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 Plot Point 4.
MET 1143 (adventure section) or 1036 (summary table) days, oh
dear. I ran this at 1143 and gave the PCs nine more advances as they
slogged back from the Pleiades, but I think 1036 makes more sense. Not
really consistent with the next adventure being at MET 1039; I think
"A Long Way From Home" (next) may originally have been planned to
happen before this, and honestly I think it might be a better fit
there than having two "weird cosmology" sections in a row.
Again this is mostly a sciency adventure to start with, and with one
of my groups the scientist's player couldn't make it for that session.
Mostly I just asked for each discovery roll in succession; both groups
of players worked out the core of what had happened very quickly, to
the point that they wanted to go and look for the ex-star even before
they'd found the planetary evidence.
(I suspect that taking position readings at the stutterwarp shelf is
the best way of doing this: given that the volume of gravitational
effect is a sphere, four FTL/STL transition points give you enough
information to get a central location, and more will help fine it
down.)
I'm very unconvinced by the whole "star trails" thing on the obelisk
(stars appearing to circle in the sky do not change position relative
to each other and line up once in a while!), and the adventure text is
very skimpy on its actual intended significance. After consultation
with John Dallman (thanks!), I think that, for a start, the surviving
face is the one that's most sheltered from the prevailing wind. What
we have on it is a scattering of circular indentations, one of those
circles surrounded by spikes, and some of the others (which may have
been shaded differently, but that's now been lost to erosion) with
vertical strings of thirty or so symbols each next to them. (There are
only two distinct symbols, used in all the strings. One of those
symbols is the topmost one of every string.)
The circles that don't have symbols loosely match visible stars. The
nearby ones have moved quite a bit, but there are bright distant stars
too. Some of those have ceased to shine in the intervening time. But
with a bit of work this will get an overall orientation. The spiky
circle is the star that exploded.
The circles that have symbol strings are (very distant) pulsars, and
the point of the map is to locate them in the celestial sphere.
The symbol strings are the pulsars' frequencies, expressed in binary
in terms of some atomic constant that the people of this world
regarded as reasonably fundamental. It doesn't actually matter what
the constant was: the pulsars can be identified from the map, their
frequency has changed in calculable ways, and so the ratios of their
frequencies can be used to establish an approximate date of
construction. (See also the Pioneer
plaque
and Voyager Golden Record, though the monument builders weren't trying
to indicate a location since this thing was fixed on the planet rather
than on a wandering probe.)
In game terms: an Average (8+) Astrogation, Navigation or Science
(astronomy) check (1D minutes, INT) will determine that the unlabelled
circles represent the local visible star field, even though it's not
currently accurate. An Effect of 2+ on the roll will further spot that
the labelled circles are pulsars, and since the main obvious
characteristic of a pulsar is its frequency, the meaning of the labels
should be apparent.
Keep the written Routine Electronics (Computers) check to set up Ace
to track back relative frequencies and get a candidate construction
date, and then compare the visible stars from that baseline. Ace will
report that (a) there's no attempt to indicate proper motion on the
map (and even if there were it might not be valid any more, if the
crew has spotted the proper motion anomalies by now), and (b) several
stars on the map aren't visible, these being (b1) distant giants that
may well have collapsed into white dwarfs or other things by now and
(b2) the "spiky" star.
The lost inscriptions on the other faces of the obelisk were attempts
to describe the event and to mourn the passing of civilisation. ("This
is not a place of honour.")