Another chapter of using Starforged as a fiction oracle. Things are getting weird! Lots of exploration but I’m getting itchy to start seeing some meaningful conflict appear. Start from the Prologue if you want to read from the beginning.
It took them through a meal break and a short nap before the Major was satisfied the old cable rigging wasn’t secretly a trap. She hung from the cable, bounced her body weight on it, sacrificed a random bag of bolts and a carabiner by letting it slide down into the darkness. “Yeah…I guess this is gonna have to do. Echo, you ready to go ziplining?”
Echo had no idea what ziplining was but shrugged, turned on every light on his helmet and looked down the cable as far as he could. They both had harnesses on at this point. Nothing to be done but start sliding down down down. Or, you know, go home. Home was always an option too.
The giant red sun began to rise behind them, reaching into the Monument’s darkness with its dim glow. He could see hints of surfaces within, cracked stone towering all around them. Possibly, maybe there was a shelf at the far end of the cable? Or possibly the dim red light was playing tricks on him. With enough adrenaline to make his stomach curdle, he watched the Major clip onto the cable and begin her slide down. She seemed to accelerate as she disappeared into the gloom. But a moment later, he could see the ring of her helmet lights poking back up at him from deep within the crevasse.
“It’s faster than it looks,” she said over the radio, breathless. “I’ll catch you, kid. We’re good to go. And you’re gonna want to see this.”
Echo opened his fist through pure willpower and began the slide down. Sure enough, he picked up speed much faster than he expected. The whine of cable-on-carabiner vibrated through the harness into his bones.
“Is the gravity weird in here?” he found himself yelling into his mic. “If I grab the cable I’m gonna burn through my glove —“
By the time he formulated his concerns, he was already careening at and into Kimbra. She sidestepped his lanky body and caught him as he passed by. Echo ended up on his feet, as if he’d practiced the move for weeks.
“Right?” she asked him, grinning like a maniac, still adrenalized. Echo looked back up the cable and burst out laughing from nerves.
“Holy shit. Holy shit,” he gasped, unclipping as quickly as possible. He couldn’t tell if he actually felt heavier or if it was just the EVA suit.
They looked around where they had landed.
The two of them shone their helmets around where they had landed. It was a natural-looking shelf of rock, the tip of a rocket-propelled grappling hook lodged deep into the material. Echo knelt down and rubbed the surface. It felt like crumbly rock. As he stood up he got lightheaded, not just dizzy but literally lighter than he had been. Kimbra reached up and grabbed his boot as he started to drift in microgravity.
“Well this is weird,” he said, still giddy from zipping down the cable. A dozen small loose rocks continued floating up and past him as the Major pulled him back down.
Beyond the shelf they were standing on, the stone looked as though it had eroded away through some natural process. Rather than a worked passage, the stone smoothly receded deeper into the Monument’s interior. Kimbra pulled up her carbine, flicked it on, and proceeded inward. A few minutes later, they emerged into a vast, vaulted space. Clearly a made space, even if the geometry of the walls and ceiling didn’t quite make sense to his eyes.
As his lights moved along the ceiling, a dense cloud of dust and dirt puffed away from the light. It swirled along the ceiling, moving into the darkness.
“Oh dang,” Echo muttered. The Major had already dropped to one knee and brought up her carbine. There was enough atmosphere in here that he could hear the small whine of the charge humming out of the gun. “Is this…is this the nest?”
She shook her head inside her helmet so he could see her. “I think it was just the one. Throw something up there, see if we flush any more of them out.”
“Flush them…and what are we gonna do if there are more? You’re not gonna shoot dust.”
She sighed, reached down, grabbed a large bit of broken Monument rock, and chucked it at the ceiling. In the very low gravity, it accelerated away at an alarming speed. It bounced off the ceiling, but nothing else moved. “Just the one. Let’s get deeper, I think we’re onto something.”
Somewhere from within the ceiling, a blue light very much like what they saw kilometers above the Monument outside suddenly flared bright. The light filled the chamber, glowing out from columns of sigils and scratches all over the walls. Echo could feel the intelligence behind the marks, certainly not random. One stack of markings, a square several meters wide and high, remained a blue glow as the rest of the space returned to darkness. He walked straight toward it.
“Echo, kid, Iiiii dunno if that’s such a good idea,” Kimbra muttered even as she too walked towards it.
As he got closer, the stone-carved symbols began to rearrange themselves. The stone itself seemed to flow and shift as the blue symbols changed tone and size. As he walked left to right, the dozen-or-so closest to him seemed to glow the brightest and grow the largest. Echo stopped, faced the wall, could hear nothing Kimbra was saying in his radio.
What he heard instead was his own inner tickle, the thing that let him rewind events just a smidge. Rather than a vague “I’m in trouble, help help” urge, staring into the symbols seemed to give him … focus? Purpose? An instruction manual?!
He reached his hand toward the center-most icon, which looked like a star, and all the other icons looked like stars, and soon the whole wall was filled with stars and they were winking into darkness one after another even as the center star grew and grew, and as he looked at a familiar cluster of stars they were a constellation he had been born under and looked at every day of his childhood but it too was winking out one by one —
“Echo, kid, Iiiii dunno if that’s such a good idea, “Kimbra muttered, even as she too walked toward it.
Echo startled back to the present, felt the little loop kick off in his gut, and reached a hand out to stop the Major. “No, don’t,” he said.
The Major turned toward him, at first an angry look but quickly replaced by concern. “What’s up? Are you okay?”
He turned back to the wall to point at the ever-growing central star. But it was just three vague squiggles. The blue light was starting to fade away, one, two, three pulses. Then the squiggles were gone.
“I’m … not sure what I saw. I don’t think it was for you.”
Kimbra scoffed and shook her head. “Okay. Whatever. Nest can’t be much further at this point. Let’s go, you weird kid.”
They continued deeper and deeper, hours of walking, sometimes so light they had to push themselves off the ceiling of the natural worn passages, sometimes so heavy they had to help each other take steps. They had brought enough food for a couple days of walking and were quickly approaching the halfway mark on their calories. Echo had eventually learned to ignore the taste of his recycled pee.
The passages had become a criss-crossing maze. Kimbra marked the walls every once in a while with the tip of her shipboard blade. The stone was soft, much softer than the perfect flatness they had driven across would have suggested. The maze soon felt more like an insect hive, thin bits of stone barely connected to each other.
Then the stone was gone. All of it. Echo and the Major stepped to the edge of a bottomless hole hundreds of meters across. The blue glow above had returned. As he looked up, Echo was certain he was seeing the glow that had appeared over the Monument, because this hole apparently shot through the center of the entire structure. Had the glow emerged from this hole? Or just endless dust devils?
They sat at the edge of the hole, letting their legs dangle. They were exhausted, keenly aware of the food situation, achy from fighting strange gravity, frazzled from the low-key anxiety of running into more dust devils without a real action plan for them.
“They have to be coming up from down there, yeah?” Echo said, peering down into the depths. He sucked a bit of nutrient paste out of a tube inside his helmet. It tasted a bit like an apple this time.
Kimbra nodded, looked down, and laid back on the stone. “I don’t have any idea what we do now,” she said, staring up at the blue sphere kilometers up. Echo could almost make out the starry sky at the edges of the light as he looked up with her. They laid back in silence for a bit.
“Did you know I was a Paragon for the farming outpost I’m from?” Echo finally asked.
“Mmm hmm. The old guy never told me why.”
“You two talked a lot, didn’t you?”
“Oh you know. Lots of years. We have the kind of friendship that waits. It’s like no time had gone by at all no matter how long it was since I saw him.”
Echo nodded and took another sip. Something meaty this time, maybe fowl of some sort. “Yeah, so. Remember that room back there with the lit up symbols on the wall?”
“I do. They only lit up for a second though, I couldn’t even see what they were supposed to be.”
“My township made me a Paragon because I can see the future, sometimes. Or maybe I can rewind time a bit. It’s never much, just a few moments. I’m not really sure how it works.”
Kimbra nodded. “That’s a good one. Only ever heard of one other like you out there. Your folks were lucky to have you.”
“Not really! I mostly kept my family from getting hurt by some dumb thing I had done.”
Kimbra sat up and pushed herself away from the edge of the hole. “As I understand it,” she said, now moving more like the old woman she was and not a battle-hardened veteran, “these things take time to develop. I’m sure you’d have been ready when it was time to do something more with it. The colonies don’t pick Paragons lightly. It’s not cheap to throw extra resources at some random kid just because their parents think they’re special.”
“I think this place showed me how to work it.”
“Huh. How to work your time thing? See further into the future or rewind more of it?” She shook her head. “Well I’m glad one of us got something out of our little hike. But now we need to head back and explain to the brains what all we’ve seen here, see if they can give us more of an action plan.”
“See, I think I can use it to bring back more intel.” Echo also stood up, equally stiff. He started looping rope around the nearest, largest bit of stone he could find. “Or at least make sure nothing stupid happens if I try.”
Kimbra saw he had a belay device in his hand, the rope fed through it. “Oh whoa wait kid, you haven’t tested —“
Echo took one step back and fell down the hole.
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A short session this week. The procedures are still prominent but producing interesting prompts. If you’re just now finding this, the story starts at the Prologue. I’ll keep injecting the mechanical bits per the rest of the series. My takeaway with this session is that Starforged is designed to deliver good gameplay, not necessarily good narrative, and the real creative work here lies in finding ways to treat the game’s output as useful prompts without getting pulled along by mechanical momentum. The fact I need to be consistent and principled in things like establishing fictional positioning for my characters helps, but honestly? Not sure I’d bother if I was just playing “for myself.” Thanks for being an audience to play — and write — toward!
Recap Everything
Quick review of everything so far!
Stats
Momentum +7
Health 3
Spirit 5
Supply 4
Relationship tracks
Kimbra Freeman (Dangerous): 4/10 boxes
Dr. Zari Vandu (Troublesome): 3/10 boxes
Other tracks
Help Kimbra defend Helia (vow, Formidable): 0/10
Expedition to Monument 62 (journey, Dangerous): 6/10
Tension clock: The Monument Activates: 0/8
Session starts without any session moves. This isn’t a new chapter, I don’t need to set any flags, etc. Let’s proceed with the expedition!
The little Helia truck sitting dead in the dust, Echo and the Major walked toward the dark crack at the base of the monument. Looking at it with his own eyes, Echo thought he could see a bit into the darkness. But the huge red sun had fully set and the only light was the dim blue glow of whatever was going on above the Monument, kilometers over his head.
The suits’ power sources seemed to be working just fine. Echo had no idea why, and the Major wasn’t questioning their good fortune. She was cycling through her various camera lenses and image processors, standing stock still under the faint blue glow, touching her own helmet to refine what she could see.
Secure an Advantage
Getting out of the truck and making the approach warrants a Secure an Advantage moment as Echo and Kimbra take stock of the situation. They’re just observing, now that they’re on-site and relatively close, Wits 3 +1 for Kimbra’s relationship +2 vs 5 7: a weak hit. Gonna take +1 on our next move, which will be Undertake an Expedition.
“Rangefinder says the crack is less than a kilometer high,” she muttered into their radio channel. “Not seeing any movement. Piles of junk right where I was gonna walk us…kind of weird. Guess the dust devils decide what to keep after they haul it back here.”
Her words chirped in Echo’s ears, tinny and unreal. He’d never worn an environmental suit before. A few hours into it, he couldn’t recommend the experience. He felt itchy and heavy and slightly damp. He craved sunlight on his skin, thinking about what a gift living in his farming township had been.
Why had he left? What was so great about standing in the shadow of this colossal alien thing? He craned his neck back as far as he could, remembering his dream with his sister.
The tickle in his gut, the little adrenaline spike that meant he’d gotten a glimpse of something bad in his immediate future, kept ticking over. Low key anxiety crawled up his spine and down his fingertips, without any particular glimpse at all. Just the warning sense, humming in his skin.
“Maybe we come at it from the left?” he said, pointing to an especially tall pile of junk. He recognized a Weave transmitter atop the pile, bent into a V shape, as well as bits of corrugated metal and spirals of stiff wire. “Can we hide ourselves behind all that?”
Kimbra bobbed her upper body to convey agreement through the stiffness of the environmental suit. “Kill our lights, too. I think whatever that is,” she said, pointing at the blue light, “will give us enough to see. Nothing to trip over, anyway.”
Undertake an Expedition
Undertake an Expedition roll, continuing to be vigilant because why not? Wits 3 +1 for Kimbra +1 for Secure an Advantage + 4 vs 6 8, a strong hit! Reach a waypoint, +2 boxes on the track (8 total).
They set out across the mirror-flat surface, each step feeling almost slippery. Eventually they reached the junk pile, which like everything else Echo had seen since leaving the township forced him to re-evaluate the scale involved. Mostly he noticed there was more junk in the pile than the dust devils could have possibly pulled off the Helia habs without simply taking every scrap, including the habs.
“Where’d it all come from?” he asked aloud. Kimbra walked around the base, still carefully keeping it between her and the looming black hole. She poked her carbine into the pile here and there.
Explore a Waypoint
I think Kimbra is actually Exploring a Waypoint at this point. Echo of course joins in. Wits 3 +1 for Kimbra +3 vs 6 7, a weak hit. +1 Momentum (+8 total) +1 more for Explorer (+9 total).
Go to the oracle for a ship name: Mercy. Character name: Arcus.
She pulled out a mass of fabric with the barrel of her gun and turned it slowly toward Echo. It was a gray jumpsuit, the most common bit of clothing worn by ship crews. The Major carefully spread it out on the ground and they stared down at it: MERCY was emblazoned in an arc across the back, with official corporate livery of Helia below it.
“I don’t know what this is,” Kimbra muttered. She flipped the jumpsuit over. The name badge read ARCUS.
“Did the brains arrive on a ship called Mercy?”
She shook her head. “No. I mean, I was told they arrived by passenger shuttle a couple years ago. Never heard of this Arcus, whoever they were. Never heard of a ship calling itself Mercy, either.”
“Maybe not an Overseer? Just a dumb ship?”
The Major stared, silent, body language screaming I do not like this at all. She nudged the jumpsuit with her boot toe. “No signs of injury, no entry or exit holes, no blood. The dust devils grabbed someone’s laundry? They’ve only ever shown an interest in metal and smart materials.”
Echo poked his head around the junk pile and looked at the yawning hole. It wasn’t far now, just a couple hundred meters away. Still no signs of movement, no change in the blue light, no monsters bursting out of the junk piles. The wind had stopped. The stars quietly turned overhead.
“I think we’re alone,” he said. He turned to look at Kimbra, watched her carefully fold the jumpsuit and slip it into her backpack.
“Got some questions for the brains after this,” she muttered. Then, louder: “Let’s get inside this thing and see what’s what.”
Undertake an Expedition
Last Undertake? Wits 3 +1 for Kimbra +4 vs 4 4: strong hit with a match, +2 boxes (10 total, time to finish the expedition)! Let’s go to the action/theme Core Oracles to see what it gives us: BREAK WEAKNESS. Huh, not sure what to do with that. Let’s try the descriptor/focus set as well: PERILOUS ROUTE.
They crossed the final few meters to the chasm. The opening was dozens of meters across, and towered up and out of view as they looked up. This close to the Monument, they lost the overhead blue glow. Kimbra flicked on her suit lights.
Finish an Expedition
Finish an Expedition: our first Progress roll! 10 boxes vs 8 10, oh no, a weak hit! Looks like we know how our Oracle rolls play out now. 1 tick on my Discoveries legacy track (boo), +1 tick for Explorer. The journey, I think, is a chance to Develop Your Relationship with Kimbra, so +2 boxes on her relationship track (6 total). We’ve also Reached a Milestone on our quest, first box on our (formidable) Vow track.
So the Monument is obviously a Precursor vault. I already know a lot about it based on previous rolls, so I can skip over generating the exterior. Inner first look table: TOXIC ATMOSPHERE.
A sturdy industrial tripod stood perched at the edge of the opening, suddenly obvious under her lights. Echo recognized the type immediately; farmers of the township used these all the time to secure structures, provide mounting points for sensors, string up tarps for picnics. This one had a heavy duty cable reel bolted to the top. The cable was taut and aimed a few degrees downward into the darkness.
“What the…we’re not the first ones?!” Kimbra almost yelled. “Damn it. Damn it! I wanted to be first. Why didn’t —“
Echo walked up to it and pulled on the cable. “It’s stuck to something down in there, can’t see what.” He turned on his own lights and followed the cable into the dark. “At least 50 meters in, I can’t see where it ends or how it’s hooked into anything. Good thing it’s here, though.” He knelt at the edge of where the Monument should have ended were it not for the crack. “There’s no way in or down without it.”
A sensor pinged a notification on his face plate: a quick sniff of the atmosphere within the chasm said the air was bad-toxic. Like evacuate immediately toxic in the case of a suit rip or faceplate crack.
Undertake An(other) Expedition
Probably the right way to proceed is to Undertake An(other) Expedition to find the dust devil nest they’re actually here to deal with. Don’t love that, it feels a little repetitive, but I’m not sure I’d have established the first expedition a different way without seeing how this one turned out.
I start a new track: Explore the Monument (dangerous). I pick dangerous because this feels like a pacing choice more than a threat-level choice, and the trip across the flat just to get here felt long “enough.” This might be where my narrative choices conflict with good-game-play choices.
The Major pulled on the cable, hard, putting her weight into it. It barely budged the tripod.
“Do you trust it?” Echo asked. He peered back down into the darkness, directing his suit lights all around. Still no movement or even any signs of features other than complete void.
“Hell no I don’t trust it,” she replied, also staring down into the dark. “Maybe there’s something in the truck we can use to secure ourselves up here.”
Check Your Gear
Check Your Gear for something to help them use the cable: Supply 4 + 4 vs 3 3: another strong hit with a match! +1 Momentum (+10, maxed out), and consult the Oracle for something to do with that match: FORTIFIED VOID, interesting!
They made the trek back and poked around the truck bed until Kimbra yelled, triumphant. “Yes…yes! This is perfect.” She pulled out climbing harnesses, ropes and other depth-delving bits and bobs. There was even a set of ratcheted grips that would let them work their way back up the cable.
“Helia packed the truck with all this?” Echo asked, skeptical. “Like they were expecting to go down a hole?”
Kimbra grimaced. “Yeahhh. Vandu and I are going to need a long talk when we get back. Grab your gun, let’s go find us some dust devils.”
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