Sufficient Ruination

Sufficient Ruination

Hulaka is ruined. Hulaka continues to be ruined afresh. It is a place where riches and danger are thoroughly intermixed in a matrix of desolation. It is a place for the desperate, the mad. For you.

MAYBE

Hulaka was a Potemkin village created to defraud interstellar investors; a planet made to look as if a thriving colonization effort was underway. When the corporate government behind it collapsed, its great, untenanted works were left in situ, and it has since become a wildcat dump for the entire sector.

OR

Hulaka was a a nation whose magical and technological might was legendary. But something happened, and Hulaka is no more. Legends speak of an overwhelming hubris which led the god or gods of the legend-writer’s choice to strike Hulaka down. Others say the end was more prosaic: increasing fractiousness, a string of poor decisions, decades of poor resource and economic management–slow death by a thousand cuts. Now it is a place of strange ruins, danger, and possible riches.

OR

H/ULAKA is the code-designate of an ontologically compromised region. In a great spasm, shards of other worlds metastasized into our own. Familiar structures were violently converted into alien equivalents; whole regions of atmosphere were replaced with high-pressure poisons from unknown gas giants; fragments of otherworldly cities dropped, exploding like architectural bombs. The original residents died or fled; many inhabitants of otherworldly structures were killed in place by the transposition and others could not survive conditions in our world. H/ULAKA is still subject to these bombardments, though almost exclusively in the form of architectural and industrial refuse. No one knows why.

LOOK UPON ITS WORKS!

(More to come, hopefully–the two ideas below are sort of proof-of-concept to myself)

THE STORMSPANS

A vast bridge. Two arrow-straight spans, 3 kilometers long, 300 meters across, with 30 meters separating the two. The surface a translucent, glossy black. Strange icons of light float within, flickering, pulsing, buzzing, twitching, sometimes vanishing for days or weeks at a time or changing with the weather.

Some of these easily are interpreted. Glowing fluorescent-green dots marking the centers of lanes. Serrated red bars indicating closed-off areas. Blue, gently turning arrows giving traffic directions.

The language is more cryptic. It looks pictographic, and color may have been part of it; eye-searing pinks and yellows and purples all mixed in glyphs that look hugely stretched in the direction of travel.

Fluted pylons like decorative arches rise from the ground to support the bridge. Where they are intact or undisturbed, they only just touch the underside of the spans, either side of their apex meeting the lowermost edges on either side of the 30-meter gap. Half are like this.

The other half are in some state of displacement or decay. The lean drunkenly out of the ground, exposing a gleaming metallic banyan rootwork with hexagonal interstices. Parts of it bend downward, seeking earth and spreading out where they find it. Other parts are broken off or project into the air. These pulse a bright red, with blinding flashes at random intervals.

The spans themselves are broken in no sensible pattern. Seemingly random sections of one span or another are sheared off, revealing a structure like crumbling baklava made of black ash. It is here the red bars cluster, migrating slowly along the bridge toward the missing sections like scavengers made of light, or like strange animals coming here to die.

HAZARDS:

Lightning storms for above the bridge with startling rapidity and frequency. For every exploration turn, or scene, or exchange (basically anything that constitutes a discrete action in exploration or travel involving the bridge) there is a 2-in-6 chance of a lightning storm forming, a process that takes 1d6 combat rounds (or otherwise is very swift).

The storms are intense.

• Black cloud cover means pitch blackness.
• Hurricane-force winds mean arrows are useless, even firearms will have some difficulty.
• Lighting flashes are extremely bright, forcing a reflex-like save to avoid being blinded for a turn or two ( or 1d4-1).
• For anyone not under solid cover, there’s a 1-in-6 chance of being struck by a lighting bolt every time they would take an action. 50% chance it happens before they can perform their action. If your system has stuff like chain lighting or lighting bolt spells, use those and treat them as coming from a mid-level sorcerer. If you have weather rolls, find the nastiest lighting you can. In bother cases, there additional effects of being knocked down, blinded and deafened. No save. It’s lightning.
• The storms last for 1d20 turns, then vanish as quickly as they formed.
• For 1d4 turns, exchanges, scenes, etc. afterward, broken portions of the bridge hum and spark. Anyone who gets within a few feet of the spans, even if they are on the ground below, is in danger of being hit by an electrical discharge. Treat it as one bolt from the storm, above, but with the normal reflex saves or dodges or whatever is appropriate for your system being possible. Yes, this can still be in effect when a storm whips up. Yikes!

TREASURES:

• None? The bridge might serve as an entrance to Hulaka, setting the tone and warning PCs and players alike of what’s to come.
• Access. It may be the only way to cross enter an otherwise inaccessible area, making the access itself the reward.
• Chariots of the gods! The bridge was clearly meant for traffic. There may be skycars here, with one still functional, or repairable after scavenging power cells and motor parts from others (I’d recommend Eld bubblecars from Chris Kutalik’s Misty Isles of the Eld—In fact I just recommend that whole book in general). If your world has skycars aplenty, then one of these is a collector’s item, an exotic/classic model still somehow in excellent condition.
• Lightning rods! Cylindrical, wand-like components along the edges of the span. If removed improperly, they explode or go inert, but if removed carefully, they can be used as wands of lighting bolt/milspec electrolasers.

THE TORTURED EARTH

A sinkhole. 1D6x10 meters wide, 1d12x10 meters deep. Roll 1d6 for form:

1-3: A rough circle, conical in cross section, narrowing to a debris-choked bottom.

HAZARD: Crumbling debris is difficult to climb, any failure results in a small collapse, raining down on the climber and those below. Damage as for falling from a height equivalent to depth passed so far. Probably knocks untethered climbers loose, causing a fall in addition.

4: Perfectly circular, as if a section of earth and substructure was removed with a vast precision tool.

HAZARD: Smooth, fused stone and earth. Any metallic substructure will be sheared and melted, forming sharp edges. Wood will be burnt and ready to collapse.

5: Cruciform, in the shape of a +. Edges appear folded into smaller and smaller pleats, becoming vertical edges.

HAZARD: Weird energies linger here. Failed climbing rolls trigger a burst of violet aurora which does 1d12 temporary strength damage as a climber dislodges some of the debris. Successful climbing rolls have a 1-in-6 chance to triggering the phenomenon.

6: A tear or rent more than a sinkhole. Like the earth torn asunder in an old disaster movie.

HAZARD: Volcanic gasses have a 1-in-6 chance erupting each round. Treat them as dragon’s breath or flamethrowers, with additional poison effects.

TREASURES:

• None? This might simply be an obstacle in the player’s path. If that’s true, at least give them access to some tunnels to explore, or something. Put a quick dungeon in there.
• Access to the world below. One or more tunnels open up here, providing access to a partial substructure of some sort. Sewers, subways, steam tunnels, that sort of thing. All have their own potential treasures and hazards.
• The vault! A large, armored, sealed structure, designed to defeat simple lockpicking and resist determined attack for hours if not days. It contains (1d6):

1. Forbidden knowledge. Spellbooks. Secret histories. Operational manuals for arcane tech.
2. Wealth. Exotic currency, bars of valuable metal, deeds, documents, art.
3. Banks of cryosleep pods. Maybe citizens of this or some otherworldly city. Maybe hideous experiments best left lie.
4. A command center and armory. Fine weapons and armor, communications systems, symbols of authority, food and water.
5. A communications center. Communications equipment, food and water, access to a scattered network of monitoring devices, most malfunctioning or dead.
6. An archillect. Banks of brains in jars, or a massive computer, or a mysterious grouping of crystals. A vast depth of knowledge about its time and place of origin, and a brilliant, rigorously logical mind. Violently insane from damage and/or years of isolation.

OTHER HAZARDS (Roll for each):

• 1-in-6 chance of a laser grid covering part of the depth. If a laser grid is present, 1-in-6 chance it covers the entire depth. A flickering, lethal gridwork. Nimble, careful, or clever climbers can find a way through the interstices, taking advantage of local outages as damaged emitters malfunction. Otherwise, roll a random hit location. The laser neatly slices off whatever was hit, doing little damage, and instantly cauterizing the wound.
• 1-in-6 chance the whole place will collapse in 1d20 rounds, actions, scenes, or whatever is appropriate.
• 1-in-6 chance of some aggressive predator nesting here; it will defend its territory, possibly to the death.
• 1-in-6 chance of CHUDs, slow mutants, restless dead, morlocks, or whatever you like. They will have protection against any local hazards, or at least know their way around them, and are hungry for fresh meat.