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Player's BatCaves?

S

savage

SOC-14 1K
I came across this cheap, cool, location. Then wondered how many others are there. Everyone knows about missile silo's for sale but...
http://io9.com/5914293/bond-villain-yard-sale-secret-mountainside-submarine-base-only-175-million

Batman's hangouts:
http://batman.wikia.com/wiki/Bats_Cave

Here are 4000+ real Mancave photos that people have created. Some are cool.
http://www.houzz.com/man-cave

My players took over a space port construction facility and started fixing and building ships. I've been in other campaigns where that has occurred.
I had one NPC living in his trashed/crashed Safari ship on the mountain side.


What Player Caves have you and your groups come up with?
 
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The players are currently using the interior spaces of a derelict heavy cruiser hull that was scavenged and abandoned, along with the rest of the wreckage in the system, by the Imperial Navy after the last war 20 years ago IMTU. The entire system is a Red Zone and regularly patrolled by picket boats and light destroyers as a serious hazard to navigation, not to mention the gold mine of scavenging potential. But it is also a war memorial and so visits are regulated.

The players have the crew of one picket bribed to look the other way when they jump in and out of the system out near the 6th of the 8 planets in it. Two heavy cruisers collided and are in a slow spin around the axis of their collision point which provides 2/3G inside one of them where the drives and hangar bays were scoured out. The other hull gives off too much radiation to be liveable inside for more than a short time, but that means it's harder for sensors to pick up movement near it. The players have to make some good rolls with their piloting skill to go in and out of the ship they use.

The players accordingly have enough room to hide (and patch up if needs be) their 400 ton ship. There is also plenty of room for supplies, living quarters, etc.. It's not where they regularly hang out - but it is a hidey-hole for them to run to if they need one.
 
Heavy Hangout

Great batcave.

Did they fix it up so it was partially operable? Or leave it as expendable?

Which type of cruiser?
 
savage said:
Great batcave.

Did they fix it up so it was partially operable? Or leave it as expendable?

Which type of cruiser?
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They are a couple of heavy 80kt cruisers from my non-OTU game. One an enemy cruiser and the other a friendly. Neither is operational - the salvage teams just cleaned out what they could and left them that way. Since the system used to hold the largest depot in that section of the "front" during the war, and was the last stand of the Confederation Marines and Navy against the final push of the alien empire (yes, very space opera), and the battle lasted a week while forces from both sides kept jumping in to reinforce each other the whole place is now a gigantic war memorial. The (formerly the Terran Confederation) Terran Empire - the victors - salvaged what they could, placed memorial markers and beacons to allow for visitors (closely escorted) to safely navigate through and pay respects. It is like a system-wide Truk Lagoon.

So the players just left the cruiser they are using alone and did what work they needed to to allow it to hold atmosphere and when their ship is there they use it for power, otherwise they have small generators to keep everything from freezing when they leave. Since the enemy ship is radiating hot rads from it's engineering section the small amount of power that escapes form the heavy armor of the ship the player's are living in is lost in the fuzz. The only risk, is that they can't dare to use active scanning to make their way to their hidey hole, or in and out of the system - they have to make their rolls to navigate, then pilot their way through a safe corridor of debris and hulks until they can dock or jump out without getting caught.

The picket boat crew they have bribed looks the other way, but they aren't always where the players need them to be - they have a schedule for the patrols, but there have been some close calls when they needed to run to ground and lick their wounds...and their buddies weren't on patrol when they jumped in that day due to the rotation.

The cruiser is left dead, but that's the point: if signs of life started to show up - even if they could get the two ships separated, etc.., then all heck would break loose with the Navy guys keeping watch over the Arlington Cemetery-Truk Lagoon of my campaign. There is no particular memorial attached to this ship, either - its just one of the hundreds of ships like it that played a minor part along the edges of the major fight centered around control of the Naval Depot and the two gas giants. There are 250kt carriers and 150kt battleships adrift around that area and those are what the tourists, under escort, want to see anyway...not a couple of anonymous hulks welded together by their collision and several days away form the tiny area the Navy lets people see.
 
Truk Lagoon

Awesome... well thought out. In a campaign i was in we recovered and restored a similar vessel for special, noble sanctioned projects. Essentially corporate support of naval fleets.

Anyone else want to share Bat Caves for your heroes?
 
You know, I can't think of any player group - or my characters in other GM's games - who had a bat cave. There were a couple who installed priest-holes in their ship, but mainly if they had a ship it was their bat cave, and if they had no ship they were usually too busy chasing someone or being chased by someone to bother with a bat cave.
 
hang out

Icosahedron said:
You know, I can't think of any player group - or my characters in other GM's games - who had a bat cave. There were a couple who installed priest-holes in their ship, but mainly if they had a ship it was their bat cave, and if they had no ship they were usually too busy chasing someone or being chased by someone to bother with a bat cave.
Click to expand...

Campaign length and recurring story maturity might be part of the reason. Some refs like to explain down time or places to get together with a location.
I am surprised that no one mentioned the local starport bar where they'd meet and hang out or store stuff. Yep most have ships but what about when they have multiple ships... etc.
 
savage said:
Campaign length and recurring story maturity might be part of the reason. Some refs like to explain down time or places to get together with a location.
Click to expand...

The main catch with player hideouts in Trav, is that the nature of Jump drive makes hideouts somewhat useless.

With 'go anywhere instantly' drives (SW hyperdrive) it doesn't matter if your secret lair is on the other side of the sector, you just spin it up an *bamf* you're there, and Alfred is waiting to fill up the tank and polish your shoes. J-drive however takes a week and (in most PC cases) can manage 2-3 parsecs, not to mention J-space itself is an impenetrable hideout. Permanent hideouts are only useful if the PC's are restricted to a smallish area - say a subsector or even a single system.

Of course, PC's can have 'quasi' hidey holes around the place. A noble in the Arglebargle system owes them a favour, a Belter refinery who doesn’t ask questions, or even some people in Startown they helped out once. But most of these are ad-hoc hideouts and not permanent.

I am surprised that no one mentioned the local starport bar where they'd meet and hang out or store stuff. Yep most have ships but what about when they have multiple ships... etc.
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Well, I wouldn't call them "bat caves" as opposed to meeting points.

That being said - busy starports are another good place for a quasi hideout. Slip some credits to the right people and you ship 'administratively' disappears among hundreds of others. And if you have several ships you play a shell game, where you switch ship names and mix them up with the starport traffic - "Which is the PC's ship? That Beowulf which just left - was it the PC's or a decoy?"
 
Lycanorukke said:
The main catch with player hideouts in Trav, is that the nature of Jump drive makes hideouts somewhat useless.
Click to expand...

Despite what the name of the game implies, it's perfectly possible to run a Traveller campaign where PCs stay mostly or even exclusively on one world.

The Regina Startown Campaign, the beginner's campaign that John G. wood, Mark Gellis, and I wrote and had published on JTAS Online, took place mostly in Regina Startown, with one short jaunt to Ruie and a visit to another part of Regina. A campaign I ran some years back had the PCs all work as troubleshooters for Oberlindes Lines, being sent to Ruie, Forboldn, Knorbes, and elsewhere, but alway returning to Atora (capital of the Duchy of Regina where Oberlindes HQ was located) and also having several missions on Regina itself.

Admittedly, in neither case did the PCs have a batcave. But they could have had one if they'd wanted one.


Hans
 
campaign types

Two interesting viewpoints. It depends on the gaming group. If money was hard to come by it was unlikely the need for a Batcave would occur. In Firefly, they we're beginning to develop places they returned too regularly as a matter of clients.
The Imperium is 11,000 systems plus client states and foreign powers. Managing a "traveling" campaign is possible but can be paperwork intense. There was never enough maturity to the visiting worlds to make an easy ref approach to continuing...on and on. Unless you're a college/high school student of course with excess time.

Travellers Aid Society (TAS) is the built-in, game OTU, BATCAVE. Reminding us of times when British clubs pondered adventure, world travel and jobs.

All that being said, most of the campaigns i ran/participated in attempted to stay within smaller confines. Reasonable areas for Ref management...
 
In a spoke and hub style campaign, the players could easily have a batcave. Players who are active duty in any service will have a batcave too.
 
Lycanorukke said:
The main catch with player hideouts in Trav, is that the nature of Jump drive makes hideouts somewhat useless.

With 'go anywhere instantly' drives (SW hyperdrive) it doesn't matter if your secret lair is on the other side of the sector, you just spin it up an *bamf* you're there, and Alfred is waiting to fill up the tank and polish your shoes. J-drive however takes a week and (in most PC cases) can manage 2-3 parsecs, not to mention J-space itself is an impenetrable hideout. Permanent hideouts are only useful if the PC's are restricted to a smallish area - say a subsector or even a single system.

"
Click to expand...

I disagree - while the nature of the jump drive mechanics makes it possible to stay a week ahead of your enemy it also narrows the places for them to look. If you could just go anywhere at once (like the SW drive) then it would be easier to find a place to hide for a while if you even needed to.

In Traveller the jump drives consume obscene amounts of fuel in a single jump and unless you have an oiler following you around you need to tank up after every jump. So you need jump to a system with a gas giant to skim off of, or with a world you can get water or hydrogen rich ice from. Only so many of those around which is why they are strategic locations for the Navy. And that means, too they might be monitored regularly by the authorities if only to help with traffic as ships come and go to skim.

And if you ship isn't equipped for frontier refueling then your options are even narrower. Only so many Type A and B starports around.

So eventually you will find your options (unless you plan on leaving the subsector behind forever) narrowed enough that the past will catch up with you faster than you might think. If only because you need to hole up in a decent shop long enough to scrape the greeblies out of the intake filters from skimming-jumping-skimming-jumping and all the gas giants within range have giant wanted posters projected next to them.

Having a good place to hide, with spare parts and reserve fuel stored at the very least is a good idea for players skimming around on the raggedy edge of legality. It gives you a place to fuel up, repaint the ship, fiddle with or swap transponders, repair holes and lay up until everyone heals form the last gunfight they got into on yet another planet they might never be able to go back to.
 
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