Dungeon23: Ice Planet Colony

Finished! Here’s the final map.

I never thought I’d get this far, particularly because the 3 friends I started it with had all dropped it by May, but I’m pretty proud of the whole thing. I’ve never done a year-long challenge before.

A bluish force field doorway leads from this room to the airspace outside of the solar station, and a trio of rudimentary air vehicles sit on the pads. They have clearly been poorly manufactured using spare vehicle parts and welded together in the vehicle hangar.

Each “plane” has two seats and an absolute plethora of weapons built into the nose. They show as having full fuel tanks and the second seat has a navigation display with a crude map of the colony complex.

A wide space for repairs to vehicles, with a turntable built into the floor and a small cargo crane built into the ceiling. Heavy tools line the walls, such as metal saws and pillar drills. Some form of armoured buggy is under construction in the centre of the room, armed with a pulsed laser weapon on the turret. [Gunnery] The laser weapon here is frighteningly powerful; on its highest available setting it could cut right through the walls of the solar station or colony with ease.

If the marines have not been encountered to this point, this is where they will be holed up, with a continuous gun battle at the edge of the room with the insurgents trying to kill them.

Similar to 25/12, this is a long, L-shaped corridor of a room, but where the first was divided into regular series of bunks and lockers, here the space has been radically altered: the lockers have been dragged out to make barricades and battle lines, and the bunks flattened and reshaped to form something resembling a medical tent and triage station.

The main battery bank of the sole station runs through the entire complex like a stake pinning the building deep into the ground. It is heavily guarded, and potentially very volatile, as it stores massive amounts of energy for later use.

An instrument panel one one wall proudly states that the Battery storage here can contain enough free energy to store the station’s entire output for 3 solar years, in the event of a catastrophic atmospheric event.

Long, L-shaped and narrow room; more like a corridor to nowhere than a room at all. Bunk beds against either wall, stacked 3 high, separated from their neighbours by a column of lockers. If an empty bunk can be occupied without drawing the attention of the watchful warden Android, Gnomon, it counts as safe resting space, even if the insurgency are enemies of the player characters. At the end furthest from the door is Gnomon’s charging hookup, a vertical coffin built into a maintenance duct. Behind the coffin is a secret passageway to the other set of Billets.

2/3 of the bunks contain sleeping insurgents; if roused together they would make a small army, but by design this never occurs purposefully. Gnomon, the Warden has no weapons, but their hulking strength is far in excess of any human on the planet, and their “pick up and throw” approach to problem solving rarely leaves survivors.

The entire roof of this room hinges open to either side to reveal a partially assembled artillery weapon aimed at the colony - only the sights of the weapon are currently operational, allowing the outside of the colony to be viewed with great precision.

The immediate sight upon entering this spartan room is the dead soldier slumped over against one wall, clutching a data drive. They have clearly been killed by a brutal throw against the wall, having left a bloody print in the shape of a spread eagled body, something that would have been almost cartoonish were it not for the state of the crumped body on the floor [1 Stress].

A tall room, similar in shape to the armoury next door, but where the walls of the armoury were reinforced with armour plating, and the viewport little more than a firing slit, in here the walls are floor-to-ceiling glass. They appear to be similarly tough despite this: telltale plasma burns to one bottom edge suggests the room has been fired upon before.

From the vantage point of the watchtower, the colony is little more than a distant smudge on the horizon, but the wide fields of the solar station are bared for all to see, allowing a dominating field of view for anyone sheltering in the solar station to see would-be invaders.

A wide, low-ceilinged hexagonal room, bathed in a red glow from the lighting strips recessed into the floor. Racks of guns folding down from the ceiling, a step up to a firing slit along each wall. A camera mounted in one corner watches, but doesn’t seem perturbed by any looting of the weapons.

Tunnels have been carved into two opposite sides of this icy cave: one leads back through a narrow passage over thin ice to the elevator in 19/12, the other spirals upwards towards a hidden hatchway in the ceiling leading to the dojo in 4/12.

The elevator here has been roughly hewn into the icy walls, clearly through the use of slave labour. It is overly large, but does not appear to be capable of carrying a particularly heavy load, only a large number of occupants. The lift is guarded by an android dog, of the king commonly found within the Security section of the colony.

If the lift is fully extended upward, behind the main motor panel a slight crack in the ice widens beyond the slim opening into a roughly hewn “escape tunnel”, leading through the ice to 20/12. The floor of the tunnel is weak, and anyone with Armour above 4 must make a [Speed Check] to avoid breaking through the ice and landing in the freezing waters beneath.

Cyber-Dog

C: 45 I: 60 W: 2(20) DMG: 1d10 Teeth

The Insurgency Gail is clearly more of a place to temporarily store torture victims than a long-term jail solution; there is no heating, and the metal bars are set directly into the ceiling above and the ice below.

A single, large cage sits on one side of the room, with a narrow bench along the far wall, too thin to sleep on. The lock is simple, mechanical and in no way alarmed, and aside from the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling outside the cage, the room is completely un-wired.

3 Corporate Executives in ragged business suits sit, barefoot and silent, on the bench. They will offer great riches to anyone who can break the lock and free them, but one of the three has snapped and will attack as soon as he is freed, using a jagged surgical saw he has secreted up one sleeve. The others will simply flee when this happens, trying to get out of the way.

Mad Business Exec

A similar vault door stands here as in 14/12, but whilst that one was standing proud and tall, this one is destroyed. The vault door itself is in 3 large chunks, and it appears to have been destroyed with a combination of mining explosives and some form of strong acid, possibly at different times.