Need some Ancient help

[Gray Pennell]

My players are going to end their campaign in some Ancient Ruins chasing down a Zho spy. Now we know the traditional troupes of Ancient Sites of of mountains and pyramids any other suggestions? I am thinking a missile like silo.

 

[Ackehece]

My players are going to end their campaign in some Ancient Ruins chasing down a Zho spy. Now we know the traditional troupes of Ancient Sites of of mountains and pyramids any other suggestions? I am thinking a missile like silo.

hmm something different eh? Try a ancient's greenhouse
glass dome in the middle of a desert with seasons, environmental controls, and 200k+ years of wild plant growth....

 

[far-trader]

A forest? Are those really some kind of alien flora and fauna? Did that flower just wink at me? Is that insect humming the soundtrack from the movie we watched last week?? Wasn't there a boulder there a second ago???

 

[Icosahedron]

Maybe the entire planet is a 'planetoid hull starship' with accommodation on the outside. Of course, the J and M drives are FUBARed and the PP would require antimatter on a currently unfeasible scale anyway, but the scale of the engineering puts the Krell to shame - and a few peripheral backup generators might still be fuelled up...

 

[Gray Pennell]

A forest? Are those really some kind of alien flora and fauna? Did that flower just wink at me? Is that insect humming the soundtrack from the movie we watched last week?? Wasn't there a boulder there a second ago???

I like the green house idea is interesting one. So we have any other ideas?

 

[Ackehece]

1st I myself would go with the greenhouse - avoids potentially adding TU wrecking tech or making your players like they were bait n switched as to the reward they would receive in the mission - no you don't get a TL25 item!
The greenhouse has lots of potential for story telling without universe wrecking...


that said as per your "missile silo"idea. AMPed to ruin the tech level of the TU
THIS IS A SERIOUSLY BROKEN TECH FOR EVEN A TL 15 UNIVERSE....



Large cave - appears natural for the first 150 meters and then very very very slowly changes toward artificiality.
wierd hums and gurgles in the walls of the cave - getting louder as they go further in. - describe in a creepy way
Ooze is slowly dripping out of microscopic holes in the wall.
if they chip at the walls they have a small chance of finding cooling tubes (ultra fine - they appear to be bundles of glass fibers and ooze) or jump plates (metal plates with what appear to be weird swirl of lanthanum on them
the further they go the more unnatural the cave is
if they have a jump engineer in the party they may notice the capacitors built into the wall as potentially jump capacitors
if you have a naval gunner they may notice some similarity in the configuration of the coolers in the wall to meson cannons.

as they go further small things like dead space rats and wierd spider webs start to turn up.
finally after about 25 kilometers of walking (YES IT'S BIG) they reach something that only a scholar in particle physics would recognize (in theory) as a massive anti-gluon generator - something postulated but never successfully built.
in the next room a jump engineer will recognize what appears to be an circular array of 5 Jump 3 drives (at least as far as they can tell) that are 30% smaller than normal ones.
in the final room is a stellar map - but it only shows systems that are up to 15 parsecs away. Nothing works within the room other than the map projection
No other rooms are detected (no power source nothing) even with serious investigation.
if they try to remove the jump generators they all discharge inside the cave and destroy themselves (and anyone unlucky enough to be touching them)
The anti-gluon generator is so huge it will not fit out of the cave without dis assembly but it appears to be monolithic in nature.






--------------------------------

what is it?

A massive disintegrator that uses a jump muzzle to project a planetary destroying attack up to 15 parsecs away


yes jump projectors and disintegrators....

 

[Ackehece]

Ooooh. I had an evil but fun idea. A vacation spa for ancients. It's all decorated in an alien idea of opulence (how ever you want to simulate) to with things like nesting (aka sauna) rooms, natural de-stress (aka pools not hot tubs) rooms. Rejuvenation centers (aka med labs that can rebuild you to optimal specs - make these rooms sound scary) and let them run free.

Lots of hiding spots, lots of mystery, lots of potential room for charge improvement without the fear of creating a imbalance in the world.

 

[MCEvans]

That sounds totally nasty. :devil::devil::devil:

Hook us up with a copy if you flesh it out.

 

[Strummist]

A giant robot "mole" miner/refinery that eats its way through rocks, separates them into it's constituent elements and leaves behind isotopically pure ingots. Some of which could be nastily radioactive, and it's been running a long time without supervision.

There could be a whole mining culture dedicated to finding the "droppings" - but which as yet hasn't found the "mole" - or maybe they don't even know it exists, and don't know why they keep finding these improbably rich mineral deposits.

(the actual physics of this are possible now - basically a huge mass spectrometer or an array of differently-tuned AVLIS devices)

 

[Ackehece]

<snip>
There could be a whole mining culture dedicated to finding the "droppings" - but which as yet hasn't found the "mole" - or maybe they don't even know it exists, and don't know why they keep finding these improbably rich mineral deposits.
<snip>

hmm I like this idea as well...
2 radioactive ingots just below the critical mass.... don't store em together or well you know :rofl: The TL3 indigenous peoples don't know nuclear physics so they have a high metallurgy skill set (Titanium/Steel alloy swords!) but can't figure out why villages sicken and die, or just vanish in a cloud of thunder and fire.

 

[Ackehece]

That sounds totally nasty. :devil::devil::devil:

Hook us up with a copy if you flesh it out.

the spa? If you want

 

[Strummist]

... or just vanish in a cloud of thunder and fire...

Well strictly speaking, that'd be hard to arrange. Fire, yes. Thunder, not so much. But given the fuel, you can have a nuke at steam tech. There's a novel "Queen Victoria's Bomb" that has sub-critical masses on colliding trains (by design, not accident). And steam tech is arguably TL3 or or so (the Romans could have had steam engines if they'd bothered - and if slave power wasn't cheaper).

In a pulp SF universe, sure. Big bang as soon as the lumps are stacked. In real life, you get heating and meltdown.

 

[Ackehece]

True enough. More like sudden sickness for smaller lumps - we have been cursed. For larger lumps fire and meltiness...
It's possible that you would see cultures that would stop developing metal objects if they can't track the sickness to certain types of metals. All metals would be forbidden. They would have proof that metal working and mining is frowned on by the Gods.

 

[Strummist]

Heavy metal poisoning causing low birth weight and other deformities perhaps?

Yes, we have mining dwarves!!

 

[Ackehece]

Heavy metal poisoning causing low birth weight and other deformities perhaps?

Yes, we have mining dwarves!!

Very High Birth Mortality as well...
I think you would have 1 of 3 normal reactions (of course this is my limited human mind)

1) Metals are bad! Avoid Avoid Avoid
2) Metals are God! We are not appeasing them enough! We must use them more!
3) Brilliance! Maybe some of these metals are poisonous and others are not! Lets do SCIENCE! On the people who are still alive.

external interference:

3) Cargo Cult - it was done this way and it is the only way we know so we do it this way going forward - Externals are gods and have shown the correct way to do this.
4) Brilliance! I can advance the technology that those precursors left us!