24. Free port

Occupying an unlikely gap between the territories of several governments and corporations, this place is outside of any jurisdiction. It’s a swarm of hundreds of stations, scuttled ships-turned-habitats and converted asteroids towed here from across thousands of kilometres, engaged in a complicated, barely coordinated dance of orbits. Anything can be sold or bought here, competition is fierce and law enforcement minimal.


Type: Habitat cluster

Function: Free trading port

Power source: Various

Gravity: Various

Size: Hundreds of km across

Affiliation: Various 

Population: Thousands at any given time

Sells: Everything 

Buys: Everything 


This is a place for trading, but not primarily for illicit goods. No taxes means that certain goods can theoretically be acquired cheaper, but that depends on the individual traders and the type of deal you are able to strike. There is a local Trader Council, composed of well-regarded traders elected by popular vote, and a militia that is able to keep the most blatant crime to a minimum. There is nothing to protect you from getting swindled however, and little but charity to rely on if you run out of funds and fuel or suffer some malfunction. 


This is among the few places in the system where you may freely connect to FreedomNet. The Trader Council is anxious to not jeopardise the free status of this place however, so open discussion of insurrection is frowned upon.


When trading, roll on the following table to determine location, counterpart and deal. Successful, relevant skill checks may improve the result or allow re-rolls.



1d10 Location Counterpart Trade goods Initial deal
1.   Mega-freighter Ex-officer  Antibitotics  Obviously insulting
2.   Converted research probe  Stausque bounty hunter Protein bars  Bad
3.   O'Neill cylinder refinery station A family of five  Military surplus  Acceptable
4.   Trader frigate Nervous, filthy miner  Mining equipment  Acceptable
5.   Hydrophonic farm station Gang of arrogant punks  Stocks and options  Average
6.   Asteroid temple Heavily modified cyborg High performance computers  Average
7.   Cluster of scuttled vessels Sharp-looking business woman (shoulder pads) Superconducting magnets  Beneficial
8.   Carousel space station Obvious pirate captain  Hydrogen ice  Beneficial
9.   Decomissioned military cruiser Robotic envoy  Rare earth metals (ingots)  Highly profitable
10.   Asteroid (council headquarter)   Eyless cyber shaman  Strange artefacts (unknown origin) Suspisciously good

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

22. Witch coven

The three cyborgs have been living here for as long as anyone can remember, their lifespans extended far beyond that of baseline humans. They nest in an abandoned research station from the earliest days of colonisation. It doesn’t look like much, but then three, haunting voices speak “welcome” to you in unison. Was the comm system even turned on? Type:  Abandoned habitat Function:  Hermitage Power source:  Thermonuclear batteries Gravity:     None Size:  500 m diameter Affiliation:  None  Population:  3  Sells:  Prophecy Buys:  Batteries, water This asteroid is the home of  Spin ,  Lot  and  Turn ; three heavily modified post-human cyborgs. It is rumoured that they are able to predict the future. It is also probably rumoured that they require some kind of sacrifice to do so, which is true. The habitat itself consists mostly of a large cavern with a few airlocks and antechambers, without any rotational gravit...
Read more

What is this?

As a part of the #Dungeon23 challenge, I will be creating a small adventure location intended for semi-hard sci-fi campaigns a day. Asteroids23 will consist of 365 asteroid habitats, space stations and derelict vessels to explore. While intended for a private homebrew campaign, I want it to be reasonably setting and system agnostic, usable with games such as Mothership or Death in Space. This is obviously not a dungeon in the classic sense. Notably, Asteroids23 will lack the structure inherent to a dungeon. There will be interconnectedness however, some sites will be related to each other in various ways (keys, passwords, lore, etc). I want the whole thing to function as a pointcrawl, encouraging players to double back and return to old sites now and then, unraveling one of several overarching mysteries. The sites should preferably be situated in the same asteroid belt or cloud. I will be adding angular coordinates to indicate relative distances. Additional goals and limitations: Shor...
Read more

28. Procedures for space travel and ship-to-ship combat

While I don't want to design a specific rules system for Asteroids23 (yet...) I feel it might benefit from some guidelines on how to handle space travel and navigation in the implied Belt setting. These rules are supposed to be as minimal as possible while covering those things that I feel are interesting to model in a game with this focus. Handling ship damage, navigation and fuel economy should create tension and interesting scenarios! Ships Most vessels that the PCs will have access to are either corvettes or frigates; ranging from 50 m to 100 m in lenght. They are frequently powered by fusion reactors, situated at the base of the ship. Most fusion reactors are toroid-shaped tokamaks, and therefore the reactor module looks bulky, often spherical, from the outside. The reactors power the ship systems and accelerate a stream of purplish, superheated plasma through nozzles under the reactor module.  In addition to the reactor, large fuel containers filled with frozen hydrogen (50% ...
Read more