This is part of an ongoing series about the preparations I've made to
run Mongoose's revised edition of the Bayern campaign for 2300AD.
Spoilers for Interlude 1.
We're 70 days out from Earth, so the first self-improvement
period has had a chance to take effect. (I actually deferred this
until we'd played some of this scenario, so that players could work
out what skills they felt they were lacking.)
I extracted the ship map from the PDF and built an SVG map with each
room of the ship blanked out so that I could reveal it as needed.
(This is a standard thing I do with map-exploration games. If needed I
then get some player and monster graphics to move around; I find this
all much less faff than full-blown virtual tabletops.)
The procedure for getting internal doors open doesn't seem to be
covered in detail, and this is the sort of thing my games tend to
focus on. For airlocks (both the personnel locks at the waist and the
hangar bay):
- Close entrance door.
- Turn entrance-door wheel anticlockwise until you feel a slight
spring resistance. Bolts are now engaged.
- Turn wheel slightly further against resistance to a hard stop (about
a third of a turn). This locks the wheel in place and begins the
pressurisation or depressurisation cycle.
- When the lock has filled/emptied, exit door wheel unlocks. Turn it
clockwise to withdraw bolts, and pull/push the door open.
- If the airlock is unable to match external pressure with the exit
door, it will cycle back to the pressure outside the entrance door.
For inner doors, unless the team has cracked the control interface (p.
B4:9, can be tried at any door), they're going to have to crowbar
them. STR 8+ roll for the first one, but unless the group is acting in
haste they probably don't need to roll after that.
The ship's atmosphere is a bit low on oxygen (14%) and a bit high on
carbon dioxide (5%), plus trace chlorine; it's not clear whether this
is all as designed or a failure mode of the life support system. It
won't be immediately fatal if breathed but doing so for more than a
few moments will do some damage.
There's no sign of a landing site on the planet that the ship is
orbiting. (By the time it got to this planet, the crew was already
dead.)
First level annoyance (getting too close to a worm cyst) is shown by a
dimming of the lights around the problem area, and a low bell-like
chime, getting faster if needed.
Second level annoyance (persistent first level, or interfering with
either computer core) is shown by random thruster fire, shaking the
ship around and possibly causing injury (DEX 6+ to avoid 1D damage).
Third level annoyance (persistent second level, or interfering with
the stutterwarp) is shown by opening hatches between main engineering
and the hangar bay, and starting to open the inner, then the outer,
airlock hatch. (Note that there's a direct line of sight from
Engineering.)
If the parasite infestation is removed, the ship will make three
high-pitched chimes. Sensor watch aboard Entdecker notices the
stutterwarp grumbling has stopped, and it's now discharging. A
countdown starts; this is displayed on the bridge, in blurry pale
purple glyphs, which a Mathematics 6+ (INT) roll will identify as
balanced base 13 (each digit has a value from -6 to +6), highest place
value at the top. Next steps are repairing the damage to the ship
while the drive fully discharges (about twelve hours), then preparing
the stutterwarp for departure; the ship will break orbit with its
rocket, engage in-system stutterwarp to head directly away from the
star to the FTL threshold, then alter course towards its route home.
(Any observers left aboard will be ejected through the hangar bay
lock.)