It’s Litha (or at least, this post is scheduled for Litha), but instead of doing one of those goal-oriented updates I usually do I’m just gonna drop the Vestitas stuff I’ve been working on. I can no longer think of any goal oriented things to post, so clearly that was never going to be a long running tradition.
This is for the Enclave, one of three unfinished areas left in the Vestitas hex crawl. Just like the hex encounters, it has no specific stats, just vaguely defined monster roles the details of which I’ll fill in later. This isn’t really the content that the audience this blog stumbled into cares about, but it’s a part of my ongoing quest to complete all my unfinished projects, so I’m tossing it up anyway. It’s not gonna slow down the Succubus review in any case, since I’m only posting these on the Tuesday/Friday non-review article slots.
The beastmen control the surface of the Enclave, and are the most numerous and belligerent of the mutant factions there. Because they control the surface, anyone who wants to leave the Enclave must go through them (with the exception of the jumpers, who can use their teleporter for one-way trips only). The pale ladies maintain good relations with them for that reason, but they have a chillier relationship with the other three, who are bottled up inside. The jumpers are sometimes able to negotiate with the beastmen through the spook witches, and the beastmen are forced into an uneasy alliance with the pelagers by virtue of the fact that the pelagers control the biodomes, and therefore the food. The beastmen and blind men are in a state of cold war, and the beastmen rely on the pale ladies’ trade to the outside world for all their manufactured goods.
Beastmen tend towards aggressive personalities, have 30 Disposition with strangers to begin with, and purely human parties take a -10 on top of that. If the party contains at least one visible mutant, including a psyker who visibly uses a power and shows no immediate signs of being sanctioned, there is no Disposition penalty. The beastmen will assume the other party members have less visible mutations. Having at least one clearly Imperium aligned party member is another -10 on top of that, and a party with at least one member wearing an Imperium uniform and none who are visibly mutated will be attacked on sight unless they talk the Beastmen down with a Very Hard(-30) Charm or Intimidate check.
The staple of the beastman forces are the axe crew and the gun crew. A gun crew has a single gor gunner and three riflebrays acting as spotters and support, while an axe crew is led by a wargor and has three caprigors backing him up, carrying a great-axe in one hand and a stub automatic in the other, dropping or holstering the stub to hold the axe in both hands upon reaching melee. The beast lord and his bestigors are armed similarly to the caprigors, but with bolt pistols, carapace armor, and chain-axes, in addition to being superior warriors in general. Ungors and especially brays fulfill most of the specialist roles, like snipers, medics, and the bray shaman casters.
Ungor servants also appear in large numbers, but are usually poorly armed with only improvised daggers and shanks and will flee rather than fight. Those ungors who aren’t being used as servants tend to be slightly better armed, acting in squads with usually two riflemen carrying autoguns, a single assault ungor carrying a shotgun, and six ungor thugs as backup, carrying an equal mix of stub revolvers and stub automatics.
01) Train Station
This rail line once connected this ancient facility to the main lines that followed the Grey River. Now the rail rusts away to nothing just a few hundred yards out. Decaying shipping containers are scattered about and a train rusted to the rails lies still atop the tracks. A hidden trapdoor in the station requiring a Challenging(+0) Awareness check to notice leads down to the hidden teleporter lab. Eastwards, the rail splits, with one track ending at the west edge of the star port, while the other curves down into the facility’s underground transit system’s western station.
An axe crew of caprigors guards the rails, lurking amongst the shipping containers. While they usually joke, gamble, and drink with one another, if they know an attack is coming, they’ll lay an ambush. Purely human parties take a -10 to their initial Disposition with the beastmen, but if the party contains at least one visible mutant (including a psyker who visibly demonstrates powers), there is no penalty, and the beastmen will assume the non-mutants in the party just have less obvious mutation.
02) Starport (West)
The flat tarmac is pockmarked here intermittently by the rusting wrecks of old shuttles. Between the wreckage, a bray gun crew patrols, living out of the remains of a luxury passenger shuttle with spacious interiors. To the west, a train station with rails leads off into the wilderness before rapidly decaying into nothing, a transport that would have once connected this facility to the rest of civilization, probably via the river. At the south end of the starport is a small building containing a miniature lobby and stairs that lead down into the western transit station. At the north end is a freight elevator leading down into the underground storage, locked in the downward position, with nothing but a five meter drop to prevent entry.
Searching the area and passing a Challenging(+0) Awareness test will turn up a handful of functioning parts in a few of the shuttles – some intact coolant tubing and a functioning capacitor – but not enough to build a complete, functioning engine on its own. A Very Hard(-30) Tech-Use check will allow the parts to be successfully recovered without damaging them. Fail by one or two DoF and the parts are stuck in place, but not damaged. Fail by three or more, and the parts are ruined in the effort to get them free, but are removed successfully, so you can still strangle someone with the coolant tubes or the capacitor as a sizable bludgeon, you just can’t use them as engine parts.
03) Starport (Central)
A ruined ship spans the entirety of the starport’s central tarmac here, nearly 100 meters long. Though tiny by the standards of the present day Imperium, it would be more than large enough to serve as a mobile base of operations for a team even as large as one or two hundred strong if it could be made spaceworthy again. The wreck is currently inhabited by a full standard squad of brays, plus the underchief’s squad consisting of the bray underchief himself, a bray shaman, an ungor medic, a bray sniper, and two riflebrays.
The wreck’s engine is largely intact. A few of its coolant tubes have punctures, one of its engine turbines has rusted solid, and a capacitor has blown, but other than these fairly minor problems, the ship is fully capable of taking off and landing as an atmospheric craft, provided the crew have oxygen masks to deal with the thin air in the upper atmosphere. The multiple gaps in the ship’s hull will cause it to incinerate should any effort be made to leave (or re-enter) the atmosphere without more extensive repairs. A Very Hard(-30) Tech Use check is required to reinstall the missing parts should the party be able to find them. The gaps in the hull are too numerous to be plausibly repaired by a single tech priest or even a small team, and must be brought to a major city and repaired in exchange for a Very Rare(-30) requisition check. These repairs will take 1d5 weeks.
The west and east ends of the starport are easily accessible from here.
04) Starport (East)
The blasted remains of two fairly small ships, about 30 or 40 meters each, lie on this stretch of the tarmac. They’ve completely fallen apart, each one broken into multiple pieces and with more of their interior exposed to the elements than not, overgrown with plant life. The engines of the two ships are as badly damaged as the rest of them, but there is one fully intact turbine. The bolts holding it in place have badly rusted and a Hard(-20) Tech Use check is required to pry it free without damaging it. Failing by one or two degrees means it’s still stuck in place, but failing by three or more means the turbine has been damaged while being ripped out.
The axe team of a caprigor squad comes out here during the day, but they sleep in the lobby to the east at night. The gun team from the lobby will provide fire support if they notice a fight going on out in the starport.
At one end of the starport is the lobby, while to the north is an inoperable freight elevator leading down to underground storage. The elevator is at the bottom of the shaft, so with a ladder or some repelling gear or just a willingness to jump five meters down below, anyone can get down. The starport continues down to the west where a large ship carves the tarmac in two. A manhole to the side lead down to a sewage treatment plant. A small, dilapidated building contains an elevator shaft twenty meters deep that passes by the underwater laboratories on its way to transit central. The elevator cable is still intact and can be used to ascend or descend, although a Routine(+20) Athletics check is required to jump and grab onto it. Five meters down is the opening to the upper levels of the underwater laboratories, while at the bottom is the elevator car, the service hatch at the top long ago removed and allowing for an easy two meter drop into the car to exit to transit central (if a character more than a full meter tall hangs by their hands and then just lets go, the drop distance is less than a meter and no check is required to avoid any damage from it).
05) Underground Warehouses
This underground storage room is home to dozens of storage containers. Most of their content is dust, rust, and slurry by now, and most of what isn’t was looted long ago. An ungor squad lairs here in the cold, damp ruins of the underground, pushed out of all the better living accommodations by the brays and caprigors, but at least they aren’t hunted like they are in Imperium territory. Two broken freight elevators lie at the south side, and anyone who can find a way to ascend the five meters up to the surface will find they let out at the east and west ends of the starport. At the north end, a stairwell leads up to the ruined parking garage.
Searching through the shipping containers for anything valuable left over is a Difficult(-10) Awareness test, but for each degree of success the characters find a crate full of something still usable – plasteel ingots, promethium canisters, that sort of thing – that weighs a few dozen kilos and is usable as a Rare(-20) item in trade.
06) Underground Parking Garage
The remains of several autocarriages lie scattered about here, little more than rust and shards of glass. The leader of the ungor cult lives here along with a squad of his underlings in tents meant for outdoor survival and repurposed to keep out the damp and cold of the rockrete surroundings. A stairwell descends down into the underground warehouses below, and a door to the east leads to a small, dilapidated town.
07) Surface Town
This half-ruined town is kept somewhat intact by the half-dozen ungor servants kept here by the caprigors who rule over it. Those half-dozen ungors are armed with daggers, hatchets, and machetes, but will go fleeing for cover as soon as a fight breaks out. The caprigor squad living in the more intact buildings of the town will handle the defense (as best they can). To the east is an entrance to the underground parking garage built into a nearby hill, and to the east a path winds around a hill towards the small dam across a tributary of the Grey River.
08) Lobby
This lobby still contains a large, stylized map of the entire facility. A gun team of caprigors has taken up a post in the nearby office, and the axe team that patrols the eastern starport during the day sleeps here at night. North of the lobby is the dam, which also serves as a bridge leading to the town across the Grey River tributary the facility is built around. Out behind the lobby is the eastern edge of the starport. The lobby also contains an elevator down to the eastern station of the underground transit system. The elevator is non-functional, but a rope ladder has been placed by the enclave’s inhabitants leading down the fifteen meter descent into the bowels of the underground facility to the east transit station. There is also a service entrance to the sewage treatment plant here.
09) Dam
The dam here also serves as a bridge across a tributary of the Grey River. It has been blocked by barricades made from various debris, requiring anyone who wants to cross it to take a zig-zag route. In the event of a fight, gunners can lay their heavy stubbers down on the barricades to make an instant machine gun nest with AP8 cover. The only patrol stationed here by default, however, is a single bray sniper with his spotter. At the south end of the dam are trails leading towards the facility lobby and the bunkers overlooking the tributary from one direction. At the north end of the dam are trails leading to the surface town and the fortress which overlooks the other end of the tributary.
10) Bunkers
A pair of bunkers overlooks the trail that follows along the cliffside path towards the reactor warehouses. Each bunker is occupied by a caprigor gun team. One of the riflebrays in one of the gun teams has been replaced with a wargor leading the double-gunner squad. To the west, the trail leads to the dam, while to the east it leads to the loading area for the reactor warehouses.
11) Cliffside Fortress
The cliff here overlooks the Grey River tributary the facility is built around, with one side of the fortress wall along that cliff. The “fortress” is smaller than the name might imply. A three meter rockrete wall (effectively impenetrable if fully obstructing a target, but AP16 when at a corner) surrounds a camp site about fifty meters across, full of tents and foxholes. The walls are patrolled by a full squad of caprigors day and night, while the interior contains two more caprigor squads as well as the beast lord’s squad, containing the beast lord himself, his bray shaman, two minotaurs, two bestigors, a pair of ungor medics, a bray sniper, and the bray sniper’s bray spotter. The camp is also home to two dozen ungor servants. The trail outside the north entrance to the fortress leads west towards the dam and east towards the power reactor’s loading area.
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