29. Odd market

I am experimenting with sub-locations. This one could be placed in any habitat where commerce is going on, for example in the Ancient City.


Rounding a corner, you emerge on a busy, narrow street. The ceiling is suddenly so distant it might as well be the open night sky. Shaded, ancient arcades line the thoroughfare which is dimly, unevenly, lit by neon, string lights, strobes and fire in equal measure. Steam from some malfunctioning vent wrap the stalls in misty strands, mingling with sweet incense smoke and other, odder vapours. Your nostrils are assaulted by a hundred smells you recognise and twice as many you don’t. Many of the things on sale are unfamiliar, yet there seems to be buyers for it all, as strange as the merchants themselves.


Type: Area

Function: Market 

Power source: As habitat

Gravity: As habitat

Size: Narrow lane 

Affiliation: None

Population: A dozen vendors, many visitors

Sells: See entries 

Buys: See entries 


Many, strange cultures, subcultures and ways of life have emerged in the Belts, and many odd things are produced, sold and bought in the system. Merchants from across a hundred worlds and worldlets come and go in this place to peddle their wares. 


  • A slender cyborg with rough, metal skin (which turns out to be rows upon rows of etched poetry on close scrutiny) sells strange and frightening AR-programs and custom holo-projections. Many of them shimmer in the air around their stall.
  • A large, grey-bearded man under a silken, blue canopy sells many-coloured seeds from large ceramic bowls. They can be used to season food or ground up and smoked. In any case, they evoke an intense sense of nostalgia.
  • An old woman with neon braids and emerald eyes sell what appears to be flotsam. She claims it came from space. Analysis reveals it contains human DNA.
  • A grinning punk with mother-of-pearl skin and long, metal fingernails sells knives in all shapes and sizes, including vibroblades and ephemeral monofilament swords.
  • A small, dour-looking man sells a thick stew, the best you’ve ever head. He refuses to share the recipe. 
  • A bearded monk in a stall adorned with smoking censers sells beautiful icons, depicting saints you’ve never heard of.
  • Three tiny, identical ladies sell used paperback books. If you buy one, it might contain coordinates to a strange places scribbled on the inside of the cover. They are very expensive however.
  • A large punk with a silver buzz-cut invites you to his very small surgery room through a door in the arcade. He will install counterfeit cybernetics at a bargain. Every Sunday, they shut down for seven seconds. There is no way to trace or detect the error.
  • A crestfallen, bald woman in a sharp-looking but dirty suit sits by a crudely written street talker. She sells a frigate at a bargain (still a huge amount of money of course). She won’t tell why.
  • There is an unattended stall with beautiful, artisanal handguns. No vendor to be seen. No one has seen the for days,  but no one seems to dare to steal anything either.
  • A woman, statuesque in demeanour as well as appearance, sells military surplus protein bars. They are not very tasty, but very cheap. She seems to have an almost infinite supply.

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