Thoughts and Ramblings

Aurora City - My First Campaign

I've recently started GMing my first long term closed campaign. I've run a few one-shots and a couple sessions of an open table, but finally after years of wanting one, I finally have a group of players willing to commit long term to a regular and consistent schedule of games.

Speaking of which if you are one of those players who somehow found this blog, stop reading here, there will be spoilers as this post will detail some of the initial prep I did for the campaign.

What am I running?

I knew before I started that I wanted to run a city adventure. I'd only run dungeons before, or relatively linear and closed off one-shots, but since I first learned about RPGs some 10 years ago, what I've always wanted to run was a dense open world with factions, political maneuvering and roleplay.

I went with Monolith for my system of choice for a few reasons.

What's the campaign about?

The players are all fixers and problems solvers in the city of Aurora, Trying to pay off their debts to the Cyberware company Peachboy.

I expect the players to be in Aurora city for about 4 sessions minimum, until they pay off their debt and get their spaceship repaired, after which I will follow their lead on whether they want to stay or go exploring the galaxy.

In addition I have been thinking of adding in some wilderness exploration options if they decide to venture outside of the city.

My Initial prep

I started off by giving the players 2 adventure hooks, I thought that would be the minimum I needed since it still gives them choice and I don't have to worry about overprepping

Pretech Ruins

The Continent of Gavinia on which Aurora lies is known to be a hotspot for pretech ruins. The New Horizons Colonization corporation has founded three cities (New Haven, Purple Shores and Aurora)

The cities are founded near ruins and meant to sell the artifacts found from the ruins near the city for their initial economy, and then use that to bootstrap themselves into becoming megacities. The plan worked for New Haven and Purple Shores, but the ruins around Aurora proved to be far more dangerous.
They had taken years to explore and taken many lives. Leaving Aurora lagging far behind its sister cities.
The newest ruins that had been found had seen the very first expedition to enter go missing in their entirety. Now no one wants to go inside.

The players are going to be contacted by Chloe Alcanter, The director of Pretech Recovery for Aurora and one of the PCs contacts to tell them about the new Pretech site, and explain the situation, and ask them to go into the ruins.

A small regret

A question I had for myself when prepping this was "why is the government trusting these people?", It was partially desperation, they needed someone to go inside and get a few wins to get more people to explore the ruins. But also I had planned to start the players off as relative nobodies, and their characters hadn't been dungeon diving yet, so I felt like to justify Chloe asking them personally.
To do this I had her tell them that the first group that went in was a bunch of teenagers who faked a bunch of credentials and never had any experience in the first place despite claiming to be veterans. And that the ruins were not actually that dangerous.

But in hindsight I don't think I really needed to justify any of that, and it just might make the players think that the dungeon is safer than it really is. But I can also just play it off as her lying if it goes really bad, and the players are pretty cautious so it hopefully won't turn out to be a serious mistake.

What's in the ruins

My plan is to run Hole in the oak reflavored for Sci-fi. I've had lots of success running it before in Knave and ShadowDark. I haven't planned how exactly I'm going to reflavour it, but I'll wait for them to go in or express interest first, and just wing it my first time and prep it properly if I feel like it would help.

A New Drug on the Market

In the last 9 months the gang 'Dorph Company has cornered the local drug market. But a new drug called Kalm has quickly become the second favorite in just 2 months.
The 'Dorph company has identified the source of the drug, and hire the PCs to eliminate them.

How I prepped it

I did quite a lot of prep for this, I was very inspired by hitman when I came up with this and I wanted it to feel like a very open ended mission.
I used a lot of inspiration from The roll tables from Augmented Reality, The Holistic City kit.

I first started by creating The Map
The target lives in the building and never leaves, making eliminating him a lot harder.
I also rolled on a random table a few times for things the target might have in a safe or secreted somewhere and got 1kg of calcium.

And I have to say the #1 biggest thing I've learned from the OSR is how amazing random tables are, because this one result helped me define the entire rest of the situation.

I took all my notes in TLdraw creating a Pepe Silvia-esque conspiracy chart (click on the image to make it sharper) This graph includes all the main NPCs I've prepped so far.

This kind of notetaking fits my brain a lot better than just textual notes like in obsidian. In fact I've been thinking for a while about creating my own note taking program that prioritizes relationships and has a first class graph view, but that's a story for another time.

The Situation

The Target is a researcher by the name of Ezra Vambeer, from Purple Shores. He was working on Nannites that could enhance the human body and perhaps make the perfect soldier, but the research never went anywhere and he lost all his funding. In a moment of desperation, to prove his research had value, he tested his Nannites on his first Human subject, himself..

The Nannites feed on a synthetic glucose variant called Syncrose, The Nannites were supposed to harmlessly deactivate if they don't get enough Syncrose, but instead they consume the hosts body. After one day of not consuming Syncrose, the host will feel sick, weak and tired.
After two days They will have a strong dull pain across their entire body, muscles will feel sore and bones weak. Thinking straight will become a challenge.
After three days the host will become entirely bedridden, unable to move and in severe pain. After four days, death is all but guaranteed.

But if the drug is administered within 3 days, any and all symptoms will clear up within 2 hours as the Nannites rebuild the parts of the body they have destroyed.

When all this came to light instead of being vindicated Ezra was humiliated. His reputation was ruined and no one would work with him again, well at least no one who cared about their image.

Enter MAELSTROM, One of the main gangs running things in Purple Shores. They found out about his research and saw an opportunity. They created a false identity for Ezra (John Doe) and got him a job working as a head of a manufacturing plant run by Mainline Pharma, a small pharmaceutical manufacturer with little focus on Aurora. MAELSTROM falsified records for "John" showing him to be a head researcher from the planet of NewHab.

Upon starting his job, MAELSTROM immediately hired a covert construction crew to quickly build a secret lab underground, connected to the manufacturing plant.
MAELSTROM would provide weekly shipments of Syncrose precursors (this was the first spark of an idea I had from the 1kg of Calcium) MAELSTROM didn't provide all this for free however, and expect payment back. To this end Ezra has been skimming a little bit off the top of their manufacturing, and those drugs are used as ingredients to make Kalm. And the sale of Kalm is used to pay off MAELSTROM.

Involved NPCs

Ezra Vambeer - Oversees the Kalm drug trade, but mostly is focused on his research and doing the bare minimum for Mainline Pharma to not look suspicious or get fired.

Fiona Nguyen - Receptionist for the plant, but in practice the one who does most of the actual work Ezra is supposed to do, helps cook the books to hide evidence of their illegal activities.

Anton Alcantar / Hikaru Yoneda - The two guards / inspectors that check the manufactured goods, they skim some of the product, marking it as rejected to hide the evidence.

Skye Barrick - Head of manufacturing who doesn't do anything but is paid off to maintain their silence

Delivery Driver - Makes an extra trip to the Railway yard to pick up Syncrose Precursor and to the Park to drop off the Kalm ingredients

Railway cargo worker - Takes bag of Precursors from secret compartment in train and keeps them in a hidden location to be picked up by delivery driver