Another twentieth century, a time of dieselpunk space exploration. Weird science has allowed humanity to explore and exploit the solar system; Saturn’s moon Enceladus is a prime target, with its abundant water, oil, and mineral wealth. However, there is sentient life in its sub-surface ocean, and within its thick, icy crust. They do not take kindly to intruders.

With various factions from Earth competing for the resources of Enceladus, whilst fighting or bargaining with the native groups, back on Earth a World War erupts, and support for the colonists all but dries up. The inhabitants of this dangerous world must fend for themselves, but the drilling and mining has awoken something ancient and terrible that lurks beneath the seabed…

 

The world of Gerrha is engulfed in a long, slow war of attrition against alien invaders; biomechanical horrors who cannot be negotiated with.

The invaders are mostly drones, directed through command and control hubs; one such hub has been installed in the former fortress on Death’s Head Island. If a tactical team can perform an amphibious assault and sabotage the hub, the invaders in this region will be overwhelmed.

 

Officially a Soviet technical institute conducting plasma research, the remit of NII-437 was to investigate the paranormal and turn whatever it could find to the advantage of Mother Russia. After success in developing supernatural talents in children, NII-437 was consolidated in a remote location in the Solovetsky Islands.

While NII-437 continued to produce results, increased funding saw the facility expand, but eventually NII-437 was too successful. The test subjects began running the place and conducting their own esoteric research. Alarmed about the potential of this rogue school of witches and wizards, when the Solovetsky facility could not be brought to heel, the army were sent in.

The battle was terrible, and though the test subjects were powerful, they were not disciplined soldiers or military tacticians. Expenditure of men and ammunition won the day for the Soviet authorities, but the legacy of NII-437 would live on…

Adventure Seeds

Digging in the Dirt: The ruins of the Solovetsky Island facility are contaminated with magical fallout, but there may be paranormal artefacts waiting to be found. Of course, there are probably unnatural things still lurking nearby…

Forgotten Victims: Soldiers exposed to horrific magic might still be incarcerated in various asylums, as might surviving test subjects, chemically sedated but kept alive for study. One of these inmates might be the road into uncovering the story of NII-437, or maybe someone or something with unnatural powers escapes…

Down Among the Dead: A selection of artefacts either found or created by NII-437 were deemed too dangerous to be kept on the mainland and were sent by submarine to a remote arctic facility. They never got there, but now the missing sub has been found on the seabed. Are the characters sent to recover the artefacts, or ensure another team doesn’t disturb them? Or has something terrible washed up on the shore near an arctic town?

“This is where I see the face of God,” says Bock. We’re in a dingy sex shop, somewhere in the endless sprawl of Los Angeles, and the clientele are giving me a creepy Pulp Fiction vibe. I’m sure there’s a room out back that sees plenty of action, not all of it consensual.

Bock is a pensioner now, but a lifetime ago he was part of the Fratenitas Saturni. He’s got a hard-on for Nazi occult bullshit, and bangs on about sex magick as gnostic liberation, but really, he’s just a dirty old man. If he didn’t occasionally turn up something useful, I’d probably have found a better place to hang out this evening.

His approach to divination is to take a load of mescaline, watch some weird hardcore pornography, and wait for the universe to speak to him. I find it a little depressing that his window into the sublime is through human depravity, but hey, whatever works.

Most of what he gives me is the usual cryptic garbage, but once in a while there’s something I can run with. We talk, and I make notes as he peruses the latest DVD imports of improbable kinks; nothing chimes from his latest communion, but I slip him a few bills and make my excuses. Even the city air feels cleaner than the clammy atmosphere of the shop.

With nothing to go on, I decide to visit another of my sources. Technically I could walk to Stan’s place from here, but I don’t trust these streets, especially when it’s getting dark. In the cab I review my notes; I’m still not making any connections, but the phrase ‘Potbelly Squeals’ feels familiar. It’s like that sensation of a dream you can’t quite remember; the details are lost, but a kind of mental flavour lingers on.

Stan is not a pervert, but he’s just as strange as Bock in his own way. Stan talks to UFOs through his TV set. Give him a chance and he’ll regale you with a sprawling narrative about reptilians and Ashtar and higher vibrational energies. The story is always changing, absorbing every new ‘revelation’ that surfaces on the internet, but for the most part the saucer crowd seem to agree on it.

I think of it as an elaborate roleplaying game that the players have convinced themselves is real. It’s fascinating to watch the tenuous connections reach out and ensnare real world events, linking them to the interstellar fiction. Nobody has ever really explained to me why Earth is central to these alien antics; maybe ET finds our weirdos as fascinating as I do.

Stan doesn’t have anything new for me, but we smoke a little weed and chat while the TV buzzes with static in the background. He’s fired up about Earth energy, ley lines, and UFO movements; he’s been drawing maps and making odd connections. This sort of thing is my bag, but my brain fogs up after a while and I get left behind by his rampaging train of thought. I make some notes, snap a few pics of his maps, and leave for somewhere quieter.

Through Stan I’ve met a lot of the LA saucer crowd; contactees and abductees, self-confessed hybrids and incarnated space ghosts. Probably the most interesting is Penryn. He claims to be from another dimension, which you could almost believe from his sickly blue pallor; I don’t know if it’s make-up or a serious medical condition, but he certainly doesn’t look right.

I nearly consider dropping in on Penryn to talk about metaphysics and the ‘outer things’ he’s supposedly hiding from, but he’s a recluse and doesn’t appreciate uninvited guests. Instead, as the city lights up and the night people come alive, I slink back home, grabbing some whiskey on the way. New graffiti has popped up on my block; a slavering bat-winged creature looming over incomprehensible writing. The vampiric horror seems to move in the flickering neon light, an effect that makes me feel queasy. I hurry past it.

My apartment looks just like any other crank’s, with layers of notes, cuttings, flyers and photos pinned to the walls; a section through the strata of California’s weirdness. This is my hobby, looking for correlations and cross-correspondences in the occult trash, trying to find patterns in the noise. I guess you could say I’m as bad as the saucer crowd in that respect, but while I love this stuff, it’s not like I really believe any of it. At the same time, I’m hoping to find something if I dig deep enough. I just don’t know what it is.

The nausea has abated, so I pick through the leftovers of yesterday’s Chinese and then practice my own form of divination; surfing Facebook with a large glass of Scotch. From time to time, you encounter a spooky coincidence in your newsfeed, and tonight the algorithms deliver. I click on a link from a history page, and start reading about Gobekli Tepe, a Neolithic site in Turkey crammed full of weird stone pillars. What catches my eye is that Gobekli Tepe means ‘Potbelly Hill’ in Turkish. Potbelly squeals, Bock?

I spend several hours reading up on the ancient history of the region and megalithic sites, referencing Stan’s ley line maps, and drinking plenty of whiskey. Eventually I’m just sleepy and confused, so I crash on the couch and surf channels for a while. I stop on a program about exoplanets, new methods of detecting worlds around distant stars, what we can learn about their composition and atmospheres and climate from so far away.

In my addled state, I compare myself to the scientists making these discoveries; they might be using physics and multi-million-dollar machines to look across vast gulfs of space and time, while I’m rooting in the trash of America’s kooks, but aren’t we both just looking for answers? If there’s a reason for all this, aren’t you as likely to find it in the dirt as in the stars? Or is my project just a pointless obsession; a futile, masturbatory act?

At some point I pass out, and dream of a vast metal cube, hanging in space. I know with absolute certainty that there are living things inside, and suddenly I’m afraid.

—-

As dawn starts to stain the horizon, the curious T-shaped stone pillars of Gobekli Tepe start humming. The sound grows rapidly into a high-pitched electronic squeal; weird lights play over the site like the aurora borealis. As quickly as it began, the phenomenon suddenly stops.

Many light years away, wings rustle inside a dark prison.

 

A burnt, ebony planetoid orbiting too close to its parent star, Blackrock is nonetheless contested for its mineral wealth. The massive macro-excavators of the Gneissguild toil for Baron Gonsalvus, a brute more beast than man, but the guilders have to fight for every ton of ore against the Kaluta, humanoids who hold Blackrock sacred. These beings are led by the Llian, warriors apparently immune to heat, radiation, and conventional weapons.

The conflict is complicated by the presence of the petrogs, monstrous carnivores with a black, oily sheen; it is assumed they were transplanted here from elsewhere or engineered to survive the brutal conditions. The creatures seem to have a connection with the Slag Walker, a mechanoid only seen stalking the day side of Blackrock, its deformed metal plates glowing red hot.

Earth, the 1950s. The dream of atomic science is a reality; not only does atomic power provides cheap, plentiful energy, but the splitting of the atom has revealed a cornucopia of strange new particles and energies to be exploited for the advancement of humankind.

Atomic science has turned Manhattan into a utopia of gleaming spires, busy with cars and air vehicles running on atomic power. The power of the atom has also been turned inwards, to unlock superhuman abilities; those brave few who have volunteered for the process are dubbed ‘Atomic Men’, or simply ‘Atomics’.

These all-American heroes are at the forefront of a fight against extraterrestrial invaders, whose infiltration of the US became public knowledge following the Roswell incident. Influence of these aliens, known as ‘Xeds’, is investigated by the House Extraterrestrial Activities Committee led by Senator McCarthy, and citizens are advised to be vigilant for ‘Xeds under the bed’.

Xeds aren’t the only threat to Manhattan, the Atomic City. Below the spires, in the old streets of New York, crime runs rampant. Mobsters not only make use of advanced technology and alien weapons, but also magic; a power that manipulates the same strange energies and particles that atomic science taps into. The threat posed by magic is less well understood by the public, and mostly dismissed as urban legend and folklore.

If Xeds and magic mobsters weren’t enough, the Atomic City is also threatened by it’s supposed guardian; the computer system known as Metropolitation Automated Logistics. This vast mind is meant to oversee the day-to-day running of the city, but MAL is completely insane, yet smart enough to hide that insanity from it’s creators. Through fake messages and phone calls, and by rerouting supplies and power, MAL gets others to do its bidding, conducting unethical experiments and muscling in on the criminal underworld. MAL is building an army of robots and grotesque abominations for the day it decides to take over the world.

Joining the Atomics in the defence of Manhattan are Legionnaires, mostly war veterans who don costumes in imitation of the Atomic Men. There are also the ‘Tin Men’, sentient robots powered by atomic technology, and some Xeds that can pass for human, who have defected to work secretly for the US Government. Magicians are also on Uncle Sam’s payroll, adding magic to the arsenal of America’s defenders.

Welcome to the Atomic City, where things could go critical at any moment…

In the 1920s, a group of investigators are drawn into a plot involving the sinister effect of a carved stone skull on a group of spiritualists, and the disturbing results of their experimental photography. It is a story that leads to Mexico, where eldritch influence has inspired strange machines, and led a man to open a doorway that should have remained shut.

Something hangs over the rainforest, corrupting life at the genetic level; unless the temple of Xipe Totec is breached, and the gate closed, soon all living things will be remade…

There are gates to the world known as Oubliette across the Plurality, which has brought many visitors here throughout the ages; the problem is that those gates are one-way. Stepping through, travellers find just an empty stone archway behind them, and no means to escape the planet.

Most believe that the species dubbed the Trappists built the gates, although they may simply have discovered Oubliette and settled there. Whatever the truth, they raised impressive stone structures (many of which have weathered the aeons well), and were capable mages, leaving behind enchanted relics (as well as cursed ones). They created museums of artefacts from other realities and seem to have interred the remains of travellers with dignity, although it is not clear if those travellers were treated as guests or prisoners (or killed and dissected upon arrival).

The Trappists appear to have vanished suddenly, and the next notable civilisation was the Machinists, a technological species who attempted to unravel the secrets of magic and the operation of the gates through scientific exploration. At some point their focus changed from research to defence, as they built ever larger and more powerful Wardens; robots whose remains are found across Oubliette, some still active and pursuing millennia-old programming. The largest Wardens are found on the great plains, where monumental and grotesque skeletons have been found, unlike anything existing on Oubliette today. A few of the massive robots are still operational, sitting idle in low-power mode, as though waiting for such monsters to return.

It is unclear if the Machinists were organic beings, or machines themselves, but their reign also ended abruptly. Beings have continued stumbling upon Oubliette throughout the centuries, and the current civilisation (if it can be called that) is a melting pot of myriad races. Some species are represented more frequently, such as humans (due to them being endemic to so many realities) and orcs (descendants of a tribe led through a gate by religious visions). There are also familiars and robots used by other cultures to test the gates, and thus abandoned on Oubliette; an entire race seems to have arisen when a rat-like familiar arrived and bred with the various rodents already on the planet, creating a new sentient species (something like a cross between a large rat and small monkey, with a nose for magic).

Not everything that comes through the gates can be reasoned with, and there are many dangerous critters and horrific entities that have become part of Oubliette’s smorgasbord of an ecosystem, as well as hostile factions that don’t play well with others. Another hazard of the planet are the void storms; lurid clouds in which occur flashes of utter darkness. Sometimes this darkness takes the form of cracks in the sky, appearing with an awful high-pitched sound, as though reality itself was screaming. Normally these cracks fade rapidly, but occasionally they persist, and grow large enough for something awful to squeeze through from the void beyond.

There is growing agreement that the void storms are becoming more frequent, and more likely to deposit nightmarish terrors from that dark place. Some wonder if these rents in reality will eventually unleash gargantuan beasts, like the vast remains on the great plains; if this is a cycle that has played out again and again in previous epochs. Some whisper that this is the true purpose of the gates, to provide a harvest for the things from beyond, to sate their hunger so that they will slink back to the emptiness in which they dwell, at least for a while longer…

Outside of the influence of the major powers of the galaxy, Zentrum is an arid world with significant mineral deposits, although its major trade is information. In the distant past, a listening post was established; a massive tachyon antenna array, which now forms the heart of Whisper Town. Bitsifters harvest stray broadcasts, and bandwidth brokers arrange for transmission and processing of information across known space, all under the direction of House Delphyn. The settlement is full of whisper dens and datasmith’s lairs where knowledge can be bought and sold, and this network hub makes Whisper Town an ideal place to trade physical wares too, at the Matter Market. There are numerous dealers and collectors in Whisper Town, the most notable being Mugler, said to have amassed a horde of rare and valuable artefacts from a thousand worlds.

As well as smugglers and criminal cartels, and the mining clans who control industrial settlements across Zentrum, several nefarious alliances also make the planet their home. The group known as Volatile Memory are machine supremacists, who run weapons and ammunition through the Matter Market, and use the whisper dens to plot terrorist attacks against organic life throughout the galaxy. Stranger still is the militant cult of the Mordax who operate from the massive, yet half-finished tower known as the Starspike, jutting from the ruins of Solum. Some say it is the radiation that keeps scavengers away from that city, others say it is something unnatural summoned by the Mordax…

Colonies were already well established across the solar system when VRN Industries discovered the Cenote. It was in a temple carved into the rock beneath the dark side of the Moon, built by unknown hands aeons ago. When the massive capstone was lifted, below was a pool of liquid water; though cold, much warmer than the frigid, airless surroundings. Drone submarines were lost while descending, a mystery solved by the first brave or foolhardy divers; somewhere in the depths of that huge, endless well, gravity shrinks and then reverses. What was down is now up, and continuing in that direction, the diver emerges from another Cenote in a much stranger place.

The Construct consists of three hollow worlds nested inside each other; although each is spinning on a different axis at a different rate, this is not enough to account for the Earth-like gravity experienced on the inner surfaces of the three spheres.

The innermost sphere surrounds something like a tiny star and is constantly bathed in sunlight. This is a hot and dusty land, barely habitable beyond the river valleys and oases. The structure of this sphere is incomplete, with vast, irregular holes in its surface that look down upon the middle sphere and let the sunlight through.

The middle sphere is of a temperate climate, with fields and forests, mountains and oceans; day occurs when one of the massive holes in the inner sphere moves overhead, but day and night cycles are variable due to the different speeds and rotations of the two spheres. The night sky is the outer surface of the inner sphere, smooth but carved with vast, softly-glowing runes. The middle sphere is also riddled with enormous holes, which look down upon the outer sphere.

The outer sphere is a cold land of perpetual winter and long nights; day only occurs when the holes in the first two spheres align, otherwise this sphere exists in a gloomy twilight, lit by the runes of the night ‘sky’. The outer sphere also has holes in its surface, but these look only onto a black void.

The outer surface of the construct resembles that of the inner spheres, but is a bleak, airless place. Each sphere is tens of kilometres thick, riddled with caverns and dungeons and mines; for not only is there breathable air and vegetation in the Construct, but sentient beings. Alongside the apparently human inhabitants there are races and creatures seemingly inspired by the mythologies of Earth, many of which possess powers that can only be described as magical. It is evident that many civilisations have risen and fallen, leaving numerous dilapidated temples and ruins; there are numerous kingdoms, some of which clash with each other, while others dwell in isolation.

VRN Industries are intent on exploring and exploiting this impossible construction, trying to understand who built it and how, and attempting to harness the power of its magic. The Cenote is large enough that, appropriately packaged, military vehicles and equipment can be shipped through. VRN have established forward operating bases and are continuing to map the Construct and spread their influence.

There are many stories to be told beyond the Cenote…

Invaders: VRN operatives are strangers in a strange land; they may be tasked with exploring regions of the Construct and investigating ancient ruins, they might be employed to negotiate with native inhabitants or influence their behaviour, or they might be sent on military missions to destroy hostile forces and retrieve magical artefacts. What if there is more than one way into the Construct, and another corporation unlocks it?

Inhabitants: The natives of the Construct have always had to contend with brutal warlords, diabolical sorcerers, orcs and goblins, the undead, and mighty dragons, but now a technological force is thrown into the mix. What happens when the king becomes a puppet ruler for VRN? When a despot receives their backing to quell a region, or they arm orc tribes in the mountains? What happens when VRN seizes a mine from the dwarves or bulldozes an elven forest?

Insurrection: What if forces from within the Construct seize control of the Cenote, or find other exits? What happens when an era of space colonisation is invaded by necromancers and gargoyles and wraiths?