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 7.
I have given up believing the MET numbers. I'll put together my
own table as part of the inevitable "Bayern Companion" document (which
will otherwise be, mostly, these blog posts in a single convenient
place).
I found this section surprisingly hard to run. What is powered and
what isn't, and what's the basis for deciding? Is there any way in the
adventure as written to get in without completely compromising the
atmospheric pressure? It doesn't help that the one illustration of the
facility shows it raised out of the water in a way that the text makes
it clear that it isn't. I ran it with power still on for the lifts,
which I think does no harm, but manually rotated airlocks on a
double-sided cylinder design. At the very least, with water leaking
in, there must be pumps running to keep the situation stable.
But first we have the descent from orbit, and I'm inclined to expand
this a bit: never mind the "now or later" decision (and why not wait
eve longer until the next daylight landing opportunity, there's no
time pressure that we know of?), I think there should be more things
to dodge on the way down than just the Raider ship. Let the heroic
pilot do some heroic piloting. (All right, the heroic pilot for both
my groups was the NPC Yvonne Rourke, because "there's always time to
be scared later if you need to" and she's happy to sit in the lander
working out how to do something incredibly dangerous with it while the
party goes off exploring.)
Also, the water hunters… just aren't terribly interesting. Yes,
they're carnivores you can't easily see coming because they're in the
shallow water of the flooded base (shades of Deep Blue Sea) but what
else? They don't have an interesting life cycle, there's no reason not
to kill them, they're effectively an environmental hazard. (But, to be
fair, I tend to feel this way about a lot of animal encounters in
classic Traveller adventures, so it's probably not fair to blame
this adventure specifically.)
Where I will blame this adventure specifically is that there doesn't
seem to be a model of how the base worked. There's a passenger tram
system, which could have been very Black
Mesa, but… the longest trip
you can take on this system is 600 metres end to end (and it's a
military facility, so they might have something like fitness
standards). Was this really worth installing a whole transit system
for? Even if you had heavy things to move around sometimes, surely
electric buggies or something that could run on the normal corridor
floor would have made more sense than a whole dedicated marshalling
yard and track system.
Thinking about heavy things, how were the surface-to-space missiles
got into the silos? Given that this thing is only 15 metres below the
water surface (probably a bit less in its day given the flooding on
land), I suspect the best bet would be to attach a cofferdam over the
launch hatch, pump out the water, and then lower the missile from a
surface ship via crane. Which means even less excuse for the transit
system: you might need to bring in compressed gas and whatnot for
maintenance, but you shouldn't need to shift missile bits through the
base itself.
It is unlikely that anyone will shut down the power plant, but enough
flooding could do it (such as from a grenade in just the wrong place,
ahem). At that point the pumps will stop and the water level will
gradually rise.
The Random Builder Artefacts table is dispiritingly mundane. I mean, I
realise that's the point, but it's two pages of "stuff that doesn't
work even if you can make sense of it".