>>67213307
What were they researching? Why would that bring them to this planet, what is here that they needed?

>>67213307

>As the facilities core system is brought back online snatches of an audio recording can be heard
>It's an audio log kept by the, supposedly, last known person to be in the station and they set the computer to repeat the diary infinitely.

>>67213350
They could have been researching something as boring and prosaic as materials science and applications based around whatever they were mining up on that dusty rock Alternatively, they could have been using the planet's mining operation and remoteness to hide the fact that they were researching dangerous alien tech.

>>67213378
>The audio logs that the party hears seem to be drawn from years' worth of recordings, illustrating their maker's mental breakdown.

>It's unclear whether the logs that play are those that have remained uncorrupted, ir if they were cherry-picked for some reason.

>>67213413
Why not both? They could be exploring the interaction of alien tech and a native element that's similar to their power source.

>>67213610
>While the facility had originally been built to mine the mundane mineral wealth of the desert planet, they eventually found something... more...exotic far below.

>Knowing what they'd found could possibly make them a fortune, they kept their discovery secret and began shipping in scientists and experts to research it.

>Things went slowly but supernaturally sour at the station, and the mining corp's secrecy made it easy for them to abandon the facility and planet to a dusty fate.

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>Although the desert planet does have a thin, breathable atmosphere, the heat makes going outside the station for any great length of time hazardous.

>The climate control inside is better, but sometimes only marginally so in the collapsed sectors and clearly on its last legs, clanking and thunking.

>Sometimes party members swear that the A.C.'s labors sound more like someone, or something, clambering around in the vents behind the walls.

>>67214126
Keep the characters and players unsure of how much of what’s happening is stress, heatstroke and dehydration, and how much is honest to goodness paranormal activity.

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>>67214221
Exactly.

>Did Kowalski really see those figures watching them from up on the ridge overlooking the station, or was she suffering a heat-induced delusion?

>Is there someone or something roaming the facility with them, or are the automatic doors and intercoms simply malfunctioning from neglect?

>Is Robbins really acting suspiciously as Martinez and Johnson claim, or has the exhaustion and stress just made them paranoid and on-edge?

>>67214221
>>67214694
Mix the supernatural and the alien together for the actual threat. Keep it confusing whether you're dealing with one thing that's able to be in two places at once, multiple creatures... Hell, throw in a traitor player for good measure.

>>67217152
>just mix it all whatever the fuck it is
ungh

>>67217152

>In the darkest parts of the facility a hastely thrown together status unit exists and inside is...Something
>It's a simple creature but it speaks through though thoughts and in it's haze and stupor these thoughts have a way of effecting members of it's species
>As the systems come back on line and the unit housing it is taken off of auxillary power it stirs and it's fear and desire for freedom will again affect all those around it.

>It isn't so bad, is it?
>The sound of sand blowing against the metal plates of your shelter
>It reminds you of the sound of rain on the roof
>A place to rest
>A place to sleep and dream
>Sand seeping in through the edges
>Scouring away faces

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>As the closest thing to a geologist the crew got, set to work getting the drones to build an independent well, as all the primary ones at the mining facility are dried up or heavily diluted with some red liquid the mineral checker keeps flagging as inconclusive.
>Drones keep turning themselves to power-saving mode incremently the deeper they go.

Anyone else experiencing this?

>>67217741
I sort of like this angle.

>The isolated desert planet is a dusty, sleepy and forgotten place where the blazing sun and the blowing of the wind across the alien dunes dulls the senses.

>There are few signs of a struggle or violence at the station, if any at all, just the degradation of decades spent abandoned to the elements on this hot, dusty rock.

>The various ships of various makes and ages and in various states of disrepair, however, suggest that the party is not the first group to get stranded here.

>The fact that the station's climate control and computers still work at all are evidence that those stranded here have performed what repairs they could.

>There are logs, written and audio, recorded by a half-dozen different crews over the long and lonely years that describe their attempts to escape the planet.

>Each group, it seems, eventually succumbed to a sort of sullen, wistful delirium, a heat haze of madness that robbed each spacer of their drive to leave.

>Some shut themselves up in crew compartments and quietly died of the heat. Some took their own lives. Some simply walked off into the alien desert.

>>67219222
So it's more of a slow and insidious threat than some sort of stalking alien or rampaging research project? Maybe there are alien ruins on this planet, or strata of alien ruins that get discovered beneath the surface. Maybe this planet is cursed such that anyone living there suffers a slow and hopeless death.

>>67214694
>As the party's Engineer, Kowalski has spent all together too much time in the scorching sun and the desert wind, trying to repair the station’s long-range telecom array.

>She claims to have begun seeing a woman out on the dunes and crags, buck naked, with long black hair, staring at her from the distance as she works.

>The rest of the crew chalk these sightings up to her being a young horndog who’s spent too much time in the heat and without pleasurable company.

>She denies this, and eventually starts claiming that the “staring woman” has started watching them through the windows and beckoning for her to follow.

>One day Kowalski just disappears, apparently walking out into the desert, the tracks left by her boots accompanied by a set of bare footprints.

>The places where the climate control work well are generally safe if eerie. The places where it begins to fail are dangerous and more overtly supernatural.

>While the station isn’t incredibly big, the hallways are tangled and hard to navigate, especially in the sectors without AC, almost as if the layout isn’t completely fixed.

>There is evidence of multiple crashes and emergency landings in the area, and of different groups being forced to occupy the station awaiting rescue.

>The facility’s A.I. assistant is old and buggy, and suffers constant issues with timekeeping and identifying the number of people currently on-site.

>One room in the crew quarters has its door locked or barricaded from inside. Those listening at the door can hear a sound that might be the AC or might be crying.

>Vaguely worrying graffiti can be found across the station. The most common phrase that keeps appearing reads “Let it all go and listen.”

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>Hundreds of skeletons
>Each one lying on its back outside; apparent death of dehydration

>The party searches for clues
>Every single scrap of information - recordings, post-it notes, notebooks, scrawled graffiti - is just the words "Stare at the Sun" repeated over and over again

>The party finds fuel and returns to the ship
>Attempt ship startup
>All computers have been wiped
>Navigation screens only say "Stare at the Sun"
>Crew checks the ship manuals so they can attempt a hard start of the engine
>The words in all the manuals have been replaced also

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>>67213307
How many suns?

>>67221502
Does the sun ever go down on this world? I’m thinking not. Perhaps there are two suns, or the angle of the planet prevents the sun from ever completely setting on the station.

>>67221575
I like the idea of the sun not setting completely and just circling the horizon, fat and red and sullen until it rises again.

>>67214126
>>67214694
>>67216679
I'm really enjoying this rugged, modular supertech. Please post more if you have anything like it.

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This planet reminds me of Beachworld.

Newfags won't get this.

>>67221800
I was going to write the same thing.

>>67221701
I have more on my home computer. Once work is over I’ll share what I have.

>>67221800
It does sound similar in the almost hypnotic effect that the place seems to hold over those stranded on it.

I like the idea of leaning heavily into mirages, delusions and hallucinations and instilling characters and players with uncertainty as to whether what they’re experiencing is being caused by the heat or by something genuinely paranormal.

A sandstorm blows in as the party is sheltering in the research station.

>The party can almost swear that they can see figures stumbling through the storm. When the storm finally dies down there is no one there.

>The wind and sand gets into the station, wheezing and whispering through failed joints and openings, setting everyone strangely on edge.

>The storm breaks a vital external component to the station’s climate control system, necessitating a hasty repair before the party is roasted.

>The storm unburies the entrance to the mine proper, and along with it scores of desiccated bodies laid prone and prostrate in front of it.

Which scenario makes for a better game:

>The PCs are forced to make an emergency landing on the desert planet and scary shit happens.

>The PCs have been hired to guard the abandoned facility from looters and scary shit happens.

>>67213307
>it turns out that the planet is about to be eclipsed for several years and most of the native fauna stay underground until then.
We Riddick

>>67222776
Probably crash landing. Gives them an ultimate goal of "Get Off The Planet" rather than "Sit Around And Guard Something".

>>67222800
Alternatively, nighttime, when things cool down, is the safest time to be out and about as most of the paranormal activity occurs in the daylight and the heat. At night, or as close to night as it gets on this planet, minds clear and imaginations settle, leaving the the party in a better state to make progress on their escape.

Maybe helpful notes and clues have been left for them in glow-in-the-dark paint.

>>67222859
Agreed. The guards option might work for a game that starts off slice-of-life and then turns to horror, but it’s probably best to just dump the players right into the desert and tell them to escape.

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>>67220524
The fucking Staring Woman is everywhere, I see.

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>>67213378
Uh-oh

>>67223141
She’s an important part of /tg/ Sci-Fi horror.

>>67213378
>"Libera te tutemet ex inferis"

>>67222922
The glow in the dark paint is a great idea

>>67223577
Thanks. I’m liking the idea that unlike most horror games, it’s the daytime that’s dangerous on this abandoned desert planet. It passes like a long fever dream, full of dangers both real and hallucinated, environmental and paranormal. It’s only at night that the PCs get some relief from the heat and the supernatural. As the desert cools down, flowers open, alien insects and critters emerge, and clues left in glowing paint make themselves visible.

>>67221575
>>67221542
It is a binary star system. The larger of the two rises and sets much like any other, the smaller is forever hidden behind it. When you check sensor logs from the inbound flight they return inconsistent data or say that there was never a second sun.

>>67223762
>Is the second sun real, or a heatstroke induced delusion? It seems to come and go, rise and set in different places and at different times.

>>67223889
>Your second shadow moves according to another body. Or was it your first shadow? Either way you've been moving to it's will for weeks.

>>67223928
>For a moment you stood to stare at it
>Now wherever you look the white spot remains
>It doesn't fade
>You can't sleep
>An alien sun burning on the inside of your eyelid

>>67224018
>You've stay out of the sun's sight since you landed only leaving the ship on the darkest night.
>Gregory says he's going blind. As the ship's medic you have to at least pretend to care.
>He describes a burning light where the sun seared itself into his retina. It's so vivid you can almost see it yourself.
>You can see it yourself. You can see the furious glint in Gregory's cataracts.
The Sun has found you at last. When Gregory next comes to you you will remove his eyes. If the light still bedevils you, you will remove your own.

>>67224291
Man my spelling is even worse than I thought. That'll teach me not to phonepost.

>>67221800
Singing dunes are a thing. The desert howling on a windless dusk is peak horror.

>When the sun, or was it suns? finally set, it feels as if the entire planet breathes a sigh of relief.

>The fever dreams of the day melt away and you begin to think clearly after hours of awful hallucinations.

>The crusty, coral-like lichen clinging to the walls of the station bloom in sprays of soothing bioluminescence.

>Alien critters and beasties lope and chitter and sing in the neon twilight, coming out of hiding to enjoy the night.

>Your eye is caught by a piece of graffiti on a wall you’ve passed a dozen times that wasn’t there before.

>It glows in the dark and reads “Stay out of the sun. Stay out of the heat. Stay alert. Stay sane. Stay alive.”

>>67223762
>>67224387
Rogue planets are usually creepy but everything native to the desert seems wholesome. Why not have the second, bad sun be a rogue star? An intruder that perverts the system around it.

>>67224485
Maybe the second sun is not actually a celestial body, just some kind of strange alien device that has similar power output? To acquire it would be to gain incredible fortune and the power to destroy any planet you want! Just to glimpse its secrets would be enough to advance human science to the next age! Just one more trifling sacrifice and the Second Sun will be in our grasp!

Sounds almost like we're setting up for a Night Shifted Traveller game.

>>67224558
Small black hole radiating enough energy to be mistaken for a sun. What keeps it from evaporating explosively is a mystery as is why it hasn't sucked the native sun into its accretion disc.

>>67224633
Inverted, you poor sun-stoked bastards curse the night shift who get to take it easy.

>>67224652
>black hole
>radiating energy
Isn't that... wrong?

>>67224485
I may have went a little overboard with describing the peace of the desert night, but I wanted to try and retain a dreamlike atmosphere while contrasting the horror and burning of the daytime.

>>67224558
I think that using the Second Sun in some way as the antagonist is a good idea.

>>67224677
Hawking radiation, the smaller it gets the less the hole's gravity can prevent single spontaneously generated particles or antiparticles from escaping. It's a problem with creating black holes, it's actually quite hard to fatten them up.

Check out this channel, you might like it. Unless you're that one speech impediment autist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ

>>67224737
Oh sure, the mildew will infect you and desert predators must feed but these mundane dangers are almost nostalgic in the face of day's bright madness.

>>67224677
Yes, but no. Ordinarily you would expect it to be impossible for something to escape from someplace where the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. However quantum mechanics lets things tunnel outside thanks to the uncertainty principle. The bigger the black hole the fewer particles manage to escape through this effect. For tiny black holes the math suggests this effect would be very strong, quickly evaporating the black hole as its constituent bits escape. For most black holes this process is so slow they would probably finish evaporating only after all other activity in the universe has ceased. How black holes actually work we will probably truly learn only once we get to take a good close look at one.

>>67221800
Anyone have a PDF of this? Or any good Stephen King books?

>>67224737
Station personnel moved and positioned rock and junk and mining equipment into a calendar and alter, worshipping the Second Sun, whatever it truly is, and tracking its eldritch orbit about the system. Ships always crash and people always go mad when the Second Sun reached the end of its cycle.

>>67224997
Let’s you set up a potential fakeout, where you plant the idea that there’s something evil down in the mines when the evil is really above their heads the whole time.

>The miners went into the mine and collapsed the entrance behind them, trying to escape the sun.

>>67225126
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wQYdmqK6Tk

How would this setup work in a Traveller game where the players have a Capital ship with a spinal mount fusion cannon?
I want to give them a spook but also I don't want to break their yuge ship they worked and bleed for, when they come down with escape pod there is still the question what the ship is doing

>>67225447
If the sun is really the problem, they could lose contact with their ship because of strange solar interference.

>>67224633
It might be Night Shifty if we go with the alternate start option where the PCs are a group of space rent-a-cops who were hired to guard our abandoned mining station.

>>67225447
Probably they should be separated from their crew at least. Honestly this works better when there is only the players, not whole military ship

>"Hey, Em! What are you doing up here? Dinner was half an hour ago."
>She didn't seem to notice my voice at first, squatting over a sandy patch of ceramic tile on the topside of the station
>She wiped the back of her hand across her brow, pushing beads of sweat away from her eyes
>Plains of arid sands and sloping dunes stretched away into the horizon behind her, hazy and blurry as heat bled away from the earth
>I moved closer, rattling the keychain at my waist
>She didn't seem surprised by the sound, but slowly looked sidelong at me, eye level with my crotch
>"Hmm?" she hummed, before turning back to the tile she was leaning over
>"Dinner. You missed it. How long have you been out here for?"
>I dropped down to her level and tried to follow her gaze
>She was staring intently at her hands, slowly moving them up and down above a crudely scrawled piece of graffiti
>"What do you think of this?" she said, ignoring my question
>The word "Don't" had been scribbled in thick black on the tile, partially shaded by Em's hands
>Apart from that, the tile seemed no more interesting than any other
>"Weird. Have you been looking at this the whole time? What's so interesting that you missed curry night?"
>I looked up at her face again, hesitating at her expression
>She still wasn't looking at me, but she was drenched in sweat, barely blinking as she stared at the word
>"Look closer, there's more beneath it," she murmured, oddly quiet
>I sighed and leaned a little closer, expecting some juvenile scribble or other
>But a glimmer in the shade of her hands caught my eye and I leaned even closer
>They were almost invisible, but some more words glowed just faintly enough to see in the shadow
>"It says.... Look up? Don't look up? The fuck does that mean?"

>>67225795
I dunno, losing control of the crew as they slowly go full cultist is another kind of horror.

>>67224673
>Other than the troubling dreams, sleeping during the day is the best way to get anything at all accomplished
>But someone HAS to stay awake
>After the last big blow, a hatch plate had finally worn through, and near critical machinery
>You let the AI handle the repairs while the crew slept
>When you all came to, you found the worker bot had welded jet black thermal tiles to the floor in front of the hatch in an odd geometric pattern
>It perfectly tracks the movement of the light from the suns shining through the hole

Create this constant tension between the need to keep the facility running (and you alive) and the sacrifice of someone or someones having to brave the day. You should already be passing notes -- imperfect observer effects are all over this thread. This is a perfect vehicle for building conspiracies and paranoia. Jenkins keeps pulling day shifts because he's a loner and he's sick of being stuck right next to these people, everyone else wonders if he's slowly slipping. Or it's done by lots, and Yuri is resentful because the RNG just keeps coming up five every time it counts. And on and on.

>>67226054
>The words below seemed to be way more worn that the first one, painted in some glow-in-the-dark ink
>The urge to look at the sky started to build, but I shook it off
>No need to blind myself over some shitty graffiti
>"Probably just some weird prank message."
>I poked her in the arm, frowning as she simply kept staring at the graffiti.
>"Have you been drinking enough water? You look kind of... out of it."
>She finally let her hand fall away, leaving just the word "Don't" to sit alone on the tile
>"Hmm? Yeah, I'm fine. Did you say it was curry night?"
>She looked up at me finally, her mouth parting in a small smile
>"You love curry night, Em... Alright, come on, let's get you to medbay. I think you've been out here way too long."
>I hooked my hands under her arm and dragged her up, pushing her towards the service stairs
>"Maybe," she mumbled, pushing her hair back out of her face
>She stepped down into the shaded stairwell, wobbling slightly as she took the steps
>But I paused for a moment, looking back towards the horizon
>Something in the sky glimmered for a moment, something at the edge of my vision
>I blinked and rubbed my eyes, runnels of sweat already slicking my forehead
>Best just to ignore it, I thought, just some joke from the last survivors who crashed here

>>67226054
Nice, very foreboding. You could have a xenobiologist confused that all native fauna that brave the day have downward facing eyes despite the obvious disadvantages.

>>67225494
Sounds reasonable
Good thing is also that only the officers hold the keys needed to fire of the fusion cannon

>>67226063
True, having redshirts go full full r'lyeh over the time, only to have the cultist disappear first half and being stranded and suddenly all alone on a possible cursed desert works sounds pretty good too

>>67224932
>Anyone have a PDF of this? Or any good Stephen King books?
I collected a bunch of King's shorts that he had published in porno magazines before he made it big; pretty sure I also have a copy of Beachworld in the folder. I'll try to post them later today.

>>67226068
Metal expanding under the sun(s?)'s baleful gaze is bad enough, the fact that their properties subtly change by day makes for a true engineering nightmare.

>>67226145
>Good thing is also that only the officers hold the keys needed to fire of the fusion cannon
Cue the ship crew confused that the captain is screaming "Shoot the Sun! KILL IT!" after weeks of radio silence.

>>67226219
>Shooting a possibly artificial sun with an exploding artificial sun
That can't possibly go wrong

>>67226219
That even more crazy than their usual orders, so they would be confused and way, likely try to keep him in the medbay for some time to his vitals go back to normal

If he's still convinced and the sun doesn't do anything to stop then they would totally shit it tho

>>67224737
I like the image of madmen trying to capture or control the sun.

>>Before getting stranded on this god forsaken rock nobody but the captain and the first mate had ever paid much attention to the ship's navigator, a quiet but intense man in his forties. Reliable and without a sense of humor most people saw in him little more than an organic computer.
>>When you first got stranded he seemed to cope with the... just something of this place better than most. Then on the fifth day you found him outside screaming and writhing in the sand without his protective mask, trying to claw his eyes out. As you carried him to the makeshift infirmary he openly wept about "the Second Sun" and how he "now understands".
>>Couple more days went by and with so much going on most people forgot him again. Until one day he arrived at the mess hall with a bloody starburst carved into his forehead and began preaching his new faith.
>>At first people didn't take him seriously, but as the weird things kept happening some started taking him seriously. Sometimes he just knows things. Like when he warned the captain the men he sent out to check the mysterious lights in the horizon would never return. He says the Second Sun whispers the truth to him in his sleep, which his followers say is always troubled.
>>When the AC of the annex you were camped at crapped out you thought he was crazy as he proclaimed his deity would spare the group only if the proper sacrifice was made. When he demanded the blood of a junior technician you thought he was insane. When the crowd seized her you realized things were truly fucked and you ran out to the mid-day heat.

>>67226072
>>67226054
This is really good. Just the faintest taste of the worryingly fantastical.

>>67226286
If it gets pregnant it might get cravings and decide to eat another system instead.

>>67226353
>The sun's course is actually a complicated mathematical message
I dig it.

Shane that this course likely wouldn't go down this day with my players
Too many battle hardened and disciplined pirates, going actively against the captains order is at least a firm whipping, at worst a short personal meeting with the head of security

>>67226371
But wouldn't the shop be the daddy, wouldn't it be to pay her for bursting all over her red hot surface?

>>67226353
You could steal the gas-giant watchers from absolution gap. Assuming normal day length they can't build moving cathedrals to keep the sun forever at zenith but they can have "witnesses" in glass coffins that turn to face their god. sun-blindness is both the greatest sacrifice and blessing. The heirophant has peeled his eyes open with hooks and filled every inch of his vision with mirrored images of his obsession. Though blind to the world he has miraculous insight gleaned from the augury of flares.

>>67226466
I'm the one giving a star a "little death", the ship is an oversized vibrator.

>>67223577
>The Second Sun’s eldritch orbits have fried and cursed the station's computers, and leaving anything in writing for the sunburnt obsessed to find during the day is no good either. The best and most secretive option is to leave messages read only under the safe cover of dusk.

>>67226834
Maybe you could use braille. Assuming that the sunburned are literally scorched their touch will miss subtle bumps. I can see nocturnal paranoiacs shunning any light, especially if it is that of the sun re-emitted.

>>67221999
Is there a way to have like one player be all the other characters insane selfs?

>>67227772
Can you give us a little more on this idea?

>>67226353
>a bloody starburst carved into his forehead

I like the iconography of a starburst being used by any potential insane/cultist element that might appear.

>>67227998
>Many of the station's windows in rooms and corridors facing the suns-rise have had unsettling starburst designs scratched into their surfaces.

>This same starburst can be seen in graffiti as well, accompanied by phrases like "IT RISES" and "LOOK TO THE SUN" painted in a frenzied hand.

>Bits of metal and junk have been been worked into starburst designs, each holding a bright lamp at its center as if it were some kind of idol or totem.

File: Beachworld.pdf (35 KB, PDF)

35 KB PDF

>>67224932
>Anyone have a PDF of this? Or any good Stephen King books?
Here's Beachworld

What are some possibilities for what might really be happening at the station? The two obvious answers are that maybe the crew are just losing their minds from the stress and the heat, or maybe there is some kind of alien device or creature behind it all. What could the Second Sun be? An alien spaceship driven by an inscrutable AI? A psionic alien of such terrifying power that organic minds experience its presence as a blinding light? An atmospheric disturbance that tints the color of the real sun and delivers hallucinogenic contaminants?

>>67228227
I like the idea of the crew piecing together everything and trying to build a rational explanation, whether alien satellites that are leaking radiation that scrambles the brain, some material that's poisoning the sun, etc. And then when they finally think they have the answer and come up with a fix, something that breaks the world happens and they realise it's truly incomprehensible and they have to get as far away from it as they can. It happens because it must and not because of any logic.

>>67228192
THANK YOU BLESSED ANON

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>>67213350
>What were they researching?

"The Androsynth showed themselves, and something noticed them. There are no Androsynth now, only Orz."

>>67228227
I think we have, potentially, a three-level multiple choice explanation at play here.

The first level, as you've said, is the rational one where all of this could be explained as a series of escalating hallucinations and delusions brought on by heatstroke, dehydration and fear, with each new group building on the paranoia and psychosis of those stranded before them.

The next level is the Sci-Fi, which you've also mentioned, in which the Second Sun is either a giant alien artifact or an extremely exotic natural phenomena of tremendous and terrible power. Although deadly, it is more or less neutral and has been made a threat by happenstance.

The last level is the eldritch, that you came close to, in which the Second Sun is not a natural anomaly or alien-built construct without intent or will, but is a Lovecraftian entity that actively seeks to pervert and corrupt and do us harm as soon as we catch its attention.

I think that in a game like this, you want to hint at all three levels and allow the characters and players to come to their own conclusions.

>>67228192
Thanks for finding and posting this.

>>67228184
>>67224997
>>67213307
>From the ground, the ruined station has been ringed with haphazard arcs and piles of debris and old mining equipment.

>From above, the control tower has been made the gnomon of a huge sundial and astronomical clock.

>>67226068
This feels feels like a great mechanic to employ after the party begins to realize that the heat and light of the day are beginning to mess with them. Yes, they can try to force themselves into a new nocturnal sleep schedule, but it won't be easy or pleasant, and there will still be tasks that need tending to and emergencies that need dealing with during the daylight hours. Who takes the hit? Who risks their mind? Who do the rest of the party risk may lose it and turn on them?

>>67228227
Pure physical phenomena. What you see as a "sun" is a sufficiently-large n p-brane where it oopsied and overlaps our realspace. Even though the incursion is no larger than a beach ball the interface is blasting out incredible amounts of energy, mostly in the form of infrared and visible light. It snagged the star of this system as it meandered past, creating the appearance of a binary. (On a long enough timeline and from the right frame of reference, if you compared the system to the stellar orbits of the rest of the galaxy, you'd note that it's functionally standing still.)

The madness comes from gazing upon a Thing Which Should Not Be, day in and day out. The conscious mind can't filter past the blasting radiation as you stare at it, but the meatbrain can tell that it doesn't conform to anything like normal 4-dimensional physical space. You can sometimes catch a glimpse of something indescribably wrong in your peripheral vision if the Second Sun is low on the horizon. The monkey brain tends to respond to this out of context problem in one of two ways:
>Utter fascination. The individual spends more and more time staring at the Second Sun, trying and failing to reconcile just what it is. Leads to blindness, dehydration, starvation, exposure, cyclical madness like OCD and catatonia.
>Fight / Flight. The existence of such a thing is anathema. Continual exposure turns an anomaly into an irritant, then a stalking predator. Triggers irritability, hypervigilance, sleep disorder, irrational rage, violence, schizophrenia, and the like.

It's as natural as methane rain on Titan. And just as deadly to humans.

>>67228844
>>67228511

I like this a lot as a "second level" explanation, an would accept it as THE explanation for what's going on, provided there are still some things that the players experience on that dusty rock that can't quite be scienced away.

>>67228508
GO GO GO

>>67228511
>>67228844
I like the idea of hinting at several possible explanations but having a real 'canonical' one.
Mix in red herrings and theories floating around from previous inhabitants of the station and it's likely the players will never find out the truth.
What's the win scenario here anyway?
Escape? Should that even be a possibility? Or would it be more effective to have it be entirely doomed from the start?

>>67229041
Escaping the desert planet and leaving the system with their lives and their minds is definitely the win scenario, and I think that it's important in horror games that escape is POSSIBLE, but should be very DIFFICULT.

Surviving the Second Sun should require skill, intuition and luck.

OH MY GOD I WAS WRONG

IT WAS EARTH

ALL ALONG

>>67226054
My dude that was good

>>67229282
I LOVE YOU DOCTOR ZAIUS

>>67227998
In old school wod wraith each player also played another players evil id. It was a difficult mechanic to sabotage your own group.

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>>67228192
Heroic anon our thx

>>67229592
That does sound both interesting and difficult to pull off properly. I think that a simpler solution with a similarly trippy effect would be to bring on a player that you are in league with, and have them play a crew member that doesn't actually exist, but who is instead a shared delusion.

>>67229667
What crew position would they be? Or no, they are a hermit who was here when they arrived?

>>67229746
Psychologist/Therapist, obviously.

>>67229746
I wouldn't make them a hermit, though I have a hard time expressing why I wouldn't. They might be a client, or a passenger that chartered a trip on their ship, someone you can drop in and take out at will.

You could also have the classic "helpful voice over the radio" that turns out to either have been dead all along or possibly imaginary.

>>67229916
I think they should be present and be an identifiable crew member (uniform with name tag) but eventually the PCs discover that they're not on the flight manifest and there's no record of anyone by that name.

>>67229894
This is pretty good. I can't think of anything else that would work better.

>>67228844
This is really good

>>67228952
>I like this a lot as a "second level" explanation, an would accept it as THE explanation for what's going on, provided there are still some things that the players experience on that dusty rock that can't quite be scienced away.
I agree with this 100%

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So I hate to ask this, because this is where a thread always goes to shit, but what sy...no nope nm I'm not even gonna ask

>>67230136
ask it

>>67229916
Adapted from an old thread about a haunted moonbase:

>The voice on the radio belongs to an earlier crash survivor who was forced to hole up in one of the small monitoring and research post built some way away from the station.

>She had been intended to do some scavenging and bring what she found back to her crew at the station but a sandstorm blew up, burying the small outpost under tons of sand, rubble and debris.

>While she was able to find a sizable stockpile of food, water and entertainment stashed there for emergencies, digging herself out was proving impossible, stranding her there by herself for some time.

>By the time the party makes contact with her, she's been by herself for weeks by her reckoning and while she's more than a little stir crazy from her ordeal, she is able to provide them with a intel.

>The woman asks them to find her people and tell her what had happened to them, as she had been unable to reach them over standard communication channels at all during her isolation.

>The party discovers that everyone supposed to be there according to the woman has been dead or missing for far longer than the weeks she'd claimed she'd been trapped in her outpost alone.

>The woman begins to panic, the stress, cabin fever and grief finally beginning to overwhelm her, and she pleads with the party to leave the station and come to rescue her from her isolation.

>The woman stops talking to the team, but they can hear her crying and muttering to herself as they make their way to the outpost. Inside, they find the woman, dead and mummified, slumped across the comms panel.

>They can still hear her frightened sobs and mad murmuring over their radios.

Fuck, i wanna run this in stars without number

>>67223750
would you have to juggle progress, resources, and getting enough sleep to not make you hallucinations worse?

>>67230536
I think that could work, so long as the mechanics are worked out smoothly enough.

>Food's gonna be an issue
>About five thousand rations, from the two cargo pods we saved coming down
>Maybe some fruits if these little shrub things bloom
>Maybe we can eat the shrubs themselves?
>I'm no biologist, but if there's plants there should be animals too right? To like, pollinate them or whatever
>So, five thousand rations and some hunter-gatherer shit, nine crew left, three rations a day, maybe drop it to two per day if we need to stretch
>About two hundred days of food?
>No lifters, no escorts to scrape our asses out of here, and the comms are busted in this old station we're in
>Even if we can fix the place up with some of the junk left lying around here, the chance anyone's coming through here within the year is slim
>We shouldn't have been out here in the first place, so no way is anyone just gonna pass by and lend a hand before that
>Fuck...
>Water should be fine though, seems the station's sat on some kind of oasis, plenty of water to draw
>Hell, the water's just lying around in these weird little pools
>Must be from whoever made this place, or whoever was here before us anyway
>Weird thing though, the pools must be made of some crazy rock or something, 'cos they don't reflect things properly
>Well, I can see myself crystal clear, that's alright
>And the plants, and the clouds and all that, I can see their reflections
>But I can't see the sun
>When I look straight at them, I can't see the sun in the water

>>67230699
Nice.

Guys, I need Soundtracks and soundscapes for such an adventure. Whistling dunes, the flapping of tents and fabric breeze, the low groan of wind through hollow metal skeleton buildings, the weird almost chirping hissing of hot sand,the cracking of glass straining in it's pane from the pure heat

>>67231039
Just put an old TV in another room on a static channel with the sound almost inaudible (but not quite)

>>67231039
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/desertedSoundscapeGenerator.php

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/shepardAudioIllusionToneGenerator.php

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/oblivionSoundscapeGenerator.php

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/intergalacticSoundscapeGenerator.php

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/anamnesisSoundscapeGenerator.php

>>67231311
https://science-fiction.ambient-mixer.com/derelict-ship

https://science-fiction.ambient-mixer.com/haunted-space-station

https://science-fiction.ambient-mixer.com/badlands

>>67230136
The one you feel more comfortable with. In my experience, horror games work best if the GM is able to keep the players under pressure, and that means you don't want to hesitate and lose momentum by having to look up something you weren't ready to handle. So that means either a system you know well or something light.
In this precise case, you'll probably want to implement a system to keep track of exposure to heat and sun and/or hydration, and maybe sleep and/or sanity, but that can probably be welded on whatever system you're using, either by using the equivalent of fortitude or constitution or hp (or willpower or whatever seems to make the most sense to you) in your system or choice to calculate how well they can withstand the heat, or simply give everyone a score of "heat exposure" that you have to keep as low as possible by staying hydrated and out of the sun. Or something like that.

>>67230136
Stars Without number with a survival system stapled to it

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>>67213307
>>67214126
>>67214694
>>67216679
>>67229507
>>67230989
Gonna need some more of this, I'll contribute what I have

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>>67231520

What, so far, are our primary paranormal happenings in this game? From what we've discussed, it seems that the party is primarily antagonized during the daytime, and a day on this desert planet lasts longer than an average day on Earth. The antagonism that the party faces mainly takes the form of mirages, delusions and hallucinations that may have mundane medical explanations or may be actual paranormal happenings. They can show the party members snips of events, past, present and future. They can create convincing NPCs for the PCs to interact with. They primarily work to destabilize the party and attempt to lure them individually out into the desert to perish under and join the Second Sun. The nighttime is a period of respite from the heat and mindbending manipulations of the day. The nights are perhaps short and irregularly timed. At night the party can think straight and can find clues on how they might resist the Second Sun's influence and escape. The ultimate goal is to repair their spacecraft or another downed vessel and escape the desert planet.

>>67231689
The AI of the station has also been warped by long-term exposure to the Second Sun, causing it to cause more problems that it fixes when it isn't attended to.

>>67231836
I would say that the station's A.I. shouldn't be actively antagonistic, but should be severely buggy and corrupted after spending decades on a hot desert planet without regular maintenance. The patchwork repairs it has received have all been from earlier castaways and have been made with wildly varying levels of skill, and really only serve to keep the climate control system operational. Other than that...

>The A.I. has a severe problem keeping track of time, which compounds the PCs' problems when they start hallucinating and losing time too.

>Most of the data files in the station computer's records have been corrupted into useless text files filled with what look like ASCII starbursts.

>Those files that have remained mostly whole do relay bits and pieces of the station's history, but must be put into chronological order by the PCs.

>The A.I. can sometimes be heard conversing with staff that are not there. Sometimes it names names, other times it denies talking to anyone.

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>The art-minded miner who left the instructional nighttime graffiti.

>>67213307
Sauce on image?

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>>67225447
Away mission in shuttle. If they have a streamlined hull, throw in the extra complication of high gravity which would threaten the structural integrity/ability to takeoff of the ship.

(They may have some anti-grav, but you can come up with something to make sure it isn't enough right?)

Other options:
Ship has to refuel, mission on world time sensitive. You have to split ways temporarily while the crew skims a gas giant to come pick you up. The nearest one should be say... 2 weeks away in system, or in the next system over (one week out, 1 back.).

Or, while landing with ship, queue severe sandstorm+lightning strikes dealing severe system damage they have to repair with materials on site. Throw in unexpected sabotage by spookies (Bonus points for sand crab infestation, so your players can fondly remember the desert planet that gave them crabs) once the ship is on the ground, and I think you'll find several sessions worth of !!FUN!! if you do it right.

Also, consider using a previously undocumented insidious atmospheric hazard. Something that might even be able to find it's way to surviving in a spacecraft's contagion hostile life support system so that once the door is popped, the search for identification and mitigation begins.

>>67226054
>DON'T LOOK AT IT!

Anyone feel like putting this on Suptg?

>>67232740
Go for it

>>67228227
I like compound problems.

Legit danger from heat/incompatibility with baseline human day night cycles, some sort of insidious pathogen or atmospheric taint that messes with already stressed metrology just a bit more. If you want to knock it out of the park, throw in a psionically active xenosapient AI making waves that all the human crew are scrambling to try to keep from assuming are there own.

The extra Sun would just a sun though imo.

>>67213307
There's an issue for my party that I don't know if it's been addressed yet, all four of my party members are full on robots.

The party members are

>0X-5G - 6 foot tall cylindrical robot with 3 wheel-legs and 18 different tools + 11 different senses, science officer skills.

>QQ-9 - female-chasis positronic android, piloting skills, some secret agent skills.

>U-TOM - hovering droid with numerous limbs and numerous weapons, security / fighting skills.

>MC-559 - octagonal with treads on bottom highly advanced engineering / ship repair droid, engineering skills and 36 tools.

I really like the idea of stranded on a way out of the way place like that (reminds me of super Metroid to be honest) but I'm not sure exactly how it would go for my party, since none of the require food or water, though all of them require sleep.

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>>67232740
I'm planning to, once we we get a little further along.

An elderly hermit living alone in the desert. For some reason, the new robot you bought thinks it belongs to him.

>>67232953
That's Star Wars tho.

>>67232973
That’s the joke.

>>67232882
Even if all four party members are bots, the desert planet is still a harsh and unforgiving environment that will put them under severe stresses unless they're incredibly over-engineered. Use the station's corrupted computer system as an example of what will eventually happen to them if they can't escape. and let the heat and radiation of the Second Sun begin to work on them, skewing their sensors and breaking down their data.

>>67232882
What type?

Do they have an organic processing matrix?

If not, the guess what? Time to bust outmeddlesome Silicon based lifeforms trying to rewire them. Perhaps the beings have watched the humans who came before, and decide to try to make the robots "more humanlike" by implementing human behavioral emulation circuits.

Then you get a psychological/technological nightmare as A.I.'s, previously unfettered by such inconveniences, suddenly end up having to cope with slowly developing humankind flaws.

Then after they escape, integrating/restoring themselves to their original state, or coping with being the hottest commodity out there by virtue of Tech Level Umpteen meddling by said Silicon based life.

>>67232882
>Droids have problems too-
>Hardware starts to need defragging more than it should
>Random, strangely named files begin popping up in the players databanks- huge, nonsensical files, seemingly useless corrupted strings of text
>Attempts to memory-wipe or destroy these files becomes increasingly difficult
>Preceptionary systems have strange glitches- "past-vision", which the AI claims to experience in rare moments of lucidity
>Parts begin to quickly malfunction in overbearing heat and fine, sandy dust

I think you make a game of "What's a glitch caused by mechanical error, and what's the *actually* insane shit?"

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>>67232953
>>67232973
>The A.I. sends the party on a search for the mining station foreman, as it can only do what they need it to with authorization from its admin. He was last seen taking a crawler vehicle and driving off into the desert.

>>67233004
Exactly. The situation almost becomes MORE interestingly worrying with robot characters,as they would be even more aware that their programming and hardware are being messed with in ways that shouldn't be possible.

>>67232985
That's a fun idea, so they would still have the various sensor abnormalities, and still be under some pressure to get out soon.

>>67232987
They are advanced enough that they have distinct personalities, and have intelligent-being mental features such as specific discernable speech patterns, accents, etc. They don't however have any organic components.

The most advanced software wise is QQ-9, the most advanced non-weapon hardware wise is 0X-5G, weapons and combat functions it's U-TOM hands down, and MC-559 handles most mechanical tasks well.

QQ-9 was built to be a sort of leader, she relies on 0X-5G's science information at times and is secondary to U-TOM in combat most of the time.

QQ-9 believes she is meant to be the 'next wave' mother-brain system, an entirely computerized version with no organic components whatsoever, not entirely untrue, but the QQ series was built as a prototype test run, not a market product.

The one capable of doing the most damage to the rest of the party is definitely U-TOM, U-TOM was designed to fight hundreds of opponents at once in war zones where every person encountered is a valid target.

>>67233004
That sounds like a great idea.

>>67232882
>positronic android
Define 'android', in this case. Can she pass as a human? haha

>>67233086
QQ-9 looks like a tall, elegant lady with a very long light green hair and glowing gold eyes. Her skin is metal-tone silver, it's obvious she's a robot of some kind. All the others are obviously robots.

>>67233083
The area around the mining base would be a graveyard of discarded tech and the station's A.I. is a buggy, heavily compromised, barely sentient mess, so your game's robot characters will definitely have motivation enough not to stick around even if they don't need to eat or drink. They'll be able to tell, perhaps more easily than a flesh and blood character, that whatever anomalies haunt the planet are no good for them.

>>67233156
So they'd have an advantage there in that they'd know to get gone sooner (possibly) than an organic party might.

I'm now imagining 0X-5G spinning around saying in a loud voice "WE, MUST, ESCAPE, WE, MUST, ESCAPE!" and QQ-9 yelling at him "IF YOU SAY THAT ONE MORE TIME, OR SPIN FOR NO REASON EVEN ONE MORE TIME, I SWEAR, BY THE SOURCE..." and then 0X-5G suddenly stops spinning and screaming.

Despite all of them being full robots with no organic components, they're far enough up the tech tree that in some respects there is effectively no difference between them and an organic mind.

>>67233181
Not knowing your players' characters specifically but being familiar with A.I. characters in general, I'm imagining that they will more easily be able to determine that there are dangerous anomalies present on this desert planet where human characters might try to convince themselves that they are suffering from overactive imaginations and paranoia. No matter how human-like a robot is, it will still understand the workings of its mental faculties better than its human counterpart.

However, just because your robots can recognize that their memories are being corrupted doesn't necessarily mean that they can prevent it or deal with the consequences more easily than a human can.

>>67233256
MC-559's main repair functions would be to things like doors, elevators, holes in walls, rewiring and reconnecting systems, etc, not fixing the memory / software stuff. 0X-5G would be capable of fixing some software stuff, but rebuilding whole station sub-system soft-matrixes is probably beyond him, or something that might take him 100 times as long as it might otherwise take a being.

I'm halfway tempted to say that the trucking journey was the hallucination, and that the robots have always been on this planet, it's part of their suffering to become lucid again for long periods and always never escape and always become insane again eventually, as AM designed it, and them, to do.

But I feel like that might take away from them as PCs rather than add to them as PCs.

>For some bizarre reason, someone has seen fit to install bear spray into the ventilation system has a security feature, on a desert planet that isn't capable of sustaining large animal life, especially a bear.
>On this note, people that have arrived to the outpost should note that they should just avoid saying the word 'bear' or any words containing the sound 'bear' in general.

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>>67222340
You deserve this (you)

>>prostration before the maw of the cave is mandatory for all new personnel, violations of this protocol is punishable by sacrifice to T̢̛̉̔ͦ͊̿̑̋̏̏͐̆ͣ͟͞ḩ̛ͤ̽̆̽͑͛͒̿ͦͣ̔͗ͨ͜͢e̸̡̛̐ͤ̓̏̊̈́͝ ̶̨͛͌͂͗͗ͦ͆ͧ̌̊̿ͤ͛̊ͮ̚͟͜f̏ͣ̍͐̊ͮ̑͊ͪ̈́͛͋͊ͮͭ̐̾̆̽͢͠â͂̈̋͆ͧ̾̒ͦ͊̏͐̀̚͢l̸͐̔͌̑ͣ̓ͧ̾͑͝ļͤͮ̌ͮ̾͘͟ę̵̢͊ͨ͂̈̂ͮ̍̉ͨ̀̃͌̑ͮ̆̚͠͡n̨̑́͊ͧ̍ͣ͒̀ͭ̊͑̈͌͐ͯͯ͌ͦ͝͠ ̡̧͑̊͒̀͗̔ͨͩ̆ͧ̓ͤ̃ͧo͛̓͒̇ͨ͗ͣͬ͌̓̇̾́̀́͝͠n̶̶̢͗̋ͩ̋͐̋̉ͯ̿̄ͩ͋̀ͭ͌͜éͬ̀̎͗̐͑̌̋̿̀͋̽ͩͦ̄̚͝,̸͗̏͊̀̊̈́͌̏͆̓̎ͩ͗̀̚͢ ̶ͬ̍̆ͮ͢͟͠t̨̍̓̈ͮ͌͆̂̊̓̊̓̾̚h̴ͩ͒͑ͬ̌ͧ͢ê̵̛ͨ̂͋͆̄̂́̍̂ͯ̓̏̐̊̏ͫ̚ ̴̶̓ͩ̐͒́͢͠s̈̈̽͢͠h̶̸͗͛͗̈̈́͋͆ͦ̉ͪ̈̔̎ͤͧ͛ͭ́r̸̷̴̃̓̊͋͐̓̂͛̂ͤ̊̚͟į̛̊ͬ̓͑̎̊̉ͬͩ̑̄ě̵̴͐̏̎ͨ̌ͤ͆ͮ͒̎͗͢͝k̨ͭ͋̈ͪ̓͆̎̓ͬ̑͂̀̔̽ͩ̚͜i͒̔͋͜ņ̷̵̶̛͗͂̾ͧ̇̐ģ̸̢ͨ̃͑̈́̄̔͊̓͗͐͑ ̷̵͗͆̾ͤ̽̈̋̚h͛̃̃̀̈ͨ̚͘͢į̧̽̈́̐͢v̂ͩ̈́̿̎͋ͫ̌͊̑͌ę̸̸̷̓̑͌̒̌͑͡

>>67232694
Capital ships are never streamlined as far as I know since Those are those massive 5000+ dTons monsters with multiple hit locations. So they would likely come down in a shuttle and then be stuck because of weather and shuttle damage

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>I've finally got a lead on what's fragging our long range distress beacons, suit comms, and survival compasses.
>I found an older generation emergency recorder shut away in one of the lowest levels of the computer vault and managed to pull some data from it before the omnipresent data corruption set in.
>This research outpost was apparently set up to send expeditions out about a hundred kilometers away from here to a location labeled "Site 4" which is almost exactly at this dirtball's equator.
>Site 4 so this recording claims is a much older installation of unknown design and it has something to do with generating artificial flux tubes to tap directly into stellar emissions .
>If these logs are true it's activated every sunrise and runs continuously until sunset, it generates an enormously powerful magnetic field which the researchers think was meant to interact in some way with the dim pseudo-star.
>There were some audio translations of the magnetic interplay but I can't listen to them, they make my head pound, I think this may be at least partially responsible for the increasingly common reports of strange behavior during the day, that signal sounds like the screaming of the damned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh2-P8hG5-E

>The hot, scorching wind shifts, bringing with it what sounds like the faintest hints of music from somewhere far, far away.

>Shiny spots of metal and glass on the derelicts scattered around glint and sparkle hypnotically under the suns.

>Automatic doors inside the station will trigger and wedge themselves open, seemingly all on their own, letting the heat creep in.

>>67228508
t. faggot who keep jumping in front

Reminds me of Borderlands 1

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>>67232367

>Up on a ridge at the edge of the station's debris field is a small Boot Hill style graveyard in which dead miners and castaways both have been buried.

>The symbol of the Second Sun, the "unsettling starburst," begins to appear more and more as time goes on in graffiti and scratched into window glass.

>A half-dozen derelict spacecraft lay scattered in a circle extending for several miles around the station, the oldest ship having been built decades ago.

>While the station's climate controlled core seems to be mostly safe, dangerous specters and mirages can be encountered where the desert can find its way inside.

>The stores of the station's cantine are stocked with enough food to last a good long while, much of which was clearly salvaged from the wrecked ships outside.

>Long-range telecommunications are cut off by both the Second Sun and apparent sabotage, while short-range is full of static and anomalous messages.

>The largest and furthest away of the crashed spacecraft appears to be a corvette class warship, and there are signs of a military presence visiting the station.

>A number of the ruined crew quarters have been locked or barricaded, and strange noises like music or crying can sometimes be heard inside.

>Violent storms and a lack of maintenance over the decades have worked to bury and collapse various parts of the station, filling in most of the mine entrances with sand.

>Bare footprints can sometimes be found in the dust in the sections of the station that are wrecked and open to elements and in the desert around the base.

>>67230136
Mothership is a fairly simple (and PWYW) game system that should be easy to run this in.

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https://vimeo.com/218410164

>>67232881
While I'm keen on mixing the supernatural in with my science fiction in this setting, I'm in wholehearted agreement that the party's problems are compound ones. It goes back to what was said earlier about this story having three layers to it, Mundane, Sci-Fi and Paranormal. Likewise, the dangers that the PCs face should also have three layers:

>Mundane: Survive on an inhospitable desert planet long enough to...
>Sci-Fi: Repair their crashed ship in order to escape, all the while...
>Paranormal: Avoid being driven insane, killed, or worse by the Second Sun.

>>67230136
Don't rest your head is all about mounting tension and dwindling sanity. There's even a hack called Terror among the stars that factors in wear and tear on the base.

>old, weathered looking warnings and graffiti seem to appear in places that were clean before.

>>67237538
>Did they somehow overlook it?
>It looks too faded to have been made recently.
>Are they misremembering things?

>>67236501
So spitballing paranormal stuff.

Psionic fuckery: I could see several ways to go with this.

>Xenosapient AI broadcasting, causing increasing SAN loss until players can get out of there/find the source/kill it. (Rimworld does events like this for instance, but you'd be free to spice things up narratively.)

>The Spice: Some McGuffinite on the planet causes even psionically inactive indiviiduals to start manifesting uncontrollable psionic manifestations of power. The planet is normally nothing special, but as soon as humans are added to the mix, unexplained and uncontrollable psychic phenomena caused by this McGuffinite and the PC's subconscious fears starts driving people insane as characters have to cope with their own, and the other party members collective unconscious demons haunting and after long enough, hunting them. A mystery game could ensue as the players have to wreck dive to try to uncover as much info as possible from past crews to piece together what's going on before they lose it. The original intent of the research station may have been to research this, but no information ever gets out due to the extreme interference, and severity of the ensuing chaos.

More traditional paranormal fare:

The rogue star: eldritch entity if you're looking for a CoC feel, however, I'd be leery of introducing something like that in a long running game as the derail potential is a bit high given the typical player response of "but what if we harness it?"

The planet: the planet itself was once a station for an ancient alien civilization that slumber in some sort of full-fledged civilization wide VR matrix'y thing, and the weird shit is the last of the unplugged civilization making your stay as unpleasant as possible so you'll leave. Derail potential a bit high; but with sufficiently aggressive hosts, the stealing excessively powerful tech issue shouldn't be a problem.

>>67237651
>Monsters from the Id.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2BYyeS-fIU

Anyone got any hazard suits that would fit this kind of setting?

>>67238330
I know that there was a mining suit posted in:
>>67232042

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>>67238330
You couldn't go wrong with a relatively normal hazard suit, if the planet's atmosphere is thin the suit may have a backpack oxygen concentrator unit. Since they're operating in intense sunlight the visors would likely either be extra thick and tinted like snow goggles are or have a flip down sunshield layer, and if there are plastic components you could expect them to be covered by some other material to prevent heat and light from degrading them.

>>67237651
I mentioned the setting sun as an evaporating black hole as one theory to avoid information loss suggests that in some way hawking radiation describes everything about the mass/energy that fell into past the event horizon and is now being re-emitted. If true this could mean that the 3d universe can be perfectly described/encoded on the 2d event horizon. In a sci fi sense simulations more complex than their substrate might be possible.

I have another blackhole-centric setting where it is a kleing bottle containing the whole universe and they're both shrinking. If this is somwhat true of the second sun it becomes the Aleph. A point in space from which all others can be seen and perhaps also the singular beauty of the Zahir.

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>>67238579
Check out this comic. Unfortunately discontinued but contains a lot of the nocturnal adaptation and hiding from the (not maddening) sky.

Also has more mirror-based murder that any other story I know.

What mementos or clues have the miners and castaways left behind?

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>>67238736
Looks interesting, suit vaguely reminds me of those in the original Andromeda Strain movie.

>>67238908
>A stack of vid-cassettes of old family gatherings set to play on loop on the console in the crew quarters.

>>67239397
>A stack of vid-cassettes of old family gatherings set to play on loop on the console in the crew quarters.

>A big tin of coffee in the galley kitchen marked as “PROPERTY OF KIDA - HANDS OFF!!!”

>A chess set, pieces positioned as if their players had left mid-game. White appears to be winning.

>A book in which certain words appear to have been highlighted and numbered as if for use as a cypher key.

>A half-finished painting of a beautifully green lakeside scene, the paints strewn about as if in a rage.

>A space suit bearing labels indicating its ownership by an M. Deveaux, even though such a suit is unnecessary.

>A stuffed animal inside of which a data-cassette has been hidden. The data on the cassette appears to be encrypted.

>>67238908
>A set of hand drawn schematics detailing the modification of a conventional pair of welding goggles which devolves into nonsense near the end, appended with a scrawled note "I've seen it"

>A laser welding kit modified with several additional crude lenses, seemingly intended to be used as a weapon of some kind but who's internal components are a fused mess. The metal components are intensely magnetized.

>Some of the storm shutters covering the base's windows appear to be welded shut, many of the welded shutters have been forcibly pried or cut to let in sunlight, or have had more starburst symbols either scratched or painted onto them.

>A partially magnetized audio recording in which several people continuously make a peculiar humming noise in synchronicity with one another.

>A medical log noting a growing number of cases in which outpost staff become distracted, talk or hum to themselves, react strangely to others or fail to react at all to conversation. The cases are noted as being most common and most severe at or just after noon time.

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>>67213413
>boring and prosaic as materials science

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>Drones dig up this
>Was fuckhuge before, but sizeshifted to fit into my hands
>Wont leave me

>>67240359
Aww, I'm so happy for you and your tiny drone girlfriend. That tuning fork was still a shit gift though.

>A 1:23 video file from the command tower security camera that shows the crew of the station standing out on the dunes with their arms outstretched as Second Sun grows brighter and brighter and brighter, causing the footage to whiteout.

>>67236310
>Mothership is a fairly simple (and PWYW) game system that should be easy to run this in.
Traveller remains my first love for sci fi but yeah, the built in stress track/panic checks of Mothership make it a really good match.

One thing I'm having trouble with is my impulse to add a combat opponent. Especially for a one shot or a short self contained campaign I like covering all the bases of play. But I can see it takes away from the setup in this case, so without a possible opponent I'd be more likely to drop this in an ongoing campaign.
Or, I guess there's the possibility of hostile native xeno-fauna, which at least need not connect to the main mystery/challenge.

>>67241432
Someone mentioned a derelict military ship just a bit up thread. Maybe it wasn’t completely abandoned, and the remnant of its mad crew have fortified it.

>>67236310
>>67241432
Does Mothership have two core books? I have the Player's Survival Book but it feels like there might be a GM's book I'm missing.

>>67241612
There may be a GM book forthcoming, but it's not out yet, and I haven't heard a firm date. Anyway the "player's" book you have describes a fully functional death st- game system, it's just slightly misnamed.

>>67238686
The problem you run into there is the information saturation is too high.

All the info might be there and discernable under the right circumstances, but the measuring instrument (the human being) can't parse the information quickly enough, or manipulate the view through which to observe it sufficiently to find what they want.

Consider a magic book containing a written account of everything in the universe. Physical considerations aside, it's useless without a set of criteria (like an index) to make information collection/referencing possible. The same thing would be true of your Aleph.

Now... Imagine you have this thing, and it's really just some sort of thing put there and modulated in such a way that it literally fucks with your perceptual systems. You think there's info there, so keep staring, meanwhile your brain/eyes are slowly burning themselves out.

>>67242012
I don't pretend to remotely understand the physics, I just saw the thing and thought "cool simulation technobabble". Regarding humans not being able to process the information: That's a feature, such a body would have to be built by posthumans and the madness and visions of humans staring at the sun is information overload.

>>67238908
>a series of research notes detailing failed attempts at survival. The miners dug away from the sun, but station personnel who succumbed to madness hunted down and slaughtered everyone in the mines. Mining equipment, makeshift weapons, research notes, survival guides/supply caches.

>More castaways, more logs. Maybe space hippies/druggies looking for enlightment or to relive the experience of the Ancient Ritual of the Burning Man. Details of bad trips from the attendees, and some more useful results from the transport ship staff facilitating the event. Should lead to some useful things to aid in survival, interesting side quests or rare valuables for fencing or resale.

>lone monk or religious order sent from homeworld ofone of the Attendees makes a pilgrimage to the desert world that consumed their loved ones. Return the body for a new Ally in their religious order.

>lost military corvette; dog tags, military hardware, classified intel, massive complications may ensue from poking around or asking too many questions.

Have fun with it.

>>67242112
It's got to come with something to keep them parsing as it were. Like a drug, or ecstatic experience. Otherwise, everyone just looks away.

That's why I was thinking dirty trap specifically deployed by highly advanced creatures who just want to be left alone.

Scan you, figure out how to fuck with your biology, then the puppetry commences.

>>67223141
sauce?

>>67243831
Unfortunately, the source for both >>67223141 and >>67235614 are an old space horror thread from /tg/ in which the Staring Woman was first thought up. She’s featured in a lot of subsequent space horror threads, but to my knowledge there’s no more comic than those two pages.

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I'd still fug the spooky space girl, she's still hot, I don't care if I have to open the airlock lads I'm gonna do it.

>>67244415
Oh no, Ted is going to kill himself by opening the outer airlock. Shucks, I wish we could stop him but... dibs on his stereo.

>>67244665
>Horny and lonely spacers trying to fuck the ghost become so common that crews start to open up betting pools on who's going to try and open the airlock first during a six month run.

>>67244665
But he's the only one who knows the access codes to the alcohol storage unit!

>>67244808
Dude, this is Ted we're talking about. It's not like he can even remember his own birthday so the code will just be 1-2-3-4. Besides, it was actually the storage for denatured medical alcohol. I mean it wasn't like we'd trust him with the code to the real shit, plus it was really really funny watching him try to get drunk on the stuff. This is the fifth time he's tried to fuck ghosts this month and the second total times with what is possibly a real ghost. I say let him go for it.

>>67244791
>betting pools
Fuck that, you'll make more money pioneering the sexy ghost hologram industry. That's right, this is now an ERP Scooby Doo adventure.

>>67245590
One of the key pieces of shit you have to worry about on a desert world is everything getting covered by storms. Sure you got that on an average icy hellhole world but flame units make dealing with the problem so much easier. When it's sand the best you can do is send out some low level grunts with giant industrial dust busters.

>>67245634
That's one element that has been mentioned a few times and could be used to good effect. The ruined sections of the base have been covered up by sand dunes, and storms blow in to uncover them, revealing secrets and horrors.

>>67244189
Well too bad, thanks anyway.

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>>67238330

>>67245694
I do enjoy the notion of a skeleton crew set up on a remote backwater station, numbered 01 despite fuck it it isn't like the government would bother with more than one station, only to discover after a storm that beneath them is the ruins of an identical station numbered 01 which contains a quite literal skeleton crew.

Why the hell do they rebuild and restaff the place? Choose an option from the hat. Secret experiments, trying to figure out why that second sun keeps driving people crazy, whatever. Personally I prefer a huge mystery that has an insultingly simple reason, like it turns out the planet is worthless, too expensive to properly terraform, not enough mineral wealth to make it worthwhile, but in order to keep anyone else from claiming it they need to have at least a nominal presence on the planet to make their ownership legal. When a freak sandstorm showed up without forewarning (because they didn't even bother to install a satellite tracking network) and buried the place it was easier just to land some prefab buildings and hire some more expendables to staff it.

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very long read but entirely relevant to this thread.

>>67247186
>suiciding yourself the very first night you experience the nightmare soul screamies
Bunch of pussies in that battalion, the galactic federation is better off without them. Their motto was seriously, "Nobody has fought like we're about to"? Yeah, I'm sure nobody else has shit themselves and committed suicide the first time the guy next to them drops his gun and it accidentally discharges.

>>67247356
no one else has had to deal with ridiculous high levels of paranormal activity either.

>>67247431
Hey man, if your space government has the technology to time compress an entire planet just to get goddamn crude oil there's something way wronger with that universe than just some nuked and pissed off ghosts. It makes Dead Space's plot almost sound reasonable.

>>67247089
>Why the hell do they rebuild and restaff the place?
The exotic energies of the Second Sun do some very funky things to the minerals over time. It's a pendulum bottleneck -- first you can't keep enough miners alive to get at it, then you can't keep enough geologists and materials scientists alive to figure out what the hell to do with it.

>>67247469
On the surface Dead Space sounds like shit. They have practical FTL and can rip apart entire planets for all the raw materials present in one go, but somehow they have both a materials AND energy crisis, because no one has figured out how to, among many other possibilities, set up a dyson array of collection satellites around stars for all the energy they'd ever need. Thing is you just blame all their stupidity on the Markers. Ever since a Marker crashed on Earth, probably killed all the dinosaurs, and has been fucking with humanity all along. That and a lot of plot inconsistencies.

>>67247545
That's just what they want you to think. Really the only reason they keep rebuilding on this planet is that it's a line item on the galactic budget, and as we all know once they have money appropriated they never give it back, plus some planetary senator is probably getting massive pork over the construction costs. Fucker probably keeps pushing it through committee because he likes having his name on a shiny gold plaque on the facility.

>>67247867
You didn't know? "Fake ship credentials" aren't a thing. The Registry is tighter than a vacseal. Every "fake" is a credential for an actual ship, just not the one it came with. You just have to make 100% certain Control never sees the same credentials squawked in two places at once.

Some groups have cooperative trade rings of grey-legal burner credentials. Some are pirate kills that were never recorded; nothing is waste in the belts. Most are borderline salvage bought by the big shadow brokers and dumped somewhere no one will ever look.

I don't know what YOU'RE here to do, but I'd renegotiate my pay.

>>67247992
Oh bullshit. You mean to tell me that the galactic government can pull all this off AND turn the entire Froggnian population gay but they can't stop the MexiCanadian Alliance from sending its rapists and other deplorable across the hyperspace borders onto our helpless God-and-Mom's-Apple-Pie-fearing worlds? Pull the other one, junior. Every time I drive my hovercar past the Tractor Beam Supply Co I see nothing but Federacion de Planetas uniforms and I don't care HOW high the cost of spaceberries will supposedly go if we don't have expendable red shirts to pick them!

Some robots that fit the kind of rugged, used look this setting evokes would be nice if possible.

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>>67213307

I'm not saying it's 'super relevant' to what maybe OP wants, but I've got a similar idea for a sci-fi campaign I've wanted to DM:

>Skeleton maintenance crew is sent down to check on the terraforming machines installed on an abandoned desert planet.
>Process was supposed to be simple: the machines are dropped from orbit, they install themselves, and they then go through the steps of producing a breathable atmosphere, establishing a water cycle, genesis a microbial biosphere, seeding flora, and then finally spawning organisms.
>The terraformers have adaptive programming: they genesis a biosphere that's supposed to 'fit' with the planet's climate so it doesn't waste resources on creating a biosphere a planet can't support.
>Everything else went fine, but in this instance something went wrong with the animal-genesis part.
>Something went very wrong.
>Party must hard reset the machines, fix them/find out what happened, call in an orbital cull, and survive all the fucked up shit it's created.

>>67248137
The Froggnian Empire was destined to turn homolust eventually. Have you ever seen a Froggnian anus? It's like staring into the winking eye of God. Glorious.

>>67248544
The major obstacle is how to prevent the party from only fighting swarms of these wrong animals.

>>67250134
Maybe a cattleprod?

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>>67228192
The god-President approves of this post.

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>>67248541

>>67242304
I really like the idea of supply caches, and think we should give some more thought to the nighttime on the planet, the glow in the dark clues and who may have let them. One person mentioned an artistically-inclined miner woman.

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>>67255108

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>>67255152

>>67252295
>Danielle "Danni" DeSoto
>Excavator for HHT Interstellar Mining, the original owners of the station and mineral rights on the desert planet
>Something of a loaner who kept to herself and studied art in her spare time.
>Also a bit of a night owl, preferring late and graveyard shifts to the standard 9-to-5
>Slowly begins to notice her crewmates spending more and more time out in the heat and staring at the sky, as well as instances of the "unsettling sunburst" design beginning to show up around base

>>67252295
I don't think we've really sat down and talked enough about the celestial dynamics quite enough to hash out the night behavior.

As a for instance; is there any natural "rain" at all? If there's an oxygen atmosphere, there has to be plant life of some kind.

Maybe the actual vegetation goes growth crazy at night, and leaves the bulk of itself hidden during the day. The day shift people listen to these stories the night shift talk about of verdant gardens and think "you fuckers are mad."

Or is there no day/night shift and more of a day/night season?

Maybe the characters land in the very tail end of the dawn before the stars rise and end up horrified as everything around them just fucking wilts and dies, and the sands start getting kicked up as the surface roots of the vegitation dessicate except for the rare clump of stuff or shrub specifically adapted to stay exposed in the extreme conditions.

The miners maybe found chambers where the bulk of the vegetative biosphere reposed during the day season, but for whatever strange reason (maybe some mind altering property of the plants) never told anyone about it.

So you get these two populations. The surface people who are sunburnt and sandblasted to hell; see nothing but sand and stars, and dead vegetation, and these miners walking around with bits of living alien vegetation decorating themselves, but never able to be coerced into explaining how or why that shit looks so fresh and where they found it.

This could play into the initial failure of the original colonists.

The second group builds on the first, but actually manages to get a cryosleep schedule going to get them through the night phase. Then you start getting that mix of disbelievers built up. People start hiding to avoid the cryosleep to see how the other side lives, then starts waking up their people until civil unrest causes the colony to collapse again.

>>67257484
I think, at least as far as what's already been discussed is concerned, that there is at least some rainfall and some vegetation on this desert world as we've had mentions of scrub brush with flowers that open at night and lichen growing on buildings that becomes luminescent in the dark.

I like both the ideas that the planet might have a day/night seasonal cycle and that caverns below the surface may contain the majority of the planet's life and water, though it might perhaps be better to adjust the timetable so that there is are 4-7 days worth of sun for every night.

This way, you set up this cycle of a prolonged, dangerous period of heat and light and hallucination followed by an all too brief night's worth of relieving darkness in which the party can uncover clues and make plans. This cycle I think can make time an enemy and make the clue-gathering more stressful.

>>67257903
On a planet with a thin atmosphere I'd expect that there won't be much in the way of rain proper since having a thin atmosphere somewhat limits how much water vapor can be present. Night time would be bitterly, intensely cold due to there being little atmosphere to trap heat overnight and your life forms would get water as what little vapor there is in the air freezes out onto surfaces.

>>67258133
Maybe it would be better then to thicken the atmosphere a little bit, though, having a cold and frosty night would also work to bring the party relief from the scorching day.

>>67258227
It could be a relief but also another environmental hazard, sections of the base are opened up to the elements and it could be yet another thing that has to be managed to make the planet just a bit more survivable. It could also be a reason for dangerous wildlife encounters since the base would probably represent desirable shelter and a source of food to a lot of wild animals.

>>67258465
That could be, true. On one hand, the nighttime brings relief from the terrible heat and paranormal dangers of the Second Sun and allows the PCs to explore the station and surroundings with clear heads, looking for clues. On the other hand, the night has its own hazards that are more mundane in nature but still pose substantial risk to those that grow careless.

>>67232882
Here's some info on the robots so they can be used (note that 'eye' means robotic eye on the end of a multi-jointed limb)

0X-5G's tools
>Geiger Counter, Infra-red eye, Radio Antenna, Modem, Router, Spinning Saw limb, Fluid sampling arm, Solid-material sampling arm, Computer-use plug-in arm, Vapor-sampling arm, Hypodermic needle limb, Phaser gun arm, Target-marking laser pointer arm, Echolocation pinger, Wi-fi pinger, Night Vision eye, Weak signal magnification dish arm, Shock weapon arm.

QQ-9's skills
>Quick Draw, Hacker, Fighter Pilot, Pistols, Dual Wielded Pistols, Codes and Cyphers, Compu-Lang (language of robots), Rote Memory, Observation, Long Rifles, 2 other languages, Agent-O (martial art used by intelligence forces) Singing, and Seduction.

U-TOM's weapons
>Heat Gun, Electron whip limb, 4-tip microlaser gun, Lightning cannon, Heat-sink blaster, Micro-Plasmathrower, Low-light-sighted beam gun, High-light sighted beam gun, Chainsaw Blades x2, Combat Razor arm, Combat Grappler net-gun, charge artillery gun (charge up to shoot a energy ball grenade), 5 combat melee-weapon-equippable arms.

MC-559's tools
>Wrench arm, Measuring laser, Welding Arm, Beveling Sensor, Heat Sensor, Pressure Sensor, Soldering Arm, Screw-driving Arm, Drill Arm, Pneumatic Hammer Arm, Pipe-joining torch, Capacity checker (check if object is hollow), Damage-scan eye, Integrity scan eye, Heat vision eye, Shield scan eye, Caulk-boiler/sprayer arm, Adhesive spray gun, Fire-extinguisher spray gun, Electric activity checker, Supervisory Bit (other robots recognize it as a supervisor-bot), Supervisory Chipset (work-team management skills), Lead boiler/sprayer arm, Acid sprayer arm.

Initial number of MC-559's tools was a mistake, accidentally gave the number of a previous bot-character's tools, this is the correct toolset for MC-559.

>>67261084
To tie it all back to this thread, basically what I was thinking was, all of these bots are present at the abandoned place, and they were all staff there at some point previous to the game starting. At first, they are either outright broken, or, they are so low-energy low-function that they don't even move or beep or anything, but over time for weirdness related reasons, they somehow get their integrity back to start working again. It's a catch-22 because while all of them know things about the base that the players probably don't know yet, all of them eventually turn 100% hostile to players as part of the story.

>>67258574
>Mostly supernatural threats by day, mundane at night.

I like it.

I did something like this in a Traveller game a long time ago after reading "Solaris". I wanted a scenario where the planet itself was the enemy, so to speak.

For my scenario, the barren planet had developed a form of silicon and liquid crystal "life" of a very limited type. It formed a psionic matrix of pure thought. The rocks themselves were sentient to some degree.

When humans showed up and started poking around, the local rock life found itself overwhelmed by human thought that it found incomprehensible. Some of the rocks were driven "insane" by the human influence, while others were desperately trying to figure out what these squishy, mobile, horrifying beings were. (The concept of emotion was particularly terrifying)

Their inability to understand humans cause them to lash out telepathically and telekinetically, driving the human crews insane unintentionally.

Thankfully the party had two psionics in the party (which the original colony did not) and they were able to piece together what was happening. They were only able to reach the most basic communication with the planet, but only after most of the ship's passengers had been driven insane, killed, or seriously harmed. (A number of PC crew were also harmed.) The group managed to bug off the planet, then sold the information to Imperial authorities who could send in an investigative team. The world was quickly quarantined.

>>67262063
It makes for a good rhythm I think.

>>67262063
>The game is a fever-dream, surreal horror adventure during the day.

>The game is a frigid detective story with survival elements at night.

>>67255108
>>67255152
>>67255168

>The PCs track the lost mining equipment to the distant butte over which the Second Sun rises.

>It seems the miners spent weeks, if not months, carving strange chambers and halls into the stone.

>It's somehow even hotter inside than it is outside, and the shadows just make the light even brighter.

>Here and there, the PCs find the remains of the miners, mummified in poses of prayer and penance.

>Impossibly, the Second Sun can clearly be seen through every single window and opening at once.

>>67264680
>Temple of the Second Sun

>>67265276
>the temple is important for two reasons, firstly, it depicts an absolutely lethal creature made of darkness (which happens to be a real thing on this world, though it is only found in one specific relatively small area), and secondly, it predicts the second sun's orbit with patterns of window-slits on it's walls and roofs in some areas.

>>67265276
>of Doom

>>67265496
>>67265276
>>67264680
>The PCs need to enter the "Temple" to try and predict the Second Sun's erratic, eldritch orbit to determine when it will be safe to launch their repaired ship and escape the planet.

>However, the "Temple" is also the place in which the heat and hallucinations induced by the Second Sun are their very worst, and as such is the most dangerous place they'll visit.

>>67267648
The labyrinthine halls of the Temple seem to shift and go on forever. The Second Sun appears from impossible angles through every window and opening. The dried, desiccated mummies of the cultist miners move when the PCs aren't looking and may even attack.

Praise the Sun!

>>67268574
What colors are the primary and second suns?

>>67269550
I’d imagine the primary, larger sun might be more of a yellow-orange color and the Second Sun might be a white or yellow-white color with tinges of more malign and eldritch shades.

>>67270133
> eldritch shades
With tentacless and spikes all over color?

>>67270213
More like, it glints and twinkles unnervingly as you turn your head. You think it’s white, but sometimes you get the impression that it’s not and you don’t like that. The nav-records for this system are outdated and incomplete and based on old far-range scans of the region, but they should really have mentioned that it was a binary system.

>>67270268
What are you smoking Anon? I've got the far view records right here. This system is trinary...

>>67217923
That's just a design feature put in to keep the drones from going too far with low power and becoming irretrievable. As for the red liquid, no idea buddy, but it doesn't look like any industrial byproduct that I've seen before

>>67270902
>>67270268
>The far-view telemetry data for the system the desert planet is part of is generally out of date and sometimes wildly inconsistent between the different wrecks littering the landscape around the station.

>How much of this is incomplete or lazy cartography, corrupted data on ruined computers or has been purposefully obfuscated for some reason is up for debate amongst the party members.

>>67271490
Would this have been a system, planet or station the The PCs have heard about before, or was the planet so minor and the mining company such a relatively rinkydink operation that word never spread about what happens there?

It seems like the thread has run its course, so I’ll archive it on sup/tg/ when I get a minute.

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>>67273553
Real niggas archive.

>>67273584
It’s done. Feel free to bookmark it, vote it up, or what have you:

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Stranded+at+a+Sci-Fi+Desert+Outpost

>>67273774
I did my part +1

>>67272428
They may have heard tell of the parent company going bankrupt a decade or more back, but I’m not imagining that they were a super lucrative corporation and I get the impression that our desert planet is so remote and unimportant that what happened and still happens there never comes to light.

up

>>67274873
I think that it's more effective if the party knows the bare minimum about what'sin store for them on the desert planet.

By that I mean, they shouldn't have heard about any mysterious disappearances,paranormal occurances or cultist activity specifically. The region, in general, should maybe be dangerous but in a boring, mundane sort of way that many real-world remote locations can be. It's far out, and accidents happen in the far-out.

The party shouldn't have heard anything more nefarious about the station's mining company than they might hear about any large but struggling space-corp in this setting. The business had a lot of holdings in remote regions of the galaxy, but spread themselves too thin over too many failed ventures and went bankrupt.

>>67243831
>>67244189

and the thread in question is http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12180900/
I still remember it fondly,

this is also highly relevant to the current subjecthttp://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12130366/

>>67279958
Both of those were good. The "Space Superstitions" threads were also a good one for smaller bites of horror and spacer culture:

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Space+Superstition

>>67261084

QQ stepped forward brushing against the the jagged metal and felt PAIN.
*She* jerked back and trained *her* optics on the manipulator and felt something a synthetic should never feel. Horror.
"My hand!" *she* screamed holding it before her and watching the thin stream of red.
"I can FEEL my hand!"

>>67282692
MC-559's voice from a distance, "Oh shut up you pansy pleasure model ninny-hammer. It's quite alright, I shall be there in a jiffy and fix it all."

>>67279958
The Martian Ghosts thread was a great example of what atmospheric horror can be achieved when the players want to be scared.