Adventure Log 003: Journey Beneath the Planet Volturnus

[Rex]

Kallina

"Lets take this furthest tunnel to our right and get moving."

[cybersavant]

Skur Vonn grabs his gear and heads in first, laser pistol ready; relying on his darkvision to alert him of danger.

[shaidar]

Bertie grabs her stuff and follows.

[Rex]

Kallina

Kallina leads the way.

"I will take point, my training should at least help with some of the critters in these caves."

She has Aware, Alert, and Perception.

[shaidar]

Bertie

"Keep an eye out for something I can use as a weapon, a club or something."

[Rex]

Kallina

"Will do."

[Pulpatoon]

The party decides on a direction and a marching order, and decides to save the sensorpak for evaluating food and water sources. Many of the passages are wide enough to walk two or three abreast, but sometimes in narrows to the point that even one’s carryall must be removed and passed along separately in order to squeeze through. Kallina often takes point, but there are times when Skur Vonn’s darkvision necessitate his taking the lead.

Within a few hours, the party has passed out of the area represented on the last sensor scan. There are a few side passages, which all seem to lead to dead ends.

While exploring one of these dead ends, you hear a loud clatter from Jeeves’ direction. “Excuse the disruption, gentlesapients,” he says to you. “I seem to have stumbled into something… Oh dear!” He bends over and you hear a hollow clanging noise. “I’m afraid I’m at a loss to explain that which I have found. I can scarcely credit my own sensors. Would you do me the favor of examining the object in question so that I might know if I need to run cognitive diagnostics?”

Incredibly, Jeeves has stumbled into a mop and bucket. They look like standard industrial items that you could purchase on any civilized world.

---

You make camp a few hours later, find a relatively flat, spacious section of tunnel. Jeeves sets up the remaining pop-tent and prepares dinner.

Everybody please give me a Survival check to see how you’re doing with maintaining supplies and navigating the caverns.

---

Ongoing Tallies
Food and Water: OOOO
Lights: OOOO
Discovered by the Pirates: OOO

PCs
Kallina: (O)OOOO
Bertie: OOOO
Skur Vonn: OOOO

NPCs
Jeeves: OOO

What do you do?
Next Update: Next weekend!

[shaidar]

Bertie looks at the mop and bucket

"How odd. The Ul-Mor did warn us that the spirits down here will try to trick us. If you were an organic, Jeeves, I'd say it was some kind if group hallucination brought on by noxious gases, but that can't be the case."

Bertie scans the mop with the sensorpak to look for anything unusual about it. If it seems normal she will try and remove the mop-head so she can use the handle as a weapon.

survival roll:
Roll: [_2d6]=(4+5)=9, dis/advantage[1d6]=4

[Rex]

Kallina

Survival (has skill) [_2d6]=(3+1)=4 A/D [1d6]=2

Kallina tries to rest up. "What does everyone think of the mop and bucket, weird. Someone must have been down here from off world at some point."

[cybersavant]

Skur Vonn "Yes. The Ul-Mor said they haven't met offworlders before - either they were lying and setting us up, or the pirates or other survivors have found their way here. Before we settle in for the night, we better scan the area ahead."


survival

[Pulpatoon]

Bertie scans the mop and bucket, and finds every indication that they are entirely as they appear: completely mundane items of low-grade industrial manufacture from the Galactic Core worlds.

Survival rolls: a mixed success and two failures.

Despite attempts to conserve on limited resources, the party’s supplies are noticeably dwindling. You realize that you must ration out food, water, and light even more tightly than you have been, or slow your progress in order to try and forage in these alien caverns.

You encounter signs of animal life during the next day's journey. In a dead-end side tunnel, you find the bones of an animal that would have been about the size of a pony. Bertie identifies it as reptilian, with a low-slung body, six legs, and long, broad snout that flattens out like a shovel. The bones are incised by sharp tooth marks, and there are droppings all around. The size of the droppings indicate animals smaller than a human, but larger than a monkey.

The afternoon is spent expending a lot of physical effort for little progress. The caverns change elevation radically, and you need to climb up or down sheer rock faces to continue forward.

Towards evening, Skur Vonn spots a glow ahead in a cavern, up near the ceiling, which is revealed to be a natural chimney lined with phosphorescent minerals. The chimney has a 3 meter diameter, and you think you could reach it, but then Kallina spots movement: an animal about 1.5 meter long that looks like a combination of a snake and a salamander, slithers along the roof the the cavern and enters the chimney. The animal has powerful hind legs and vestigial forelimbs. It tastes the air while squinting at the light of your distant glowrods before entering the phosphorescent chimney.

---

Burrower Snake.png (242.21 KiB) Viewed 834 times

---

The cavern stretches out before you, an uneven jumble of angular rocks, broken up by clumps of something with organic-looking curves—fungi! The cavern is populated by groves of mushroom-like growths the size of trees, piling on top or one another. Thick dust floats through the air.

---

Would you like to explore the chimney? The mushrooms? Make camp? Or forge on?
Please give me another Survival check for the next day.
If Bertie wants to follow Skur Vonn's advice and scan the area ahead, please give me a roll.

Ongoing Tallies
Food and Water: XOOO
Lights: XOOO
Discovered by the Pirates: OOO

PCs
Kallina: (O)OOOO
Bertie: OOOO
Skur Vonn: OOOO

NPCs
Jeeves: OOO

What do you do?
Next Update: Saturday!!

[Rex]

Kallina

Can Kallina detect any air flow from the chimney? She will use some thread or light cloth to see if it moves at all.

Survival [_2d6]=(3+3)=6 A/D [1d6]=3
Has survival.

[shaidar]

Bertie

Activates the scanner, trying to gain more information to help them decide on the way forward:

Roll: [_2d6]=(2+4)=6, dis/advantage[1d6]=6
Science and tech skills for advantage, educated for +1 = 11

Survival (no skill)

Roll: [_2d6]=(6+5)=11, dis/advantage[1d6]=5

[cybersavant]

Skur Vonn peers into the recesses of the cavern, trying to see if it has any more inhabitants

[Pulpatoon]

Kallina investigates the chimney, but is unable to detect anything in the way of a draft from it. The snake-like-creature slither-crawls up the chimney and disappears.

Bertie activates the scanner, working quickly to grab as much information as she can quickly while avoiding running down the device’s charge. She gets a decent scan of the surrounding environs, but also something unexpected: there are scattered traces of some manner of signal from somewhere to the east. She doesn’t pick up enough to make any conclusions about the nature or origin of the signal, other than that it bears the hallmarks of intentional patterning and is unlikely to be the result of a natural phenomena. Just before shutting the scanner down, she runs a quick analysis of the mushroom forest, and earmarks most of them as having high levels of some quite exotic toxins. But she also identifies one type of bloom—a small, round boule with a blue, crinkled skin—as wholesome.

---

Volturnus Caverns Scan 002.png (955.54 KiB) Viewed 816 times

Your current position in marked by the blue star. You have traveled from left to right, relative to the map.

---

Skur Vonn observes the cavern for a long time, looking for traces of life. Other than the sessile fungal blooms and the now-gone snake, nothing seems to be moving.

The party makes camp at one end of the cavern. Jeeves prepares the day’s portion of rations and scavenged food. He gathers several of the blue mushrooms for the email. The taste extraordinarily bland on their own, but Jeeves prepares a gravy from some of the worm meat and stews the mushrooms in it.

Survival rolls: a failure, a moderate success, and a string success. I’m advancing the Lights tally by one and subtracting the Food and Water tally by one. You have replenished some food stocks with mushrooms, but are in danger of running low on water. There may be a further complication that has yet to drop, however…

---

:: Day 018 since planetfall. ::

The next morning, the organic members of the party all wake themselves up by sneezing. The pop tent is covered in a layer of fine dust, which Bertie identifies has fungal spores.

As your sneezes echo through the cavern, you hear a low rumble building on intensity. Something is moving at the far end of the cavern… something large enough to cause the mushroom forest to heave and undulate like a wave. With a burst of shattered fungal forms, a great bulk of darkness suddenly looms before you. Moving into range of your morning’s glowrod, it is revealed to be a giant Ul-Mor, the size of a transport shuttle, colored a livid purple and decorated with writhing tattoos of skulls and barbs. Dark, hate-filled eyes fix on the party. A cruel, fanged maw opens up, and the creature bellows: “THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE! AND WITH STRANGE AEONS EVEN DEATH MAY DIE!”

---

Ongoing Tallies
Food and Water: OOOO
Lights: XXOO
Discovered by the Pirates: OOO

PCs
Kallina: (O)OOOO
Bertie: OOOO
Skur Vonn: OOOO

NPCs
Jeeves: OOO

What do you do?
Next Update: TBD

[Rex]

Kallina

"Everyone up!"

Kallina grabs her stunner and tries to flank it and get in a position for a clear shot.

Stunner [_2d6]=(5+5)=10 A/D [1d6]=4
She has the stunner skill.

[cybersavant]

Skur Vonn "It talks instead of thinks. Can we communicate with it? Seems to be an anomaly." He levels his laser pistol at it, but holds off firing for now.

[shaidar]

Bertie screams at the horror. She grabs her pack and link

"Run! Back down the corridor when it can't follow."

She starts to head back down the way we came.

[Pulpatoon]

Kallina fires a stun-blast at the flailing monstrosity. The creature is entirely unfazed. Skur Vonn readies his laser pistol, but holds off firing. Bertie screams and flees down the way you came with her carryall.

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ul-Mor R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!” bellows the giant Ul-Mor, tearing up landscape. Its gargantuan tentacles batter the floor, walls, and ceiling of the cavern tearing apart the fungal forests. One tentacle comes crashing down on Kallina, who had ventured close to get within stunner range. Kallina disappears from view under the colossal bulk of the thing.

Jeeves stands placidly among the wild tumult of tree-sized mushrooms being tossed around and coughs politely. “Excuse me, gentle sapients, but you are evidencing distress and alarm. May I inquire as to the cause?"

The giant Ul-Mor heaves its way towards Skur Vonn, opening a great fanged mouth, its pointed tongue whipping back and forth.

---

Ongoing Tallies
Food and Water: OOOO
Lights: XXOO
Discovered by the Pirates: OOO

PCs
Kallina: ????
Bertie: OOOO
Skur Vonn: OOOO

NPCs
Jeeves: OOO

What do you do?
Next Update: TBD

[Rex]

Kallina

Kallina tries to get out from under it.

Atheletics? [_2d6]=(6+4)=10 A/D [1d6]=4

She has Athletics if that is what would be used here.