Adventure Location, The Event Horizon

Introduction

Event Horizon is an adventure that takes place in a hard science/space horror genre and, as such, the adventure assumes that the players are playing human characters who would fit into this style of setting. While a low-level adventure, Event Horizon is not an easy adventure and is designed to be difficult. Death is probable, insanity even more so.

Each of the players will face a wide variety of problems in this adventure, ranging from the mundane—typical combat encounters, repairing the ship, etc.—to dealing with the insanity-causing rifts in time and space, and confronting old personal horrors and memories. Due to the limits placed on the players, and in keeping the adventure human- and hard horror/science-centric, a few new options have been added to the available rules and are strongly, but optionally, encouraged.

Story Background

In the dead of space a massive vessel hangs motionless above the awesome churning maelstrom of an enormous black hole. Blasts of ultraviolet light reach out from the center like the tendrils of some terrible sea creature trying to grasp its hapless prey. The ship sits precariously just out of reach of the horrible fate of compressing endless doom.

Suddenly - the lights in the ship flicker and dim. Your eyes go wider still as strange shadows appear at the end of the corridor. An unearthly sound assaults your ears like the chanting of a million lost souls.

The Bridge:

The control panels in front of the chair are covered in grime and filth, and it is obvious even from where the PCs are standing that many of the buttons and dials are broken or missing. The view-screens are foggy, and even slightly cracked with hairline fractures in the plexiglass. Strange and unsettling images flicker across their surfaces.

The captain's chair is a twisted and corrupted version of its former self; blackened and twisted metal, with sharp jagged edges. The once-plush cushions are torn and shredded, stained with blood and other foul substances. Etched into the exposed metal with unknown methods are strange and otherworldly sigils and gyphs that pulse and writhe as though alive.

As the PCs approach the chair, they feel a sense of dread and fear wash over them. The air is thick with the stench of death and decay, and they can just faintly hear the whispers and mad laughter coming from the shadowed corners.

If the PCs touch the chair, read the following:

You approach the chair cautiously, unsure of what to expect. As you reach to touch it, you feel a sudden jolt of pain and flinch back in terror. The chair is alive and has sensed your presence. You have the instinctual urge to retreat, shaken and terrified by what you have learned.

The inner door opens, and the PCs find themselves standing on a wide catwalk jutting out into a large cavern measuring about 35 meters across. This metal cave is not well lit; its ceiling and floor are not discernible in the gloom. Dominating the interior was a contraption consisting of three circular tracks — an outer, middle. and inner ring each placed concentrically and rotated 90 degrees with respect to one another. Carried on each track is a set of Norberg Field generator spheres. The catwalk on which they are standing runs through the center of the array and ends at the engineering safety lock on the far side. This walkway is, in fact, the only way to traverse from one end of the ship to the other without exiting the hull, which meant that anyone with any business to transact at either end of the ship had better take care of it before the drive array was activated. At the center of the catwalk, in the heart of the array, is a large circular platform bearing a control stand.

The sound is louder than it had been before, and it pulses through the ship with noticeably greater effect than before. A sense of pressure along with the rhythmic pounding-- which, like the sound, crests repeatedly in a series of waves. Now the pressure has increased dramatically. The PCs don't merely sense it but feel it, indescribably different from the pressure of turbulent air, more like the invisible tides of a cold sea washing across their bodies.

To the left, branching off from the large catwalk is a narrower one. It extends about twenty meters along the forward bulkhead, running past two doors, one of which gives entrance to a glassed-in office looking out onto the array room.

If this was a heart, it was a blackened, cancerous organ whose slow beat was as the chime of death.

Your vision suddenly expands as a part of your consciousness is zipped through the black portal and down the black hole's inner gullet. You see flames, and a burnt, wasted landscape that resembles a dead planet lacking water and life. Planet Hell hovers close to an alien sun, red and bloated and dying. An alien sun and a sluggish, oily, black sea. A hand reaches from the oil...