Chapter 1 – Burnt Offerings
I set up Varisia as a frontier world on the edge of the Pact System – a small planet colonized by four corporations roughly fifty years ago. Its only known menaces are goblin scavengers, who live among the moons and space junk that orbit the world (the colony ships left behind a lot of garbage and spaceship parts before making landfall, so the goblins have turned these into a bases).
The quest began with the reopening of the Sandpoint Spaceport, which was my stand-in for the cathedral. The Spaceport had been mysteriously destroyed five years before. A faulty fuel line was blamed. The spaceport director and his daughter (Tobyn and Nualia) died in the blast. But now, after five years, and with investment from the four founding families, the spaceport was finally ready for reopening. To celebrate the occasion, Sandpoint had lifted all import taxes and travel fees for anyone visiting the spaceport. This is how my party members entered the story. One was a taxi driver local to Sandpoint; one was a visiting scientist; and two were criminals hoping for a safe place to lie low.
The spaceport was a large complex with multiple businesses inside it, such as Ameiko Kaijitsu’s noodle bar, Ven Vinder’s trading post, Jasper Korvaski’s taxi service, and so forth. The players got to meet everyone while touring the lobby. I also made it clear that the Kaijitsu Corporation was a local producer of laptop computers, and many of these computers were on display at merchandise stands around the spaceport. The main exhibits were some new drones designed by the Kaijitsu Corporation which looked like pretty butterflies. These were released during the opening speeches and started buzzing around the lobby.
Also at the merchandise tables were crates stuffed with goblins. The critters made their attack as the butterfly-drones were released, and it quickly became clear that the drones were assisting them in locking doors, hacking systems and causing mayhem. The party dealt with them as expected, and also rescued another visiting space captain – one Aldern Foxglove, who came very close to being shot by the commando.
After saving the spaceport, the party rested up in the Sandpoint infirmary, and there came under siege from news crews and grateful colonists. Their doctor, Erin Habe, managed to clear out the mob, while Director Zantus and Marshall Hemlock explained how all flights to and from Varisia were now on hold, since they couldn’t work out how the goblins had reached the planet’s surface. The party would have to wait until the quarantine was lifted.
While cooped up in the infirmary, the party had to contend with the overly-familiar approaches of a fellow patient: Captain Foxglove. Amid the flattery and creepy looks, Foxglove dropped an important nugget of information for later – the fact that he owned a personal starship. While explaining this, the infirmary started suffering blackouts and power glitches. The party (somewhat eager to get away from Foxglove) investigated, and found four cyborgs in the server room, hooked to the computer archives and uploading data to somewhere off-world. Just like in the original, Tsuto had put them there while the goblins caused a distraction. The cyborgs activated their defense systems when discovered, and a fight ensued. The party was then able to hack the least damaged android and learn that the intruders were uploading data from the personal files of the previous director – the deceased Ezakien Tobyn.
Leaving the androids to be studied by Hemlock, the party accepted an invitation from Ameiko Kaijitsu (whose noodle bar they had saved) to crash at her apartment. But when they arrived at the hab complex they found a bunch of Kaijitsu personal security guards standing in the corridor. From the room beyond they could hear Ameiko arguing with her father about the computer company, the loss of the Swallowtail drones, the death of Atsui, the disappearance of Tsuto, and all that other family drama. The party considered confronting Lonjiku about the fact that it was his merchandise crates that the goblins were smuggled in on. But the old man had too much security. Lonjiku and his goons stormed out.
While comforting a distraught Ameiko, and preparing for a good night’s sleep, the party heard shots and explosions from the other side of the apartment complex. They left Ameiko and went to investigate, and there ran into some goblin commandos who were hiding out in one of the other apartments. They were holding the Barrett family hostage, since the Barretts worked at the spaceport and the goblins believed they could get them a ship to escape off-world.
As the firefight broke out, the party received unexpected aid from the bounty hunter Shalelu, who in this version was a Bobba Fett-style badass with a jump pack and a plasma rifle who came crashing through the window. Apparently, she had been hired to track down any remaining goblin fugitives on the planet.
While untying the Barrett family and cleaning up the mess, Shalelu gave the party the low-down on the local goblin tribes that inhabit the moons and debris fields around Varisia. She explains that she has a ship which was allowed through the quarantine, and is using it to patrol and clear out the colony.
The conversation, however, cost the party valuable time. For when they returned to Ameiko’s apartment they found it ransacked and Ameiko gone. Also missing was Ameiko’s security card for the Kaijitsu Factory. A quick hack into the apartment’s security cameras revealed the long-lost Tsuto Kaijitsu dragging his sister down the stairwell while the firefight in the Barrett apartment caused the perfect distraction.
Tracking Tsuto to the Kaijitsu Computer Factory, the party broke in and found a half-dozen dead security guards. The factory’s speaker system was also broadcasting the last confession of Lonjiku Kaijitsu. In the recording the old CEO admitted to murdering his wife and performing a hostile takeover of the company. He also confessed to smuggling the goblins onto the planet aboard one of his freight ships. With the cover of this horrific confession, delivered via torture, playing on all speakers, the party was able to get the drop on the goblins in the computer assembly room. They defeated them, found Lonjiku’s mutilated corpse, then spotted Tsuto trying to force Ameiko aboard a small shuttle that was firing up its engines. The party killed Tsuto before he could set a course back to a mysterious destination in the planet’s orbit.
In the aftermath, the party comforted Ameiko and learned the tragic story of the Kaijitsu family. When asked why Tsuto kidnapped her, Ameiko revealed that her brother was trying to get into the service tunnels under the factory. The siblings used to play there as children, until their father discovered this and sealed up the tunnels. She also mentions a time, several years ago, when they found a strange tunnel that didn’t appear to have been built by humans. And while down there, they ran into another teenager who was snooping around – the daughter of the spaceport director, Nualia Tobyn.
This is where the story of Nualia and Tsuto was revealed. It turns out the colony was built next to an ancient alien ruin – a tower of unusual construction believed to be over 10,000 years old. I called this the Vetalux (a mangled Latin version of “Old Light”), and explained that the colony had flourished by tapping power from the mysterious structure. Though many had tried to explore the Vetalux (including Professor Quink and Ethram Valdemar), most had ended up going mad or suffering debilitating illnesses. But one man refused to give up: Ezakien Tobyn. The former spaceport director was so obsessed with learning the alien secrets that he forced his own daughter to assist him in cracking the security in the Vetalux’s inner chambers.
Nualia was so overworked and exhausted that she became even more estranged from her fellow colonists (who already thought her a freak because of her albinism). The only one who comforted her was Tsuto, who took to joining her on her secret forays into the alien structure. But Tsuto, just like Tobyn, was completely unaware of the dangerous radiation down there – radiation that spiked 5 years ago when the Vetalux received a mysterious reboot signal from deep space (this was my equivalent of the Minor Runewell flaring up. Until that moment the facility had been dormant). The radiation caused the secret love-child of Tsuto and Nualia to be stillborn, and Tsuto was forced to cut the child out of Nualia.
Needless to say, the event left Nualia traumatized. But the spilling of her blood and her baby’s genetic material had an unintended side-effect. It brought the Vetalux’s AI into full operation. The ancient AI, known as ERYLIUM, awoke and began resuming its primary protocol. Tsuto and Nualia learned that the chambers they had found were a cloning facility, where test subjects could be grown from local DNA samples. The Sinspawn in this version were essentially lab-grown clones who would be genetically tailored and then released onto the surface, so that the Vetalux could test its weapons on them. This gene-specific weapons testing was part of the Runelords’ effort to develop doomsday weapons keyed to specific demographics and species.
The now deranged Nualia clung to this discovery in order to preserve her sanity. She gave her stillborn child to Erylium, and watched as a clone of herself was created out of the infant’s DNA. The clone was born with a burning desire to go up to the surface, as were all the test subjects conditioned here. So that’s what Nualia did – she sent this clone of herself to the surface, to meet with her father in the spaceport. Tobyn was tricked into approaching Nualia, and then killed as a bomb-device implanted in the clone detonated. The security footage was just grainy enough to make people believe it was the real Nualia who perished.
Right before the explosion, Tsuto used a freight ship to get himself and Nualia off-world. They took with them the secrets learned from Erylium – the secrets of the Azlanti Empire, the ancient angels who had passed this way 10,000 years ago. Nualia began her training as a Solarian, growing obsessed with celestial light.
Fast-forward 5 years, and now Nualia and Tsuto were back, with mercenaries Lyrie and Orik at their side. They had taken over the Thistlerock Moon, and from there were coordinating the theft of Director Tobyn’s lockpicking algorithms and Murasaki’s cutting-edge laptop devices.
The party learned all this after going down into Erylium’s cloning facility, following one of Tsuto’s goblins who fled the firefight above. This goblin (Koruvus) hid out in the cloning room and stupidly started drinking some of the water there. The rapid mutations he suffered demonstrated just how accelerated the Azlanti cloning process had become. After killing Koruvus, the party also had to contend with several clones who had been created from a gang of Sczarni thieves who had stumbled upon the facility while scouting smuggling routes. The party had to fight their way through clones of Jubrayal, Podiker, Rozalia, Gressel, etc., before destroying the backup generator that Nualia had built to keep Erylium functioning.
Erylium’s last words hinted that her master had left her long ago, but this plot hook was, of course, downplayed. The more urgent information was about Nualia and Tsuto being down here 5 years ago. As well as kidnapping his sister, Tsuto had taken several of his father’s latest laptop products down to Erylium in order to install Azlanti software onto them. This software was to compliment the algorithms stolen from Tobyn.
Using both Foxglove’s and Shalelu’s ships, the party violated the quarantine and fought their way past the goblin junk-ships in the Hinterfield. They had to crash-land on the moon’s surface and have some mind-bending low gravity fights with some goblins led by the bugbear Bruthazmus. Then they stormed the Thistlerock moon base directly, and had a close call with Chief Ripnugget (who in this version drove a power loader instead of a gecko). The base’s mechanic, Gogmurt, was the only who made the sensible decision to run away (taking the goblin wives with him).
Next up, the party chased the arch-hacker Lyrie down a ladderwell into the base’s lower levels. These levels had the same architecture as Erylium’s facility. The PCs learned that the moon was in fact a monitoring station, built to compliment the Vetalux. The base, known as the Sentinel, would assist in the targeting of the Vetalux by identifying threats both on and beyond the planet. There were monitoring stations like this one on each of the three moons (representing Mosswood, Brinestump Marsh & Thistletop), but this here was the only one still operational. And Nualia was hard at work breaking through the various security barriers to reach the facility’s generator.
Of course, the PCs didn’t know that the “generator” in this case, was not just a machine, but our old slobbery TPK friend Malfeshnikor. They soon found out, though, when they were too late to stop Nualia cracking the final door code with her father’s algorithm. I used the idea from the original adventure where two demons were being used to power the Skull’s Crossing dam, only this time it was Malfie and the Hellcat trapped in magical circles. Both demons were released, but while the cat was a severely level-drained pushover, Malfie was his full blinky, buffy self. A three-way massacre broke out in which Lyrie was killed and Malfie was held back only by the Yeth Hounds pouncing on him. The PCs, with Shalelu and Foxglove tagging along, had to run for their lives. Luckily, they followed Nualia and Orik, who made the sensible choice to flee to the hangar bay.
There in the hangar was Orik’s ship, Shadowmist. I left the details of this ship deliberately generic, because this is going to be the starship that the party use for the rest of the adventure. While powering up the thrusters, Nualia tried to hold off the PCs with all manner of Solarian tricks, but the party was able to get past and leave her to the clutches of Malfeshnikor, who was chasing them down the tunnels like Jack Nicholson. Malfie slew Nualia, who prayed to “the angels” as her body was ripped apart. Orik quickly surrendered and helped the party launch the ship. But Malfie was still a hungry, hungry boy. He cast Levitate and we quickly played out an homage to Ridley Scott by having him latch onto the ship, about to Blink through the hull and tear everyone apart, before the pilot got the thrusters to engage and burn him to a crisp.
The party escaped, and below them the Sentinel fell silent, its two power generators lost. The goblin tribes were in tatters, and the survivors led away into hiding by Gogmurt. All that could be salvaged from the base’s files was an email sent to Nualia a few days ago, from a mysterious group who said they were “considering her request for membership” and would count any Azlanti relics as a definite advantage on her application.
And there on that escaping ship, traumatized by his experiences, was a pale and shivering Captain Foxglove, whose life had been saved by those big strong heroes…
