The Faust Cherubim King 10-704 Space Station

Mothership

This play report is the first session of my Mothership RPG solo campaign, where I build the space station that will serve as a base for the characters.

The campaign started more than a year ago, so I might have forgotten how I made some things, but I have the majority of them documented. I will continue posting the story so far and let’s see if we can catch up with where my characters currently are.

Worldbuilding a space station

Or Faust-C, as the locals say

When I played this session Mothership’s A Pound of Flesh module wasn’t even kickstarted yet, so I couldn’t use its magnificent space station generator, but I had Hulks & Horrors on me an the Dead Planet module. So I managed to hack something up.

  • How does it look like?

    I rolled 12d6 to make the station’s layout, using the idea of the Derelict Ship mapping from Dead Planet. Then, since I wasn’t making a ship I used Hulks & Horror’s Pod Colony Rooms Table to know what each sector was.

    Why didn’t you use H&H’s actual space station generator and that’s it? Well, because it had a very micro-view and I was looking for the macro. Each die in the station layout is going to be massive sector, and I was looking for the main point of interest of that sector, at this point of the solo-play campaign it doesn’t make any sense to me to fill all the details. The Pod Colony Rooms table just gave me the small brush-stroke that I wanted.

    So I roll 1d12 for each die and I got:

    • Weapon’s locker: this makes no sense, so it would be the overall station security sector, where station security barracks and training facilities are.
    • Engineering: internal systems, so these people are in charge of fixing everything that happens inside the space station (see below for the other engineering).
    • Galley: this makes no sense, so in the space station this would be the restaurants area and where the food processing facilities are.
    • Containment: prison (the Freezer), this gave me an idea with is developed below. There might be also research areas where some kind of containment is needed.
    • Market square: where you buy stuff, from food to weapons, drugs, ships, clothes, maps, the water recycler for your room etc.
    • Quarters: massive residential blocks.
    • Control room: where the life support systems, artificial gravity, telecommunications and all the systems that control the space station are.
    • Entertainment: entertainment district, bars, virtual reality asteroid-golf experiences…
    • Storage: maybe you can rent storage rooms with different m³ and store anything here, no questions asked, but it is very expensive.
    • Shuttle bay: docks and dry docks, anything related to ships.
    • Entertainment: another entertainment district, this one with more shady businesses.
    • Engineering: external systems, these ones do space-walking and sometimes support the engineers from the docks.

  • How is it?

    Using Augmented Reality’s Expanded building features: High tech equipment, Self sufficient and Well guarded.

  • What is the purpose of the station?

    Using Augmented Reality’s The games corporates Play and Ways and means: Target undesirables and Mercenary Contractors.

  • Who runs it?

    Using Augmented Reality’s Corporate aristocrats table I got: Adam Hamilton, once a spy for an ecoterrorist commune.

  • How is it named?

    Using Dead Planet’s 3d10 Ship Name Generator: Faust Cherubim King 10-707

    The numbers at the end of the name were my rolls: 10-7-4 and I added some zeroes there because it looked cooler that way.

Putting it all together

Year 4072, the humanity has broken the terrestrial atmosphere’s barrier and has established in all the corners of space. One of these settlements is the FAUST CHERUBIM KING 10-704 space station, commanded by Adam Hamilton, which at the beginning of the year 4000 made a living by spying for the ecoterrorist communes.

I didn’t want to fill any more details about this NPC right now.

Faust-C, as it’s commonly known, is the source of both envy and admiration of many other space stations that conduct dishonest businesses. The whole space station is out in the open about it and it is its main source of income, in contrast to other places where it is known that a shady underworld exists, and you can definitely hire mercenaries and buy extremely dangerous and illegal merchandise, but you have to do it with caution and pay extra credit to the information brokers to set you up with the right people.

Faust-C was able to rise as the place to go for hiring mercenaries, buying merchandise and installing illegal military mods due to the high level contacts that Hamilton made during the years, which at the end of the day, happened to had a problem that needed fixing. The station is heavily guarded by military subcontractors and as any other station, is self sufficient.

The economy of the station does not differ from any other, in fact, due to the black businesses being welcomed, it is thriving. Apart from the assassination, kidnapping, thieving and other high rate services that many unions offer, the station needs haulers to mine nearby asteroids for resources and depends on trading with other outposts to get many other things. So, normal jobs as security guards, engineers, noodle shop stall managers, janitors and space traffic controllers also exist.

Among the streets of the station a controlled chaos reigns governed by the constant threat that the Freezer exerts. Faust-C has a whole sector dedicated to this massive prison-shop, where people that piss off others so much and become a problem to the station’s stability itself are stored. Depending on the “crime” you can expect to wake up from the cryosleep pods in a couple of months, years, or not wake up at all. Moreover if you’re lucky to wake up, don’t expect to be the same, since, well, you become merchandise and the station can make good credit selling your lungs to a now retired gas giant miner.

Books and tools mentioned in this post

Books and tools (DriveThruRPG links, some affiliated):