Doom Watch- a Cosmic power level campaign

[Tantavalist]

Campaign Premise

The Doom Watch campaign which I'm currently running is an ultra-high-powered Cosmic-level game of M&M 3rd Edition. Inspired by The Authority, it's based around the idea of a group of Cosmic powered Superheroes who operate from and interact with Earth, rather than being in some distant part of the galaxy. How will their presence and actions affect the global balance of power on a world still reeling from the emergence of Superpowers?

I wanted a setting which would have internal consistency of logic in a way most Supers settings don't, and adequately explain many questions about such things. For instance, aliens are often human-looking to the point where inter-species romance and children occur. Time travel and parallel worlds are a comic-book staple, and yet the great stellar empires or cosmic beings never seem to take advantage of them. And what place does Magic have in a setting? What separates it from superscience?

I set the default PC power level at 20. Yes, this sets things way above a typical campaign- but that's the point. The setting will include more typically powered Superhero action, but this will be taking place with NPCs and largely under the radar of the PCs. The more powerful NPC supers may occasionally ally with or fight against the PCs, but this won't be the main focus of things.

The following are the main source of inspiration I've used in putting together this setting, unusually listing more novels than comics- but then, SF tends to think bigger more often than comic books:-

-The Authority comic books (obviously)

-The Dan Abnett/Andy Lanning Marvel Cosmic story arcs

-The CORE Command RPG by Dream Pod 9

-Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri PC game

-The Uplift novels by David Brin

-The Culture novels by Iain M Banks

-The Xeelee saga by Stephen Baxter

-A Fire Upon the Deep/A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

-The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons

((And yes, the player who finally named the group of superheroes Doom Watch is a big fan of obscure British sci-fi dramas.))


The Hegemony

Over 300,000 years ago, the primitive forbears of Transhumanity took their first faltering steps toward the stars. They spread slowly, colonising once system after another. Eventually, as their science and culture advanced, they began to change themselves, uplifting each generation from the semi-sentient beasts that were Humans to the many breeds of Transhuman that succeeded them. On some worlds they found life, and shaped themselves to live their more comfortably. On others, they turned barren rocks into Edens. Faster and faster they spread. Terrible wars were fought, and worlds burned, but eventually, alliances began to grow stronger, and the many factions slowly became one.

The Transhuman Hegemony was the pinnacle of Transhuman culture and technology. At it's peak, it spanned thirty-seven civilised galaxies, all linked by the great Gates harnessing the Black Holes at the galactic cores and spanned by a Flaw network that allowed Wormholes to be opened to the far reaches of a galaxy rather than simply to nearby systems.

Great feats of engineering reshaped whole systems and even star clusters into Dysonian structures which would have been visible across the galaxy even to pre-starflight telescopes. Machines started to vanish as external devices, becoming integrated into the Transhuman body on levels that children would inherit. Quantum Technology allowed the fundamental energies of the universe to be reshaped and converted as easily as nanotechnology had allowed molecules to be manipulated. At the height of its power, it seemed as if nothing would be beyond the power of the Hegemony.


The Manifolds

One of the more ambitious projects was something that once would merely have been conducted with computer simulations- which had long since achieved the level of full reality, several civilisations existing purely as data constructs inside some archive. But the creators of the Manifolds sought something that would impress with its very existence, not the most efficient solution to a problem.

A linked cluster of thousands of tiny pocket universes was generated, each a light-year across. Within each, a copy as detailed as records could make it of pre-Starflight Earth and it's Solar system was created. And then each one was populated, with the pre-Transhuman creatures who were the forebears of Transhumanity. At different stages of their development, and in different combinations- for the exact history of those distant epochs could not be agreed upon, and so all were included.

A starship was set as the Nexus point for the Manifold array, able to easily traverse the Manifolds and to alter the alignment of them. Only one Manifold at a time would exist in the Prime universe, and which one this was could be altered- though it would always appear at the same point.

It was as the Manifold project was nearing completion that the end of all things began.


The Fall

The exact details of the collapse of the Transhuman Hegemony are unclear today, so widespread was the devastation. Though the reasons remembered now are vague and contradictory, the complex web of alliances that formed the Hegemony began to unravel. The process of entropy was slow, but inevitable, and eventually erupted into wars that grew ever more devastating. Eventually, the combatants exhausted themselves, isolated pockets of shattered victors who began a slow spiral into decline.

Today, the galaxy is home to less than a tenth of the inhabited systems it once possessed. Contact with other galaxies was lost when the great Galactic Gate at the core was shattered. A pre-Collapse star chart would show missing stars where the Star-killer weapons did their work, and where Dysonian structures once resided only incomprehensibly vast ruins now float.

Across the galaxy, starfaring civilisation is starting to re-establish itself. Systems ally with or are conquered by neighbours, explorers set out to seek other civilisations of the relics of the Hegemony era, still unmatched in its science.

And in a distant corner of the galaxy, the Manifold project lays forgotten, the humans inhabiting it thinking that the pocket-dimensions- given the illusion of stars and a greater universe- are the true worlds. As the Hegemony fell, the Manifolds were aligned so that an empty dimension resided in Prime Reality. Unknown, unseen, they shall remain this way forever...

Or until something within the Manifolds occurs, which could bring an inhabited system into this place.


Magic

Outside of the Universe, beyond time and space as Transhumanity know them, wait the Anathema.

The Hegemony knew them, and comprehended them as well as they could be comprehended by a mind bound by the laws of this universe. The surviving knowledge suggests that they were born of a universe with far different laws than this one. They achieved a perfect scientific mastery of their home universe's laws. And somehow, they were able to survive that universe's ending.

Now, they wait in the spaces between. They want a new universe to inhabit. They seem to feel this one would suit- given certain alterations. They are unable to act upon this universe from the nothingness they inhabit. But they can be involved in an action which originates from this universe- if something calls to them.

They have set their technology to alter reality at its base level within this universe. But they cannot activate it. Instead, they set it to respond to certain actions from beings here. They do something- a word, a gesture- and something happens in response.

This is magic.

But as magic is used more, the Anathema can begin to whisper into the mind of the one using it. They speak of other magics, increasing the power available. Soon, a magus heeds the whispers more and more. Eventually, the worship of the Dark Masters takes over more and more of a mage's life. And they begin to dream of the sealed gates being opened, the Dark Masters let into this reality.

All magic comes from the Anathema. A strong-willed mage can use it without being corrupted. But always, it has it's source in the dark, alien beings who seek only to enter this universe and twist it into their own.

[Tantavalist]

First session

The PCs began to awaken. Two of them were floating in some sort of goo, with all manner of fibres and cables wrapped around them. As they regained consciousness, these retracted, and the tank in which they floated naked emptied.

-Jack Hawkins: A burned-out CIA agent, who finds he has a strange bond to the Nexus and it's technology, letting him use many advanced items that simply don't function for most people.
((The character is essentially a Battlesuit character with a lot of points also spent on a headquarters. Obviously even at this level the ship in question is outside the points budget, so we decided it'd be very damaged and spending points on upgrades would represent systems coming back on line as the ship self-repairs. The player decided that his battlesuit would look like a cross between the silver mk2 Iron Man suit from the movie and the Necromonger commander's armour from Chronicles of Riddick. Apart from the equipment, he's also maxed out the Luck advantage and Luck Control power.))

Hawkins found himself on the Command Centre of the Nexus, a stadium-sized area filled with gravity-defying platforms and a giant holographic projection. His exclamation of "What the hell?!?" resulted in a disembodied voice answering, and he found that he was talking to the AI in control of wherever he was. A lot of strange diagrams full of flashing red and reports that went over his head managed to get the idea that something bad was happening across to him, along with the fact that for some reason he'd been give authorisation to access the various facilities here.

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Hawkins asked for some sort of weapons and/or protection, and was guided to a battlesuit. He then had the AI patch into the comms and direct him to wherever he could find what was causing this trouble, while asking more questions in the hope the answers would start to make sense eventually.

-Angela Nigrido: A French mercenary who finds her martial arts skills enhanced to unbelievable levels and her psionic potential fully awakened.
((The player decided he wanted a character based on Psylocke, and we went with the Martial Artist archetype with lower-level Psionics added. With a fighting stat of 24, the character is frequently compared to The Midnighter and, combined with the Psionic Claws psionic array power this is a very dangerous woman in hand-to-hand.))

Quickly discovering that her physical abilities had been greatly enhanced somehow, Nigrido found that she was also sensing things she'd never felt before- her newly-awakened psionic abilities. With vague memories of being pulled into some pod so these alterations could be made, she stumbled about dodging or fighting several opposing groups of military goons that all seemed intent of seizing control of wherever they were.

-Sebastian Winthrop: An Occult Investigator from Victorian Britain, whose long-running battle with the sinisters and secretive Brotherhood of the Sundered Seals came to an end when he was killed and transformed into a bestial Vampire. Awakening to full intelligence and free will again, he finds his command of the dark energies of the Anathema has been vastly enhanced.
((This player wanted to play Alucard from Hellsing, which in a Cosmic campaign isn't an overpowered concept. We decided to go to earlier vampire myths, where they were sinister shadows that drank life and had nothing human left in them, combining the Vampire and Wraith options from Supernatural Creature with a Magic array. The character occasionally reverts to his bestial state and needs confining inside an energy field, which was devised as the IC explanation for the player working night shifts and occasionally missing a game.))

Winthrop found himself standing amidst the ruins of a mystic circle, with dead bodies in the robes of the Brotherhood of the Sundered Seals all about him. He recognised his now Vampiric nature, and examining the circle he began to formulate a theory about why he now seemed to have his human mind restored.

The Brotherhood had been attempting to embody one of the Anathema into a human host, thus allowing it to function in this reality. Seven vampires had been gorged on human life, and then bound around the circle as power sources to be consumed during the ritual. Something went wrong- seemingly because the cultists were attacked by unknown soldiers with strange weapons who also lay dead around him. Instead of the human host becoming the vessel of an Anathema, all the power of the ritual- along with a portion of the Anathema's strength- had been poured into one of the vampires-himself.

He was still a vampire, but now far more powerful, and with his human faculties restored. The Brotherhood was here, and working it's dark plots, so any other concerns could wait until their plans had been thwarted.

Flashbacks

We now entered flashback scenes, where the PCs began learning what had brought them into this situation by playing through it.

Winthrop knew the most about the Brotherhood, and through his scenes they learned that there were many worlds which the Brotherhood had learned to travel between. If a building is constructed using certain principles of Occult Geometry, and if another such building occupies the same site in another layer of the manifolds, then a magical ritual conducted there will allow passage between them. In this manner, the Brotherhood had spread it's influence across dozens of worlds, first by sending dreams to influence people into building a suitable gateway and then by crossing in person to begin finding new acolytes.

Nigrido had been one of the army of mercenaries the Brotherhood had recruited as part of their master plan. She gradually became aware that something was very strange about her new employers, and that large numbers of troops who seemed very odd were somehow being assembled at points across the world.

Hawkins had been dragged out of semi-retirement and more or less blackmailed by his bosses into helping find out who this Brotherhood of the Sundered Seals really was and what their goals were. Having transformed overnight from something resembling the Freemasons into a global threat which could seemingly produce private armies from nowhere, the various intelligence agencies across the world were understandably starting to panic.

The Brotherhood had seized control of several sites of occult significance across the world, and while their troops kept the local authorities in a stand-off they conducted their rituals- and opened gates into "The Heart of All Worlds", the Nexus of the Manifolds. In several cases, the local forces followed them through when the Brotherhood's troops retreated into the gates.

The situation now was that the Brotherhood was seeking to seize control of this place- the Manifold Nexus- and use it to bring about the return of the Dark Masters. Troops from several governments were also attempting to take control of this advanced alien artefact, but they were working at cross-purposes, scattered and confused, and unlikely to achieve anything before the Brotherhood could enact the final stage in their plan.

Seeking help and explanations, Hawkins found the other PCs and they agreed that things couldn't be allowed to continue like this. After locating a group of the Brotherhood and capturing an Acolyte for interrogation, they returned to the Command Centre to put together everything they had learned.

They discovered the true nature of "Earth"- the history of the setting detailed above. They learned what the Dark Masters really were. The Nexus was a control centre for the alignment of the Manifolds, and when they were sealed to the Prime Reality, it had been lost and abandoned in a random layer. Now the Brotherhood had located it, and managed to de-stabilise the coherence of the Manifolds, allowing the Anathema to enter.

The ultimate plan, once the Anathema embodied themselves and seized control of the Nexus, would be to destroy the manifolds altogether. This would doom all the thousands of parallel worlds, and create a tear in Prime Reality where the manifolds previously stood that would allow the Anathema to invade.

Needless to say, the PCs quickly decided that somebody needed to do something- and there didn't seem to be anyone but them capable of this.

[Tantavalist]

The Nexus - the "Shock and Awe"

The Manifold Nexus- later dubbed the Shock and Awe by the players, due to the effect it's appearance anywhere on Earth typically has- is the group HQ.

When I stated I was going to use the Authority as an inspiration for my campaign, the first question asked was "Does that mean we get to have the Carrier as out base?" The reply was, of course, "As long as someone spends the points".

The basic form is of two large cylinders joined by a smaller cylinder in between. The central area is fifty kilometres long and twenty in diameter, and forms the Starship component of the base. It is also the only part of the Nexus visible from the outside, the two larger cylinders existing in extra-dimensional pockets. The larger portions are fifty kilometres in diameter and over three hundred kilometres long. Both are hollow and have a full ecosystem existing inside, illuminated by a plasma beam that passes along the central axis.

Since no Supers setting is complete without some version of the Savage land, I decided that one of the environments would be a dinosaur-filled jungle and the other would be plains and tundra filled with ancient megamammals such as mammoths and sabretooths.

The Nexus is fully mobile, with gravitic propulsion systems allowing it to fly inside conventional space, and open wormholes that allow it to travel between the layers of the Manifolds and acorss interstellar space in Prime Reality. There is also a personal transport system that allows human-scale wormhole gates to be opened to anywhere on a planet the Nexus is currently orbiting.

Points and mechanics wise, the ideas were all either easier or harder than I'd though when I sat down to create this thing. On the one hand, the vast scale of the Nexus was pretty cheap- six points is an Awesome size, so I spent eight. Then, the extra-dimensional environments were taken care of with Grounds and Dual Size.

The Portal system though... Even with the Effects HQ feature making things cheaper, the expense of being able to open portals to anywhere accurately is a steep one. I ended up taking Extended, Easy and Limited to Extended to go with the Portal and Accurate traits. This gave far too high a cost to have the other features as well- but the player wanted the Portals.

My brainwave came when I considered the Variable power. I first considered just having all the features as Variable. After deciding this was too much paperwork, I decided to take several levels of Effect as Variable: Limited to Enhance: Existing Effect. This was designated as "Reserve Power" that could be assigned to whatever system the players wanted to use at any given time, thus giving the RP features they wanted while occasionally forcing them to make a snap decision about which they needed most at any given time.

[Tantavalist]

Second Session

As they came to terms with the revelations about the true nature of Earth and the rest of the universe, several ominous-sounding alarms began to sound. The Brotherhood of the Sundered Seal had succeeded in destabilising the Manifolds by accessing the reality-engines of the Manifold Nexus directly. All across the ship, and down on Earth, rifts were starting to form and the less powerful forms of Anathema- the semi-intelligence amorphous beasts known as Darkspawn- began to pour through.

They decided that the first task would be to secure the Nexus and prevent matters from getting any worse. Using the portal system, they began moving rapidly from one trouble hotspot to another, wiping out whatever they found there and then leaving the ship's drone servitors to clean up. The human soldiers were dealt with easily enough, posing little threat to the powerful beings they had become- most were taken to the extensive brig after capture and held until the PCs had a chance to decide what to do about them. A greater challenge was posed by the mages of the Brotherhood, who formed circles of power to combine their magic, and the hordes of Darkspawn that poured out of the rifts.

((As a note- I use the "One against Many" rules from the 2nd Edition sourcebook Above and Beyond for mass combat. Essentially, a low Power level character is given bonuses to attack/damage/toughness when fighting as a group based on how big that group is. It's a simple and effective way to simulate powerful beings facing a horde of weaker attackers.))

The Darkspawn proved especially difficult because it was hard to make them truly die (giving a horde of weak opponents the Immortality power is something players will learn to hate). Learning that despite being defeated, they could re-form from even the smallest particle of their alien matter, Hawkins ordered the Nexus to travel by Wormhole to the edge of the Sun, and then used the Drones to fling the defeated Darkspawn into it. I ruled that this was likely sufficient to finish them, but would be time-consuming.

Returning to the Command Centre, they started to interrogate the AI about what precisely caused the rifts and how they could be sealed. An option was given which they didn't really understand, but with the situation become more and more dire, Hawkins ordered it to be carried out regardless.

The current layer of the Manifolds was shifted in alignment until it rested in Prime Reality. Then, to stabilise things, the layer was fused to Prime Reality, meaning that the alignment of the Manifolds could no longer be altered.

The rifts were sealed. But now, the PCs Earth was sitting accessible and exposed to the rest of the galaxy.

The PCs had to leave that concern for another day, though. As they watched the eight-minutes-old news broadcasts from Earth, they learned that New York was under heavy attack from the Darkspawn, and that something else was happening over on Manhattan.

A giant rift had failed to seal with the rest, held open by the giant black tower that was emerging slowly from it- an artefact of the Anathema being pushed into this dimension. Darkspawn poured out of the rift, both the lesser ones they'd fought already and Greater Darkspawn, larger, more powerful, more intelligent and possessed of magical power. And above, hovering at the peak of the tower, was the one behind this- an Anathema who had been successfully embodied into a human host.

With Winthrop having reverted to a feral state during the battle and needing to be confined, Hawkins and Nigrido travelled by Portal to New York by themselves to do battle with this threat.

By the time they arrived, US troops had already mobilised in the city- though they were having limited effect against the Darkspawn. Seeing that the soldiers could defeat lesser Darkspawn if they were in small numbers, the PCs decided to quickly eliminate some of the larger concentrations of Darkspawn along with any Greater Darkspawn they encountered in the city, then leave the troops to hold the line while they attacked the tower.

They were very effective at eliminating these threats. Hawkins did learn some important lessons about high-level supers combat, though. When using flight 14- 32,000 MPH- to fly at full speed through a city, use some field effect to dampen the environmental damage (the Subtle flight extra was his first XP purchase). And when throwing around plasma blasts so powerful that Superman could be taken out by them, don't fly over the target, fire down and then miss- especially not in a populated area.

After this, the PCs approached the Tower, and the first real, high-level Supervillain of the series. Being a classic Dark Cult that respected tradition, the Brotherhood of the Sundered Seal had offered up a beautiful young woman as the ritual sacrifice, not entirely grasping how the Embodiment of the Dark Master would work. So now, the stunning dark-haired girl floated above New York with bottomless pits of darkness where her eyes should be and alien words on her tongue.

The Eldritch flew down to confront them.

The battle began as a standard I-attack-they-attack dice-rolling affair. But soon, the PCs grasped that creative attacks got them small bonuses that might make all the difference against an opponent of a higher Power Level than them. After several rounds of being thrown about the city, smashed through buildings, and burning their Hero Points to recover from being incapacitated by the Eldritch's magical might, they realised that a long-term battle was never going to go their way. Only one of the two heroes could fly, which meant that on many rounds Hawkins was fighting alone against a stronger opponent.

The players decided to risk everything on an all-or-nothing attack. Spending the last Hero point, Nigrido used her psionic powers and godlike combat prowess to make contact with Hawkin's mind and guide his attacks to the weakest spot the Eldritch had (power stunt- Enhance, Affects only others, Nullify Protection). Then Hawkins flew away to build up speed for a full-on charge attack with Power Attack maxed.

Fortunately Hawkins was able to use his Luck Control and remaining Luck points to ensure that he hit, and that by forcing the Eldritch to re-roll Nullified her Protection. Lacking that, the attack managed to Incapacitate the Eldritch. With an inhuman scream, she vanished into a spinning vortex of darkness- and the Tower sank back into the Rift, which closed behind it.

After this, it was merely a matter of clearing things up. Hawkins confronted his old bosses in the CIA and told them that he was through taking orders and would definitely not be turning the Nexus over to the US Government. Using the comms array, he made a broadcast to the world stating what had just happened so that it wouldn't be just media spin-doctors giving their version of events. And the PCs travelled across the world, clearing out any remaining Darkspawn for disposal.

One major revelation once the PCs had time to take stock of their new home was how much was missing. While the PCs were being empowered- by a badly-phrased command to the AI, it had turned out- someone had managed to use the Portal network to scatter a great deal of the Nexus' technology across the surface of Earth. Especially worrying was the Quantech systems, which would simply bond to an appropriate user and then give them whatever abilities the devices were constructed for.

The PCs therefore lacked a great deal of what they would need to empower other supers- and all across the planet, people would start discovering new abilities or finding strange and wondrous devices.

The age of the Superhumans had begun.

[Tantavalist]

Third Session

It was three months after the Earth had been taken from a safely isolated pocket-dimension and thrust back into the larger and infinitely more dangerous real universe. The PCs had spent the time since then living aboard the Nexus. The ship had full access to Earth's media, luxurious private living areas and nanofabrication facilities which could create almost anything they could imagine. The limitations of these had already been encountered, though. The ability to create devices employing the principles of Quantech had been lost, meaning that the superpowered quantum-manipulation devices currently scattered across the Earth couldn't be re-created.

There was cause for concern in the fact that analysis of what the Nexus' sensors had recorded of the Eldritch's defeat suggested that she had managed to escape into another layer of the manifold. Somewhere in the various parallels, she was doubtless slowly recovering her strength and plotting to re-establish the Brotherhood of the Sundered Seals.

The fact that Earth was not the original one, or that they now stood exposed to the galaxy had been withheld by the PCs when they explained everything. Of course, since the pocket universe had been a light-year in diameter, six months after the emergence the sky would suddenly appear different as the light coming from the real stars reached Earth. But with three of those months gone, the PCs were still planning to leave it until closer to the time- mostly due to concerns that a panicked world population might take a Shoot the Messenger view and feel they were to blame somehow.

The various governments and other power blocs were coming to terms with the changed world. Laws regarding superhumans and attempts to recruit or otherwise control them and the ultra-tech artefacts turning up were the order of the day. The USA had already wheeled out it's first government-sponsored Superteam, mainly as a PR measure to try and assure their citizens that they could keep control in this new paradigm.

Having worked out how to fuse a Quantech power core to a human host, who then gained the ability to project and manipulate energies on a large scale, the three dozen members were dubbed the Starfire Squadron, from the blindingly bright plasma fields that surrounded them when they employed their powers. Accessing the Nexus records on the power cores, the PCs estimated that while no individual member was a threat to them, the Sqaudron as a whole could very well pose a threat.

Finally deciding to attempt something pro-active, rather than exploring the Nexus and watching the events unfolding on Earth, the PCs held a council and decided that they should begin exploring and cataloguing the various alternate Earths. If nothing else, the Eldritch was somewhere out there, and looking for signs of her activity would be preferable to waiting for her to finish recovering and come after them.


Exploring the Manifolds

Very little data was available on the layers of the manifold- it seemed that large portions of the Nexus archives had been sealed, and the command authority Hawkins possessed wasn't high enough to access them. Any knowledge on the alternate Earths would have to be gathered first hand.

The initial explorations were a definite learning process.

When the Nexus emerged from a wormhole into the first layer they picked to explore, it found a complete absence of electromagnetic emissions, suggesting a pre-industrial world. Moving into orbit, scans of the surface showed this to be the case- this world appeared to be a match for some point in the 17th century of their own history.

Perhaps unwisely, they decided that not having anything to fear from the locals they would simply drop right in and say hello.

Emerging from the portal in the middle of London, they quickly placed the year- the red crosses daubed everywhere and scrawled pleas that the "Lord have mercy on our souls" meant 1665. The populace, in the midst of this poorly-understood cataclysm during a century known for religious unrest, predictably reacted with hysterical violence.

Rather than simply slaughter the locals they simply fled through the portal. Paranoia at the possibility of contracting the Plague had Nigrido going straight to the medbay.

((Lessons learned- be more subtle unless you want to cause a panic, and spend points on Immunity: Disease some time soon.))

The second world to be explored was emitting radio signals and other signs of industrialisation on the same levels as Earth Prime (as the PCs decided to call their home). Analysis of the broadcasts soon showed notable deviations in the ratios of which languages were being spoken on the airwaves. Accessing this world's version of the internet by tapping into communication satellites, they found the relevant history.

This world was at the same point in time as Earth Prime, but had a divergent history- specifically, the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte was never defeated here and Europe was united under a French commonwealth nominally headed by Emperor Napoleon VIII.

They visited the world in person- appearing in an isolated area this time- but soon found that a developed world can be hard to simply walk into with no money, records or identification. They managed to steal samples of local currency and make plans for a standard protocol to set up identities and resources on such a world if they wanted to visit quietly.

The third layer visited was lacking in visible signs of technology just as the first one. Examination from orbit led to them identifying it as being equivalent to Earth Prime circa 200 AD, with the Roman Empire at the peak of it's power.

Deciding that they had to at least visit Rome, they appeared wearing several miles outside the city. They wore vaguely appropriate clothing and had gold and silver coinage copied from historical records all made from the fabricators.

The one thing they hadn't considered was that none of them spoke Latin. And that a female with the Attractive advantage wasn't going to walk past a group of bored gate sentries without being remarked on.

Deciding that this group looked suspicious and needed to be searched- the excuse to pester Nigrido- the incident quickly spiralled out of control due to the PCs not being able to understand what was being said or answer questions. Deciding to skip to the end rather than wait for things to keep escalating, Nigrido diabled the guards and the PCs escaped back to the Nexus.

((Lesson learned: 'We need Universal Translators!' Which is to say, they added Comprehend: Languages to the list of needed purchases.))

The discovery in the next system was to cut short any thoughts of quietly exploring the manifolds.


The Dead Suns

Emerging into the fourth pocket universe, the ship's sensors immediately detected that things were very, very wrong. There was zero radiant emissions from anywhere, forcing the AI to extrapolate using gravitic sensors what was happening. Eventually, a frightening picture emerged.

The sun was a dead cinder. While all of its mass appeared to still be present, all energy- even down to the sub-atomic level- had been drained from it, causing it to collapse into neutronium. The gravitational stresses caused by this had destroyed all other stellar bodies in the system, leaving only bands of gas and debris circling the former star.

The exception was the Earth. Somehow it had been protected from the fate of the other planets, and was intact. The atmosphere had frozen onto the ground with no sunlight, and examination of populated areas suggested they had been devastated and most of the inhabitants killed long before the dying sun finished whatever life was left. And all across the planet, the largest mountains had been carved into titanic monuments, statues of human-like but clearly inhuman beings regarding the dead world with expressions of malevolent glee.

On finding the dead system, the PCs abandoned the idea of slowly examining each layer of the manifold and began jumping quickly between them as they sought some clue as to what had transpired. After several jumps, they found another dead system, identical to the first apart from how long ago the destruction had occurred. A third dead system a few jumps later confirmed their fears.

Something was travelling through the layers of the manifold, consuming the stars while torturing the Earth to death for their amusement.

With three dead systems located, they began trying to calculate if there was a known path that the Sun-Eater was taking through the worlds. They soon located more dead systems, confirming they had picked up the trail. After cautiously advancing from system to system, opening their wormholes out in the Kuiper belt to escape detection from the inner system then scanning for anything significant, they found what they had been tracking.

The Sun-Eater was composed of exotic matter, the size of one of Mars' moons but with far greater mass. They had difficulty learning much about it using only passive scans at a range of several light-minutes, but it seemed that most of it was some massive machine, with a vast city circling a band around the middle.

There were also hundreds of smaller ships swarming about it, each only a couple of kilometres long compared to the nation-sized main ship. Many were forming a ring around the Sun, slowly siphoning off the energy while the main ship rested in the Earth-Sun Lagrange point. But others seemed to be around the Earth.

After much argument, it was decided that they needed to learn more. The Nexus began moving closer, and using more intensive scans. They were able to deduce that the attack on Earth seemed to serve no purpose beyond amusement, but little else- before they used active scanning and alerted the Sun-Eaters to their presence.

One of the smaller ships emerged from a wormhole close by, and commenced scanning them. Not waiting for reinforcements, they jumped to another layer, then made several rapid jumps to try and shake off pursuit. Finally they returned to Earth Prime to start thinking about what could be done about this new threat.

They would have to think quickly. Minutes after their return, a wormhole opened up nearby and one of the smaller ships emerged into Earth-Prime's orbit. It seemed that they didn't know enough about dimensional travel to successfully shake off pursuit, and now they had led the Sun-Eaters to their own doorstep.

[Tantavalist]

Fourth Session

A quick scan of the ship at close range showed that it was two kilometres long, consisting of three long spikes of exotic matter held in a parallel triangular pattern. At the mid-point of the spikes was a tangles nest of exotic matter strands which held them together and also seemed to be the inhabited section. Hawkins decided that they couldn't risk what was clearly a scout ship reporting anything it might find to the rest of the Sun-Eaters. He ordered the Nexus to bring its weapon systems online and immediately moved to attack.

With a complete lack of familiarity with both ultra-tech space battles and the weaponry the Nexus was fitted with, this did not go well.

They found plasma weapon banks and proceeded to fire them repeatedly. Unfortunately the exotic matter the ship was constructed from seemed to not even notice the hits. The return attacks were psionic in nature, mental assaults clearly intended to disable the occupants and let the Nexus be boarded. Hawkins, with the lowest Will save, was Incapacitated- he managed to gasp that the AI should "Get us out of here!" before blacking out.

A wormhole was formed, but not without difficulty. The enemy ship began trying to de-stabilise the wormhole as the Nexus passed through it. They finally succeeded in retreating to the relative safety of the Kuiper belt while the ship engaged it's self-repair systems to recover from the damage inflicted by the unstable wormhole passage.


Regrouping

Hawkins recovered in the medbay as the PCs discussed what had happened and what was to be done. The fact that they knew so little about the principles that governed the technology of their own ship and other starfaring races was a worrying one. Fortunately, a solution was at hand.

A number of other people had been taken into the enhancement pods that had upgraded Hawkins and Nigrido during the initial discovering of the Nexus. Hawkins had ordered all of these put into suspension until they had a chance to evaluate them all. now, he examined the occupants and found one who might be useful.

((OOC this was decided on as a way to introduce new PCs if there didn't seem a logical way for a high Power Level character to join the group at the current point. I had also created a couple of pre-gen characters who were occupying these pods in case we needed a new PC in a hurry.))

-Joe Green: A college student who had been brought to the Nexus with his Professor, who had been grabbed by one of the various Government task forces that had entered the Nexus to try and decipher the alien tech found there. Inside the Enhancement Pod, his brain was re-wired for Quantum Computing and given access to large chunks of the Nexus databanks.
((The player likes to play Techie/Gadget characters, so used the Gadgeteer archetype. With a +40 total in both Technology and Expertise: Science there won't be many technological mysteries he can't overcome. His main Gadget is an "Effector", a concept stolen from the Culture series which mostly resembles a Green Lantern ring in terms of capability.))

The ship repaired itself, new tactics were discussed, the somewhat shocked Green was brought up to speed- and then Hawkins ordered the Nexus to return to Earth.


Round Two

Emerging into orbit, a brief scan of the news broadcasts showed that the enemy ship had moved close to Earth, and was now hovering a kilometre above Cairo. Humanoid being and strange war machines had emerged and seemed to be simply toying with the city's inhabitants, and casually destroying whatever local military showed up to try and fight them.

The last space battle hadn't gone well for the PCs, and regardless of who won the ship being above a large city meant that the civilian casualties would be high. The decision was taken that they would simply use the Portals to board the enemy ship and capture it from within, hoping that those attacking Cairo would return to defend the vessel.

The PCs emerged inside the inhabited section of the ship. Inside, everything seemed to be a glowing, ethereal white with patterns traced in pastel across the walls and furniture. There were no edges or angles, everything seeming to be curved and organic in shape despite being clearly inorganic in composition. Strange music could be heard, and the occasional plinth or alcove held disturbingly-proportioned but undeniably beautiful sculptures.

And looking in shock at the PCs were the aliens themselves. Milk-white skin and hair with glowing white eyes, their bodies tall, slender and graceful. They wore translucent robes streaked with pastel and silvery jewellry, and their long white hair also had streak of subtle colour and silvery beads and ornaments.

Cries of alarm soon followed, as the aliens scattered. Moments later, armed warriors arrived- dressed in intricately-patterned silver armour and bearing rods that burned with white fire at each tip, with floating metal pillars accompanying them. The boarding action began.

The power rods proved able to channel energy into a number of different effects, and the pillars were soon revealed as power boosters that increased the power of any nearby warriors. And the warriors were led by elite fighters who each had several of the pillars focused on them, and who proved a problem even for the combat-capable PCs.

They planned to find the control centre for the ship as quickly as possible, and seize it. To search more quickly they split into two groups, since a lone PC could have been overwhelmed too easily. Eventually they found the chamber at the heart of the vessel, where three females stood at the heart of the ship encased in a power bubble. They threw several powerful psionic attacks at the PCs which exhausted several PCs of Hero points before they were able to pierce the bubbel and Green managed to shut the ship systems down. Deprived of the ship's internal defences, the battle quickly began to turn in the PCs favour. Not too soon either, as Green and Nigrido were besieged in the Control Centre, Winthrop had been dispersed into shreds of sorcerous vapour by concentrated fire (Incapacitated) and Hawkins had taken the fight outside the ship to draw away several Elites and was fighting the warriors in the sky above Cairo.

It was therefore Hawkins who saw that the ship, being shut down, was starting to drop slowly toward the city below. Realising this would destroy it and the civilians who lived there, he ordered the Nexus to catch it in its Gravity Beams. The ship was up in orbit- too far away to use them- and would have taken ten minute to fly there. Hawkins ordered that the Nexus open a wormhole, and overrode all the responses stating the dangers of doing this inside the gravity well and atmosphere of a planet.

A lucky dice roll meant that the Nexus only had its wormhole generators temporarily disabled and minor damage inflicted to other systems from the stress of opening a wormhole so close to a massive stellar body. The effects of the wormhole itself were of more concern- a 30km diamater hole leading to hard vacuum opened in the sky for 20 seconds meant there was an immediate hurricane wind blasting through it. The duration wasn't nearly long enough to affect the Earth's atmospheric pressure significantly, but apart from the immediate sandstorm all around, weather patterns would be disrupted across the Middle East and North Africa for the next few years.

The Nexus was able to stop the fall of the ship, though, and began taking it back up into orbit. Since it's impact would likely have caused just as much environmental damage and a much higher loss of human life, the PCs considered it an overall success.

The ship was soon secured and the three females commanding it taken to the Brig in the Nexus- the other aliens having been consumed by a ravenous Winthrop after he regained some semblance of a coherent form.


The Vaudanagh

Taking the ships to the L* point past the dark side of the moon, the PCs began to study it and to interrogate the three prisoners. Having players with superhuman scores in Technology and Intimidate, both proved very straightforward.

The Sun-Eaters called themselves the Vaudanagh. They were one of the first races who had taken advantage of the collapse of the Hegemony to begin making war on their neighbours. It seemed that they craved stimulation and excitement to such a degree that, combined with their ageless status, they eventually found that only extreme forms of entertainment- such as a real War- could amuse them. Being one of the first aggressors in the Fall, and having such a motivation for it, an alliance quickly formed against them. After devastating a thousand worlds, their own worlds were shattered and the remainder of their race sent fleeing across the galaxy as hunted pariahs.

This band- possible the last remnant of the Vaudanagh race for all they knew- discovered the existence of the Manifolds and perceived that it could save them. They entered and seized control, then closed it behind them. They brought their Seed-Ship with them, the massive planetoid-ship they had seen. This contained the entire Vaudanagh civilisation, preserved as a virtual simulation possessed of full sapience inside the exotic matter substrates.

The Vaudanagh possessed the technology to transform such recorded beings and objects into reality, but needed massive amounts of energy to do so. They therefore planned to hide inside the Manifold, slowly consuming the stars one by one. Then they would emerge, into a ruined Hegemony that had doubtless long forgotten them, and re-create their fleets from the stored power of thousands of stars to begin their conquests again. In the meantime, the primitive beast-things that inhabited the Manifolds would provide some limited sport...

But those who had created the Manifolds foiled them at the last. They seized back control of the Nexus and managed to take it to a random layer of the Manifold. This would foil the Vaudanagh for a time, meaning they couldn't escape to the Prime Universe again. But somehow whatever further plans they had came to nothing- the Nexus was left orbiting the PCs home Earth, where it would have been found eventually, and the creators of the Manifolds disappeared. At least some were trapped on Earth in exile, though, since it transpired that Hawkins was the descendent of one of the old Command Staff and still had the genetic marker identifying him as such, thus explaining why the Nexus acknowledged his command.

But now the Vaudanagh knew that the Nexus was active again, and the route back to the Prime Reality open again. They would return to Prime Earth soon, and in even greater numbers.