Decagone Driven to the Maw

I'm running a Classic Traveller campaign right now, and have a medieval tech level planet named Lorien.

The ruler of the planet is a religious dictator, Uzuale. Pontiff Uzuale de Lorien.

My brain went: "Hrm, de Lorien. Delorean. I need a medieval sci-fi time travel adventure."

Not without grand surprise, that subgenre suffers a bit of a dearth in adventures. But the characters, one of whom is a Duke, got invited to the Pontiff's banquet, so I had to get this one in. I adore the Mothership adventure Decagone, by my pal WacoMatrixo. I just needed a D&D-like banquet adventure to run, and the OSR module that popped into my mind was Brad Kerr's Demon Driven to the Maw. 

Now kiss

So you have the "Why?" Now the "How?"

This next bit contains massive spoilers for both modules. Don't read if you want to play either module.

Demon Driven to the Maw is set in a Scottish castle overrun by beautiful, secretly-hooved vampires called Baobhan Sith who have opened a gate to hell so the Devil himself can attend their party where they intend to eat and kill all the villagers for Satan's amusement.

Decagone is a time loop module set on an ocean-floor research base where the crew members are living the same 10 minutes over and over until they stop the experiment doing this to them, or die from exhaustion and stress.

Lorien has a good spaceport on a trace atmosphere, waterless, 60% gravity world, where hundred of millions of people live under a religious dictatorship with medieval technology (i.e. C5108D93).

A big part of the fun in making Classic Traveller work is taking a sentence like that, and forcing it to make sense. How can a medieval society survive on a world with basically no atmosphere or natural water? Well, on Lorien, they live in pressurized cave systems, ancient and massive lava tubes caverns deep underground. The sector at large follows Starseed, a religion based on teachings of The Shepherd for surviving on hostile worlds, so the Pontiff Uzuale de Lorien uses these teaching to motivate the mining industries and "piously" enrich Lorien.

I took the castle from Demon Driven to the Maw, and the time loop mechanic from Decagone. I extended it to 15 minutes because the castle is quite a bit larger than the suboceanic research lab. For the map, I swapped the Hell's Maw for the final two rooms of Decagone, with a secret passage from the Chapel to Decagone's Security Booth. 

Instead of a murder vampire party, the time loop became "The Festivities," which is a Purge-like party where everyone gets assigned a mask, based on Demon Driven to the Maw NPCs:

• Red Caps: ugly man red masks (2-in-6)
• Baobhan Sith: beautiful genderless white masks (1-in-6, on a 3)
• Villagers: stoic male black masks (3-in-6, on 4-6)
• The maskless Baobhan Sith chef was a robot, and I was rolling 2-in-6 chances for other hidden white mask robots 

Why do this though? Well, to rout out the "sinners" and for the Pontiff and his robotic servants to collect information on the nobles and influential of Lorien. I borrowed the shady secret police angle from Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky brothers. There's some basic rules to follow during the Festivities:

• Red mask: Must do what white masks say / provocateurs
• White mask: Must do what black masks say / investigators
• Black mask: Must only speak when spoken to / arbiters
• Anyone rule-breaking or slothful must have their liver removed (i.e. killed)

The loop began with the Pontiff asking everyone to put on their masks, as he was to admit in the workers, commoners, to eat the leftovers from the banquet and join the festivities. This leads to many people not knowing the rules off the bat, including the PCs. 

In Decagone, it's implied the PCs are just out of range of the artifact's effects when the experiment starts charging the artifact. On Lorien, the people know what they're doing, and time the loop accordingly as the Pontiff wishes. The Pontiff also is immune, as are his secretly robotic servants. 

But why were the PCs immune to the loop? Well, a few days earlier, the Traveller's Aid Society came around distributing "vitamin enhanced water" which yeah, had vitamins but also a coppery metal taste of esoteric nanobots that interfere with the time loop device. (Yes, a magic protective potion, I know.) The PCs drank the lightly green water. 

And how to stop the loop in such a big castle filled with such grotesque violence? There were three "tests of faith":

• Fight back heroically upon violent provocation (so that a bot/Pontiff sees it)
• Defeat the Pontiff in the religious debate/card game (i.e. Helal)
• Get past Decagone's laser corridor, into the artifact room.

What I didn't anticipate, and frankly should have, was that one of the players, the Duke, was wearing Reflec armor which is highly effective against laser weaponry. He didn't have any time left though to figure out who the three scientists were, nor what the artifact was.

And since the players may read this, that info will have to wait for another blog post.