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honourablejester · 10 months ago

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Numenera Campaign Concept: Gateway Terminal

Some thoughts for a Numenera Campaign, or possibly thoughts for an anthology of related Numenera Campaigns. Um. Okay. Has anyone here ever read the Heechee Saga, by Frederick Pohl? Specifically the novel ‘Gateway’?

Because. I wanted a campaign concept that originated in the Steadfast, just to play on the established infrastructure and worldbuilding. But. A lot of my favourite bits of the Steadfast are maritime or coastal. And Numenera is about discovery, in a couple of big ways. And the Steadfast, specifically, is broadly analogous to medieval Europe, with a techno-religious papacy holding a collection of feudal kingdoms together. And there’s the in-game category of ‘discoveries’, which are big pieces of prior world technology that are too big to be used by PCs and are of more worldbuilding impact, and one of the suggested discoveries is a ‘fully-functional hovertrain’. So. Transport systems are a type of discovery you can make. Including portal systems, there’s one that links the Steadfast to the Dawnlands, on the far side of Numenera’s supercontinent, that has only recently been discovered. But let’s go back maritime, ourselves.

So. The starter setting is the Steadfast. We’re a medieval society of nine kingdoms held together by a techno-papacy who has recently declared a crusade against our northern neighbours. We inhabit (though we don’t know this) a relatively small portion of the southwest corner of a massive Pangea-like supercontinent that, aside from at least one known island archipelago, is the only landmass in a vast world-spanning ocean. And recently, very recently, somebody made a discovery within our kingdoms that might change everything.

We found a hidden automated ancient ferry terminal. On our own shores. That contains several prior-world oceanic vessels designed to go to unknown and pre-programmed destinations.

Has anyone read the Heechee Saga? Gateway, the novel, is about humanity discovering an asteroid that was hollowed out by the Heechee, an unknown alien race, and this asteroid contains hundreds of pre-programmed starships. Each ship has a destination database, but no translations, so you can set a destination, but no-one knows where it goes to, and trying to change destinations mid-flight has, after considerable trial and error, always gone horrifically. So. You get in, you set your destination, and you roll the dice on whether the destination or the trip itself is survivable. Maybe you’ll find a viable habitable world. Maybe you’ll pick a destination that’s too far for that particular starship to reach. Maybe you’ll pick a destination that’s too far for your provisions to reach. Maybe you’ll pick one that’s lethal to humans, but was perfectly fine for Heechee. Maybe you’ll pick the one starship that’s secretly lethally broken after thousands of years without maintenance. You don’t know. So if you choose to get in one of these ships, you are choosing to gamble your life on the potential, the vanishingly small potential, of survival discovery.

And Numenera … Numenera is a setting about discovery. This world, this medieval Ninth World, is built on the strange, near-magical hyper-technology of a billion years of prior civilisations. Some spanned galaxies. Some rewrote the laws of reality. Some broke through to other dimensions. Some completely reshaped this planet in entirely literal ways. The known parts of the setting are a tiny corner of a single supercontinent on a world where literally anything could be waiting out there.

And I love the POV shift inherent in that. The medieval fantasy outlook of the current Ninth World layered over the mindboggling science fiction concepts of the prior worlds. And yes, this medieval fantasy world has adapted to the ruins of the ancients. They’ve built around them, they’ve made use of many of them, they’ve sensibly stayed clear of others. They know that these things exist, and that they’re vast and incomprehensible and also occasionally useful and potentially the sources of vast personal and political power, if they can be used right.

So going back to the Steadfast. Going back to this medieval collection of kingdoms, run by a papacy, perhaps not too far away from our historical Europe … on the verge of the age of discovery? With all the potentially horrific political consequences that could have. And this setting discovers … a gateway. An incredibly risky and potentially deadly gateway. To the entire rest of the unknown world. Or, well. At least some of it.

The thought I have for this is that someone, a small expedition, discovered a disguised artificial harbour carved back into what they thought was a known cliff face. Let’s say it was masked by hard light/holographic technology, so the cliff seemed fully real and physical and interactable, but if you could find the secret entrance, you could slip beyond it. Why was it disguised? Was it a military installation? Or was it an aesthetic consideration, to mask the environmental impact of the port behind a pretty hologram of the natural surroundings? Dealer’s choice. But there’s an entire artificial cavernous port behind that hologram, carved back and underground from the cliff face. Maybe it has an ancient lock system to raise vessels up to sea level to sail outwards, giving us room to expand below ground and make it massive without overly disturbing the land on the surface above it.

It was the discovery of a lifetime, and there was more. This vast artificial harbour contained ships. Strange prior-world ships. That appear to be somewhat alive, or at least capable of speaking. And these ships are still operable. I want to say that someone tried to activate one. Perhaps the ship’s AI asked them to, for its own reasons. But someone activated one of the smaller ships. Because I want someone to have realised that the ships are pre-programmed. It moved on complete autopilot through the lock system, made it to the surface, sailed out past the holographic cliff face, and then kept going. And nothing they could do could stop it once it was activated. It sailed off westwards into the open ocean, and literally no one has seen it since. The only reason we know about it is that one or several of the team that activated the ship jumped overboard when they realised they couldn’t stop it, and at least one survived to make it back to shore afterwards.

So. Here’s where we are now. A team of ruin-delvers in a Steadfast kingdom have reported finding a vast coastal facility. This facility contains prior world ships that can be activated, BUT cannot be controlled. These ships have minds of their own and unknown destinations that they’re pointed towards. And it’s possible that someone could board them, and discover what those destinations are.

I kind of want the ferry terminal to be in Ancuan. Specifically the Scorpion Reach peninsula. It does have the background for it: “This sprawling peninsula is filled with the ruins of the prior worlds. Known for its weirdness and mysteries, it is frequented by explorers, discoverers, and numenera scholars.” It’s full of weird shit and crawling with explorers, it would absolutely make sense for there to be teams in place to find this thing. But I want it to be in Ancuan because of the nearby presence of Kaparin and the Redfleets. An entire organisation of rogue pirate scientists and oceanographers. Because. They would jump on this. Not necessarily on the facility itself, or even the ships, the Redfleets don’t care much for numenera, but because of the potential for oceanic exploration. They’ve lost the capability to make their own submergine bioships now that their creator is dead. These ships have so much potential for them.

These ships have so much potential for a LOT of people. The facility is probably still broadly secret, but I think there’s five factions in particular that have picked up on it, and it’s massive political potentials.

The first is obviously the Amber Papacy, the Order of Truth. An aeon priest was likely one of the initial discoverers, and this is the Order’s whole deal. Prior world technology, understanding it for the betterment of all, and keeping hold of a political bombshell that could deeply damage the fragile peace between the kingdoms of the Steadfast. They’re going to be all over that.

Then the Convergence, the Order’s eternal foes, to control this new technology for themselves and their own causes.

Then Ancuan itself, as a kingdom. It’s theirs. It’s within their borders. It could potentially open up trade and expansion corridors to gods know where, it could let their kingdom win an edge over the others, particularly nearby expansionist nations like the Pytharon Empire. Ancuan tends to be a very self-sufficient kingdom that doesn’t pay a lot of attention to King Asour-Mantir, but he probably is interested in this discovery, and it’s potential ramifications.

The fourth is the Redfleets, because they’re right next door, and if anyone saw that first ill-fated voyage of an unknown ship in the vicinity, it was probably them. And this … this has so much potential for them. They want in.

And the fifth, I think, is the Sea Kingdom of Ghan. Because remaining the main source of maritime trade in the Steadfast is one of King Laird’s overriding concerns. He’s the one who’s interested in expeditions to find the rumoured archipelago of the Rayskel Cays and set up trade with them. Maritime exploration is a big deal to him and his people, as well as making sure that they’re the ones who go places first and set up trade routes with them. So if rumours reach him about a prior-world ship cache with pre-set trade routes, that would definitely be something he’d send people to investigate.

So there’s a lot of people interested in sending people to investigate this new discovery, both the facility and the ships inside it. There’s people interested in controlling this facility. There’s people interested in breaking into it. There’s people interested in hijacking one of these ships and just seeing where it goes. There’s people interested in launching official and well-planned, well-provisioned expeditions on these ships. There’s people interested in investigating the rest of the facility itself, the ferry terminal. Does it have connections to other facilities? Could communication exist between them? Is there something in the facility that would allow them to learn or even change the destinations of the ships? Would it have a database of where it’s sending things?

So there could be a campaign here, or an anthology of linked campaigns. Does the party want to go on an expedition? Do they want to explore the facility? Do they want to play a group determined to destroy it, to prevent invite risk and destruction on the Steadfast, or do they want to play a team sent to stop that from happening? Would they like to play spies sent from various Steadfast political powers to learn about and potentially use this facility themselves? Do they want to play the aftermath of a successful expedition?

Which. On that subject. Where are these ships going? And, for that matter, how many ships are there, and what kinds?

Because I’d say there’s a couple of big ones. Maybe three? About the size of modern passenger ferries or small cruise liners. There’s a couple of ships in there that could hold small cities worth of people, and outfitting those would be a massive undertaking, especially when you don’t know where or how far they’re going. How would you provision them? And on the bigger ships, especially when self-driven, they can also function as their own mini-dungeons, facilities to explore in their own right, with potentially a lot of secrets in their bowels.

Then there can be several of various smaller types of vessel. Submarines? Research vessels. Maybe things analogous to coast guard cutters or small military patrol vessels. Each with their own unique challenges and purposes, and thus internal arrangements and uses. Exploring each ship and its secrets can be its own whole set of quests, trying to identify what’s inside them all.

And then. If anyone wants to try activating them. If the PCs want to be sent on an expedition into the complete unknown. Where do these ships go? Some thoughts for that:

Short-range trips. Maybe some of the vessels, like the coast-guard equivalents, have patrol routes. Maybe there are facilities out there in the ocean very close to the Steadfast itself that no one knows about, and these ships can reveal them. Or some of them are automated ferries to relatively nearby areas. Say, in Lostrei? The lands north of the Cloudcrystal Skyfields that the Papacy has just declared a crusade on? You get on a ship and it sails you straight into enemy territory, what do you do? Does it sail you back? What does either your country or the enemy county do with that knowledge? Or maybe the ship sails south, past the Frozen Lands, into the strange polar seas. What do you find down there? Or does it go out to the Rayskel Cays or even other, unknown island chains, and thereby set up those potential trade routes the Sea Kingdom of Ghan wanted?

Long-range trips. What if one of the ships, probably one of the larger ones, is designed to circumnavigate the supercontinent? What if you get on this ship, and it literally circles your world. All that blank empty space on the map that you have no idea about, that in most cases, for an explorer from the Steadfast, you didn’t even know was there? You get on this ship, and maybe you’re never coming back, but you will see wonders before you die. Or there’s the open ocean. There’s all the wonders of the world away from the land. Is this continent the only one? If it is, what’s out there in the vast uninterrupted ocean on the far side of the world? What kind of facilities would the peoples of incredibly technological prior worlds have put out there where there are no people to be hurt? If you have a planet where all the civilian inhabitants are on one half, what do you put on the other?

And then there’s other sorts of trip. A lot of these, if we’re imagining a transport hub facility, would be known routes. The fully automated ships, sailing common routes to nearby or further afield locations. But maybe a couple, one or two, of these ships are not fully automated the same way. Maybe they have more independent AIs or other means of choosing their destinations. Maybe some of them are research vessels. Maybe they’re designed to roam relatively freely, and just examine things. I’m sure if the Redfleet could ID one of those, they’d be delighted to take it over.

I know, this isn’t really a set campaign as such, it’s more of a setting element that I want to throw into the world and then build probably several campaigns around. But. It’d be cool, right? You could gauge what your players are vibing with. Have them pick a faction, the Redfleets or the Aeon Priests or the Sea Kingdom of Ghan. Or independent Ancuani pirates who’ve gotten wind. Do they want to play politics, or roll the dice on potentially vast exploration? Do they want to start small, just figuring out what one of these ships is? Or is it high exploration on an unknown vessel with potentially lethal lurking secrets after a million years without maintenance sailing out on a potentially one-way trip to god knows where? Are you a Redfleet crew bringing several of their own smaller submergines onboard for the finest oceanographic expedition ever mounted? Are you a small group of spies trying to infiltrate this facility on behalf of the Sea Kingdom of Ghan, or the Convergence? Are you a group of Aeon Priests delving into the bowels of the hidden port itself in search of secrets or databases or ship manufacturing facilities? Are you all members of a cult who want to take one of the huge ships and build a seafaring kingdom of your own, like Taracal, out in the wild blue yonder?

IDK, I feel like there’s potential there, for a lot of things. I wouldn’t mind playing around with the idea. Heh. An oceanic Numenera campaign centered on a lost prior world automated ferry terminal.

Numenera: The Gateway Terminal.

#numenera #campaign concept #ttrpgs #discovery #heechee saga #maritime exploration #age of discovery #fun with worldbuilding

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