodge the arm of a body lying on a catwalk directly above, causing it to swing suddenly downward and into the character's face; a failed Spot check may cause a character to stumble over one body, only to land atop a second, and come face to face with the death mask of a third.

Whatever method the GM uses, the incident should be memorable and pointed. Once the first body is discovered, a second is not far behind, and a third beyond that. A sweep of the flashlight reveals the grisly truth about the base - it has become a lunar tomb.

The horror behind the deaths is not simply the existence of dead bodies, it is the gruesome and horrifying ways they have died - beaten, shot, burned to death, hung by the neck - that should give the characters pause.

Remind players that they are on unknown, potentially hostile ground by requiring occasional perception rolls. Those who succeed hear mysterious noises in the distance or glimpse something scuttling in the shadows. Every little sound should bring visions of attacking corpses to mind, making them jumpy and impeding their progress. Further investigation finds nothing amiss of course. Evocative descriptions of the curiously quiet stations and clues indicating a ghastly end for the crew are also tools for establishing a tone of dread. Exercise restraint, however. Most players are inured to scenes of graphic violence in games. Enigmatic hints of something horrific at work will go a lot further in setting a frightful mood. Early in the adventure, a few drops of blood spattered on a computer keyboard are more unnerving than entire walls dripping with gore, for example.

They should inch their way along the corridors, more slowly after their first encounter with the body. Their imaginations, possibly fed by hunger, fatigue, and uncertainty, running wild. That combined with the morgue-like silence in a place meant for noise and light and activity. The PCs should get the impression that the base is like a sleeping titan, a genie in the lamp, waiting to be awakened and summoned for duty in the service to evil and unthinkably powerful masters. As if not to disturb it, they should move every quietly.

There are no maps of the facility available. It might be a good idea for the PCs to make a map with whatever writing utensils and paper available.

Entrance:

Like lost children, they enter. When their first steps cross the threshold, they realize that they have left the one-sixth g of the moon behind them and are feeling full Caspia gravity again, an impossibility as far as they know. Their bodies feel heavy and sluggish -- it will take a while to readjust. Silent in stunned amazement, their eyes drink in the marvel around them, dancing from one glistening object to the next, unable to fix in understanding upon any of them.

The airlock is a standard Celestial design. A circular chamber, its walls and ceiling a bronze-like metal. Ornate, lustrous silver support braces run up the walls and arch inward above, meeting at a central ring overhead. Faceted light strips stretch from floor to ceiling, casting a warm, gentle light within the room. A simple touch of a sensor plate, or the flashing of a known coded light-signal, will open the outer door.

The inside of the airlock will hold up to 10 people at a time, and requires 20 seconds to cycle open. Touching a plate in the ceiling automatically starts the recycling mechanism. The outer door MUST be closed, or the system will not operate. At that moment, the outer door will silently shut, and the 20’ wide inner door will part to reveal the 60’ by 60’ entry area with drop tube (non-functioning) to the lower levels. The "V" doors inside and flanking the air lock (and the one to the far north as well) are access to the space suit storage racks - as well as emergency means of entry/egress to the air lock.

Closet: Row upon row of empty spacesuits line the walls, like silent sentinels waiting to serve (or carcasses on meat hooks). A row of helmets sit on a shelf opposite. One helmet has fallen and rolled into a corner, the faceplate cracked.

The suits are brilliantly conceived and executed and looked unused. While covered in white fabric like conventional NASA suits, they bear no insignia at all, no flags or other markings. They are simple in design, built without the hose fittings and other hardware that clutters the outer surface of other spacewear, instead having internal backpack connectors.

Each is equipped with magnetized soled boots that allow the wearer to  metallic bulkheads in microgravity or zero-G, a sealed helmet equipped with a concentrated food and water supply in a handy helmet-mounted dispenser, and a waste-relief system that collects and packages the wearer’s waste products in a hygienic manner.

Optional Encounter: As you step across the the threshold, a black disk the size of a plate cuts from behind one of the rows and flies at you with tremendous speed. You duck at the last moment but the razor-sharp edge of the homicidal device slashes one of your helmet antennae off. It banks sharply and comes back for another pas, aiming directly for your throat. You fire at it.

Hanger:

At the end of the corridor hub, just beyond the spacesuit storage bay, stands an immense circular area three times the size of war room (which the PCs will discover later). It has no other door. On the map indicates this room is exposed to space and to the lethal environment outside. Using the lightkey on the wall causes the door to lift slowly, dramatically, revealing a deep blackness beyond. A wall of stale, frigid air sweeps in, instantly dropping the airlock temperature below zero.

Even through your protective suit you can feel the bitter coldness that waits within that blackness. Your spotlight flickers to life and burns away the darkness of the compartment. A crystalline layer of frost covers the floor.

You cannot see in this inky gloom; the darkness before you seems almost thick enough to touch.

Each step you take into this area echoes dully, amplified by the blackness.

As the steel barrier reaches its fully open position and goes silent, a visitor approaches a wide, gaping maw cautiously, eyes straining to find something, anything, in the darkness. Stepping forward, they cross the threshold. Gentle light splashes upon the visitor, warmer and more reddish than usual.

One expect the lights of the hanger even as they ignite, but one is not fully prepared for what they reveal. Nor is one prepared to find oneself slightly airborne with that step forward—crossing without warning into one-sixth gravity, one loses their balance and falls gently to the hard, frigid hanger floor. Then, with care, one finds one’s feet once more and stands in stunned awe, drinking in the sight before them.

It is a cavernous chamber. Wall segments of polished blue metal separated by massive, rising braces of shining steel, forms a perfect dome. Comprised of irregular plates interlocked in a quilt-like fashion, they all catch the light, each plate differently, lending a subtle multi-hued effect. High along the dome, dozens of heating units glow orange, throwing their light and heat into the chamber. Six-sided and interlocked in a wide band that encircled the hanger, they speak of a metal-lined, bio-mechanically enhanced beehive.

The center of the ceiling is dominated by a round door of gleaming metal nearly half the size of a city block. That the circular portal is made up of five smaller, pie-slice sections is only subtly betrayed by the direction of grain in the metal of which they were made. That great door opens into space, and one can be grateful that it is intact and closed.

The floor, polished as if still new and perfectly level throughout, stretches far before them, as wide as two football fields, coated in places by crystalline frost. There is air in the bay but it is thin [adequate, barely, as if at an elevation of 10,000 feet or 3,000 meters] and tainted with the odor of some petrochemical.

Complex multi-leveled structures of steel and glass rise within the artificial cavern, one to each side. They bear piping and support equipment and are much like some of the launch pad structures used at Cape Kennedy. However, as with everything on the base, they carry in their flowing design an inherent style, an artistic flair that distinguishes them from their earthly more utilitarian counterparts and makes them not merely functional but pleasing to the eye.

Despite the bitter cold, one steps deeper into the chamber and notes that two large, shallow white circles had been set into the floor, crossed by painted green and yellow lines that run straight before ending at the hanger walls. The intersecting stripes are labeled here and there with writing as if different segments were designated by different numerals, and overall they give the impression of runway markings, perhaps suggesting vehicle maintenance and storage areas as well as launch positions.

The flight deck contains a number of spacecraft, ranging from two-person scouts to vessels that will carry over 100.  Each was born of a technology beyond NASA’s imaginings. The largest are perhaps seventy-five feet in length, a sweeping, streamlined form that, while thick along the centerline, sweeps outward into blunt, curved, upswept wings. Their hulls glisten like pearl, their glass-smooth bodies a symphony of pale pinks and blues as they catch the light, hanging motionless some six feet above the hangar floor. Hovering there, unpowered. No landing gear. Total gravity manipulation—the dream of the flight sciences of previous ages. The craft have no windows that one can see. From bow to stern, each ship is unbroken in line and contour.

The interior of a typical spacecraft is about ten meters long and four across, narrowing slightly towards the bow. Small glowing panels in the floor and ceiling light the interior. A viewscreen stretches across

the width of the bow and a colorful bank of controls lies beneath. Two deep pilots’ chairs sit before the console. A winking red light near the center of the board commands attention. To the rear of the hatch, two bunks are set into the starboard wall with various stations on the port side, and a small sanitary station is nestled in the far end. There are smears on the deck, leading forward a meter or two from the hatch and then tapering off toward the rear.

These ships are computer-controlled. Study is required to learn to give the proper commands, but it is not difficult.

The speed and capabilities of these ships are left to the GM, should he choose to permit PCs to leave the confines of Caspia and its moon.

Repair Area.

The place looks new, almost unused. No oils spots or fuel stains mar the floor, neither are there tools or any other kind of loose equipment scattered about. Crude elements as liquid fuels, petroleum lubricants, and pheumatic tools were apparently well below the technological level of the facility's builders.

Ground Level:

Hallway Chamber: As visitors reach the threshold, lights flare to life before them. The lights reveal a straight corridor that slopes gently downward stretching a dozen yards beyond the doorframe. Vertical lightstrips spaced equally along its length, bathe the passage with warm, inviting light. Its walls and ceilings, cut with grooved, linear facets that run their length, are made of the same bronze-tone metal as those of the air-lock chamber. Its floor, also like that of the airlock, is polished smooth. There is another door facing them, directly ahead. Unlike those seen earlier, there is a cryptic emblem etched into its cold, hardened surface. It is a deep blue insignia over two feet in height, an inverted triangle interlaced with unevenly broken lines. Like the others, it is sealed shut. Sealed---and waiting for a key.

Corridor: Accents of glass and gleaming metals, set into the walls and ceiling, catch the light. Spaced along this expansive corridor's length are polished bronze wall segments. Twelve of the sealed portals have the familiar steely sheen but the last, centered in the far wall and opposite to the doorway of the war room, is solid white. Every portal reveals a new corridor, and every passageway looks the same. Each is branded with cryptic symbols and letters, except for the white door where the red insignia emblazoned upon it differs from the others seen, suggesting both uniqueness and importance. There is also some clutter on the floor, primarily sheets of plastic (used as paper) and broken bits of machinery. None of the sheets have anything legible handwriting, and the fragments of metal are mangled or rusted and unidentifiable.

1. The Technicians’ Lounge: This area is densely strewn with tables and benches. In storage bins are games and other amusements; of note are two solid puzzles made of brightly colored plastic. One puzzle is either an illustration of the probability density distribution of the electrons of (most likely) mendelevium or a dissertation of the Big Bang theory. The other puzzle seems to involve the solution of the equations of motion of a stellar system’s major celestial bodies by successive approximations. Additional pieces can be added to include more bodies, or model different stellar systems.

2. Technicians’ Mess: The round tables are arranged quite orderly for dining; a symmetrical brown and white design covers each of their smooth surfaces. Four light brown molded chairs sit around each of them, each secured to the floor and with straps dangling from the sides (should the artificial gravity fail). One wall has a large viewscreen so the room can be used as a theater and lecture room, but all the characters see is a wall; the projection comes from within and the surface is only slightly textured. If active, select what the viewscreen is showing. Whatever it is, the picture repeatedly distorts and then recovers, and the sound is occasionally drowned out by static.

3. Dining Rooms: You glance around the room. A dozen wide, oblong, irregular pits have been dug into its floor, all neatly covered with the same polished, stony material that makes up the floor. All are of the same depth, about four feet, with gently scalloped edges and descending steps cut into each end. Rising within each pit, supported by a flowing central pedestal of polished crystal, is a translucent tabletop shaped to follow the outline of the hollow it occupies. Each table shines like colored pearl, each with a half-dozen shallow and roughly rectangular surface depressions cut into its surface. Apparently, those who dined there were meant to sit in the contoured hollows of the pits' edges as they enjoyed their food.

(The hollows yield slightly when sat on, but otherwise serve as respectable benches.)

This has to be a dining hall.

On one of the tables, in one of its depressions, rests a large, ovoid metal tray covered with the darkened remains of what must once have been an unfinished meal, left uneaten who knew how many years before.

The two large rooms to the west have mess tables and were cafeteria-like places. The three smaller ones to the east were for the higher-ups, and they contained tables and chairs. All five of these areas are now in ruins. They have nothing of value within them unless the PCs successfully activate the food dispensers in the right kitchen, in which case see below.

There is a panel in the wall labelled "trash" in the unknown language. It leads to the waste recycler. If the PCs place one of the trays near it, the panel snaps upward and out of sight, revealing a small, enclosed compartment into which they can place the tray. Then, as quickly as it opens, the door closes again. Each time this is done, there is no trace of the previous tray, but where exactly it and its trash has gone they can only guess.

4. Kitchen. This room is the kitchen that serves the technicians’ mess, and there are still computer operated food dispensers as indicated in each kitchen. Each kitchen will have some bare counter space and a number of the large, ovoid metal trays lying about unused. Along one wall is a bench with a number of devices resting on it.

These things are the only ones standing in the room—these have to be food dispensers of some kind. Toward its bottom is what could be a dispensing door, a rectangular depression three feet wide that looks as if it might open. Like so much of the technology of its builders, each device is almost a work of art, a fluid jumble of steel and glass some twelve feet high, covered above with the same colorful, indecipherable graphics they have seen through the base.

Each device has a dark colored glass door in the front of it and arranged beside these are a number of square metal plates (selector buttons). On top of each box is a short, black cylinder (temperature control knob). Inside each box are a number of shelves spaced close together. Along other walls are a fine metal mesh (microphone/speaker grille) with a rivet (call button) below it. Next to these is a long, narrow door that opens to a small shelf-like compartment. Near the entrance is a dark glass plate with four rivets below it.

(This was the daily menu screen. The rivets are control buttons for it. The menu screen no longer works.) If food is dispensed, it will be served in the dining hall on a compartmentalized metal tray. There are eight per kitchen, and not less than two will function.

You look again at the machine, towering silently against the wall as if challenging you to solve the mystery of its function.

If only you can figure it out---

Recalling the devices in the bathroom, you reach out and wave your hands before the things, moving them through the air as if conducting an orchestra. Nearer, farther, side to side.

Nothing.

You move closer, placing your palms against the cool contours of the machine, pressing lightly, pressing harder, trying first one odd protrusion then another like a man groping for a light switch in a dark room.

Nothing.

You pause, your stomach growling commands to proceed. The enigma just stands there, defiantly keeping its secrets.

Okay, think.

You turn back toward the seating pits, hoping some clue might make itself apparent.

Finally, in desperation, you can reach the rivets below the colored graphic, your hand moving them the colored graphics scattered high on its face. Once, twice, three times.

A sound.

You pause. Something inside the machine has stirred. Waiting a moment, you hear nothing else.

You reach up and try again. Again, the sound. You pull more of the rivers against more of the graphics. And again and again. Each time, the machine makes the odd little noise, a subdued squeal not unlike that of a rodent caught in a burlap sack. Sometimes the sound varies slightly, having a lower pitch than usual. Again and again, between attempts, you look down at the assumed dispenser door but find it sealed as tightly as ever.

Half a dozen times you set upon the arcane mechanism, and each time you hear the little sound.

The apparent door at the bottom stays shut.

You stoop to pick up the lightkey then spin toward the tables in the dining hall again---and your eyes are wide.

They are covered in food, all of them. Tray after tray, one for each twist of the rivet that you have delivered, for each order you successfully and unknowingly had placed.

There are 4D4+2 full meals spread out before them: steaks, breads, vegetables, fruits. Some they recognize, many more they do not.

PCs may be amazed that that despite the number of years, nothing has decayed, nothing has gone to dust. The PCs may suspect that this is the result of some kind of energy/matter converter, but they would be incorrect. Such advanced technology is still beyond the means of this base, as advanced as it is. Instead the base uses experiential TL 10 food vats to create an endless supply of imitation vegetables, lean meat, fish or other foodstuffs from raw matter, spoil-proof proteins, and gengineered cells from plant or livestock tissue cultured in growth tanks and supplied with nutrients. This creates a continuously growing biomass, which is harvested whenever food is required or it gets too big for its vat, and then formed by the machines into any shape or type of food desired. Some residents of the base preferred food grown in the hydroponics instead, or the slaughtered animals.

Roll on the following table for the different meals:

1. Breakfast: Bacon and eggs, toast with butter and jam, a slice of cantaloupe, milk, a cup of liqueur.

2. Lunch: Antipasto salad, Italian black bread with melted garlic butter, spaghetti and meatballs, a bunch of grapes, coffee and tea crystals (self-heating, when dropped into cold water, they quickly produce hot coffee or tea), red wine, four chocolate creams.

3. Dinner: A two pound steak (in a six-inch cube), salad with dressing, brown bread (a sphere, with crust on the outside), potatoes and gravy, bourbon, and ice cubes.

4. Dinner: Tacos, enchiladas, burritos, bean salad, tequila (with salt and lemon), custard.

5. Dinner: Dinosaur meat, burned on the outside and raw on the inside, dead grub-worms of three varieties, brightly colored sliced tubers, beer. (Meals such as this, which most people would find wholly inappropriate, might occur one time in a hundred.)

6. Dinner: Various meats, including roast chicken on a large scale, served with thinly sliced ham, a light colored meat that resembles turkey, and a much darker reddish one that can't be identified.

7. Assorted Fruit dish: Grapes, cherries, and apples, fruit juice.

In every case, the food is of superlative quality, the breads are delicious and moist and seemingly baked with coarse-ground whole grains and honeyed spices, the fruits are succulent, the meats hot, tender and juicy. Drinks and beverages are served in a glass and metal goblets; and all include at least one filled with cold water.

All arrive piping hot and in generous portions, and comes with metal eating utensils including spoons, tongs, forks and a serrated knife (sharp enough to be used as an improvised weapon).

5. Waster Recycler:

Like the water tank, this room is closed off to the rest of the base. The only way to enter is through one of the waster chutes. There are silent conveyor belts running inside. These chutes come from all the upper levels, where each room has a trash slot on the wall, and from the dining halls neat doors.

The chutes all lead to a giant hopper where sorting is done. Anything metallic is drawn to one side by a complex magnetic system, and there sterilized in a small oven (400 degrees Fahrenheit, 200 Celsius). Then all plates, goblets, and other regular matter is sorted by a conveyor system, and delivered to the appropriate location, clean and fresh. All plastic and organic matter is shredded in another hopper, and then reduced to component molecules. This automatic process then feeds the foodvats which produce more of the food.

Any metal objects are ground up, the metal filings packed into a waster pile to be melted down when needed for plates, forks and goblets. This is all handled automatically by the computer.

Unnumbered Rooms: These rooms are typically apartments, activity rooms (those with doors which require no key), and utility/maintenance/storerooms. Unless noted by a number code each such area is thoroughly looted, has some jumbled furniture or rotting goods therein, and from inanimate skeletons of generally human appearance. Everything is worthless or in bad condition, the furnishings plastic or metal, and only bits of rag or odd pieces of junk can be found.

1. Through the door is a tiny dark room cluttered with books, small electronic devices, a bunk and other furniture. A male corpse in white overalls, an electronic meter strapped to his waist, is slumped on the bunk with his face buried in his hands.

4 through 11. Junior Technicians’ Quarters. These rooms have frugal living accommodations for two. Like all other quarters, one human will find them comfortable. Room 11 has arrangements for three.

12 through 15. Senior Technicians’ Quarters. Larger, more luxurious, and for single occupancy, these are otherwise the same as the junior techs’ rooms.

12 has a lift shaft to 9 above.

In 13, on a desk, is a model of the complex showing modules, subway tunnels, shaft, and powerplant.

16. Storeroom. This is a storeroom for use by the senior technicians.

17. Life Support. 

This door is locked, but not alarmed. From the outside, nothing can be heard from the interior except a low hum.

Like so many others, this room is filled with unfathomable machines. A cylindrical something dominates the center of the room, a massive obelisk fifteen feet high and ten wide glints a dark silver in the light. It is surrounded by smaller support units that are still quite large in their own right, all of which are joined to the primary by curved, glowing rods of shaped crystal. Blue light courses through the clear conduits, arteries feeding intense energies into the central mechanism. Throughout the room, tiny multicolored display lights twinkle like stars, dancing within glossy black panels that also house scores of colorful though indecipherable graphic readouts. High above the cylinder is a wide wraparound strip of more crystal, also glowing blue, encircling its upper body a couple of feet from the top. More plumbing is visible behind the transparent cerulean band, metal tubes that gleam silver, cold and copper. The PCs can try walking around to the great machine, only to find an impassable jungle of connecting hoses, pipes, and luminous tubes.

A trail of red blood comes from the lift shaft, crosses corridor 29b, and continues on to room 26.

This room holds the life support machinery for this module, and all life support functions for the module can be controlled from here. The controls are clearly labeled in the unknown language for each department. The controls for gravity is across from the door, atmosphere is to the right, lights are on the left, and the switches for waster recycling are near the door. Each section has its own panel hooked up to the appropriate machinery.

Lights: Off switches for every room are one giant panel here. The lights are laid out in four levels, with all rooms numbered, but not labeled. The number correspond to the layout of the map. There are emergency lights that will turn on if the master switch here is thrown, and the backups are completely automatic. There is no way to turn off the emergency lights without turning the main lights back on. The emergency lights are located only in the halls.

Waste Recycling: This controls the conservation of materials inside the module. Without the computer operated system of recycling all water and nutrients the base would have to restock some supplies every week. 

Atmosphere: Fresh air is piped to the entire base from the garden floor, and the main control is here. This control will cause also more oxygen to be created from electrolyzing the water in the storage tank, replenishing any lost during decompression or airlock recycling, along with changing carbon dioxide to fresh oxygen. Attempts to turn off the supply of air to any level will be fruitless. The terminal will not accept any commands for stopping air, only those for decreasing to half pressure or increases to pressure and a half. Only if the control is blown to bits will there be any loss of atmosphere circulation. Then it will be total, through the entire module.  There is only an one hour supply of air in the halls.

Temperature:

Special Note: It lakes someone fluent in computer operations to operate any terminal, and the skill percentage must be rolled for each action on the computer, and the alien nature also adds a -20% penalty. A failed roll will not set off any alarms.

18 through 24. More Junior Technicians’ Quarters. 20 is a charred shambles, looking as though an explosion took place there. Under debris in 23 is a box with high quality lenses and precision optical tools.

25. Biological Center. The machinery here will not appear greatly different to the adventurers from any other machinery in the complex.

26. Refuse Disposal Room. When the door to this room is opened, a red circle above it will light up. If anything remains on the floor when the door is completely closed, the floor will slide away. The contents then drop through a tunnel to the waste recycler. Paths of blood from 17 and 26 terminate here.

27. Subway Station Chamber. A path of red blood goes through 28b to 29b and then to 26. There is a lift shaft that connects to the Commander’s cabin here.

28a, 28b, 29a, and 29b. Corridors. In the vicinities of rooms 17, 26 and 27, 28b & 29b are stained with red blood.

30. Observatory: This station houses a facility for tracking objects in translunar space. In the near-vacuum of the Moon's atmosphere, there is practically no atmospheric diffraction. The voice of the observatory's cybernetic voice greets its visitors with an endless barrage of astronomical data. This is where gigantic lenses, plus long exposures of photographic plates, which in turn can be further magnified increases the vision so tremendously that it is able to peer into the depths of interstellar space and glimpse the vastness of infinity itself. This room consists of several banks of computer terminals and monitors. These monitors still show intermittent data from deep space that are still connected to the station’s computer. Players will the necessary skills (Computer Operations and Astronomy) will be able to use the telescope and satellites to observe events unfolding in the Solar System as well as further in deep space. Computer programming and Radio: Satellite (if allowed) skill rolls might be able to re-tool these deep space satellites to observe and even communicate with the near-Caspia orbit space stations.

Upper Level (Upper Castes’ Quarters):

1. Hallway Chamber.

They exit the lift enter a new corridor, one unlike the others they have seen. There are more doors here than in other areas of the base, dozens of them, spaced evenly and closer together. Lettering and a distinctive colored graphic mark each door.

The intimidating almost Gothic passageway stretches far into the distance, threatening to unleash countless unpleasant surprises upon them. Carved wooden accents and veined stone supports arch massively overhead, mixed with the bronze and gray metals of the walls and ceiling, with gargoyles and other statuary nestled into the many ornamented alcoves. Limited pools of orange light spills from overhead, filling the corridor with menacing shadows.

2. Common Room and Recreation Area. A lounge which could be converted into a theater takes up about half the room. The other portion is a recreation center with various games, a swimming pool in the form of a grotto (currently dry), some open areas, etc.  There are also numerous wooden tables for games and study, along with comfortable amorphous benches for relaxation. In a rack by the wall are rods, each with a lens in one end. Turn the lower half of a rod clockwise till it clicks and infrared light will be emitted; counterclockwise, ultraviolet. If the infrared light is shined on an amorphous bench, it will deform under slight pressure, making a bed, for instance, until the ultraviolet light is played upon it, when it will stop deforming except for its natural “give.” There are, some heating and freezing consoles for the pool in the corners against the curving wall. The entire front wall is a viewscreen that displays scenic views, virtual entertainment, and important announcements for the residents.

3. Upper Castes’ Dining Hall. 

Repeat the description from the Technician's Mess.

The only difference is that there is an actual table; a long slab of highly polished black metal. Every seat is a captains chair with arms and a high back, but at the head of the table stands a larger and more ornately carved chair, with silver inlays, as if to imply that the host, if not technically of royal blood, could nevertheless claim to be of a station superior to the others.

4. Kitchen. At the end by 1 there is a very delicate-looking glass abstract sculpture garden mounted on a vibration-absorbing base.

4. Galley. This serves the dining hall, and is virtually identical to the one in the technician's module, except that it is more spacious and ornate. The middle of the room has numerous tables placed end to end to form one long dining table. The furniture in this room consists of roughly hewed stone tables and amorphous mounds that yield slightly when sat on, but otherwise serve as respectable benches.

One cluster of tables and benches is set apart on a slightly higher platform, giving an impression of being a place of authority. These benches are splattered with dried blood (human). A trail of blood leads from here into the open area (9), and then to the lift shaft there.

There is a lift shaft to the technicians’ mess below.

5. Second in Command’s Cabin.

Before the explorers stands the formidable first door of the lunar base's wing, a silent sentinel guarding the unknown beyond. Their hearts pounding, their breath held in suspense, they gingerly raise the lightkey to the enigmatic black disk. In response, the deep, resonating rumble of ancient machinery comes to life. With a slow, mechanical grace, the door ascends, revealing the world that lies within.

As the explorers cross the threshold, a sudden, bone-deep chill wraps around them. Their movement triggers hidden sensors, and recessed lights, burning with an orange-yellow glow, flicker to life, cutting through the omnipresent gloom. The room beyond is illuminated, revealing its long-held secrets to the newcomers. It is a revelation that confirms their suspicions, possibly their deepest apprehensions.

They stand on the precipice of occupied living quarters.

Separated by a slender partition, an anteroom unfolds before them, serving as the welcome area for the cabin beyond. Its function as a reception room, despite the alien surroundings, sparks an eerie familiarity, a hint of the human touch amidst the enigma of the lunar base.

The sight of the occupied living quarters grips the explorers with a mixture of fascination and dread. A realization seeps in: they are not merely explorers in a forgotten base. They are, in essence, guests stepping into the personal spaces of a civilization long vanished, intruding on the echoes of lives lived thousands of years before. Each artifact, every scrap of alien technology in sight, serves as a vivid reminder of the rich history that once unfolded within these walls. 

At the room's focal point, a lifeless figure sprawls in grim repose across an imposing, baroque desk. It is a grand tableau of serpentine bas-reliefs that wind sinuously across its surface, lending an air of regal decadence to the scene. The figure, stripped of most clothing save for a modest waistcloth, lies in a position of tragic abandonment; one of its arms hanging lifelessly over the desk's edge, frozen in its last act of reaching out.

The once-glistening surface of the desk is tarnished by a macabre testament to the figure's demise. Dried blood, now a haunting echo of the vibrant life it once carried, stains much of the table, its crimson hues a stark contrast against the elegant carvings. When fresh, the blood had dripped in rivulets, seeping onto the polished stone floor below, pooling into a wide puddle that had made its slow, relentless march towards the room's entrance.

The figure's face, even in death, bears the twisted mask of its final moments. A terrible expression of agony is etched into the pallid features, a grim reminder of the pain endured in life's final struggle. The cause of such suffering is gruesomely evident – a savage wound, cruelly and deeply cut into the man's neck, narrates a tale of violent death.

This chilling sight forces a stark realization upon the explorers: they are not merely witnesses to the remnants of a long-lost civilization. They are privy to its intimate, brutal end – a reminder of the fleeting nature of life amidst the grandeur of cosmic exploration.

the man would have presided over the room from behind the imposing desk, a dominant figure in the grand tapestry of his surroundings. The desk, serving as the room's centerpiece, would have played host to his living authority, anchoring his commanding presence and reinforcing his status within the lunar base. His position would have been unmistakable, a testament to his role within the dynamics of this long-vanished civilization.  On the desk, an object of an off-white hue, mellowed into a soft yellow over time, claims its place amongst the relics. It is an ashtray, its purpose evidenced by the remains of cigarettes long decayed into mere dust. The artifact is peculiar in shape, an irregular oval that measures approximately 4" x 7". Its base is rounded, subtly flattened and slightly off-center, giving the ashtray an overall unconventional appearance. A perceptive investigator may discern the unsettling truth of the object. The ashtray, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be bone. With sufficient knowledge in anthropology or forensics, they might identify it as a part of a human skull – the skullcap, to be precise. This chilling piece of decor, rather than being a simple ashtray, bears the grim history of its origin. The skullcap belonged to a prime minister of a once-mighty nation, long ago laid to waste. Claimed as a trophy during the ferocious onslaught of the Great War, it serves as a macabre reminder of the violence that shaped the history of this lost civilization.

In close proximity to the desk is a statue of a cherubic angel blowing a long horn-like affair, a trumpet of sorts.

Behind the desk is a somber stained-glass configuration depicting a hand resting on the back of a throne, as well as a faded tapestry of a virgin and a unicorn. In a corner, sitting on a jet-black pedestal is a bust of an insane-looking man with a crown. The carving looks skillfully chiseled from a rare piece of streaked porphyry.

Moving inside, they see a bladed weapon on the floor beneath the dead man’s pendent, mummified hand, apparently still lying where it had been dropped. There can be no doubt that it was suicide.

The knife is the size of machete and heavier than expected. Its straight, tarnished blade, though stained with old blood, still bears an intricate engraving. Its darkened ivory handle, displaying several stylized female figures intertwined with other, more bizarre forms, is a wonder of craftsmanship, a work of art that must once have been a proud possession.

Perhaps twenty feet square, the entire cabin is plushly appointed and is as astounding as any within the base. Earth tones dominate. The design of the room sweeps organically from side to side and from top to bottom, the walls, the door frames, the furniture. Sparkling, intricate crystalline sculptures embedded in the walls like rivers of colored fire flow from wall to wall and from wall to ceiling. Small statues and other personal items rest within varied and asymmetrical lighted alcoves. A wide, trapezoidal bed dominates the chamber, dressed with blankets of blue,  still comfortable despite its age, and it adjusts to body contours as one moves, as if it were filled with a thick gel padding. A thick, built-in table of dark veined wood stands to one side, emerging from the wall and floor as if it had grown there. What little shows of its upper surface is polished mirror smooth.

The objects of painted and sculpted artwork that spot the walls and stand within the alcoves all depict the same basic theme and are as unpleasant in their subject matter as they are in their execution. Torture on a nightmare level. Perhaps it was an art form to these people.

There is something else, resting across the chamber that catches their eyes. A flat, oddly-shaped piece of clear material an inch thick, which stands in an alcove beside the bed. Within the crystal hangs a likeness, a fully dimensional, full-color photo image of a stunning woman. She is dressed in a most revealing manner with jewelry and a hairstyle that does not suggest any culture that the PCs are likely to be aware of. Her hair is dark, but her eyes, glistening like rare gems, are piercing and unlike any they have seen. Even if the PCs have seen holograms before, it is nothing like this -- as though she were actually standing there.

Was this his wife? Or his possession?

You contemplate the woman's face again, momentarily taken by the fact that she, like the man at the table, must be long dead and forgotten.

Again, you feel like a ghost, drifting through this deserted fortress, wondering what sort of people had dwelt in these empty rooms and what dreams they had dreamed in those beds, gazing up at the cold mockery of the stars.

On the alcove, there are a few other personal possessions, including a light key that will unlock every door.

Two other doors in the room stand open. One leads into a closet of sorts and the other to sanitary facilities. The closet contains three uniforms tightly pressed.

Passing the closet, the sanitary facility is not unlike an earthly bathroom with marble floors, cream walls. The light ignites as one enters. It contains a large mirror, inset into the wall and rising to a height of seven feet. The basin, a polished metal unit that flows gracefully from the wall and floor, rises to waist height. Hand motion activates the spigot and water pours forth freely and one can also vary its temperature by raising and lowering one's hands.  A cabinet on the wall contains a large, ornate straight razor and several small porcelain containers.

The razor has the same odd quality they had found in the war room. One can not feel the edge. Testing reveals that it is able to remove facial hair without shaving cream or lubricant of any kind, and PCs using it will experience the closest and most comfortable shave of their lives.

Nearby is a toilet with no hinged lid or seat, but its bowl features a sliding cover that retracts silently into the wall before use. When tapped for the first time, the toilet speaks in an automated voice, saying in its native language. “Greetings, noble sir! I am a toilet! For all your needs, from excretion to the expulsion of vomit during gravity sickness, it will be my pleasure to sterilize and cleanse various biological expulsive material you might be pleased to extrude. If you would care for a demonstration, merely direct any organ of elimination toward the clearly marked orifice.” Unless the characters are familiar with the old tongue, all they hear is a series of gibberish.

The room also features a large, circular shower with blue tinted glass.

5 through 8. Elder Upper Castes’ Quarters. These are smaller, more modest versions of the previous cabin, without the anteroom. Only a pair of them are vacant, the others contain bodies of suicides. In a closet in 5 are a pair of harnesses (grav belts). 

The bed in 6 is covered with dried human blood. The bloodstains continue out the door into corridor 17b and from there to the lift shaft in 10.

In one of the drawers of the numerous storage units is a plastic cone 40 cm long, 18 cm in diameter at its base, lying on its side. Placing it upright, so that its axis is roughly aligned with the direction of gravity, will activate a transparent hemispherical field 3 meters in radius. This field will not pass through walls. Gases are the only matter that can enter the field; anything can leave it freely.

Rooms 7 and 8 are devoid of personal items and have apparently never been assigned a resident.  Room 8 has been destroyed, the cabinets broken, the drawers of the wardrobes pulled out and stamped apart underfoot. The bedsheets have been torn to pieces and lay scattered all over the room. And the full-length dressing mirror has been shattered. Gleaming shards litters the floor. Although they can not see it, the interior panels of the door behind them have been scarred and slashed.  Lying on the floor in 8 is the tool of assailant: a harpoon, its point covered with blood. The ornamental mounting for it is on the wall. It is roughly equivalent to a pike.

8. Open.

This open chamber is a major passageway. A lift shaft reaching to the surface and to 6 below, and a cargo lift to the surface, are located here. The cargo lift is identical to the lift shafts, except that it is much larger and rectangular in shape. Trails of blood from 1 and 4, and one from 10, of blood, pass through here and enter the lift shaft. By the lift shaft is a dagger stained with red blood.

9-11. Storage. This area serves as a pantry and general storeroom for  various foodstuffs, spare parts, and materials such as those previously mentioned are stored.

9. They fumble for the light panel inside the door, find it, and bring banks of fluorescent lights flickering to life. It is a huge storeroom filled with wooden crates stacked nearly to the ceiling and arranged in orderly rows. Each bears the manufacturer’s shipping label, so in a minutes, quietly prowling the aisles, they establish that this place is filled with spare parts for everything from lathes to milling machines to forklifts to transistor radios.

10. In every chamber they find more caches of supplies: thousands of incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs in stacks of sturdy cardboard cartons; hundreds of crates holding thousands of small boxes that in turn contain millions of screws and nails in every size and weight; hundreds of hammers in all designs, wrenches, socket wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, electric drills, saws, other tools.

11. One cathedral-sized room, paneled in moth-repellent cedar, is breathtaking as it contains tier upon tier of huge bolts of cloth—silk, cotton, wool, linen—spooled on storage racks that tower fifteen feet overhead. From that tunnel they enter another like it, equally deserted and well maintained, where additional rooms are filled with more supplies.

12 through 18. Upper Castes’ Quarters. In contrast to the previous quarters, these are stoic in their furnishings.  12, On the nightstand is an ornate starfire pistol, the charge is spent and will be to be replaced. 13, under the bed is a jewelry box full of Celestial medals, perhaps 40 of them. 14, on a shelf is a huge folio of ancient propaganda posters and documents from the Great War. In a box under the bed is an old fashioned memory tape is a film. 15. A series of record books that just contains lists of names and dates with lots of official looking stamps on them. 16. Several rifles.

17. A bunch of little knickknacks in a box marked _____ . Some used razor blades, some hair, a cigarette butt, etc.

18. Bottle of whiskey unopened.

Command Module

Upper Level:

1. War Room.

This massive circular chamber with a polished granite floor is for direct communication between the computer and visitors or crew members, including Vandaliers, scientists, or engineers. The room is a symphony of flowing organic design. Immense display screens, dark and silent, arch high above, catching the light with a pearlscence that live within their curving faces. Below, stretching wide beneath each screen, jut smooth, featureless consoles of the same pearly black. Between each screen and console pair rise ponderous wall supports of gleaming silver, anchored by deeply rooted bases into the floor. Supporting a vast, domed ceiling, they stretch like huge, overhanging tree trunks and converge high above, forming a wide, inverted central cone that is shallow in depth and hollow at its center. Plush, flowing chairs of great size, spaced evenly along the consoles and upholstered in a pebbled leather of deep oxblood, float on protruding arms of metal. Recessed lights, hidden by a flowing, sculpted soffit that encompasses the ceiling, throws jeweled pools upon the consoles, seats, and floor. The few expanses of wall that otherwise are barren harbors deep, shadowy alcoves where unpleasant surprises might easily lie in wait.

Imagine...while you were working yourselves ragged trying to get into orbit, this place was already here and probably already abandoned. You stand in silence for a few moments. As you drink in the reality of the vast indecipherable technology apparent all around you, fear fills you.

All of your years of training seems useless now. You are at the mercy of your surroundings, wholly without control over your situation, knowing perhaps that for the first time in your adult life, you know -- nothing.

Something is nestled within the central nexus above. Directly over the heart of the cathedral-like chamber, both majestic and inert, hangs an enormous orb of what appears to be pure diamond. Scores of thick, crystalline protrusions, flawless and covered with thousands of precision-cut facets, emanate from a common, central point and reach outward in all directions. At twenty feet in diameter, it throws subtle, myriad reflections as it catches the gentle light. Directly beneath the orb is a deep, wide circular pit lined by a knee-high wall and an unusually tall handrail barrier, which is a somewhat larger but otherwise identical counterpart for the sphere above.

Through this room’s floor is the gravity control room (described in its own section) can be seen below. Together these two rooms serve as the command center of the complex.

As you cross to the sealed doorway, you approach a nearby console. Closer inspection reveals nothing to you, no clue concerning its function or origin. You reach out to touch its smooth black surface, watching the mirror-perfect reflection of your hand as it steadily rises to meet your touch, but contact never seems to come. Your fingertips cannot feel the panel, despite the fact that your fingers sense the pressure of doing so.

You slide your fingers along the frictionless surface. Fascinated, you lean closer and detect an infinitesimal space beneath your fingertips, a gap visible only because they do not fully meet their reflections. Unconsciously you press your palm fully against the panel to see if increased pressure makes any difference.

It does---but not the difference you have tried for.

Brilliantly lit symbols suddenly ignite within the panel, complex geometric shapes and configurations combined with more writing in the strange language of the chamber’s door.

A deep hum immediately begins behind you, startling you, a noise that jumps an octave as you spin around, your heart in your throat.

The orbs begin to rotate, throwing light like mirrorballs against the walls of their housing, turning slowly in opposite directions as the resonance grew louder. Another octave. The orbs spin faster. The writing on the walls glows brightly, fed by the power of the machine in their midst.

And life returns to a slumbering giant.

A tremendous, blinding bolt of white arcs from orb to orb, twisting insanely as it closes the circuit between each one, casting a wash of pure, cold light throughout the room. The upper sphere descended, still rotating as it inches downward, and each inch the arc grows brighter and louder, vaporizing the air.

Your eyes remain locked upon the unearthly display. Now almost touching its lower companion, the upper orb finally halts its descent and the two move as a dedicated entity counterspinning, connected by a cascading river of energy. Then, as you watch, transfixed, the single bolt breaks into dozens of white-hot rivulets that flowed hypnotically upon and between the glassy, protruding spines. Energies snake and spit down the power lines, rekindling the blooms of color behind its grilles. A throaty rattle kicks off somewhere in the thing’s interior, sending coughs of smoke through the organ-like exhausts.

Then, slowly, the chamber begins to fill with light. You take a step back. Above, a swirling pattern of luminous plasma begins to take shape, has become a living thing, a scene of depth and substance upon which planets move, stars dance, and the sun blazes.

You stare at it, unable to read the pattern.

A star map, within which a solar system dwells.

Trying to take it all in, you back away from the incredible image. Your unbelieving eyes are fixed upon the display, as you watch in mute fascination, fully and realistically rendered words follow their accustomed transit paths around the yellow star at the system’s core. Colorful lines of red, blue, and orange trace courses between some of the planets and their moons, accompanied by momentary flashes of writing as if identifying their purposes. Geometric figures appear and disappear, first in one place and then another, again and again.

It looks like a window onto space.

It is readily identifiable as the current solar system, all four of the outer gas giants are ringed. And the planet where Caspia should be appears to have at least one more continent than usual, and they are arranged completely differently. The first two planets look much the First, but the fourth planet is desert, nor forested. The first gas giant slowly rotates, finally revealing a ruddy, elliptical feature in its southern hemisphere.

There are also what appear to be lines connecting the planets, something like proposed flight paths, all centered around the third planet. There is a dozen routes connecting it with the fourth.

The base computer is a complex device whose inner workings are impossible to discern. The nearly infinite combination of settings possible with its dazzling array of brightly colored levers, dials, and switches

set into its enigmatic surface makes figuring out its operation an insurmountable task.

If the PCs insist on it, they can move from panel to panel, bringing the room to amazing life, moving from station to station, waking them all up. None of the station has a clear function, and dazzling white light spills upon them as the chamber intensifies its glow, the demand for power increasing exponentially with each slap of their hands.

With each tampering with the controls, roll on the following table.

1 Base lights brighten/dim.

2. View screen malfunction; green and amber lights blink, indicating repair and police robots are on their way; the screen is out until repaired; both robots due in l-3 turns

2. cargo displacement/unloading ordered: worker robots discharge cargo (a bulette) while screen displays this activity

3. Temporarily shuts off artificial gravity in the control room, and they feel the moon's natural one-sixth G.

4, close and lock all doors: this is a security alert measure which will bring 4 police robots to the computer central room unless 7 or 10 occurs; pink and amber lights flash when the alert occurs

5. unlock doors: security alert cancelled; pink and amber lights go out

6. all power to androids shut off/on

7. all power to worker robots shut off/on

8. all power to police robots shut off/on

9. drop tubes sealed: all power shut off/on for tubes and lifts

10. full alert: all doors and sphincters shut and locked: red lights flash, alarm sounds at 10 second intervals; sleep gas will be pumped into the central complex of rooms in 1 round; 4 police robots and 2 worker robots will enter the computer room in 2-8 rounds; only the lightkey slipped into a slot in the

console and the action noted in 7. will cancel the alert.

11. the orb becomes a transparent relief globe of Mu measuring 2 meters in diameter. Besides showing the features of the world at a 1:3,000,000 scale, it can display the moon’s internal details— from the core, to individual crates to the pockets of gases and liquids below the crust -- all done through the miracles brought on by magick. Red dots of varying size and brightness can be projected on the surface of the globe.

13-24 Tracking and Fire Control; can track and identify 100 targets on this level. Can also provide damage reports and schematic floor plan of a particular floor.

25-36 Internal Monitor Control; laps into sensors on that level of the base. This can show structural damage, life support conditions temperature, drone activity, intruder location, and report damage.

37-46 External Monitor Control; the screen shows a high-altitude image of the moon, centered on the Mare Ingenii; this station  locates and identifies objects within 6 miles (9.6km) of the base. Also status of external weapon systems.

47-60 Communications; 1- 66% enables the character(s) to monitor communications being received by the computer; 61-00 monitors transmissions sent and received by computer.

61-72 Engineering Control; A screen shows a vast schematic of complex, interconnected systems indicating and regulating power, and reads the condition of circuitry on that level, Characters with Electrical Engineering skill can temporarily (4D4 minutes) divert power or close off sections on that level.

73-86 Drone Monitoring and Control; can summon or direct all types of drones to any location on that level. Can also zoom-in on any given drone whose serial number is punched into the panel, showing present operational status, location, and destination. A schematic of the level can be called up indicating the exact location and movement of every drone active on that specific level.

87-00 Launching Platform Control; opens and closes access-ways and airlocks. Will present a basic inventory of any vehicle bay on that level whose call number is punched into the panel.

All of the monitors feature intricate, dancing graphics

There are lift shafts here also, at the far ends of the room, that descend to the gravity control room below.

2. Core Tap Computer Room. The computers dedicated to the operation of the core tap are located here. They are the complex. Most of it (all but the center) is taken up by flashing lights, whirring and clicking things, and readout and geometric shapes and patterns that appear in the air. Other graphic displays include viewscreens on the curving wall giving: computer-generated images, temperature, pressure, magnetic flux, spectrograph analysis, and other vital information on any point on or in the Solar System. (All readings are, of course, in alien figures.) The controls for the globe and its attendant displays are not immediately comprehended. The only thing that resembles a control panel is what appears to be an altar. It is supported by a single metal column and two arms are bent towards the door. One wall is made entirely of glass, although this is too dark to see through. (This is the viewing screen. The entire wall will show a picture when the master switch is thrown.) There are three skeletons sprawled near the altar.

To understand them sufficiently to achieve operational mastery of the core tap requires a basic roll of 12+ by the investigating party, rolling every four hours of study. Allow a DM of +1 for each Ievel of computer, heavily shielded, immune to all but the most intense radiation.

The reason for their great bulk is that the makers of the complex had difficulty acquiring advanced compact computers and had to settle for these. They are roughly equivalent to three model 7’s, but cannot be reprogrammed. These computers’ circuits are permanently impressed with their programs, so they cannot be dumped. Like most of the machinery in the complex, determined investigation of them results only in their destruction.

Scattered throughout the room are the ubiquitous tables and mound benches (as though the technicians remained here for long stretches of time). There is a lift shaft to the storage room below in the narrow part of the room.

In the center of the altar are 6 fist-sized dials, 3 coin-sized viewscreen controls, and a master switch. To the left of these are 10 sliders, and to the right are 2 rows of buttons. The wings of the altar are decorated with panels of small glass squares set in rows: key consoles. This is one of the terminals and is now only in touch with a smaller auxiliary computer. The large master switch will turn on the visual display screen above the control panel, while a mechanical voice will begin to relate what is being shown and report on the state of the ship in that area - all in an alien language, of course. The recessed controls are three buttons: OFF, HOLD, CLOSE-UP. Pictures flash on and off in 6 seconds (1 segment). There is also a 120-key console for input; 8 switches, 10 sliders, 6 dials, and 10 buttons. If any of the buttons, levers, etc. are depressed, moved or whatever one of the following will result (roll d12):

3. Communications Room. This has been strongly reinforced to become a vault room. It may be opened only by correctly touching a combination on its massive front door, or with a signal from the commander’s cabin or the intruder defense computer. All sensory and communication gear for interaction with the outside is located here. In addition to office furnishings, there are viewscreens, holographic projection equipment, and several computer terminals. In the middle of the room is a powerful communication laser perched atop a telescoping boom. The ceiling slides open to allow the boom to extend up 100 meters above the ground. The sliding hatch is not detectable from the outside.

4. Data Storage.

The dead man's hand holds a small plastic case of video pellets. Several other pellets are strewn on the floor among the debris and blood.

You move over to the man and bend his fingers away from the crystal case. The dead man's empty sockets seem to watch you as you lift the case from his hand. You extract one of the inch long pellets from the case and insert it end first into the playing slot. It lights up emitting a low tone which soon fades. A large viewscreen, measuring at least ten feet across, comes to life.

5 through 7. Offices. They contain tables, benches, computer terminals and other miscellaneous items. In 5 there is a great deal of dried human blood on the back wall, some on the floor (continuing into corridor 16a on to open area 8, and to the lift shaft there), and a drained laser carbine (human-made) at the foot of the wall. The weapon’s optical sights have been jarred out of alignment. In 7, in a drawer of a desk arrangement, is a small crystalline bar which can be easily held in one hand, with some characters engraved on it. It is a combination lock. When placed over a flat surface with a break in it, like the break between the door and frame of a safe, it will affix itself. The only way to remove it then, besides destroying it (and it’s as strong as diamond), is to touch the characters in a specific sequence. By placing the bar in a slot of a computer terminal, the current combination will be shown on the viewscreen, and a new one up to ten characters long may be programmed in by simply using the terminal’s keyboard.

8. Open Area.

This open chamber is a major passageway. A lift shaft reaching to the surface and to 6 below, and a cargo lift to the surface, are located here. The cargo lift is identical to the lift shafts, except that it is much larger and rectangular in shape. Trails of blood from 1 and 4, and one from 10, pass through here and enter the lift shaft. By the lift shaft is a dagger stained with more blood.

9. Storage. Extra parts for all machinery and computers on this level are stored here. These spare parts are in black boxes and are as difficult to examine as their parent machinery. Since the room is extremely crowded, the lift shaft against the wall may be overlooked.

10 through 13. Offices. These are offices similar to 4 through 7, but smaller. In 10, a barricade of light furniture is by the door. There is evidence of an extensive fight having taken place here. Damage from lasers and bullets is substantial. An automatic pistol and a laser rifle, both spent, are on the floor. An unmarked box of a dozen grenades, ripped open, is by them. The grenades consist of four smoke, two tear gas, and four anti-laser aerosol grenades. Remnants of two tear gas grenades are by the barricade. The tear gas is non-persisting, so the explorers will not be molested. There is quite a bit of dried blood, especially on and near the barricade. A path of mixed blood leads into the passageway and on to the lift shaft there.

14. Lounge.

With a quiet rumble, the door rises to reveal darkness beyond. Once again, lights flare to life as the PCs step into the room. The walls of the room are an elaborate combination of handcut wood beams and formed plaster. Built-in lighting units are regularly spaced throughout, throwing a gentle, even light. Multicolored tapestries of various sizes, most of which feature sayings of sorts hang here and there.

After but one they step, they stop abruptly. Startled, their minds fight to accept the gruesome sight suddenly laid bare before them. A scene of savagery on a massive scale fills the cavernous chamber from wall to wall. Clearly, the now-silent room once has been the site of a vicious man-to-man battle.

And those who had fought there apparently had died there.

Uniformed corpses lay strewn where they have fallen, their torn and mutilated flesh now mummified, their bodies contorted in horrifying, agonized poses. They appear human. Several of them had been dismembered, and judging from the abundance of bloodshed it had happened while they were still alive.

The dark remains of dried blood and splattered tissue, reduced to a hard, caked powder, covers much of the walls, the floor, the ceiling. What must once have been furniture lays toppled and broken, hurled in combat or crushed beneath bodies. The deep, violent char of what may have been concussion charges scar the walls of the room, which once had been lined with heavy shelves. Most of the shelving had been pulled from its mounts and toppled, damaging its contents as they had fallen. Unrecognizable equipment lays everywhere, smashed and useless. Sparkling fragments of glass, ceramic, and metal shone in the light. The oppressive quiet is wildly discordant with the sheet devastation of the scene, and only adds to its unreality.

They walk cautiously into the room, careful not to step on the bits of jagged debris. They feel true fear, their minds flooded with wild imagings of the combat that had taken place.

There must be a dozen of them, though it is hard to tell.

With reluctance they walk through the room, surveying the carnage, looking for any clue as to the identity of the crew. They find none. One thing, however, is obvious---the battle had been fed by exceeding hatred.

Insanity? Mutiny? Whatever it was. It happened a long time ago.

Tattered uniforms---each one black, maroon, or dark green---hang loosely now upon the desiccated forms. The fabric looks almost new, except for the damage and bloodstains. No sign of decomposition. It still glistens.

They look down at one form, a body that lies broken and twisted over the shattered remains of what must have been a table. Its face is pointing upward, empty sockets staring at the them, the flesh around them ripped away to reveal bone beneath. This one has had its eyes torn out.

There are several odd, elongated devices scattered among the bodies, discolored at one end as if by heat. Some are broken in a manner suggesting they had been used as clubs, some still clutched tightly by lifeless fingers.  They look like weapons.

They move back into the passageway, leaving the gruesome scene behind them. They extend the lightkey, take a deep, cleansing breath, and seal the portal shut.

15. You enter a room, and make your way along, your footsteps silent against the hard, cool floor. Alcoves line its walls on either side. The first one reveals a small alcove, as does the second and the third, and so forth. All are empty, their walls and floors barren save for a single wall-mounted protrusion that might be a seat.

This is a lavatory of exceedingly alien design.

16a and 16b. Corridors. Cutting across 16a from 1 to 8 is a trail of human blood. A similar trail from 4 merges with 16a for a short distance and then continues into 8.  One alcove contains a large pedestal-mounted sculpture of a winged, dragonlike creature with three heads.

Lower Level:

1. Weather Control Room. This room is laid out similar to the core tap control room, which can be seen through the transparent ceiling. There is a holographic globe projection of Mu’s surface and atmosphere. Slaved to it are screens with meteorological data. This entire graphics package can show the moon’s present condition or a computer-generated construction of the planet. A setup analogous to the one for the moon in the core tap control room, but this one for the sun, is also here. It is geared towards the study of sunspots. This passive display of conditions on the solar system is rather straightforward.

However, this room controls the directional gravity-wave generator (located in the lower level of the auxiliary module), and thus can influence the base's gravity. Assume players have no chance of learning this until they have explored both this room and the gravity-wave generator room.

There are lift shafts in the corner of this room.

2. The contents of this room are identical to those of the core tap computer room, but are for weather control. Blood paths from 6 pass through here and go on into 4.

3. Storage. This room is about half filled with spare parts for the equipment on this level. The rest of the room is empty except for some water tanks, and two lift shafts against the outer wall.

4. Subway Station Chamber. Trails of blood from 2 enter here and proceed into the subway car.

5. Intruder Defense Computer Room. The only access to this room is the door leading from 7. The door will not readily open, and must be blasted open with about 2000 hits from energy weapons or explosives. There is a red circle above the door. The room itself has no internal defenses.

6. Life Support. This room contains life support machinery for this level and is identical to the previous one. The lift shaft here has red blood trails leading out of it, through 2 into 4.

7. Conference Room.

The unlocked door leads into this quiet room, obviously used for conferences. The main feature is a simple, plain table in the center, 5 feet high and 30 feet in diameter. Around it are ten chairs. Looking closer reveals that eight of the seats are ripped and probably uncomfortable, and that the table has deep scratches. There is a thin layer of dust all around the walls, except for the one wall across from the door. That entire section has a dull sheen, and is of a smooth texture. There is a large switch on the end of the wall, near the corner. The switch is in the off position. The dust on the floor has had paths worn through it, with a large path leading to the shiny wall by the switch, and a much thinner path leading straight to the base of the table. The entire shiny wall is actually a communications screen, and can be turned on by flipping the large switch in the corner. The screen allows two-way communication with the Citadel. It is currently deactivated. If turned on, anyone in the conference room will have a view of ____. Of course, the ____ can also see the person who turned on the screen.

Unnumbered Rooms:

For every corridor they walk, two others seem to appear. They open door after door, if only reluctantly. Fortunately they discover nothing more menacing or nightmarish than convoluted mechanical equipment and storage rooms---with no more mangled bodies anywhere in sight.

AUXILIARY LEVEL

Upper Level:

1. Air/Raft Dock. In the open space near the center of the level are three air/rafts of Celestial design; they enter and leave through a large, round hatch in the ceiling. They weigh 18 tons each, can carry up to 10 tons, and have a top speed of 200 km/h. They have a pressurized cabin. Due to this space shortage, the controls are difficult to operate, though easy to learn. After a few hours of travel, the referee should impose fatigue penalties. These air/rafts do not consist of four identical modules, but the forward section can be detached from the rest of the air/raft. (The remainder will operate normally.) This forward section then becomes two small pressurized one-man units with a top speed of 500 km/h.

2. Air/Raft Garage. This curving room has three recesses in which the air/rafts fit snugly. An air/raft placed in a recess will be automatically examined and repaired.

3. Generator Room Extension. This area is closed off by transparent plastic sheets. The gravity wave generator extends into this space. The rest of the generator room can be seen from the periphery of this area.

4. Cargo Hold. This region is used as a cargo hold (empty now), and to house additional small vehicles if need be. It merges with the air/raft dock. There are two lift shafts.

Lower Level:

1. Subway Station Chamber.

2. Directional Gravity Wave Generator Room. In the center, dominating the room, is a massive contraption jutting through an opening above it in the ceiling, leading to the upper level. It’s a huge, double-ended hammer, mounted on a ponderous pedestal so it can swivel and elevate. A mass detector aimed at it will display incredibly high readings. This is a directional gravity wave generator. Its heart is a quantum black hole restrained and controlled by an electromagnetic field. It can be directed from the cramped facilities lining the walls, or from the weather control room in the command module. Its intended purpose was to provide the station with normal gravity (1.0 G).

There are safeguards against shutting off the electromagnetic field and releasing the quantum black hole. Should the electromagnetic field be in danger of imminent termination, or if someone starts disassembling the device, it and everything within two meters of it will be engulfed by a stasis field. No time will pass for anything within the stasis field. In effect, that volume of space has been cut off from the rest of the universe. Using the controls in this room it’s possible to vary the gravity throughout the station (or only in selected parts of the station) from 0 G to 4.0 G; the lower settings make it easier to move heavy objects, while the upper could be used to slow down an enemy (though it would also affect the base's own personnel). If someone does turn off the artificial gravity, the station is plunged into one-sixth gravity. This lasts until the backup systems are engaged (4D6 seconds). During this time, anyone without free fall experiences will bob around; speed is reduced to half, and everyone suffers a penalty of -2 to strike, parry, dodge and roll.

3. Storage. Here the spare parts for the module’s machinery are stowed. A lift shaft in the center goes up to 4 above.

4. Life Support. A lift shaft here reaches to 4 above.

5. Medical Areas:

The room is nine-sided, its walls each seemingly cut from a single piece of a rosy, highly-veined wood with which the PCs are not familiar. Metal instruments of incredible variety and complexity hang upon the walls, their polished surfaces gleaming. Two feet off the ground are five or six light, cantilever triangulated constructions which project from the wall. Each 'bed' has beside it a large rack holding dozens of colored vials. Each is pearlecscent and filled with a different, brilliantly colored liquid. On a tablelike protrusion beneath three chromed spheres float in the air, motionless, wholly unsupported so far as the PCs can determine. Another wall features a holographic chart of the human body, which updates itself to the current patient.

The ‘bedclothes’ are a single, light quilted square. Each ‘bed’ has beside it an electronic unit to which the patient is attached by a thin leash of cables. The cables terminates in a small circular unit, strapped to the center of the patient’s chest.

There are several unfamiliar medical tools:

* A metal rod with small spheres at either end, like a tiny dumbbell connected to a unit above by a flexible crystalline filament. It glows faintly as it nears an injured area on the patient.

6-9 Laboratories. These rooms were the special research facilities for geological, biological, biochemical, and chemical projects, and eventually were used to stop the plague aboard. Those labs without color card keyed doors are general purpose work areas, and they contain nothing of value or interest except some empty plastiglass retorts, beakers, petri dishes, vials, etc. There are a few smallish cages for animals (which now contain nothing but bones), work counters, and the like.

6. Geology Laboratory. Here samples from the core tap shaft are brought up by a tunnel (not shown) to be analyzed. It is unlikely that the adventurers will have the skills to utilize this lab.

7. Lab A: This room contains a lab technician worker robot still at work, vainly attempting to find a serum to cure the plague which wiped out the ship’s human population a century or so ago. (The virus which was the cause of it all died out itself when the last of the human hosts died.) If the party displays a yellow card (or one of higher order) they can help themselves to anything in the place. On a counter top are 2 ampules of poison antidote, 3 of disease cure, and a canister of healing spray (2d12 hit points of damage healed per charge, 3 charges left), see the end of this module. If no proper color card is shown, the party interferes with the robot’s work, or they attack the robot or are destructive, the worker will broadcast a high frequency top-security-priority alarm which will bring 1-3 Security robots in 1-4 melee rounds.

8. Lab B: The PCs see that they are standing on the threshold of what seems to be a greenhouse laboratory. The hissing sound comes from heated pipes that run across the floor and along the walls, apparently providing heat and nutrients for the bizarre and exotic flora on display in glass cabinets standing against the walls. Some of those cases are filled with clouds of gushing steam, making the tendrils and leaves of the verdant plants writhe and twist as if they are alive.

As you walk, you pass close to one of the glass cabinets against the wall, perhaps the tallest of them all.

Within, the clouds of steam wreathe and curl - and can it be that the tangle of vines, shrubbery and gnarled foliage inside the case seem to unfurl even more hungrily than before?

If any use of a computer console has been made prior to entering lab b the computer malfunction factor will have caused it to pump nutrient solution into the tanks to feed the selected plant.

9. Lab C: A number of chemicals are stored here. Most chemicals are no longer active or have no use to those ignorant of chemistry. There are 20 of each sort of containers mentioned to experiment with. A few have the following uses: 3rd bottle of white powder - defoliant which causes 1- 10 hit points of damage to vegetable life forms or will absolutely wipe out a 10’ square area of vegetation; a total of 10 handfuls of powder are in the bottle 2nd, 7th and 9th bottles - these are clear fluid acids which cause 3d4 hit points of damage when spilled over any living creature 5th jar of green powder - highly poisonous chemical which must be saved against at -1 if touched, -5 if tasted 20th jar of pink powder - contains 36 doses of a chemical which will enable a human to have infravision to a 90’ range for 6 turns 1st large ceramic bottle - holds a greenish fluid which will cause plants to grow (add 2-8 hit points per application to vegetable life forms, otherwise it will act as a plant growth in a 10’x l0’ area, if entire bottle is used, 20 applications in the container);  2nd large ceramic container - this is lined with a special material, for it contains an acid which will eat through deck metal in 1 turn; the entire contents will eat away a 10' diameter section of the deck. Only one deck will be dissolved. If the acid is used as a weapon it will cause 3-18 points of damage the first round, 2-12 points the second round, and 1-6 points on the third and final round. All bottles are made of glass unless otherwise specified.

10. Lounges: These areas were once very posh and comfortable, but they are now messy. There are torn easy chairs, small tables broken and overturned, broken drink and snack dispensers, rubble and ashes from fires, bones and skulls, and some few personal items in the deep folds of lounge furniture lost during the last few hectic days before the plague took everyone. Roll a 1D6 for each lounge area searched. Check once only. The treasure found will be:

1 - notes on _ (level II)*

2 - 1-3 ampules of serum which will cure any disease if injected

3 - 1 piece of jewelry worth 300 - 1,800 g.p.

4 - 3 pieces of jewelry worth 1,000 - 4,000 g.p. each

5 - jet black card

6 - violet or orange card (50%/50%)

*must use comprehend languages to understand; it will detail where the creature has been confined; after the first 1 is rolled a brown card will be found thereafter

70% potent, 20% neutral, 10% poison

11. Meeting Rooms:

The tables located here are concentric rings with three walkways cut through them. The tables have computer terminals and other devices built in. There are various forms of seating. The complexity of the tables’ equipment, and the degree of luxury of the seating arrangements, increases toward the center of the room. There is nothing of value, and anything loose has been taken away.

Recreation Area: This room was for various group participation games and similar activities. The equipment and furniture is now destroyed or taken. There are many piles of litter and skeletons in the place. The party can spend many turns searching here and find absolutely nothing useful.

Game Rooms: These rooms originally housed various amusement devices of mechanical and electronic nature. If the party members have any of the coinage used on the base they can get rid of it here “shooting” at spaceships, monsters, etc. You may optionally include any sort of gambling devices You wish here - slot machines, black jack, etc. How you run such games is strictly up to you. Describe machines as brightly colored boxes with various slots, buttons, wheels, weapons, etc. as component parts. There are also several standard shooting gallery games here. These include guns with handles bolted to tables, others with cables coming out of them, and other various things like this. Players should be told that they are mysterious metal shaped objects unless they have found such weapons or have encountered creatures using them. In this case, they should be told they see more objects similar to those they have already seen. If any character spends a turn or more practicing with these shooting galleries, trying to learn how to handle them (this should be specifically stated), they may be allowed a -1 on their die rolls on the charts when attempting to learn how to use a similar weapon.

Security Station:  A small lock-up consisting of two cells. The only exits from this lock-up are via an impassable security door and a small maintenance hatch into a narrow access tunnel leading into the dark interior of the station. Each cell is a sunken pit, with a few steps leading up to the cell door. The corridor floor outside cuts across the other side of the bars at waist level, forcing prisoners to look up at their jailers. Each cell is equipped with a hard leather cot, about the size of a twin bed. There is a water basin mounted below a mirror. There are no faucet handles, but twin green-glass spigots extend up from its metal basin. Placing one's hands beneath it causes waters to pour forth. The only towel is an odd leathery sheet of reddish fabric. Adamantine bars of polished metal seals off one end of the room, with stone walls make up the rest of the  secured enclosure.

South Room: Note that this area can be entered only by a red color card. Furniture many centuries out of style fills the room. Lounges and chairs are scattered about. There are decorative plants – some real, some artificial– objets d’art, and tape viewers for casual reading placed throughout the area. A large, curving desk faces door the PCs now step clear of. Its top is bare save for several professional pieces of recording equipment. It is the office of the former chief security officer. His uniformed skeleton still sits behind the desk, but it has nothing - card or weapon. There is already obsolete form of play-back bank, an ident scanner thirty percent larger than current models, and several other devices----all designed to serve in some fashion to record information or provide it. Built into the desk is a monitoring screen with an off-on switch, a 56 position slider (each former level of the ship - positions 11-16 now show levels I-VI of this module), and three dials (100s, 10s, 1s) which show specific rooms on each level (and naturally the room key is long since gone). Close up lenses are malfunctioning, so only wide angle views of rooms (or the four corners of areas larger than 50’ square) are available. Dark areas have infrared lens viewing, but only one in six of these lenses still function. There is a 1% chance per round, cumulative, that use of the viewer will cause its total malfunction. The room also has the personal locker of the chief. This is locked and can be opened in the same fashion as the metal chest outside. In the locker are: - the rags of a full dress uniform upon which are several gem encrusted medals (3 pieces of jewelry worth 1,000 - 4,000 g.p. each) - a blaster pistol on full charge (see section at end of module) - a suit of powered armor (see section at end of module) that had a malfunction which was to be repaired but was not before the disaster wiped out the crew; this armor functions as follows (roll d4):

This small central emergency stores compartment is the only stocked room of its kind on the base. There are various crates and containers of materials which are totally unrecognizable and unuseable by the party. There are sufficient foodstuffs to equal 100 iron rations packages. There is a packet of 4 each of the following ampules: disease cure, poison antidote, radiation antidote. There are also 14 canisters of healing spray, but only one in six are still functioning, and those that do function (d6, roll of I) will have from one to six charges (curing 2-24 h.p. per spray). A small brown box with violet labels on it holds a “Repair Robot Remote Control” which can be used to summon and control a worker robot by vocal commands. However, each turn of operation has a 2% cumulative chance that the power pack will drain, a blue light on the panel will blink, and in 1-10 rounds the remote will go dead. Any power disc will reduce chance of failure by 5% per charge in the disc, but it too will eventually drain and the remote will go dead.

Weapons Locker:

Motion sensors activate the room’s lights as the door opens. This might once had served as the vessel’s armory but it now sits empty; gleaming metal racks line the walls, and a double row of storage lockers hang open down the center of the room. The only motion inside is a wisp of vapor that forms in the doorway and swirls outward as you watch—apparently, the armory is much colder than the rest of the base. Condensation begins to form on the doorframe, turning it into a glistening arch, bejeweled with fine droplets.

The armory is set to a lower temperature in order to keep the ordinary contents less dangerously volatile than they might be.

This small unlocked room is crammed full of weapons. There are racks of grenades, almost stacked to the ceiling. The grenades have no labels on them nor does the rack, and it is impossible to tell by looking what each type can do. There is a small colored stripe along the middle of each grenade which may be some identification code. There are many grenades with red, blue, gray or green stripes. There are only ten grenades with a yellow band on them. There are twenty standard assault rifles, and fifty laser pistols. In boxes by the door are hundreds of ammo clips for both weapons. All look in perfect shape, ready to be loaded and used at a moment’s notice. Near the boxes are thousands of rounds.

Random Encounters:

1.  Through the hatch is a small room with several large steel conduits rising out of the floor and disappearing into the ceiling. It is from these conduits that the heat you could feel through the hatch emanates. Crossing the room, you come to a sliding door, which you open a traction and peer through the gap. Before you is a large and fashionably furnished room - odd couches and chairs, tables at just the wrong heights and lights set to just this side of too blue. Seated, reading from electronic resource-sheets, are two .

The tunnel twists and turns through the ship's interior for a considerable distance. Eventually you arrive at a junction, with similar passages disappearing into the darkness to the left and right. To the front, the tunnel ends in a small doorway which is marked; WARNING. EXTREME DANGER ENTER ONLY WITH AUTHORITY You may go left, right or through the door,

2. Here are huge machines of no obvious function. All have a monolithic look, as if designed to last for all eternity. Control levers and dials are ten to fifteen feet up. The smallest machine weighs several hundred tons, the largest nearly fills gallery 9. All seem to be sealed, and none appear to do anything comprehensible. The devices are conical, trapezoidal, cubic, spherical, and so forth. Most are of a seamless white or gray material, but a few seem to be made of metal or stone. In most cases the form seems subtly wrong and discomforting, though no one can be sure why. Only a few can be made to penetrate.

Level Six: Temple, Athletic and Activity Deck

The passageways are carved out of the moonrock by acid and magick, the PCs are a thousand feet beneath the surface. Music resonances throughout the temple's halls at odd times, but the PCs cannot locate the source of it, nor identify an instrument of that requisite capable of producing that volume of music.

1. Atrium ("Hall of Earth").

The corridor soon twists sharply to the right, then to the left again. The sound of gently running water whispers from up ahead, and the PCs quicken their pace. After a short distance the passage widens into a spacious open atrium, a circular area some forty feet across. It is vast, this room. It is as if they’d gone through a small series of hallways and closets to come out in an enormous ballroom. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive. The domed ceiling stretches 22 feet high overhead, upon which is elaborate paintings tell the story of humanity according to a Caspianist philosophy: the entrance of the human principle into the world of forms as the divine unity of masculine and feminine, the creation and evolution of the universe, time, the development of civilization, the battle against one’s own limitations, and the awakening of the inner divinity within every human being. Sunlight can lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountains main figure.

At the center of the atrium, a precious circle in black marble contains a glittering fountain, masterfully sculpted in lunar anorthosite. From its midst rises the tower figure of a woman hewn from the same white stone.

Her expression is intense, her features utterly exquisite. Her flowing gown sweeps outward as caught by the wind, and beneath her feet are chiseled the bones of conquered enemies, protruding from the rippling surface of the water, surrounded by a mosaic depicting four bulls. In her hand is a knife much like the knife the PCs found. Eight columns covered in white ceramic and decorated with gold leaf motifs delineate the perimeter of the atrium. The rest of the room is rich with painting, mosaic, sculpture and glasswork. The main themes relate to the diversity of life on our planet, the cycle of life, and individual and cosmic time.

Ancient blood spatters the floor, and pools around crumpled skeletons and broken weapons. Bloody handprints mark the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood have left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretch five or six meters up the sheer walls.

Four doors, spaced evenly circle the atrium. Two stand open, one painted with the colors of the sun. Opposite it one in a thousand shades of blue, sky blue and silver.

Optional Hallucination:

The statue seems to turn to gaze at the PCs as they walk by.

2. Sacrificial Temple:

As you enter the room, lights rise.

In front of you, the floor falls away to reveal a vast, sunken rotunda, a place that must once have been the religious heart of the base. Stone arches soar high overhead, supporting a ceiling of gold and a central dome of shimmering blue. Row upon row of long, sculpted stone benches stretch before you, sharply tiered to give a better view of the focal point of the room --- an elaborate altar, erected at the feet of a towering statue, upon which lay the remains of a final, ghastly sacrifice.

You walk deeper into the temple, descending the steep aisle steps, struggling to believe your eyes.

The majestic statue is covered in solid gold and stands almost forty feet high. Its body is like that of a Herculean man, and in its board hands it holds a pair of polished stone spheres representing two worlds. Its limbs are powerful and muscular; its legs firmly planted. Between its feet is a pit filled with ash-covered coals, long cold. The huge altar before the imposing visage is crafted of reddish, veined stone that sparkles subtly in the warm orange light of the room.

Atop the altar, its face contorted in agony, is the decomposed body of a woman. Once clad in the standard cloth uniform, the upper part of her now-tattered clothing has been torn away as if hurriedly so. Something shiny and metallic protrudes from her chest.

As you slowly grow closer, you can see a heavy coating of dried blood covering the top of the altar, blood that also has collected in a trough that runs around its outer edge. The object jutting from the body is a huge serrated knife, inlaid with gold and silver, and had fully opened the victim’s chest.

Beside the altar and flush with the floor is a great, circular pit, the bottom of which almost vanishes into depth and darkness. Peering into it, you see the shadowed forms of tangled skeletons and dried remains---dozens of violated creatures piled where they must have been hurled.

Sacrificial animals!

You back away from the pit and look again to the woman’s corpse. If they sacrificed animals, why is one of their own people lying dead on the altar?

You shake your head in disgust and repulsion, overwhelmed by it all. You gaze up into the eyes of the sculpture, eyes that shine like ruby.

Stepping closer, you reach out with some hesitation and put a hand to the cold, smooth stone of the altar and feel there the icy wretchedness of its builders.

A section of one of the walls is a concealed viewscreen which can display information from the main computer.

Sacrifice Pens: Turning aside, they spot an open archway, the entrance to an antechamber obscured by deep, eerie shadow. Unsure and wary, they step into the large room and find two rows of great caged enclosures, fully recessed into the floor and running along either side of a wide, central walkway. There is no safety rail. Cautiously, they peer down into cell after cell as they slowly walked the length of the room. All are paved in black stone and carpeted with the scattered remnants of what once had been beds of hay. Within them all also lays the desiccated carcasses of animals, surely intended for sacrifice but left to starve. All are over-sized, and among them they recognize the remains of goats, pigs, and some kind of deer. There are a few other creatures they cannot not identify, things with thick tails and leathery hides.

Optional Hallucination: The sacrificial tools appear to glisten with fresh blood, which drips off them onto the floor. The PCs blink, and the blood is again centuries old and dried to rust.

3. Life Support. This room contains life support machinery for this level and is identical to the previous one. Inside they can see the great machines carrying out their designed function, just as they have done for thousands of years. The gleaming device hums away, its icy blue strip still glows, its many pipes and conduits still dutifully doing whatever it is they are doing.

4. Gymnasium:

Warm lighting acknowledges a visitor’s presence. The room is circular, and tiered seating climb high upon its walls, surrounding an enormous area twice the size of a basketball court. At its exact center stands a heavy, two-foot-wide torus of polished metal mounted atop a ten-foot pole of the same material. The entire floor of the area is paved in polished white stone, what there is of it---deep, circular, bowl-shaped pits more than eight feet in diameter covers it completely, spaced so closely together that there is little floor left behind them. One can not begin to guess at the rules of the game that are played here, but whatever it is, one can be certain that it is violent—copious amounts of dried blood stains the floor, the central pole, and even parts of the seating area.

This was the equivalent to a gym and served for athletic competitions as well as other athletic activities such as tumbling and jumping. The seats were for spectators during special events, and during such events the artificial gravity was turned off (making knockback a much more significant factor).

5. (Temple of Metals)

This circular Temple is dedicated to metals and to time. Eight precious glass windows represent eight faces, complemented by symbols from the Celestial Pantheon as well as information about the metals, and landscapes that symbolically represent human life stages. Four doors in Tiffany glass dedicated to air, water, earth and fire embellish the niches in the walls. In front of each door and in the center of the Hall, ceramic columns are decorated as if they were trees that grow from above to below, representing the tree of life. Knights and dancers on the terracotta ceiling protect the central fire, opposing the allegories of vices represented in the floor mosaic. The symbolic theme of the Hall of Metals is based on opposition and action: the importance of choice, knowledge and will for transforming negative elements into positive ones and overcoming the need for conflict.

6. (Hall of Mirrors) Light comes from above, shining through a precious cupola in Tiffany glass. The dominant shade is the yellow of the sun, and other colors of the rainbow are also present. The light that illuminates from within gives the impression that there is an open sky above. Because of the skillful play of reflection on the surface of the mirrors, the luminosity diffuses throughout the entire space. Underneath the cupola, a balcony runs along the entire perimeter of the Hall without any support from the ground. Glass mosaics dedicated to the Solstices and Equinoxes decorate the lateral walls of the balcony, with symbols and colors that recall the other Halls of the Temples. A circle of precious black marble accents the center of the red granite pavement and reflects the colors of the cupola. It is surrounded by a fine stone and colored glass mosaic, that portrays dandelion fluffs. Four niches are located in the center of the walls, each with an illuminated sphere within it, embellished by glasswork dedicated to the alchemical elements.

7. Labyrinth

The Hall contains 35 windows, each one dedicated to a different divine force. At the crossing points of the naves are large statues of men and women, representing the Guardians of the Labyrinth.

The walls of the central nave are completely painted, illustrating the evolution of civilization after the fabled destruction of Old-Earth. Civilizations, inventions, invasions, revolutions and wars: many crucial events of documented history are represented in this Hall. Portrayed in vivid, full relief are heroic figures fighting. Burnished wooden detail subtly melds into stone, adding a clever and refreshing organic feel to the work.

These images serve as a memory, a warning and a propitiation for future choices that lead us toward respect for cultures and diversity, harmony, peace, and the evolution of humankind.

8. Hall of Water:

This hall has the shape of a chalice, a symbol of receptivity and welcoming. In the Hall of Water, blue light diffuses through the Tiffany glass cupola above, giving the sensation of being immersed in an underwater atmosphere. Metaphysical diagrams, selfic schemes and ancestral symbols are painted on the rounded walls of the Hall of Water. Four serpent-dragons on the walls made with gold leaf symbolize the emergence of four Synchronic Lines, the pathways of energy that unite distant worlds in the solar system. At the left of the entrance, a rock alcove hosts the main altar of the Hall. Behind the sphere on the altar, a fire was always lit. The mosaic on the floor depicts six dolphins inside a six-pointed star with a double square at the center, which is the symbol of the flag of Damanhur.

9. Hall of Spheres:

The walls of this room are a polished, gleaming black, set with tiny flecks of glowing crystal. These multicolored pinpoints make it look as if you are surrounded by an empty void filled with prismatic stars. Nine spheres of faintly luminescent glass, eight of which are positioned in the lateral niches on both sides of the walls, and one of which is placed in the center of an opening excavated in the rock, faces the entrance. Above the openings are markers with alien inscriptions. Each sphere appears to contain alchemical liquids of a different color. The Hall of the Spheres is artistically characterized by the presence of figurative mosaics, sculptures and paintings. The ceiling and the upper part of the walls are completely covered in gold leaf. The niches are separated from each other by small, young-stone columns, and the sculpted capitals support precious metal chalices. The floor of the Hall of Spheres is paved with precious marble in grey-pink tonality with red veins.

10. Library: 

Here and there, throughout the room, several volumes are gone from the shelves, lending an appearance not unlike the smile of child with a few teeth missing. A small fragile piece of sculpture lays shattered on the floor, having apparently been knocked from its cherished place above.

A library, consisting of at least fifty thousand volumes, is housed in the last room off that second tunnel, just before the second junction on this levels. This is also deserted. There is no fiction here: gone is Dickens, Dostoevski, Stevenson, and Poe. One finds no history section, either: banished is Gibbon, Herodotus, Plutarch. One is likewise unable to spot even a single biography. Shelf after groaning shelf holds dry texts solemnly devoted to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, geology, biology, physiology, astronomy, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, electronics, agriculture, animal husbandry, soil conservation, engineering, metallurgy, the principles of architecture. With only this library, a quick mind, and occasional assistance from a learned instructor, one could learn to establish and manage a bountiful farm, repair an automobile or even build one from the ground up (or a jet aircraft or a television set), design and erect a bridge or a hydroelectric power plant, construct a blast furnace and foundry and mill for the production of high-grade steel rods and beams, design machinery and factories to produce transistors.

Here is a library specifically assembled to teach everything for the successful maintenance of every physical aspect of modern civilization but which has nothing to teach about important emotional and spiritual values upon which that civilization rested: nothing here of love, faith, courage, hope, brotherhood, truth, or the meaning of life.

Level Seven - Mining and Excavation

The cavern beyond the wooden doors is enormous, fully two hundred feet long and varying between eighty and a hundred-twenty feet in width, with a high domed ceiling. The rock floor has been chiseled, planed, and abraded to form a level surface from wall to wall; all the deep holes and crevices have been filled with concrete.

Adventure Seeds and Threats:

Events:

A Meeting with the Base Computer:

This encounter can takes place in the computer tap control room or the war-room.

The dark, inscrutable panel stands silently and still before you, reflecting your own puzzled image but showing nothing else. You consider the dormant console. For days it has stood defiantly, black and still, an island of darkness in an otherwise vibrant room. It alone, of the many varying panels throughout the base, has failed to awaken at your touch and for no apparent reason.

You lean close, extending his hands yet again. Though he could not feel the sleeping panel beneath his fingers, he knew he had made contact. Pressing both hands against its glide barrier as firmly as he could, he slid his hands back and forth and from side to side, seeking a response.

He tried small circles, large circles, sweeping motions, whatever he could think of---moving his arms and wrists like a conductor leading an orchestra.

Nothing.

Then, suddenly---it speaks.

“Corsic tylsta creatani,” are the words, calmly and in a rich, masculine voice.

You jump. You had expected perhaps a display of lights and motion as with the other consoles, not a verbal address, and they are the first words, other than your own, that you have heard since your arrival.

“Corsic tylusta creatani,” it says again, more firmly.

The PCs cannot discern a specific source for the voice, seemingly it comes from all around them, as if spoken simultaneously by several identical people standing beside, behind, and before him.

Silence.

“Corsic tylusta creatani!” comes the words again, insistently this time.

After the third time the voice stops repeating itself, saying instead the words, “Loskeni yanira creatani. “Kyto fendalia...alitria jialo tosanna!”  in a threatening tone.

In answer to continued silence, a tight row of bright, angry red circles, each perhaps six inches in diameter, flare to life within the console. Stretching from left to right and from one end of the panel to the other, the lights, all thirty-seven of them, glow solidly and more brilliantly with each passing second.

“Merilla doso,” the voice says in a very matter-of-fact tone. “Merilla uli. Merilla eristi.”

The lights swell to a peak brightness and remain, unwavering, at that level.

“Merilla aldo,” the voice conclusively states before going silent.  There are no further utterances.

You count the lights twice and come up with the same number both times, assuring yourself that you have done so correctly. Your heart is pounding---you have done something you probably should not have, bringing to life a machine with capabilities you could not venture to guess.

You watch the illuminated row for a good while, never moving from the map operator’s chair. The lights remain steady as if staring, like unblinking eyes of angry crimson. As far as you can determine, nothing more is happening at the awakened console.

The computer is programmed to learn about the unknown intruders.

It will begin with small things to probe them, playing with them like a child plays with mice, teasing them and bating them to perform.

The computer begins by shutting off the gravity in the room where the PCs are, decreasing the temperature in those rooms by twenty degrees, perhaps making them believe that the base's life support is failing, lights will turn on and off (the cameras and servitors can see in the dark).

As a final gesture, the computer will run the simulation of the world ending, and test to see if they react the same way that the crew did.

Viewing the Log:

You see perhaps a dozen people are gathered in the war room, all uniformed, intently watching one of the huge data displays. Their backs are to the camera, their attentions fixed. One of the men is leaning over a console, speaking into the transmitter of a communications system. His voice loud and insistent, he repeats himself again and again, yet no response comes. On the screen above them, filling it from edge to edge, a world.

The man in the brilliant red uniform is obviously the commander of the group. The others, all dressed in muted dark greens, reds, and blacks, seem to respond to his orders, at least at first.

Dissension then seems to grow in the ranks.

Voices rise. Arguments begin. The nine men and three women panic, clearly in response to what they are seeing on the screen overhead. The disputes continue, rising intensity as the commander fights to maintain order. Blows are exchanged, and any semblance of stability quickly disintegrates.

One man suddenly bolts from the room and runs down the corridor leading to the spacesuit locker. A few of the others call after him and give chase, apparently trying to stop him. The commander manipulates the panel and at once the screen above is filled with a view of the locker compartment's interior.

Several in the war room begin to panic at the sight, crying out in angry, frantic words as the instinct for self-preservation takes over. The commander's already tenuous influence over his crew has now vanished, and any remaining stability among the ranks has broken down entirely. Utter chaos sweeps the room.

On the screen, a portion of the spacecraft's forward hull fades into transparency, becoming a view port. High above the craft, pinpoints of brilliant light begins to appear in odd lines, increasing in number with each passing moment.

A great, circular door is opening, its retracting segments revealing the sparkling stars above.

Before the wide portal is fully open, and with no sound or light or visible thrust of any kind, the craft rises and disappears from view, accelerating at a rate that should have killed the pilot.

The dead lay strewn where they had fallen, their flesh lorn and mutilated, their bodies contorted in horrifying, agonized poses. Unseeing eyes stare from battered sockets. Blood and splattered tissue cover much of the walls, the floor, the ceiling. What had been furniture lay toppled and broken, hurled in combat or crushed beneath falling bodies. The deep, violent char of concussion charges scarred the walls of the room, once lined with heavy shelves that had been pulled from their mounts and toppled. The oppressive quiet was wildly discordant with the sheer devastation of the scene.

The rotunda is lit only by the light of a fire pit that burns beneath the towering idol of gold, one representing the deity the PCs themselves have likely worshiped on their home world. At its feet, a large goat lays stretched upon a stone altar, pinned there by two men. A half-dozen of the base’s personnel sat on low stone benches before the ghastly display, their arms up-stretched, their voices raised in the eerie intonation.

A robed priest in a death's-head mask raises a glinting blade, and as the gathered few chant, down it flashes again and again.

The PCs watch in revulsion as the priest cuts the beast’s heart from its carcass and tosses it into the fire behind him. The two men holding the animal drags it from the altar and drop it into a pit dug into the floor to one side. The priest motions toward another man tar across the room, who responds by pressing his hand against a small black panel on the dark, arching wall.

A section of the wall glows and becomes a large display screen, filling with an image of the dying planet.

It is still dying, still gray, still lifeless.

The chanting ceases, and a murmur rose. The priest raised his arms, the bloodied knife still in his hands.

"Konndt sclicu!" he cried out, his voice deep and menacing. "DoKen m soriad"

The two men at his side rush the audience, who appear surprised. Seizing a woman seated there, they pull her from her place on the pew as she scream and struggles to free herself. No one around her lifts a finger to help, but rather begins to chant again, raising their arms in supplication.

She is lift from her feet and placed atop the altar, her continual shrieks filling the chamber. It is evident that the priest considers animal sacrifice no longer sufficient to overcome the global devastation of their now-dying home world. Not that it had helped there.

The Vandalier's Arrival:

Which Vandalier it is, it up to the GM and his needs.

Bloodmist:

He is an immense shape, eyes blazing; like a massive bronze statue brought to life. He holds a maul in his hands.

Howling, the enraged Vandalier flies at them.

Nemos:

Further Adventures:

Items found during the adventure

Minor Item Table

Major Item Table

Space Suits, advanced

The joints appear to be finely, if somewhat strangely, articulated and an oily, black, leather-like material may be seen at major joints. The armor appears to have been worked to create the illusion of a heavily muscled man. The great helm is unusual in that it has no openings, only a broad glass plate in the front with a piece of glass above this. There are strange plates and tubing at various points and large metal bosses seem to be placed randomly on the suit. On the back of the left hand is a rectangular metal box. From this comes a short projecting rod tipped with a cone shaped red crystal or jewel. The armor is opened by pressing two separate buttons concealed at the rear of the helmet beneath its lip. Pressing both buttons at the same time will pop open a seal down the middle of the back of the armor. A person may then climb into the armor feet first, double over and slip his or her head and arms into the suit. Then, by arching his or her back, the suit will reseal itself. The release catches may be reached while wearing the suit, but it will take a round to operate. It’s usually festooned with exterior pockets, sticky patches, straps, and hooks for access to equipment, plus at least two lifeline hooks for safety when outside a vessel. The suit has a back-mounted life-support pack (LSP), which provides heat regulation, cooling, and energy for the suit’s systems. It also includes an air tank with a 12-hour air supply, recharging 1 hour per hour of non use.

The suit has built-in biomedical sensors. These embedded sensors monitor cardiopulmonary function, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, posture, and activity level. The sensors also note the location and size of any penetrations into the armor. This permits remote monitoring of physiological status over a communications system; the patient data can also be encrypted and stored in a built-in storage device. 

Should the characters attempt to put on one of the spacesuits, roll on the following.

01-20 Slow Leak---There’s a slow air leak somewhere in the suit, reducing Life Support Endurance by 10%.

21-30 Communications Problems---The communications system has seen better days; reduce range by 7d10%, and communications will be static-filled and hard to understand (in either direction; -2D10% to attempts to make sense of messages).

31-35 Life Support Problems---The regulation systems are on the fritz; not instantly lethal, but may not be moderating humidity, temperature, and vital gas mix correctly; wearer will fatigue twice as fast while wearing the suit.

36-40 Fragile Build---Weakened seams, rotting materials, overstretched joints; the suit isn’t as resilient as it used to be. Physical attacks(punches, kicks, grappling) do double damage to the suit.

41-50 Short-Outs---Electrical systems cut in and out intermittently 1d4 times per 15 minutes, not enough to seriously jeopardize the wearer, but enough to scare them badly. Lights flicker, radio is rife with static, and the AC ‘pulses’.

51-55 Electrical Problems---The opposite of Short-Outs; some of the systems cannot be turned off, wasting electrical power (reduce Power Source endurance by as much as 20%) and potentially jeopardizing the wearer(radio keeps broadcasting the presence of the suit, lights don’t go off, etc.)

56-60 Poor Visibility---The helmet optics/sensors are yellowed, scratched up, simply fog up, or are just poorly designed, making it difficult to see out; -1d6 to Perception rolls or -1d6 to Initiative (depending on which you use)

65-75 Joint Lock---Be it rusty joints, over-pressured bellow-joints, or fuzed rotary cuffs, the suit is increasingly difficult to move in, increasing Encumbrance. Reduce movement (speed and bonuses) by half (on top of an existing design issues, this can lead to some serious problems).

76-80 Poor Seals---The seals and joints don’t catch as well as they should, the helmet needs to be forced on, and the closures need a little extra effort to make fast. Donning and striping off the suit takes twice as long.

81-85 Incompatible Connectors---The external connectors are worn, or just aren’t standard anymore, making hooking up to an external life support hook-up, computer port, or power plug difficult(if not impossible) unless some jury-rigging is done(and enough duct tape applied).

86-90 Bad Heat Management---The suit overheats badly; heat-based attacks do double damage to the suit, and the wearer likely suffers constantly from heat-related issues.

91-95 Poor Insulation---Alternately, the suit cannot retain heat well; unless the wearer can handle near- freezing cold, they’re going to be courting frostbite and hypothermia, even with the suit heaters on full-blast. +10% to fatigue and GMs may want to apply a +1d4 exposure damage per every 10 minutes spent in deep shadow/cold conditions.

96-00 Fitting Problem---The generalism of ‘one size fits all’ no longer applies to this suit, even within its general size category (extra-small, small, medium, large, etc...). The elastic gathers no longer pull, the zippers stick, the adjustment actuators no longer work as smoothly as they should, and wearers will find the suit seems either too loose or too tight; -1 to strike, parry, and dodge, and +10% to fatigue while wearing the suit.

Knives, Ceremonial:

Ceremonial knives are usually ancient remnants of the days of the Great War.

Each knife is the size of machete and heavier than expected. Its straight, tarnished blade, though stained with old blood, still bears an intricate engraving. Its darkened ivory handle, displaying several stylized female figures intertwined with other, more bizarre forms, is a wonder of craftsmanship, a work of art that must once have been a proud possession.

Used for ritual purposes or just as a gruesome demonstration of loyalty, sacrifice became a common part of Caspianist worship rites long ago. The knives used in these ceremonies were ideal tools. Touched by the power of the God-King, these knives became powerful weapons in the bloodied hands of their wielders, all the while reinforcing the brutality such cults demanded. Many rites of devotion involved sacrifice and bloodshed on the part of the senior participants as well as hapless victims, and these traditions were incorporated into the enhancement of the altar knives.

Most are merely inert lumps of sharpened metal until their enhancement is invoked with the wielder’s own blood.