2 Scamander Point

Scamander Point is nestled in an area of small-ish (relatively speaking) area of jungle that springs out from the desert around a handful of large table-top mountains (think lost-world style). On one of these table-tops is a huge cracked habitat zone (Scamander). The hab dome itself is very old, and a much newer structure has been built poking out from the wreckage - this is the Arch-Novel Scamander Station Fortified Laboratory.

The jungle sits atop an ancient underground city, which is largely unexplored, due to their being a Scylla down here. Mostly, the city is only really accessible accidentally.

The Scamander Laboratory is a meld research laboratory, and houses a large stable meld swarm. The scientist here are working on meld/animal hybrid creatures (these are Pumas). Regalia Luxe is extremely interested in the work that’s happening here. It falls firmly into their wheelhouse of freaky biotech.

At the other table mountains, an abandoned facility is still powered. Something from an age long passed is trapped inside, but no-one gets near because it appears to be haunted?

Mission Report

QC Feedback: Too Many Pumas

Dismounting from The Vengeance, and knowing The Quality Control is in the area, the gang heads straight there. They probably have some useful information, and they’re likely to be willing to share.

Once there, greeted by Yellow & Lorey, the entire gang is in absolute awe at the Corrective Action. They really want the big gun¹. They stop drooling long enough to ask what’s up, and what they can tell them. The Quality Control leaders explain the situation, and that local area scans mean that they think there might be a way to get the Quality Control back in action at the abandoned facility on top of one of the table mountains. The appearance of Ghost Mechs in that area means no-ones tried yet though.

The QC salvage team are currently out at work in an old evantis manufactury. If you want to help, meet up with them, and they can direct you up to where the reactor parts might be found. Still thinking about the possibility of owning just a really cataclysmically big gun, the crew agrees.

At the manufactury, they find the salvage team being set upon by pumas. They move to engage, and swiftly dispatch a number of the beasts and frighten off the rest. This nets them a pretty big payout of bio-salvage.

Henry (the salvage team’s leader) agrees to show them up the table-mountain, while the rest of the crew drags themselves back to base after being royally fucked up by mega-fauna. The Vengeance crew asks them to transport the bio-salvage back, which they agree to do.

The Scamander Ghosts

On up to the lower table mountain the party encounter a number of ruined mechs littering the jungle. They decide to watch and wait for a while, and eventually a junked-up looking mule starts wandering through. It’s one of the ghost mechs we’ve been hearing so much about.

They attempt to initiate communications, but get nonsense data back from it. The nonsense data seems similar in form to what Laz0rbrn received when attempting to talk to the meld behemoth in 1 Downing of the Atychos. They decide to give it a gift of some scrap, which it dutifully accepts in its hydraulic clamp.

It seems, well not exactly friendly, but largely unbothered by the party, and is now making its way back through the jungle with its gift in tow. Nothing to do but follow I guess, and hope the gift helps ingratiate them. They follow it, into the facility at 9 - Abandoned Facility.

Inside, they move through and then up, with Henry noting that (from their scans) the reactor core seems like its below them behind those big blast doors in the floor.

Spiralling up through the facility to the surface, they move into the abandoned warehouse. Inside they spy, laid out in regular patterns, many many mech parts. Lurking in the corners are huge lumps of meld. They initiate contact, and attempt to communicate with them, by playing bits of recorded data back to them. After some back and forth they eventually manage to decode enough of the data stream to gather some rudimentary words/concepts:

• IFF (identify friend or foe)
• Friend
• Foe
• Useful

This was some of the best TTRPG gameplay I’ve ever had, it was SO FUN to do, reminded us all a lot of the movie Arrival (which is ace and you should watch it if you haven’t, or read the original short story called “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang). I can’t stress enough how cool this whole sequence was.

They part in peace with the meld here, after initiating some contact. They’ve got work to do for now, and further conversation with the meld can wait for the future.

They stop off to investigate the Watchpoint, and discover some old data about the main facility layout, in particular a secondary access tunnel.

The Other Scamander Ghosts

Back down, to the control room, they disable the laser turrets using a gigantic mech sword (that’ll do it). And have a look in the control facility. Hacking in, they discover the facility is still powered, and the blast doors leading down have been sealed for about 5000 years. What the heck, let’s crack this puppy open.

Creeping down, they enter the main reactor room. Within, a huge 4-armed gold plated mech stands, flanked by a floating octopus looking construction arcing lightning - AGLA and INRI.²

Athena lies to them vicariously, supported by Laz0rbrn’s hacking giving them some fake Argent Republic access codes. Sceptical, but ultimately not really fussed by the crew’s appearance, and very thankful to be let out of their tomb, AGLA, INRI and NOX leave.³

That’s probably nothing to worry about right? This’ll be fine.

Anyway, we’ve got the reactor, so let’s ship it back to the QC.

We take a quick area salvage moment, and roll a natural 20 down in the pit! What could I give them but one of the Argent Republic frames, so I hand out an INRI chassis discarded in a corner, along with one of NOX’s weapons (who they haven’t really seen), a hellfire shotgun.

Between Sessions: The GM (that’s me) at this point says, you just picked up a boatload of effectively T1 salvage from the Pumas, and now the QC can move again. If you want, you could cash that in on the next downtime and upgrade your crawler to T2, which is narratively the QC and The Vengeance crews joining together. Effectively, your reward for bringing the reactor back is access to an absolutely bonkers crawler-mounted weapon. They agreed, and The Vengeance Control is born.

Scamander Station

Now, the crew set off once again into the jungle and towards the secret access tunnel to the main Scamander Point facility.

On the way, trudging through the jungle, they find a curious device stamped with the Arch-Novel logo. They consider scrapping it, but eventually decide to just use the blueprint scanner on Laz0rbrn’s Spectrum to see what it does and how to build a new one. It turns out to be a local climate stabiliser, and many of these dotted around the area is the cause for the jungle in this region.

While trudging around, Athena and Gert scoop up some seeds for various plants, along with a very pissed off lizard who they name Dougal. Dougal is, and I can’t stress this enough, absolutely furious about this turn of events. Party pet! Party pet! Party pet!

Up through the tunnel, they spy one of Scamander‘s drones and dispatch it quickly. Unfortunately, breaking a drone leaves a whole in the network, and whoever is at the top of the facility probably knows they’re here. Time to get moving.

At the top of the tunnel, coming out at 10.5 they are met with an array of drones, and Julie Garnet in her Terra. This seems like a pretty small defence force, and it turns out to indeed put up almost no resistance.

Why are they so thin on the ground? Well, it turns out AGLA got here just ahead of the party, and is pretty much done wrecking the other half of Scamander’s drones and Dawn Ike. The crew decides, frankly, that this looks like a bad situation, and lay low for a while.

Eventually creeping up through the wreckage, they make their way into the facility. Down to the lower levels, where they find a cracked containment dome and scenes of destruction around it.

Hacking into the camera system they discover, in grainy footage, AGLA moved through this space, cracked the containment sphere and seemed to somehow manipulate the meld inside. It flowed up into the AGLA frame’s machine body, turning a bright silver from its gunmetal shiny black as it did so. That’s freaky.

Finally, rooting through the computer files, Laz0rbrn discovers the location the Atychos from the first adventure was originally travelling to - Facility N01.

They decide to head towards Facility N01, because it looks from the trail through the Jungle that AGLA is making his way their as well.

Outcomes

• Lots of scrap, including an INRI frame and Hellfire shotgun.
• T2 crawler, fitted with a stupidly sized railcannon.
• The location of the Atychos’s original destination - Facility N01.
• AGLA is loose, and in possession of a quantity of meld roughly equal to a behemoth, who knows exactly what his relationship to the alien construct is.
• Some rudimentary ways to communicate with the meld.
• Plans to build climate stabilisers (immediately put to use on the crawler roof).

Adventure Setup

Main feature

Cracked Habitat Dome

Threats

• Tyrant: Broken Wheel Raider Boss - Rowan
• Torment: The endless spilling jungle
• Aberration: Ghost mechs

Weather

Roll
20	Clear skies, warm in the sun.
11-19	High wind, scattered clouds.
6-10	Driving rain - reduced far range visibility, harder to hear.
2-5	Heavy fog - no long range visibility, medium visibility down.
1	Thunderstorm - reduced long range visibility, harder to hear, thunder.

Random Encounters

Roll
20	Quality Control salvaging team prepping to ambush Broken Wheel Party.
16-19	Broken Wheel Raiders making their way back to the Spoke.
11-15	Puma pack, hunting.
6-10	Arch-Novel supply team, bring new hardware to Scamander.
2-5	Ghost Mechs.
1	Regalia Infiltration Clade + roll again.

I love adding “roll again” to my encounter tables. Nothing spices up an encounter like just a second encounter happening at the same time.

Locations

Map

The crew deploys into 1.

1 - Outer grasslands

The desert slowly turns to waving grasslands, dotted with trees. The jungle looms in the distance.

The crew deploys here.

2 - Wreck of the Quality Control

The Quality Control was a lumbering six-legged squat crawler, big wide open plate on its back. It now lies in the grasses, with small trees and vegetation starting to grow over it.

The Quality Control came into serious difficulty near the Scamander point jungle, losing a number of critical reactor components and causing catastrophic failures. Repairs need to be made, but it’s slow going given how hot the reactor core has become, and the extent of the damage. They’re getting supplies from other local unions, but no-one nearby has been operating at a large surplus, and they don’t have as much as they’d like. There might be something like a replacement reactor core in the abandoned facility but no-one’s made it in, and they can’t afford to lose anyone else. There’s also a suitable reactor in The Spoke, the raiders aren’t looking to sell.

They’re under pressure from the raider crews operating out of The Spoke, they haven’t directly launched an attack because the pride of the Quality Control is an ultra-heavy rail cannon affectionately called the Corrective Action, which is still in operation.

See The Quality Control for details of some of the people here.

3 - Mountain Pass

Picking your way up through the mountains, high peaks overhead, stones clattering down.

2 Broken Wheel Raiders, Hylia & Misery, have set up a small trap. They’re intending to drop a small avalanche on anyone they don’t recognise and try and loot the ensuing wreckage. They’ll definitely flee if given any real resistance.

4 - The Spoke

Raider settlement, no getting in without a tribute of some kind, or fast talking. Or entering the combat pit.

Inside, a bowl-shaped settlement of scrap metal sits ramshackle around a huge mech fighting pit. The sound of engines and screaming metal ring out almost around the clock. We’re mad maxing it up here.

Chief Rowan runs the Spoke, keeps a lot of effectively slaves on hand to do most of the menial work.

5 - Outer Jungle

Tall trees, alive and shrieking with animal calls. Long vines trailing, roots growing deep into tangled knots.

Travelling through this region everyone should roll, falling into the ruined city below on a 2-5, and alerting Scylla on a 1.⁴

Huge caves and scars in the earth lead down into a huge city below, the lair of the biotitan Scylla. The caves and chasms leading down to the city below will be obvious as you walk through the space.

In the underground city: Area Salvage TL 3 // Supply 6

6 - Inner Jungle

Dotted through this region of the jungle are a handful of blinking contraptions. They’re marked ArchNovel, and could be salvaged for 2 T3 scrap each. Destroying one will alert Scamander - who will send a drone to investigate.

7 - Old Evantis Manufactury

The ruins of an old Evantis manufactury, slowly being consumed by the Jungle.

Quality Control Crew out salvaging, being stalked by a pack of PumaPumas.

Area Salvage TL 2 // Supply 4

8 - Lower Table

The Jungle continues on this table plateau. Amongst the trees are a lot of destroyed and wrecked mechs, mostly old models, bits and pieces, with vines running all through them.

Disturbing the mechs will cause a handful of them to awaken, piloted by meshed meld.

Approaching the upper table, a huge blast door hangs open leading into the abandoned facility.

Area Salvage TL 1 // Supply 4

9 - Abandoned Facility

Map

The door leading to 9.1 opens onto 8 on the main map. 9.3 & 9.4 are in location 9 on the main map.

9.1 - Mid Level

3 Meshed Meld Nanoids lurk in the corners of this beautifully carved space. The huge ramp descends circularly up and down around the edge of the pit. Huge blast doors block the passage further down.

At this level you can see a control room behind heavy reinforced plate glass, burn marks all over the inside of the room, but the lights of the control banks still blinking slowly. Getting into the room is relatively easy, but there are two laser turrets (2 HP, D2h)⁵ affixed to the ceiling. The room smells of dust and long decay.

9.2 - Lower Level

A lost Argent Republic Interdiction Squad consisting of: an Agla Pattern War Automata, an Inri Pattern Tactical Support Automata, and a Nox Pattern Executor Automata, has been trapped here since the fall of the republic.

A still-functioning reactor core is here, powering the abandoned facility, it could be easily used for to repair the Quality Control.

Area Salvage: TL 4 // Supply 2

9.3 - Watchpoint

Abandoned watchpoint facility for the ArchNovel base, powered down but can be reactivated without much trouble.

Inside in the whirring computer banks is a map of the Scamander lab, and surrounding area, plus directions to some of the access tunnels.

Area Salvage TL 2 // Supply 1

9.4 - Warehouse

4 Meshed Meld Nanoids and 2 Meshed Meld Splitters lurk in this abandoned hangar/warehouse. Mech parts litter the floor, deconstructed and reconstructed in a number of strange configurations.

Area Salvage TL 1 // Supply 5

10 - Scamander Point

I couldn’t find my map for Scamander Point - it’s lost to time.

10.1 The Waterfall

Easiest route up through the crack in the dome. Watched by Dawn Ike & Scamander from 10.3

10.2 The Pool

Source pool for the river, likely to find Paulie Garnet here in the Sifter.

10.3 Scamander A

Abandoned facility building.

Area Salvage: Tech 2 // Supply 5

10.4 Scamander B

Main scamander point facility building, Dawn, Scamander, and Paulie will retreat here if they can.

In the pit of the facility is a meld research laboratory, a large meld swarm is being held in stable containment in a giant metal sphere.

Area Salvage: Tech 3 // Supply 3

10.5 Facility Rear

This is where the secret tunnel comes up, dense jungle.

Groups

ArchNovel

Subsidiary of Adamant Arch Planetary, concentrated around the Scamander facility.

Scamander

• Walker Drones, probably about 20 in total, unlikely to deploy them all in one go.
• Sub-core drones - 4 in total, direct AI core link to Scamander, smart, not the actual core.
• Head of Security Dawn Ike (she/her) - Evantis Atlas
• Head of Operations Paulie Garnet (she/her) - Sifter Terra

Supply Team

• Mulligan (he/him) - Osiris Forge
• Martha & Helena (both she/her) - Opus Gophers

The Quality Control

Is a Union Crawler, currently with their main reactor down, and stranded on the edge of the jungle.

The Corrective Action is a space ship-to-ship railcannon (would have been fitted as part of a battery of auxiliary weapons on a medium-weight ship-of-the-line) it is Over-Far Range, Damage 30 SP, Ballistic, Deadly.

Overseer: Lorey Dust (he/him).

Union Rep: Yellow Halyard (she/her).

Salvage Team

• Henry ‘Gavel’ Judge (he/him) - Maggie Magpie
• Jun Harrow (she/her) - Thatcher Jackhammer
• Mikael Vondix (he/they) - Stefanus Buzzard
• Whelk Ion (they/them) - Rigger Scrapper

Broken Wheel

Are a sizable raider band, operating out of a raider town on the outskirts of the jungle.

Chief: Rowan (he/him) - Thunder Storm Atlas

Raiding Party

• Ungur - Blackbeard Kraken
• Theri - Cackler Jackhammer
• Cudgel - Butcher Thresher
• Auk - Evantis Mule
• Fighting Box Wheel
• Raider Band x2

I didn’t give these NPCs full names, just sketches. To be filled in if needed.

Ambushers

• Hylia - Mauler Hussar
• Misery - Ironmonger Magpie

Critters

Puma

Six legged long-snouted partially exoskeleton’d mega-fauna. Hunt in packs, with specialised bioforms performing specific roles. While this has the same name as an old-earth creature it’s as high up to the shoulder as most mechs, and easily three times as long. Absolutely not to be fucked with.

15 SP each.

All of them have:

• Giant claws: Damage 3SP, multi-attack (2)
• Shimmering Skin: Cause attacks at medium or higher range without targetter to roll twice, take lowest.

Some of them have:

• Corrosive spit: Damage 2SP, Causes Vulnerable.

Ghost Mechs

Various meld splitters and smaller, and any number of piloted T1 mech patterns as appropriate.

Regalia Infiltration Clade

Part of Regalia Luxe, no direct obvious presence, only here in the random encounters.

• Scion Anastasia//SAPPHIRE (she/her) - Modified Needler Photon//HALBERDIER Severe features, bloodthirsty cold blue eyes, long black hair. Her mech is painted bubblegum pink. “Infiltration”.
• Handmaiden Juliana//GRANITE (she/her) - Sakura Solo//GRAVESTONE Black suit, brown hair, bangs over her eyes, gloomy.
• Butler Julius//STOIC (he/him) - Custom Jackhammer//IN DEFIANCE Black suit, close-cropped hair, bright face.

We don’t see any of Regalia this time round, but we will in the future 😈. At this point in the game, I’ve written them up, and you’ll see I keep putting them in the random encounters. That’s not really just because I wanted them to turn up, but more that I had already prepped them and they hadn’t shown up. No use letting a good tactical infiltration squad go to waste!

Argent Republic Interdiction Squad

The Argent Republic fell 5000 years ago. This interdiction squad has been trapped underground for a long time, many things can become lost in the wasteland.

This consists of:

• AGLA, leader and in the body of a war pattern automata
• INRI, a tactical support automata
• NOX, an executor automata

AGLA is the only one that speaks to the crew, although NOX can also talk. INRI cannot, being a fundamentally different kind of mind and unable to really conceptualise language. See more details about The Argent Republic at that link.

Footnotes

1. I should have seen this coming. ↩

2. I intended this to just be a boss fight. I really just wrote it down without thinking about it too much. “Oh, lets put something down there we don’t need to feel to bad about just having a fight with, ok they’re an ancient robot subjugation force, great they’ll just fight them and move on.” I am SO stupid. ↩

3. It’s at this point I realise I have accidentally made this a super interesting character, and was intending for them to be exploded. Now I have to think up what the Argent Republic actually was. Shit. ↩

4. This is sort of a “bad trap” because there isn’t really an obvious telegraph. That being said, if the players gather information from the Quality Control or raiders, or asked their crawler AI, it’s something I would let them avoid. It’s also pretty soft, only really being an objective problem on a nat 1 (which players could re-roll). Looking back, I probably wouldn’t write this like this again, but it didn’t trigger so it doesn’t really matter. ↩

5. This is a good trap! The laser burns! What was I thinking with the jungle? ↩