Moon's Haunted

The strange phenomenon in the sky of Nocturne.

**Moon's Haunted** was a campaign that took place on Nocturne and Kamens in 396 A.U..

## Background

During the First Coalition War, a few months after the signing of the 2nd Treaty of Korinth, ATC ships patrolled Celestial Space. On one occasion, a cruiser returning to the Pin Jump on the way from liaison in Sigvald's Domain was forced to take maneuvers to avoid an inexplicably panicking pod of void whales, far outside their usual territory. In the process, the ship incidentally discovered a very weak etheric gate, nearly un-findable unless right on top of it.Upon investigation, the ATC found a pocket dimension containing a bi-planetary system.

Scans told of population centers, though fairly primitive, on one planet. And on the other, no apparent inhabitants, but spectacular, vast quantities of quicksilver as well as the wrecks of many ships. The ATC also found that etherics worked less effectively upon entering the system, though minutely so. The ATC made first contact with the inhabitants of the former planet, Nocturne, so named for its longer night cycles, a result of the etheric phenomenon. The ATC learned that the Nocturnals are essentially a hodgepodge of stranded and exiled Celestials who came together to create a settlement over time; though they were aware of the the value of the other planet, Kamens, they lacked the technology to reliably reach and further extract anything from it. The ATC made a deal with Nocturnal leaders to do all the labor in extracting and selling the quicksilver of Kamens, as well as “protect” the system from potential Fialta or Perfect Prince invasion, in exchange for a 75% cut of whatever was found there.

The first few ATC mining parties assigned to Kamens reported progressively worse phenomena after first breaking ground: first, more aggressive, infrequent disruptions of etheric devices that at first were limited to short-outs on Kamens’ surface and have since increased in scale all the way out to the gate of the pocket dimension. These preceded reports on Kamens of missing and mutilated miners, as well as hominids seen at a distance on the surface and within the mining tunnels. Details are unclear about what the last mining party saw before all operations were suspended, as almost all of its members either died on-world or have been shuttled back to Aeldrum for advanced psychological treatment.

However, rumors spread like wildfire that survivors raved about “the chittering,” and seemed to make noises no one else could hear. Nocturnals claim to have no information about what could possibly be on Kamens, pointing only to their knowledge that the planet is covered in wrecks.

Rather than abandon such rich quicksilver deposits at a time of war (or report the danger to the Aeldman military, which might ask the ATC to abandon its new source of income), the ATC Board of Directors authorized an expeditionary mission to travel to Kamens (undercover, to prevent panic about the seriousness of the threat), discover the source of the disturbances, and neutralize it. The mission, in short, is to make Kamens safe for capitalism.

Session Zero will take place at Port Muirkirk, an artificial plateau created by the ATC near Nocturne’s main settlement to host and resupply docking ATC ships on their way to Kamens with mining equipment. Your handler McCabe (discussed in a later section) briefs you the following:

You’re being sent to Kamens undercover as Mortuary Affairs, recovering bodies off the surface from the last group of miners; you’ll be stopping at Muirkirk on the way there, ostensibly to refuel before you descend to Kamens. While you’re there, gather as much information as you can from the miners and pilots that have been to the surface about what’s been happening and whatever they think is down there. Don’t encourage them if they’re just spreading rumors — we want people LESS scared — but if they have actionable intelligence, don’t be afraid to press them.

## Summary

### Session 1

The party, a special missions crew of the ATC’s Expeditionary Exploitation Operations Division—gathered aboard the deck of its ship, reviewing its orders from McCabe. It had aptly christened its vessel *La Petite Mort* for its size and for the party’s cover as ATC Mortuary Affairs. Preparing *La Petite Mort* for travel to Nocturne, the party’s members talked amongst themselves. Present were the commanding officer, Major Vash Kesdis, her second in command, Master Sergeant Jaures de Vranne, covert operator Corporal Belle Zuiki O'Clery, freelance contractors “Grandma” Gladys Lockheart (an occult specialist) and Gaston Rimm (children’s book author and expert in frontier research and alien cultures), and an ATC civilian psychiatrist, Eleanor Macabeau. Further, Lockheart brought her granddaughter Abbey. Rimm brought his scribe and assistant le Fou. Maj. Kesdis brought her aide-de-camp Specialist Mik Dozir. And Eleanor brought her wife/sniper Nolwen Katarin and her wife/Irish mercenary Moirin Cuilinn.

Only de Vranne had not been a longtime associate of the EEOD—Kesdis, as a commanding officer, had previously (and successfully) served with both Lockheart/Abbey and Rimm/le Fou, and was aware of the exploits of O’Clery and the renowned therapeutic care of Macabeau (who seemed singularly able to convince imperialist colonizers that they weren’t evil and assuage their consciences, a key CV builder in getting her attached to the division.) Similarly, the others in the EEOD had heard of Kesdis and her leadership abilities and boldness in “hostile negotiations,” and vaguely knew of each other’s existences in the division as well. But de Vranne, a transfer from another unit, neither knew anyone on the team, nor was known to them. The team took this chance to introduce themselves to him, and to each other. In turn, de Vranne called particular attention to his deputy role, reminding all solemnly (and to some eye-rolling) that the say of a superior officer was final, and that he would deal with any who allowed personal feelings or goals to interfere with the mission. (He also, to some confusion, urged others in the party not to cross into his line of fire.)

After these introductions, the party reviewed the comms policies. The ship was able to reliably and securely radio McCabe from its systems, but all communications were to go through Major Kesdis. After the party moved from Nocturne to Kamens, McCabe would relocate from gods-knew-where to Nocturne to maintain real-time close contact if necessary. Further, Kesdis would be able to personally contact McCabe via her own handheld radio, but this was only for emergencies, as its security could not be assured. Finally, after a few verbal barbs among colleagues, a besotted and mildly-insubordinate drinking competition, and a retelling of the stories of the dwarven Maccabees and Banshee the Blind by Rimm, the party settled in for its voyage to Nocturne.

Landing on Nocturne, Kesdis and de Vranne were accosted right away by Port Muirkirk’s harbormaster. The harbormaster intuited the true nature of the party, and warned against leaving the ship alone, as locally employed Nocturnals acting as spies would certainly discover the party’s nature as well—though rebuffing the harbormaster and holding cover, Kesdis left Specialist Dozir to watch over the ship.

The party found Port Muirkirk in a sad state. Meant only to harbor a few hundred miners at a time, the about 2 kilometer-squared encampment was overcrowded with ATC workers awaiting extraction after their sudden withdrawals from Kamens as waves from even the very first rotation of miners had still been unable to get transport home. The poverty of depleted rations and full bunks lent itself to a seedier section of the camp. De Vranne and O’Clery traveled to a nearby bar, the most wretched hive of scum and villainy they could find in Muirkirk. After deftly fooling an aggressive drunk into allowing passage, de Vranne began to chat up the bar’s patrons. Gathering little but what he knew already from McCabe’s briefing, de Vranne prepared to leave with O’Clery, until one of the patrons he had been chatting with leaned in close, showing as he did a dark matting of blackened, varicose veins along his back. A dull glint suddenly entered the patron’s eye, looking almost like an uncanny sort of abject despair, as he whispered something known only to de Vranne. Horrified by whatever it was, de Vranne hustled the patron outside into an alleyway at gunpoint. O’Clery followed to keep watch (of both the street and de Vranne) as de Vranne began his interrogation.

A sobbing, now nearly-comatose patron, revealed to be one Paul Wilson, had no memory of what he whispered. de Vranne intuited that some sort of control had taken place while Wilson’s eyes contained the mysterious glint. Wilson added a bit to the atmospherics of the situation, mentioning that he had seen some of the returning miners mad and frenzied enough that they actually attempted to scale walls — to some success and at the cost of their fingernails. He further noted that the only “normal” survivors of the most recent wave of evacuees, the last mining rotation before the party was summoned, were across town, holed up together for safety in one barrack as a sort of “union.” Wilson noted they were scared not only of being killed by some unnamed horror, but also of being taken by the ATC. Apparently, many of the last voyage’s wounded or seemingly most insane were wrapped up by unknown ATC forces almost immediately upon return to Muirkirk before they could talk to anyone and were extracted back to Aeldrum. As de Vranne left Wilson with money and supplies, Wilson entreated him to find his brother on Kamens if he could, Pete Wilson, whose fate was unknown.

The party sent Rimm, Lockheart, and Macabeau to make contact with the union, hoping their collectively less-intimidating auras would open more doors. Winning entrance to the barrack with promises to the guard to protect the union from the paranormal, Lockheart led the trio inside. With dozens of eyes upon them, they sought audience with the union’s leader Renata, and her second, Pike. Pike told his story in a back room: The first week of labor on Kamens tired everybody, seemingly to tangibly weigh them down physically and emotionally. Pike’s reduced production but keen eyesight got him placed on 12-hour shifts standing watch at the lip of the crater where mining was taking place, which extended still a few hundred meters above ground level. As the next 2 weeks passed, Pike saw strange, unimaginable things. Figures darted across the landscape. The “crater diamonds” that some claimed to see when landing or ascending from Kamens seemed not to be embedded at all, but hovering above the ground of the craters. And indeed, sometimes in the shadow of these craters, long figures hid, meters in size and occasionally draping appendages over the craters’ edges. Never knowing if he was hallucinating, and certainly missing events both to falling asleep and to the system’s strange night cycle, Pike ended his account with his harrowing boarding of fleeing vessels after about three weeks, seemingly to escape some ongoing attack he could not remember.

Asking Renata what she could corroborate of these events, the party noticed the same glint in her eye as de Vranne had described in Paul Wilson as she shooed them away. However, the unionist escorting them out spoke briefly with them outside, indicating that Renata and Pike had left out a key part of the story. Apparently, after the first wave of miners reported seeing things, each subsequent rotation was accompanied by one Dr. Gant, who maintained a station near the mining site and who oversaw treatment of work injuries and mental stress. However, individuals who went for consultations with Dr. Gant invariably never returned, with excuses made about being “taken off the job.” The unionist further indicated that after the final attack, many evacuees were triaged at the far corner of Muirkirk by one Dr. Larsen. After the trio reported these leads, the party searched the starting intelligence McCabe had given them to find the personnel files of Dr. Gant. However, Kesdis found that only she had the clearance to see Gant’s file, and she reported little except that Gant was indeed a real person whose whereabouts were unknown but who should have been with the final rotation.

Recognizing Renata may be possessed, the party split up: Macabeau and O’Clery to surveil Renata, de Vranne to poll the drunk tanks of Muirkirk, and the rest of the party to interview Dr. Larsen. The party found Larsen seemingly entirely alone in his practice apart from a moaning in the back. When the party used its cover to press Larsen to allow them the chance to interview survivors, Larsen led the party to a nearly-comatose miner named Edgar. Rimm communicated with Edgar via blinks, eventually convincing Edgar to draw what he had seen in le Fou’s notebook. With sudden fury and hand bleeding from effort, Edgar drew a horrible, multi-legged creature before rearing in bed and giving what looked to be an awful shriek. Interestingly, no sound came out at all, though Edgar’s vocal cords bulged. Rimm alone appeared to hear something, and turned to the corner of the room to see it but found only an open window looking out onto Kamens, shining brightly. Further, Rimm, familiar with illustration from his childrens’ books, recognized a note of celestial illumination as though from holy texts in Edgar’s work.

As Edgar lapsed into a heart attack, Larsen attempted to shoo the party out, but along the way they noticed a storage freezer. Being Mortuary Affairs after all, and responsibly attempting to take custody of any bodies, the party forced Larsen to open it. Inside was the body of a miner, whose chest had been clearly punctured inward by some wounding object about six inches in diameter. Fleeing to another room, Larsen had time to call for security forces before Lockheart’s granddaughter Abbey “hugged” him to sleep and promptly zipped him into a body bag for transportation back to the ship, which would leave passerby none the wiser thanks to the party’s cover. The party slipped out the back window just in time to escape security, but not before reading a strange communique sent to Larsen on his workstation:

You know what to do. Report to me when it’s done.

– M

Meanwhile, Dozir, the aide-de-camp, held watch inside the ship. Hearing a noise from the storage compartment, he stepped to the doorway to find that some of the body bags the ship had brought along to appear to be Mortuary Affairs had fallen off their racks. Stepping into the room to replace them, Dozir saw the door close behind him. As he turned back around, he noted that one of the body bags now appeared to be full, with a human shape. Suddenly, the full bag sat entirely upright, and the head of the humanoid silhouette fully turned to look at him. Finally radioing the party for help, Dozir watched in horror as inch by inch, a sharp black spider’s leg punctured through the top of the body bag. Reaching a meter long, the freed leg began slowly to unzip the body bag from inside as the mass within turned less human and more an apparent writhing ball of limbs. Firing a few missed shots, Dozir stumbled backwards and passed out from fear before he could witness the event’s end. Before he passed out, however, he seemed to hear footsteps within the ship, which left as quickly as they came. Racing back to the ship, de Vranne found Dozir unconscious. Believing his story, but unsure of what to make of it, he used his etherics scanner to examine the inside of the body bag, still on the floor and clearly unzipped. All ambient etheric energy had been wiped from the inside of the bag.

On the other side of town, Macabeau and O’Clery noticed Renata attempt to leave the barrack by herself. Trailing her, O’Clery caught a glimpse of Renata disappearing over the edge of a roof, apparently demonstrating the climbing abilities Wilson had told of. Luckily, O’Clery’s own platforming abilities allowed her to swiftly scale the building with her whip and give chase, apprehending Renata with her whip and body-bagging her before the pair could be noticed.

Now reunited at the ship with two hostages, Larsen and Renata, the party prepared to interrogate. De Vranne, O’Clery, and Dozir threatened Renata, who by this time had become fully bestial, her eyes keeping their uncanny glint and her torn sleeves now clearly showing matted, varicose veins. Renata responded with naught but a shriek, which, just as with Edgar, appeared to not actually make noise. However, O’Clery noted that both de Vranne and Dozir seemed to react to some other faraway sound she could not hear. De Vranne scanned Renata and found that overall she had far less etheric energy within her than a normally-souled human would. Further, it was almost totally gone from her extremities, and instead concentrated at the center of her veined mass, as though whatever was left in her body had been drawn there. In the other room, the rest of the party questioned Larsen. Instead of faltering, Larsen declared that he had “gamma-level clearance” and refused to talk to plebeians such as the party.

Kesdis revealed that she alone did in fact have gamma clearance, and told Larsen that he could speak with the rest of the party as well. Larsen relented, revealing that the ATC had asked him to stay behind as a researcher on Muirkirk in the aftermath of the evacuations of Kamens, operating on/dissecting any miners that ATC security forces didn’t triage as needing immediate extraction. Larsen was aware of the seeming transformative, possessive phenomena taking some of the miners, but had not had a chance to study anyone truly in its throes enough to understand it. De Vranne offered Larsen the chance to vivisect the possessed Renata, but lacking his surgical tools while on the ship, Larsen could only operate if Macabeau would lend him hers. We left the party with Macabeau’s decision point. Will she offer her doctor’s tools to allow an experimental surgeon to vivisect someone who could have been an innocent before her possession?

### Session 2

Gathered aboard *La Petite Mort*, the party prepared to begin experimentation on Renata. Macabeau agreed to offer her tools, with caveats in favor of Renata’s life. In perhaps a ploy, however, whatever had controlled Renata temporarily released its grip, leaving the party with a confused and terrified civilian. Coolly ignoring her cries, the party sedated her and prepared her for surgery—but upon Larsen’s first cut into her black masses, the bestial Renata woke up and began to struggle and howl desperately, screaming with gaps in the sound that seemed to some like a radio cutting in and out (but to others, of course, the silences were filled.) As Larsen continued to cut, Renata’s secret was revealed: a large spider, of perhaps 1m in size and legs of 0.5m in length, had somehow gotten inside her, latched along her spine, and wrapped its legs inside of her in the hydraulic "death curl."

Various tests were run on the exposed spider’s back. It was quite clear that it was parasitically feeding upon Renata’s etheric energy, drawing it slowly out of her body. It also was able to control Renata’s nervous system. The effort to etherically scan the distressed Renata/spider nearly broke de Vranne’s device, though it eventually (and perhaps for the worse) learned to process the information, leaving de Vranne with a seismograph of its changes in energy. Though sound did not appear to affect it, deaf as it was without a spider's usual sensory hairs, it greedily consumed the etheric energy aimed by Grandma Lockheart’s strange projection device—and indeed, briefly forced a two-way connection that dialed up the intensity higher than Lockheart had selected. This “adrenaline shot” of energy enabled the spider ‘s back legs to burst outward from Renata’s ribcage. Dozir was brought in briefly to confirm that this was the same kind of creature he had seen—he had just enough time to say so, and add that the one in Renata looked smaller, before he was forced to flee the room in abject horror and nausea.

Despite Eleanor’s assessment that Renata’s body, though perhaps not mind, could be saved, the party resolved there was little else that could be done in their mission timeframe and decided to kill Renata to see what would happen. Macabeau and O'Clery were disgusted, but could do little to sway Kesdis from allowing de Vranne to approach Renata, pistol drawn. However, seeming to sense the imminent death of its host, the spider hurriedly sapped the last of Renata’s energy and used the jolt to begin to emerge and fight. In a hail of gunfire, the party destroyed it.

The party released Larsen and finally set out for Kamens, running final tests on the corpse along the way. The spider was made of some sinewy organic material, but none knew what—indeed, it was missing many of the normal organs a spider might have, appearing instead to be a simple, dark mass. Grandma Lockheart noted that it smelt of some kind of old Celestial religious offerings, but not to any god she had ever studied. Questioning how the spider might have entered Renata, Lockheart also noted that in some particularly invasive possessions by angels, the angel’s aspect "steps into" its host—Lockheart thought it feasible that the spider had simply phased into Renata in the same way. Autopsy confirmed that there were no signs of entrance trauma in Renata’s body. The party kicked the corpse out the airlock and prepared for landing.

Unfortunately, a brief etheric blackout enveloped *La Petite Mort* as it grew closer to Kamens, interfering with the engines. The ship’s pilots compensated poorly, crash-landing the ship onto Kamens’ surface and wholly shearing off one of the ship’s engines. The party found itself stranded on the lip of the crater containing the ATC’s mining operation on Kamens, a few steps from where the operation’s abandoned freighters were parked. As the party surveyed its situation, Rimm noticed a few short humanoids seem to pop up from behind a ridgeline, observe the party, and pop back down. With only seven hours of daylight to use, the party split up: hoping to get a read on the area, Dozir and Nolwen the sniper ascended the crag, a protrusion from the lip of the crater a few hundred meters high which had likely been some feature of the landscape sheared when the crater was made. O’Clery, de Vranne, Lockheart and Abbey went to seek replacement parts for the ship’s engine from the abandoned ATC freighters nearby. Eleanor and Moirin stayed with the ship, setting traps. The rest of the party set out to investigate the small humanoids.

Dozir and Nolwen observed little in the landscape from the top of the crag. The outpost building at the summit was a different story, however. The office had obviously been the site of a melee, with a blood trail leading out and onto the elevator. The two found the log of one McClure, who had apparently been the alternate shift partner of watchman Pike. Though Pike had held the day shift, McClure had worked the 12-hour shift which was entirely comprised of Kamens’ long night cycle, and in the process had apparently seen terrible things—things he had not told Pike, at first to keep Pike from thinking he was crazy, and then to protect Pike from the awful knowledge. Many nights he had seen the small humanoids stilly observe the ATC installation from along the ridgeline, only to disappear into the ground. More alarming, he noted that the crater-crystals many had told of were not actually crystals at all, but actually light hitting great webs along the insides of Kamens’ other craters. These great webs contained gigantic spiders. Noting that the graveyard of Celestial and Perfect Prince ships further back in the landscape contained, in many cases, ships crash-landed inside craters, McClure intuited that the ships had perhaps tried to land in the craters (as they made flat LZs and were good landmarks) and become caught in the webs. It was unclear if this was the cunning hunter’s intelligence of the huge spiders. McClure prayed it was not. The log ended the day before the final rotation’s evacuation without incident (if, of course, the above can be considered normal.)

Meanwhile, on the ground, the team of four investigated the abandoned freighters. As these had been used mostly to move equipment, and had not been part of the final wave’s evacuation, there was little of human interest inside them. Finding one in especially good shape, Lockheart triaged its systems, finding all to be perfect except for a "foreign object" in one of the engines. Investigating, de Vranne and O’Clery discovered the source—one of the great spiders, nesting in the external thruster shielding of the ship. Not wanting to damage the engine with gunfire, de Vranne lured it out with an etheric pulse while O’Clery crouched to the side with her shotgun, preparing to ambush. As the horrific arachnid slowly uncurled and stepped out of the thruster, revealing its size one 3-meter-long leg at a time, de Vranne lost his nerve entirely. White as a sheet and seemingly about to flee, de Vranne was deeply relieved to see O’Clery entirely shred off the left four of the beast’s legs with a shotgun blast—though made uncomfortable with the revelation that it had still not been killed outright. Taking out his embarrassment, de Vranne sawed its thorax in half with machine gun fire, executing it. The spider had been caching the webbed-up corpses of ATC miners in the back of the engine, which the team buried properly. Afterwards, all noted de Vranne dart to an emergency therapy session with Macabeau, Lockheart barely stifling a laugh. The remainder of the team determined that the freighter was in better shape and better equipped than *La Petite Mort* and reestablished its base of operations within.

Kesdis’ away team reached the top of the ridgeline, getting a view of the ship graveyard as it sought the small humanoids. Rimm realized that they had possibly been emerging from, and disappearing into, sheer and narrow vents in the ground. As the team investigated, le Fou tripped and got his leg caught in one of the vents; in horror, the team listened as a humanoid scampered up the walls of the vent and grabbed onto le Fou’s foot, trying to pull him down. It lost its grip, though, and Rimm listened as the figure moaned and swore as it fell back down, surmising that it spoke some pidgin of Celestial. Rimm shouted “peace!” back down after it in the same language before searching around the vents. The team discovered a few things of note: first, the vents’ walls were streaked with blood and lacked real hand-holds, and there were a few fingernails at the top, which Rimm took for study. This seemed to imply that the figures were climbing the walls the same way as the possessed on Nocturne could. Second, a shell casing was found near the edge, as though a rifle had been shot from the vent and implying the humanoids were armed and sniping. Finally, the team discovered tracks indicating that the figures had, at some point, circled around the lip of the ATC installation’s crater, slid down it, and then climbed back up—potentially meaning the humanoids had previously been spying on, or even infiltrating, the installation. Rimm tore a page from le Fou’s notebook, writing "peace?" and leaving it and a pencil near the exterior of one of the vents before departing.

Gathering back together and reporting each other’s findings, the party prepared to settle in for its first night on Kamens…

### Session 3

As night on Kamens approached, a few members of the party sought to alleviate the stresses of the day’s events with therapy sessions with Eleanor. De Vranne grudgingly accepted a bit of Eleanor’s counsel (albeit alongside a gift of stimulants and beta blockers). Dozir, on the other hand, took a great deal of comfort in Eleanor’s therapy and changed his attitude for the better towards Kesdis's apparent coldness in leadership. Seeing the positive results of the sessions, Abbey as well hinted to Eleanor at a secret which she needed support in keeping.

The party secured its new ship and left the engine running on *La Petite Mort*, hoping its remaining etheric energy would draw away any potential predators. Half of the party took up posts atop the crag, while the rest patrolled the inside of the ship. Thus the party began its first 16-hour, two-shift night cycle. The first 8 hours of night brought on a strange numbing effect, perhaps the heaviness which miners had told of on Nocturne. It subdued Dozir and Moirin to sleep, and they joined off-duty Rimm and de Vranne in a shared dream of a gigantic subterranean cavern chamber, ceiling lit by a charged quicksilver motherlode. Most of the cave’s floor was but a rim to a vast, abyssal hole, blacker than black. A select few of the dreamers bore witness to the silhouette of a massive spider, exponentially larger than any seen so far, waiting in this hole, before the dream’s abrupt end.

Observation by the party’s second shift taught a few new things about Kamens. Spotters from the Crag observed swarms of smaller spiders pour out of the ATC’s mining tunnels in the crater at night. Further, groups of the smaller Celestials from earlier joined them from their vents and appeared to pass unharmed among the spiders. The Celestials spent the night dragging bodies out of the ATC facility and leaving them at the mouth of the mining tunnels, seemingly as an offering (perhaps to make it easier for the spiders to take them deeper into the tunnel system, as the spiders were mostly not large enough to have the strength to drag bodies for long distances.)

At the end of the night, the spiders returned to their tunnels, and the Celestials, making what must have been a holy gesture, returned to their vents. Meanwhile, the ship’s spotters observed from the bridge that one of the surface’s larger spiders was indeed attracted to *La Petite Mort*, though it turned out to have no interest in the simple etheric emanations from the running engine, and instead poked around the craft looking for organics. Finding none, it demonstrated strength enough to roll the craft in its frustration.

As morning came, the party jumped on its chance to explore further, and after finding that Rimm’s "peace" letter had been taken (but went unanswered), descended down the freight elevator into the crater and finally entered the mining facility proper. The elevator ride offered the party a chance to see torn-apart miner bodies dotting a few roofs in the camp. It seemed likely that these were the shreds of miners who had climbed the buildings by hand in their final moments of possessed insanity before having a spider burst from them and leave their flesh behind to rot. Reaching the facility, the party split in two. Many of the combatants departed towards the mining tunnels leading deeper into the planet, hoping to triage any remaining spider threat from the night before.

Tunnel A had caved in at the entrance, but Tunnel B was the site of a catastrophe of gore. At least three dozen bodies lay stacked just inside the entrance, with countless blood trails leading deeper inside and indicating that this was probably just one more round of a nightly process of harvesting the miners’ bodies. (Likely, the Celestials were getting them out of buildings and tight spots for the spiders, who took them over from the tunnels. But why the Celestials couldn’t just go all the way into the tunnels themselves was unclear.) Hearing shouts and moans from deeper inside, the combat team progressed a few meters to find none other than Pete Wilson impaled to the bottom of a stalagmite, struggling and barely alive. De Vranne attempted to treat his wounds, hoping to calm him with news that Paul was alright. Upon finding that Paul was on his way off-world to spread his infection, however, Pete broke into an evil laugh as a spider emerged from his torso, bisecting him. It leapt at the team, but was promptly shredded by machine gun fire. Before heading any deeper, the team observed the cave-in of Tunnel A. A detailed scan revealed that it had been caused by explosives, and done from the inside. More interestingly, a few human figures with normal etheric signatures seemed to be idling on the other side, backs to the cave-in.

Meanwhile, Rimm, le Fou, Lockheart, and Abbey explored the camp’s barracks for clues. Among bodies killed equally by beastly violence or apparent spider emergences, they found a number of logs hinting at camp life. Though everyone felt the typical effects of the planet, much of the camp was more scared of Dr. Gant than anything else. Any workplace injuries, or reports of acute stress or “hallucination,” were taken to Gant (though strangely, none ever mentioned where Gant was actually located). Those individuals were invariably never seen again. This led the miners to stop reporting their mental problems at what was apparently a critical mass, as swaths of the camp descended into obvious hysteria. The worst affected were those miners which had worked the night shift, who commonly reported seeing things on the walls and ceilings in the deepest parts of the tunnels and hearing ominous chittering. Interestingly, Renata had apparently been the foreman of the night shift, and was responsible for pressuring workers who had experienced such things to stay on their shifts and tough it out at the risk of being "disappeared" by Gant. Also interestingly, the camp’s cafeteria and commissary were ransacked of any food whatsoever. Perhaps the Celestials had taken it? The team left a bit of food as a peace offering.

Perhaps the strangest find within the barracks, however, was a bunk room which had been locked and cordoned off by Dr. Gant as “under quarantine.” Hoping to ascertain what was on the other side of its door, Lockheart shot her etheric projection device at the door, but broke off contact suddenly after everyone present heard a deeply pained woman’s scream erupt from the device (confusing Rimm, but apparently not Lockheart.) Breaking in, the party found evidence of a spider emergence from a shredded body on the ground, and carvings all over the walls and ceiling probably made by the miner while he lived. Most prominent in the room was some sort of holy symbol, three large concentric circles. These seemed to Rimm to possibly be a callback to his dream of the cavern chamber, and the great hole within it. What the smallest, centermost circle might represent, though, was unclear.

The rest of the room’s carvings all appeared to be the same single word over and over. Strangely, Rimm and Lockheart could both deduce that it was a word, and both recognized it to be in a language that they subconsciously should be able to understand, yet both faced some sort of mental block preventing them from actually reading the word or characterizing it, almost as if they were able to see the shape of a forest without being able to pick out individual trees. Sensing a perfect opportunity to use her cryptographic device, Lockheart acquired some readings. Even the device itself was unable to fully read and translate the word, but it did gather a few things: first, the word was a sort of portmanteau of Celestial and Elder Script, and mashed together a few separate concepts in a sort of compound word (how the miner knew how to carve such a thing was unknown.) Perhaps most interestingly, the device identified one of the expressed concepts in the compound word: the term for “trapdoor.”

The soldiers prepared to press deeper into the mining tunnels as Rimm and Lockheart headed away from the barracks and towards the administration and records buildings...

### Session 4

The session opened with the exploration of the ATC mining camp’s administration building by Gaston, le Fou, Lockheart, and Abbey. Outside the office of the administrator himself, the building held little information except for within the logs of the administrator’s assistant. These, however, offered an interesting look into the final days of the camp. The logs explained that the administrator began to show signs of deepening madness early on, but refused to seek treatment, in part to put on a brave face for the camp but more relevantly because he too was afraid of being disappeared by Gant. Apparently, Gant had been assigned to every mining rotation since the second (the one after first contact with Kamens’ strange phenomena) and was not a camp asset, but sent straight from ATC headquarters as a separate entity—as such, the administrator did not have any authority over Gant or his resources, and suspected Gant might in fact have more power than himself. In any case, according to the assistant, the administrator was largely unaware of what was actually inside Gant’s office.

Because of this, the assistant gradually noticed strange obsessions take the administrator. The assistant was given orders first to shred all the camp’s personnel files, then all records of how deep the mines actually were, then any files about the scientific and geologic discoveries made on Kamens (the assistant couldn’t execute the final, as he found all those files were kept in Gant’s office out of the administrative office’s reach.) The final order the administrator issued to the miners was apparently to stop mining the quicksilver inside the tunnels, but instead just to dig down as deep as possible to prepare for “future infrastructure.” He assigned all security personnel to watch over the front of these mining operations to prevent dissent. Presumably, this meant they were all killed first when the final attack on the camp happened.
After reading these logs, the team entered cautiously into the office of the administrator himself, finding a very similar scene to the quarantined bunk — the shredded body of the administrator, alongside three concentric circles painted on the wall in the administrator’s blood. Few files remained within his office. Gaston uncovered only pages of nothing but the strange word found earlier, until finally discovering a cache of heavily redacted documents on Gant. These papers, though offering little new information, did provide the party with a picture of Gant and a crude map of the general area of his office, which appeared to be in the tunnels to enable quick access for wounded miners.

More spookily, Lockheart sensed that the entire room’s etheric energy had been wholly drained and had been turned into a null space. Lockheart guessed that based on the vague curvature of space and gravity around the symbol on the wall, the local etheric energy drain had been caused by a sort of hypergravitation of energy towards the symbol as a vortex. This struck Lockheart as strange, as it was not a traditional power of any deities. More importantly, it was perhaps a microcosm of the slow etheric drain throughout the planet and even the system. Lockheart pondered what the source of this huge gravitational pull could be. Armed with information about Gant, the camp team rejoined the tunnel team to report their findings and face the tunnels together.

Meanwhile, aboard the freighter, Nolwen noticed something during her patrols. The great spider which had overturned La Petite Mort had damaged numerous parts of the hull, and shredded arrays from the communications systems spilled out from the broken windows. But hanging from one of these arrays, likely previously hidden but now visible, was what appeared to be a listening device paired with a transponder not of ATC make. Wary of the potential security implications, Nolwen did not report the finding by radio to the ground team, but instead waited for their return to inform them in person.

The party began its trek down Tunnel B, hoping to reach the connector to Tunnel A which would allow it to investigate the human etheric signatures near Tunnel A’s cave-in. It was not long before the party encountered the sinkhole down which the spiders appeared to be taking the bodies of the ATC miners it had not destroyed via emergences. Wary of an ambush, the party dropped a grenade down it. O’Clery noted that the sinkhole appeared bottomless, and that the grenade was swallowed up by near-tangible darkness and non-Euclidian geometries before it could ever detonate. Moirin covered the hole with claymore tripwires before progressing.

Moving kilometers deeper into the tunnels, the party eventually came upon sections whose quicksilver had gone unmined, and noted that despite the day cycle the crystals’ absorbed etheric charge from the air around them was far weaker than it ought to be. These tunnels were also gradually more perforated with a number of 1-to-2 ft wide vents along sides and ceilings, just the right size for spiders. The party readied its weapons and moved de Vranne and Kesdis to the front. De Vranne, however, began to have a Very Bad Time. De Vranne’s eardrums swelled with the sound of thousands of spider legs skittering inside the walls and vents though none could be seen, and realized that he had finally experienced what all the miners had called the Chittering. Meanwhile, the party watched him tense and start at nothing visible. Explaining what he heard and finding no one else had heard it, de Vranne argued that others in the party had been hearing strange things that not everyone could. However, when called out, no one in the party was willing to fess up to this to Kesdis.

Confidence in de Vranne a bit shaken, but still accepting the likelihood of contact (noises or not), Kesdis kept de Vranne at the front and prepared for a fight. But as de Vranne took point underneath a particularly large vent in the ceiling, he alone saw a spider laying in wait to drop. Stumbling on the draw, de Vranne took the brunt of the spider pouncing on him and beginning to grapple him. Seeing de Vranne fall, but strangely, appear to struggle against something invisible on top of him, O’Clery whipped the space above him but found no target. The whip’s crack, however, roused de Vranne from what was an apparent hallucination. De Vranne pleaded he had been tackled and attacked, and asked whether it looked like he had fallen because of some force or his own accord. The clumsiness of his pivot to shoot towards the vent, however, made it unclear whether he had just accidentally tripped. By now, some in the party wondered if de Vranne was beginning to lose it, and Lockheart asked Kesdis to check him for black masses on his body. De Vranne argued against stripping his armor in a combat zone, and the party warily agreed to table the issue until they were back on the ship.

The party’s arguing, however, offered cover for a few spiders to emerge from their vents and sneak toward the party. Vigilance by Abbey allowed the party to slay them without much incident, but some made an interesting observation about how far the noise of their gunfire carried—sound in the tunnels was somehow being dampened, possibly to allow the spiders to hunt more effectively. This was to Lockheart even more evidence of some planet-wide hypergravitation of energy, as the dampening meant sound waves were being sapped from the environment just as much as the air’s own etheric charge. Scans of the air in the tunnels found that it did not have as much etheric charge as it ought to, and that its charge was even weaker in the vent from which de Vranne had supposedly been attacked.

After about three kilometers of marching, the party finally came upon the junction into Tunnel A, but was faced with an unexpected stimulus, the smell of a cooking fire further down Tunnel B. Gaston smelled burning paper and heated ATC MREs, and correctly intuited that whoever was cooking, they were using camp records as kindling to cook food taken from the camp cafeteria. This meant that whoever was down there was probably also whoever had cleaned the camp out of all of its food, and that it could be the small Celestials, or even ATC survivors. Most of the party wanted to check this out before crossing into the junction, but Kesdis alone argued that investigating Gant was the mission priority and that he was probably through the junction. The party agreed to cross through the junction just to see what was immediately on the other side. Coming out of the connector, a sealed airlock door was indeed visible in the opposite wall of Tunnel A. A reference to the administrator’s map confirmed this was probably the door to Gant’s clinic and lab. But as the party approached, it noticed cart rails lined the floor of Tunnel A, and about 100 meters towards the cave-in, two living, sane ATC miners spotted the party and took cover behind a railed mining laser.

Demanding the party’s identities, the miners readied weapons and charged the mining laser, which the party could now see had crisped scores of spiders in the other direction. A failed attempt by de Vranne to intimidate the miners into submission only gave the miners cause to call for backup and to fully charge the laser. There would be no crossing Tunnel A towards Gant’s office until the situation was defused. Gaston, however, realized the miners were likely starving, and offered the sentry team rations of beans from his own supply; the sentries dropped their suspicion long enough to allow Gaston and Lockheart to walk food over to them, and Gaston convinced them that the party meant them no harm and knew as little as they did.

Satisfied the party was neither possessed nor an ATC hit team (at least, not for them), the miners explained that there were other survivors holed up against the Tunnel A cave-in three kilometers back, which they had caused in order to leave only one possible way into their hiding spot. The team of two were acting as sentries against spiders heading in that direction, but also as a kind of bait. They reasoned that if they were overwhelmed far enough away from the camp, then the spiders might not realize there were more survivors to kill at the end of Tunnel A, which would buy time for the camp to reestablish defenses. The sentries further explained that the spiders seemed to have a hive mind, and what one could see, all could—so if they were ever spotted leaving or returning their post, it could lead the spiders into the camp. The sentries also corroborated that the airlock door was Gant’s office, and that some great battle had happened inside after the final attack on the ATC facility had already taken place, but no one had been seen leaving. Concluding that if the door was sealed now, it could stay that way for a while longer, the party agreed to evacuate the miners back to the freighter, and sent Moirin, Lockheart and Abbey to the camp at the end of Tunnel A to blow open a hole in the cave-in and escort them.

Arriving at the hideout, while Moirin prepared charges Lockheart noted that for humans that had spent nearly two months on Kamens, the miners were comparatively very sane. Examining the area, she realized why: the miners had been sleeping and sheltering in etherically-shielded mining equipment that had been originally meant to deflect energy released by lasering and cutting of quicksilver crystals. The mining equipment had apparently had the reverse effect as well—the miners had not been subject to absorption of their own energy by the planet so long as they stayed in the cabins of the equipment. Moirin blew open the cave-in and the team brought the dozen survivors to the freight elevator up out of the crater and towards the freighter LZ.

During the painfully slow ascent of the elevator, however, the team came under sniper fire by the small Celestials, a group of which had popped from their vents on the crater’s rim and were now shooting blindly into the crowd. With none on the team possessing a gun to return fire, two miners were cut down and one was grievously wounded before Lockheart could prepare a rune to shield the group as it disembarked and sprinted to the safety of the ship. As the Celestials withdrew back into their holes, the team finally got its first good view of the figures—small, hunched, very pale, and by all accounts looking like the inhabitants of Nocturne. The team concluded that these small Celestial figures were in fact the descendants of the original Nocturnals which had become stranded on Kamens a thousand years ago—but how could they have been surviving?

The evac team radioed its findings to the rest of the party as it decided next to investigate the fire smell, and found that their current distance away (about four kilometers between the ship and the junction) was about as far as radios would work; any further, and communications could fail. Approaching the fire, Gaston was surprised to hear voices speak not in Celestial, but in Vedlys. The voices were apparently aware both of the spiders and the Tunnel A survivors, and ambivalent towards the latter. Gaston called out to them, shocking them, but quickly followed with offerings of peace. Not yet able to see the party, the voices argued amongst themselves about how to answer, apparently thinking they were talking to the Tunnel A survivors; one was concerned that it was "Evrikson’s trick," but the other thought it was worth the risk if the speakers had supplies and guns.

Accepting an offer to parley with Gaston, two figures walked into view. Gaston was amazed to see that these individuals did not fit the description of the small Celestials the evac team had given, but instead appeared healthier and were covered in the ceremonial tattoos and brandings associated with servants of Perfect Princes. Gaston realized that these were not Nocturnals, but the descendants of the Perfect Prince raiding party which had occupied Nocturne and disappeared on Kamens about 200 years ago. De Vranne noted to himself that if it had been that long and they were still using the Prince’s markings, some maintenance of hierarchy must still be happening.

With ten traumatized miners on its ship and the new knowledge that Kamens hosts not one, but two intelligent populations, the party prepared to negotiate with the Prince’s servants…

### Session 5

The party parlayed with the mysterious tattooed individuals, lovingly dubbed Spork and Beans, whose marks Gaston recognized quickly as those of the slaves of perfect prince Vakhtang the Pious. Supposedly, more than 200 years ago Vakhtang ruled an empire in the same territory Sigvald held, earning it by leveraging the secrets gained from complete devotion and worship of Othal (to include marking every new slave with tattoos promising their souls to Othal at birth.) One day, though, it is rumored Othal asked Vakhtang to pay a greater price, ordering him to send his military to an unknown part of space to destroy something unspecified. They were not heard from again, and Leth the Conniving, Sigvald’s predecessor, swooped in on the undefended territory. Standing before the slaves now, the party suspected that Kamens was where Othal sent Vakhtang.

The individuals were loath to speak at all to the party until it could provide a modicum of rations; one held guard at the camp while the party took another back to the freighter to prepare a package of a week’s worth of food. The rescued miners there were suspicious of the party’s plans to give away food to random aliens just as the miners were getting there, but diplomacy by Gaston and a life-saving surgery on one of their number by Eleanor calmed them down. Gaston, le Fou, de Vranne, Lockheart, and Abbey prepared to travel to the Vakhtangian camp.

While they prepared, Nolwen reported the communications penetration she found on La Petite Mort to Kesdis. The party realized the tap had probably been placed while Dozir was passed out after his horrifying experience in the hold, instead of keeping watch. Realizing it was time to check in with McCabe, she had Lockheart repair the communications systems, sans tap; McCabe’s voice crackled to life almost immediately, indicating he had probably been trying to hail the party for some time. McCabe reported that because of the tap, the miners still on Nocturne had heard all the events of the vivisection of Renata aboard the ship and were revolting at the “assassination” of their union leader. They had lynched Dr. Larsen and locked down Port Muirkirk entirely—there was no way any extra supplies or help were coming for some time. McCabe then had a private word with Kesdis before signing off.

Meanwhile, Spork began to open up—apparently, the Vakhtangians had been living on Kamens in some number ever since the events of 200 years ago, and despite the death of Vakhtang they continued the practice of devotion to Othal because Othal was protecting them from going insane (signaling his direct and continued interest in this place.) They had been living on hunting and killing of Nocturnals on Kamens, and had been excited to raid the ATC cafeteria as a change of pace, but had never seen miners while it still operated, implying it had always been Nocturnals watching it.

Spork and Beans led the team of five to their camp, explaining that the vents peppering the mining tunnels were actually a network all across the planet that allowed the spiders to get around; the mining had cut the ones in the tunnel, which is how the Vakhtangians found the ATC. Sliding down deep into the planet through one especially large vent, the party found themselves allowed past the gates of a village of a few hundred, built into a great cavernous chamber and crafted entirely of scrap salvaged from vessels in the ship boneyard. Strangely, a stream of running water ran through the edge of the village. The party was challenged by the scrap-crowned chieftain of the village, Bata; Bata barked an eldritch word, interested whether the party would hear and react to it. When de Vranne did, Bata’s guards prepared for a fight, apparently believing that anyone who could was a threat—Gaston defused the situation, however, and an appraisal of the power of de Vranne and Abbey encouraged Bata to allow the party into the village to seek answers. However, the party was to speak again with Bata about an offer once they had spoken to the village priest of Othal.

The party explored. De Vranne made conversation with a group of Nocturnal-hunters, hoping to learn more about warrior culture. Sensing de Vranne to be a vicious killer like themselves, one of the hunters explained the source of the Vakhtangians’ raids’ success: a ritual taken from an intercepted Nocturnal religious text providing glimpses into the future of danger. The ritual itself was highly violent: the victim had to be flayed of the Othal tattoos that protected their soul, and become possessed by a spider. Once the spider was inside the victim, both had to be sacrificed, and the flesh of the spider had to be eaten. This would offer vision quests that the Vakhtangians would use to predict where ambushable Nocturnals would be. De Vranne was darkly impressed by the incidental way this controlled the size of the Vakhtangian population.

Meanwhile, Gaston and Lockheart investigated the river. They could not figure out whether drinking the water would hurt them, as the Vakhtangians were doing it, but they were protected by Othal; running tests, they found that it was ostensibly just a regular river. Scans revealed that the waters were collated together by water sources from a series of planets, none of them anywhere near Kamens; Gaston recognized one as from a river on an etherically superconductive planet in Celestial space. Efforts to determine if the river flowed in non-Euclidean ways failed, as its etheric charge seemed to disappear when the water disappeared into either of the vents it moved through. The party headed off to speak with Ketevan, the priest of Othal. Ketevan began to finally explain a bit of what was going on on Kamens, based on knowledge gathered through her worship of Othal and the Vakhtangians’ capture of Nocturnal holy texts during raids.

The spiders the party had seen were not of flesh and blood, but were actually demons of an entity dubbed (Ketevan struggled to name it without the horrible words of its religion) the Trapdoor Spider God—calling back to Lockheart’s discovery. The spider god claimed to have been an Elder God once, “weaving the fabric of the universe,” but its terrible hunger and horrific aspect led almost none to worship it when civilization was finally established; indeed, if Zulkir was the personification of Death, the spider god was the personification of Hunger. This inability to control itself or perception of it drove away any who could sustain its hunger, and over years and years the spider god lost its sanity and ability to control reality, becoming confined in form to its aspect, which had somehow arrived on Kamens. Now, its only goal was to consume as much etheric energy as possible, both by creating the energy-absorptive effect in the pocket dimension but also by conscripting religious followers for their souls.

Ketevan explained that the Nocturnals were worshippers of the spider god, and were not preyed upon by the smaller spiders but instead served them. This worship was possible because of the spider god’s apparent signature power: the ability to prevent others from perceiving its form. Learning over the eons that its true nature was the problem keeping others from worshipping it, the spider god’s abilities to affect reality faded, but its ability to affect memetics stayed; the spider god created a sort of buffer around itself and its paraphernalia and rites that would keep people from being able to perceive them if they were not already driven half-mad by the mental influence of the spider god, by which point they would be much more pliant for cultivation as worshippers. Simply put, Ketevan said, if you don’t believe in the spider god, you won’t be able to see its form or read its holy texts—but by the time you can, the spider god has enough influence on you that it might be too late. This explained why some in the party were seeing and hearing things that others could not: Lockheart remembered her inability to read the Celestial-Elder script word that was apparently the spider god’s name, and that the party seemed to keep almost-hearing some spoken word that was likely also its name. Privately, Gaston and de Vranne worried that in their dreams they had seen the beginnings of the aspect of the spider god.

Ketevan explained that this ability had allowed the spider god to manipulate the Nocturnals who were stranded on the planet thousands of years ago into worshipping it. The power of the extra worshippers, for the first time in years, was what gave the spider god the ability to slowly suck energy throughout the pocket dimension. The memetic ability was also what drew Othal’s attention to Kamens. Othal felt that the spider’s ability to mask and stop knowledge from being perceived was tied to the strange eldritch questions that Othal puzzled over eternally, and wanted to harvest the power to decipher them from the spider god’s world, wherever it was (and to kill the spider god, so that no one else could make unsolvable questions.) Othal had sent Vakhtang to do this, but Vakhtang failed; Vakhtang’s general, Evriksen, was possessed by the spider god once their raiding party reached Kamens. Evriksen and his officers assassinated Vakhtang and forced-marched much of the Vakhtangian party across the planet to sacrifice them. In exchange, the spider god made Evriksen the closest to an angel that it had. This all led Othal to continue to protect the surviving Vakhtangians on Kamens in the hopes that they would one day complete Vakhtang’s objective, but as one could see, they were all but cornered in the village.

The party resolved to help the Vakhtangians defeat the spider god. Ketevan supposed that because the spider god’s current level of power and latent absorptive effect were a direct result of the Nocturnals’ worship of the spider god, the easiest way to weaken it for a confrontation was to genocide the Nocturnals on Kamens; de Vranne agreed enthusiastically. Gaston asked where the Nocturnals’ home could be found. Ketevan explained that she was unsure, but that the Vakhtangians were certain that it was somewhere near the tunnel Evriksen had forced Vakhtangians into for sacrifice about twenty miles away, and proposed that the party could gain deeper knowledge by engaging in the bloody ritual the hunters explained previously. Gaston agreed to eat spider flesh for the ritual. Ketevan set to work with a ready-flayed sacrifice in her cellar, allowing a captive spider to forcibly possess the sacrificial victim.
As he screamed, Ketevan calmly explained the role of the smaller spiders as demons of the spider god: they were meant to force others to worship the spider god by whatever means were most relevant to the victim. This could mean a few things: individuals who mentally resisted the spider god’s influence were just killed outright by the spiders, and their bodies were taken who knew where. People who were weakened by its influence into compliance, however, were often possessed by the spiders, who controlled the host’s body to force the host’s soul to worship the spider god until the host’s body and soul gave out, at which point the spider would unceremoniously slough off the host’s flesh and move on. Individuals like the camp administrator whose body was mangled by the possession were the result of individuals trying to fight back against their possession once it had already happened. And of course, those individuals driven totally insane by the spider god did not need to be possessed by a smaller spider at all, but worshipped the spider god of their own accord—like the Nocturnals.

After relating this, Ketevan threw open the door and stabbed the possessed individual with a ritual knife, carving spider out of his back and offering it to Gaston. Steeling himself, Gaston accepted, and embarked on a terrible eldritch vision quest upon ingesting it. Gaston’s perception flew across the planet, showing him the entrance to the tunnels where Evriksen had led his sacrifices. Past that, through darkness and various chambers, Gaston saw a great settlement of cave rock resting on the edge of a subterranean chasm; this was the Nocturnals’ home, and it seemed there could be thousands of the little people. Gaston’s vision descended deeper, though, down a stone-hewn spiral staircase all the way to the bottom of the chasm. There, through a simple door, lay the great chamber and central abyss some in the party had seen in their dreams or had seen depicted by the Nocturnals’ holy symbol of three concentric circles. Evriksen, long spider legs dangling from his back, waited in the chamber, and attempted to assault Gaston; however, he was distracted by the mysterious arrival of tall, rag-cloaked figures carrying long rifles and wearing iron masks. Turning to deal with them, Evriksen allowed Gaston to fall down the pit. Gaston seemingly fell forever, but as his vision faded to black, Gaston thought he saw a sort of cathedral at the bottom.

Gaston reported his visions to the party; Ketevan had no idea who the figures concerning Evriksen were. Gaston further asked to copy the Nocturnal holy texts Ketevan had to retell the story, but Ketevan vehemently refused—again, the more people who were aware of the spider god, the more powerful it would become. The party left to speak again with Bata, and she made her offer: whoever came after the party, the Vakhtangians would help them navigate the world—but the party had to defeat the spider god and the Nocturnals. The party accepted; de Vranne asked for, and received, 20 Vakhtangian hunters with enough black powder for grenades and their far-outdated rifles. The Vakhtangians ushered the party out through another entrance into the ship graveyard, the entrance from which they pulled the salvage for their village, and the party returned to the freighter.
The party agreed that before venturing to the Nocturnals’ home, they would find Gant—if only because his office might contain an armory suited for arming the Vakhtangians with better than black powder. A final medical examination of de Vranne revealed that he had no black markings indicating possession, but one of the hunters made an apt note: the marks come from possession by a spider, not just being influenced by the spider god. One could be driven to madness without any outward physical signs at all...

### Session 6

Freighter now full to the brim with party members, traumatized miners, and alien occultists, the party took stock of its situation. Major Kesdis opened by sitting down the party and reminding them all that SHE was in charge, chastising the away team for agreeing to kill a lesser god and bringing back twenty extra mouths without her concurrence. Her point taken, she noted that Belle had been drinking a lot more recently, and ordered her to see Eleanor about it. Belle sullenly responded that the miners had been looking for Kesdis.

Kesdis met the remaining ten miners in their quarters on the freighter. The miners were furious at the arrival of the Vakhtangians, who they saw as little more than dangerous alien savages. Somehow, they knew about the violent flaying and possession ritual that the Vakhtangians practiced for premonition (though it was unclear who had told them, from the away party or otherwise.) Perhaps rightly, the miners feared they would just be fodder for this ritual at the Vakhtangians’ hands, and absolutely refused to be housed anywhere near them, let alone have rations from the freighter’s pool be used to feed them instead. As Kesdis attempted to assuage their fears, the miners dropped another bombshell of information which they should have had no knowledge of: though the party was already looking for Dr. Gant for information about the threat, the miners accused Kesdis herself of having been secretly tasked to extract Gant to safety. The miners threatened that if Gant was still alive, they would not allow Gant anywhere near them, nor allow the party to use the remaining rations to feed him. The miners asked Kesdis simply who she would rather help: them, or an insane war criminal and a bunch of alien executioners she plucked from underground.

Kesdis, shocked and wondering how the miners could know about the ritual or about her objective with Gant, passed the latter off as simply “selling him back to our employer”: not quite believing her and fed up, the miners demanded that they be given a week’s rations and to be allowed to leave the ship with them to go their own way, no longer feeling safe aboard. With one more desperate hope of avoiding conflict, Kesdis reminded them that they would be making it harder for the party itself to survive and therefore stop the threat, and asked them what conditions they would need in order to stay. The miners asked a few things: to be given double rations over the Vakhtangians; to be housed separately from the Vakhtangians and Gant, if he was still alive; the right to arm themselves, starting with the remaining pistols in the hold; and priority of keeping new weaponry found over the Vakhtangians.

Not finding anything particularly problematic in these, Kesdis decided to concede to each of the demands, and tasked De Vranne with clearing out one of the other freighters in the abandoned LZ to keep the hunters in. De Vranne stormed off, angry at both missing the chance to enforce discipline on the mutineers and being given a menial task as a direct result of their disloyalty. As he left, Gaston looked up from writing about the encounter in his notes, with a bit of a glint in his eye; moments later, McCabe crackled to life over the radio, with great news. Though reinforcements certainly would not make it past the Port Muirkirk blockade, he had successfully gotten a rocket full of food and munitions launched to their location, which would land within a few hours. With an “I told you so” to the miners, Kesdis ended the conversation. None in the party felt the miners’ accusation against Kesdis was anything more than derangement.

While De Vranne began to clear the freighters with the hunters to teach them small unit tactics, the party had some down time to talk amongst itself. Gaston visited Eleanor for a therapy session about his vision quest, coming away much calmer and with better techniques on how to handle his own fear. Meanwhile, Belle had refused to see Eleanor, so fellow Irishwoman Moirin came to her with a bottle of hearty Irish whiskey to try to break through. Though suspicious at first, Belle ended up speaking to Moirin at length, revealing some personal details—including the revelation that Belle used to be in the FIRA, fighting the communist Irish government before she lost her hand. Belle began to ask Moirin what she knew of McCabe, but would not continue the conversation if Moirin did not match Belle’s aggressive drinking. Making the excuse that as the explosives expert, she shouldn’t have any more to drink until after she had checked her traps, Moirin refused. The two tabled the discussion with mutual suspicion.
In another room, Gaston and Granny Lockheart discussed the strange female scream that emanated from Lockheart’s “etheric projector”; Lockheart finally explained what it actually was: a projector for the soul of a powerful psionic and one of the founders of the Academy of Saldan, Sadine. Gaston recognized the technology as similar to the projections of the Foundation aboard a certain Mage Imperium Station from his tales... The two continued to trade stories, developing a budding friendship.

Business aboard the ship concluded for now, Kesdis led Belle, Lockheart, Abbey, and Dozir back to the airlock door in the junction leading to Gant’s office and lab. Seeing a working call panel, Kesdis announced the party; the singsong voice of Dr. Gant greeted them, overjoyed he was finally being rescued and warning the party about “the psychopaths at the other end of the tunnel.” Opening the door into the decontamination chamber, Gant explained that he could be found in the morgue; he asked the party to please gather any of his notes they found along the way, to also be saved. Forebodingly, he warned the party that beyond the door was a bit of a mess, but that nothing in his lab would hurt them.

As the decontamination chamber opened into the hospital wing, the away team was met by an abattoir. The bodies of both Gant’s security personnel and spiders alike littered the hallways; the miners had mentioned some great battle had happened in here, and they were apparently right. The only survivors, interestingly, were some pallid, starved-looking individuals in patient’s gowns, shambling around mutely and staring at their feet. Gently prying pistols and improvised weapons from their limp hands and trying to get their attention, Lockheart made a sad discovery: not only were these individuals traumatized to total insanity, but they were in fact soulless. As the room inside was charged normally, Lockheart suspected immediately that the shamblers were made this way not because of the spider god, but as a result of Gant’s medical experiments. It was a cruel, but effective strategy: if the spiders hunted people with souls, then the best killers of them would be the soulless.

The team examined the somehow still-functioning security terminal, an etheric computer. Interestingly, its power, as well as all of its security functions, had somehow been routed to the morgue. There were two uncorrupted records: the first, a final log by the security officer noting how much even Gant’s own personnel wanted to assassinate him. However, the officer journaled, they had all gotten orders from someone very high up that he should not be touched. The second was the metadata from a failed distress signal to Port Muirkirk. Apparently, the message had failed because someone had emergency expired the encryption key for the terminal’s communications systems; the administrator listed for this action was McCabe’s designator. Lockheart, realizing that McCabe had blocked the distress call from Gant’s office, asked Kesdis suspiciously if she knew anything about this; Kesdis said that she did not. The party split, Kesdis going to meet Gant while Lockheart explored the lab wing’s geophysical section. (Two other sections, archaeological and xenozoological, went unexplored.)

Kesdis found Gant in the morgue, surrounded by bodies executed by deep trephinations. Demanding an explanation for the shamblers, Gant excitedly revealed his research: he had discovered a way not only to make contained nullspace, but to turn those containers into batteries holding the entire etheric energy of a person’s soul—a battery to outmatch nearly any existing power source of its size. Gant explained his “absorption pike”: archaeological research had indicated that the holy symbol the likes of which the party had seen, the three concentric circles, created localized intensified energy absorption effects similar to what the spider god did across the whole planet. (This harkened back to the strange gravitation Lockheart had found in the camp administrator’s office.) When the symbol was forced into a small, etherically shielded container, it could turn only the contents of the container into null space after being allowed to work for a few hours. The holy symbol was then detached, and the null space container was affixed to a quicksilver bit which could be plunged into a souled creature. Nature abhorring a vacuum, the quicksilver trepan would conduct the etheric energy of the victim to quickly drain to fill the null space, tearing apart the victim’s soul in the process.

Violent and inhumane as it was, though, it created a battery with the power of a human soul, but without the problems of ensouled technology. To prove his point, Gant showed that his etheric computer in the morgue had been running on the batteries for weeks. Kesdis realized finally why the ATC wanted Gant so badly: this invention could change the field of etherics forever. It had the added benefit, Gant added, of protecting people from the spiders: as a test, Gant had let spiders in to slaughter the survivors within the facility, and they had attacked everyone except his “patients,” who in turn killed the spiders.

Lockheart, meanwhile, learned a few things in the geophysical labs. First, it was revealed that part of the reason the “gravitational field” (by now, known to be the spider god) was so effective was a result of the planet’s concentration of quicksilver. Whereas on a regular world, the absorption of etheric energy would take place slowly and weakly over the area of the entire planet, the quicksilver was acting as a superconductor: as much of the etheric energy on Kamens was already charging on or attracted to the quicksilver, it was acting as a series of waypoints from which the gravitational field could draw on all at once, instead of having to exert pull on the entire area. Lockheart understood this to mean that the spider god was using the quicksilver almost as a circulatory system; indeed, it might have been why the god was on Kamens at all.

Lockheart read a second, more macabre discovery: the gravitational effect was causing the souls of the dead not to immediately leave their bodies, but appear to stay for some amount of time. Lockheart remembered grimly that the Nocturnals had been offering the bodies of dead, unpossessed miners to the spiders for them to take deeper into their holes; Lockheart suspected that these bodies were still souled, and that based on Ketevan’s information, the spider god was doing something with them. Finally, Lockheart got a readout of planet-wide etheric fluctuations for the last few months; interestingly, there was negative correlation between population of Kamens by the ATC and its levels of etheric energy. Though having people and equipment on the surface should have been adding to it, it appeared that having more people and machinery on the planet triggered stronger gravitation, which led to a net decrease. Lockheart realized this was probably the spider turning its absorptive effect off and on based on whether there was prey on Kamens to exploit.

Lockheart finally left to confront Gant with Kesdis. Lockheart asked Gant to talk about what he knew of the holy symbol and how it worked; Gant explained that it appeared to be the inverse, based on translations of discovered texts, of a summoning ritual. Whereas summoning rituals take power from a god to put it on earth, the ritual that this symbol invoked took power from the earth to give it to the god. Though canonically the god was apparently quite capable of taking power from Kamens by itself with its absorptive effect, worshippers putting the symbol in different places created new hyperconductive nodes in the god’s “circulatory system” that could drain the areas they were placed in much more quickly. It was much clearer now why the possessed in the camp seemed to often be found with these symbols; they had probably been compelled to make them in service to the spider god. Gant indicated that it was a fairly simple matter to destroy them.
With nothing else to learn from Gant, Lockheart and Belle were visibly disgusted, and openly considered killing Gant. Their case only improved with the revelations that Gant apparently had not had to eat in some time, the same way the Nocturnals didn’t, and that technically speaking Gant had been a constant producer of the spider god’s holy symbol. Finally, Kesdis revealed that the miners had been telling the truth: she had been given the objective to safely extract Gant, and that if the others killed him, the ATC would be furious. This and Kesdis’ orders still were almost not enough to convince them, but Lockheart finally relented with the understanding that Gant’s research could probably help her own projects. However, Lockheart noted that if all the ATC wanted was Gant’s research, Gant could possibly be made disposable if Lockheart could reproduce and improve Gant’s work more morally and pitch it to McCabe; Kesdis agreed to consider this once they left.

After Kesdis told Gant to prepare to leave, Gant grabbed a scalpel and set to work executing his old patients, the facility’s soulless, insane shamblers. Abbey quickly restrained him, wanting more than ever to snap his neck; deeply offended, Gant asked the party what else it planned to do with the shamblers if it wasn’t going to take the shamblers with it. With this, the party faced a dilemma. The shamblers did not appear to be able to feed themselves; unless they were fed and actively cared for, they would starve to death (they had been starving all this time as it was.) But if the party took them back to the ship, the miners would riot over the idea of the rations being used to feed the braindead, soulless shamblers—if the hunters didn’t outright eat the shamblers first. And indeed, none present thought it was moral to follow Gant’s lead and mercy-kill them. Hardest of all, whichever solution the party chose had to be sustainable without its presence, as IF the party wanted to pursue the spider god, it had to fly the ship miles away from Gant’s office.

(Kesdis noted that this was in fact an “if”: despite some in the party’s apparent enthusiasm to kill the spider god, the fact that the party now had Gant, miners, and possibly the shamblers to get to safety, as well as a distinct lack of material readiness to kill a god, was calling into question what Kesdis felt the party’s primary objective should be. She planned to address this with McCabe when she updated him on having Gant; Lockheart agreed with this assessment.)

With the only immediately-available options to kill the shamblers, let them starve, or take them to the ship and subject them to third parties, the team hoped to create a fourth option by leaving for the moment to consult with Eleanor about how much they could actually be helped, and if at all, whether she would consider sneaking them rations and caring for them indefinitely. Hearts heavy with the morality of saving Gant while potentially damning his innocent patients, the away team returned to the ship with the mad doctor and his research in tow.

How will the miners receive him? Will the party keep Gant alive? What will the party do about the shamblers? Will it even decide to face the spider god? How did the miners know the secret information they knew? Will de Vranne blam everybody for their incompetence and treachery?

### Session 7

The away team returned to camp, Gant slung roughly over Abbey’s shoulder. To the glares of the miners, de Vranne’s hunters ushered Gant into the cleared freighter and began standing guard. The party congregated to discuss the multitude of choices before it: what to do with the shamblers? De Vranne offered they should just be put out of their misery, but his own opinion notwithstanding, he was deeply frustrated that any plans to “sneak” rations to them to avoid upsetting the miners were a totally inappropriate capitulation. And what to do with Gant—keep him safe and sound, or kill or debilitate him as vigilantes? Anything but the former, de Vranne was quite sure, would be a direct violation of McCabe’s orders. It became quite clear that all hands were against de Vranne: nearly everyone wanted to do SOMETHING to Gant.

As the party argued, Belle snuck away to rally the miners to move against Gant. To her surprise, she found that Moirin had been there before her, and had reassured the miners that Gant would be prosecuted and executed—five of the ten miners believed Moirin. Belle argued that this was indeed not the plan, and Moirin was only concerned with keeping the peace; though Belle didn’t change anyone’s minds, the five miners who still sided with her were moved to grab their pistols (full access to which had been granted by Kesdis) and assault Gant’s freighter.

As the party continued to debate, the five miners attacked the hunters guarding the freighter. The element of surprise and a lucky first shot into a hunter’s gut allowed the miners to advance, but two were wounded and dropped their weapons. The other three, however, decided the execution of Gant was a suicide mission, and continued pressing forward through the hunters’ slow black-powder volleys. Two other miners were killed. The final very nearly made it to Gant’s door, but was restrained and coolly executed by de Vranne’s hunter deputy, Irakli. Shouting profanities at everyone, but mostly Kesdis for arming the miners, de Vranne raced to the scene.

De Vranne attempted to interrogate the more cogent of the wounded miners, but was met only with stubborn defiance. De Vranne planted his boot (somehow, wet with mud despite having been in no water since Bata’s village—the Aeldman racial trait?) firmly on the prone miner’s chest, drew his pistol, and prepared to end the traitor’s life. Kesdis, however, feeling enough blood had been spilt already, stopped de Vranne and reassured the miner that if seeing Gant dead was what he wanted, he would get it, but that the miner had to do things the party’s way. At this continued negotiation with the rebellious civilians (and barely-veiled promise that the party planned to have its own way with Gant,) de Vranne became apoplectic and demanded to speak with Kesdis privately. De Vranne began to openly question Kesdis’ leadership, harshly criticizing the move to arm the miners and recommending that they be disarmed immediately. Kesdis stood firm, however, believing that despite the incident de Vranne was overgeneralizing about the trustworthiness of the miners and reminding him that five remaining ones had not joined in the assault.

As de Vranne and Kesdis stepped away from the rest of the party, Belle snuck back to the miners to try to convince them that they should take their chance to flee or fight, as it was very likely that de Vranne would take his rage out on them when next they saw each other. However, she was interrupted by the arrival of de Vranne and Kesdis in the remaining miners’ dormitory—de Vranne called Kesdis’ bluff and went to gauge how cooperative they would be in telling what they knew about the assault beforehand. Kesdis saw with relief that the remaining living miners were all Irish; Kesdis had earlier secretly sent Moirin to talk to the miners to investigate how they knew about the Gant mission and the hunters’ rituals, and thanks to their shared heritage with Moirin, the Irish ones had apparently been cooperative. Kesdis implored them to say what they knew beforehand and whether anyone put them up to the attack, but emotions belied her diplomacy and her platitudes enraged one of them. Shouting that his friends’ deaths were all her fault, the miner dove for his pistol, which by now had been confiscated by one of de Vranne’s hunter lackeys. De Vranne had been rearing for a fight, and with readied reflexes he drew his weapon and blew away the offending civilian with one quick motion.

Belle drew on de Vranne and declared he had gone too far, urging Kesdis to consider whether de Vranne was acting either morally or in the interests of the party. Kesdis drew her own weapon and initiated a Mexican standoff, revealing that she knew from Moirin’s spying that in fact Belle was the one who was leaking the information and that she didn’t know if she could trust either of them. Belle offered soundly that there was no way she could have known about Gant at least, and stated, riskily, that the miners would vouch for her. When Kesdis turned to them and asked them to do so, none said a word—all knew that Belle was their source, and had told Moirin as much, but were intent on following Moirin’s example of “keeping Irish business among Irish.” Just as de Vranne was about to become more aggressive in his questioning, Gaston arrived and offered an interesting (but unknowingly misguided) possible explanation: Eleanor's role as therapist for the party meant that everyone came to her with information. Perhaps Eleanor was the true leak, and had directed Moirin to lie to Kesdis about Belle being the culprit.

Both de Vranne and Kesdis were interested in this lead, and started to take Eleanor together to Gant’s freighter for holding and questioning. They forbade Belle from following them, but Belle argued for full minutes that she should come too as she didn’t trust de Vranne to be alone with Kesdis. Despite Belle’s insubordination which grew noticeably more suspicious the longer they debated, Kesdis relented and sent Belle and de Vranne off together to track down Moirin and Nolwen while Kesdis interrogated Eleanor by herself.

Finally alone outside the freighter, Belle and de Vranne traded barbs; confident he knew what was coming, de Vranne derisively asked Belle to get it over with if she planned to frag him. Belle obliged, and both drew their weapons—but de Vranne drew first, and fired multiple rounds into Belle with perfect accuracy, killing her instantly. But as she collapsed to the dust of Kamens, she emitted a death rattle which crescendoed into the chittering of the spider god, the eldritch noises of which reached into de Vranne's mind despite every effort to block it out. Finally, de Vranne knew for certain that Belle had been under the murderous influence of the spider god.

Belle’s alcoholism had the sublime advantage of offering her glimpses into her amnesiac past when she was intoxicated enough, but she had discovered early in her time in the Kamens-Nocturne system that the strange effects permeating the planets were somehow reversing her ability, giving her clairvoyant glimpses of the present and future. These visions, of course, were controlled and chosen by the spider god—but ironically, none had been false, but only the real firsthand details of various bad and occult acts by different members of the party. De Vranne and Gaston’s participation in the hunters’ rituals; Kesdis’ secret plans to help, rather than hurt, Gant; McCabe’s plans to exterminate whatever natives were left when Kamens was safe for the ATC to return. These visions had played straight into the hands of Belle’s sense of right and wrong, leading her to believe many in the party deserved to die. When one of Belle’s visions revealed to her the truth of her amnesiac past—she was a skilled FIRA insurgent captured and brainwashed by McCabe—she realized that her roots lay in fighting (and killing) for what she believed in. Unfortunately, they brought her to a violent end at the hands of de Vranne.

The wave of eldritch influence that washed over de Vranne as he listened to Belle’s death rattle permeated him, and mixed with the adrenaline of battle: de Vranne’s reflexive tendency to shoot anything that crossed into his line of fire, friend or foe, was primed, and the first person to try to approach him would probably take a few rounds. Indeed, the terrible noises made by Belle’s corpse were all too familiar to de Vranne’s hunters, and they stopped in their tracks rather than run to their master; instead, Eleanor and Kesdis raced to the scene, only for de Vranne to gut shot Eleanor in a fit. Seeing de Vranne shoot Eleanor while standing next to Belle’s body, Kesdis was finally convinced de Vranne had lost it and prepared to fire. Seeing her draw, de Vranne instinctively fired a round, which missed only because he lost his nerve to shoot a commanding officer at the last minute. Their master under attack, the hunters regained their will and tackled Kesdis to the ground.

Rather than help Kesdis, de Vranne decided to consolidate his control of the situation and went looking for Nolwen the sniper to neutralize. Nolwen, seeing the scene unfold through her scope and watching de Vranne shoot Eleanor, decided revenge was more important than rescue and began to draw a bead on de Vranne rather than shoot the hunters off Kesdis. Kesdis worked her arm out of the dogpile and reached for her weapon, dropped to the ground; one of the hunters caught it, however, and unsheathed his machete to amputate the offending limb.

As all of this happened, Gaston sat up in his bunk and began to feverishly write—perhaps chronicling the noises he was hearing outside for a later story? With a sinking feeling, he put the final period to paper, lay back in his bed, and waited. Nolwen’s finger hovered over the trigger of her rifle to snipe de Vranne. The hunter brought his machete aloft, to bring down upon Kesdis’ arm... When suddenly, from the ship graveyard, a great rumbling came. All on the scene froze in place and waited as the rumbling drew closer… and closer... until finally, from over the ridgeline, three big crater spiders scuttled into view astride 10 ft-long legs. Apparently attracted by the sounds of the fight, they were eager to divide the bounty of the freighters.

Remembering the strength that just one of these-sized spiders wielded, everyone outside began to sprint for the freighter and hope it would protect them. Abbey raced out to sling the wounded Eleanor over her shoulder and bring her to safety, leading Kesdis alongside her. The hunters started to scatter, but de Vranne ordered them to hold firm—the hunters realized, hearing de Vranne’s confidence in spite of the danger, that the strength he had just displayed in “dealing with” his party was the kind of true survival instinct they wanted in a leader, and remarkably, they all readied their weapons and came to stand alongside him. The hunters were his now, and de Vranne ordered them to the freighter with him. Nolwen, from the freighter door, began to snipe at de Vranne in a rage, inflicting a deep wound and slowing him down. As Nolwen aimed again, Kesdis radioed her to stand down—not for lack of wanting de Vranne dead, but because if he was killed they would have to fight his hunters next. Frustrated, Nolwen shouldered her rifle and allowed de Vranne’s team inside. Everyone made it into the freighter.
As all of this happened, Grandma Lockheart fired up the freighter’s engines, intending to use their etheric energy as a power source for her runes. Manipulating the gravity around a large boulder near the freighter, Lockheart made a sort of coilgun of energy and prepared to shoot the boulder at the spiders. Lockheart fired, and with the speed of a bullet the boulder lanced into one of the huge spiders. In an instant, the party had maybe its only optimistic moment since it had landed on Kamens, with some even breaking into smiles, as the great beast flew backwards and crumpled under the devastating hit—a hit so unexpected and powerful, in fact, that the second of the three spiders lost interest in the party and fled. The final spider reacted similarly, but as it left the scene it sensed some other etheric energy to consume elsewhere in the area... it zeroed in on the second freighter, where the party had been holding Gant—no one had remembered to rescue him during the mad dash to escape, and he was still inside. With preternatural accuracy, the spider’s sharp legs pierced through the openings and weak parts of the freighter, probing each of its rooms until finally it found Gant. It stabbed once, and the party heard Gant howl in agony as the spider withdrew its leg, Gant impaled about 2 ft up it, and galloped away on its seven other legs back to the ship graveyard.

Safe from the spiders and tensions defused by the joint struggle to survive, the party fell into an uneasy peace while de Vranne apologetically healed Eleanor’s gunshot. None in the party were ready to forgive de Vranne’s breakdown, but unable to execute him outright for fear of retaliation by his hunters, the party prepared to put him on trial...

### Session 8

About a day passed between the fateful incidents of de Vranne’s confrontation with the party as everyone physically and emotionally rested. De vranne/his hunters and the rest of the party isolated themselves in their respective freighters and prepared for de Vranne’s trial. Kesdis radioed McCabe to inform him of the situation; apparently earning his explicit support, she then took a number of countermeasures to ensure that she would be the only word on the subject, hoping to keep de Vranne from influencing McCabe. In the meantime, a group of de Vranne’s hunters emerged to start harvesting the supplies from McCabe’s rocket, untouched since the spider attack. The hunters seemed to take almost all the guns and ammunition inside for themselves, and tore out a big chunk of the rocket’s radio guidance systems; they left half the rations, as well as the remainder of the ammo, for the rest of the party and dragged their own spoils to de Vranne’s ship.

Hours before de Vranne was set to appear for trial, McCabe called Kesdis back: he wanted to speak to both her and de Vranne together, privately. On the call, McCabe revealed that de Vranne had indeed contacted him after speaking to Kesdis—Kesdis could not be sure how, as she had tried to deny him any access to secure comms, but suspected that he had reverse-engineered a way to reach McCabe from the harvested telemetry of McCabe’s supply rocket. McCabe explained that on the call, de Vranne had been quite open about his growing insanity and culpability for his actions, and McCabe had no illusions about the potential risk that de Vranne posed to the party. However, de Vranne had briefed McCabe more thoroughly on the trapdoor spider god and on Gant’s research than any in the party had before, and had apparently made him aware that only those who had been heavily exposed to the spider god’s influence were able to perceive it. De Vranne made the case—which McCabe had bought, and parroted now—that this meant that only someone who was losing their sanity to the planet’s phenomena would be able to perceive the spider god to fight it. Someone who was wholly sane couldn’t fight what they couldn’t see.

This, McCabe explained, made de Vranne an important resource that the party ought not dismiss out of turn. McCabe knew the danger of keeping him on BECAUSE of his insanity, but admitted that because of the spider god’s increase in strength for each person that knew it existed, he was loathe to retire the party just to send in another large force to take care of the threat—and anyway, the more time that passed without the ATC restarting work, the more chance the Fialta would also discover Kamens before the ATC had a security footprint to resist them. This meant that McCabe if at all possible wanted the original party to complete the mission, whose importance was now bigger than the party (and its survivability) and urged the party to take any advantage it could get. McCabe assured Kesdis that he would not overrule her, and the choice to execute de Vranne would remain hers alone to make autonomously now or in the future—but for the mission’s sake, he hoped that she would not.

The revelation from de Vranne that Gant’s research and batteries hinged on the spider god’s holy symbols, which could stop working if the spider god was killed, also led McCabe to issue a new order: the party was to give preference to weakening and capturing or containing the spider god over killing it. This would allow sustainability of Gant’s work with a future black site on Kamens, and possibly offer reams of other eldritch knowledge. That said, if killing the spider god was the only option, McCabe would not consider it a failure.

Finally, McCabe ordered Kesdis to immediately send anything that remained of Gant’s notes and research on the extra freighter to a drop point in Celestial space, so that the ATC could collect it before the party progressed any further. Any who disagreed with the decision to carry on the mission despite its reduced survivability, or the new focus on capture over kill, could rejoin ATC main without any negative consequences by getting on that ship too and leaving. But everyone who stayed would get an exponentially higher payout at the end of the mission, with a preference for spider god alive over dead.

Kesdis struggled to accept any of McCabe’s new missives and felt certainly she was missing some extra piece that put McCabe on de Vranne’s side when he had been on hers hours ago. However, loyal to her employer (and the promise of impossible riches in exchange for wild heroism), she gritted her teeth and came to an uneasy truce with de Vranne. She solemnly returned to the party and communicated McCabe’s news. The party, unexpectedly, was split on what de Vranne’s fate should be. Some certainly considered killing him anyway, and most, including Kesdis, wanted to nerf de Vranne by making him cede control over his hunters. But Gaston spoke in favor of de Vranne and admitted that he was the best person to command the hunters, while Eleanor (though not trusting him or necessarily wanting him in the party) forgave him and agreed to have a conciliatory therapy session with him. After arguing at length, the party agreed to split control of the hunters: one team led by de Vranne, one team led by Kesdis with Gaston as translator, and one team led by Abbey with Lockheart as translator. De Vranne accepted this, but testing the limits of the new peace, would not commit to never use his hunters against the party.

The issue of Gant’s research was more hotly contested. Lockheart had locked up all Gant’s research and probes with a runic mechanism only she could unlock, and in a turn of insubordination abjectly refused to let it off the planet. Kesdis and de Vranne were confident, however, that this would certainly be a harshly punished failure, as would be any effort to try to lie or alter the work. After some cajoling by Kesdis, Lockheart realized that the ATC probably already knew the majority of what was in Gant’s research, and was only missing model probes and the science behind the holy symbol’s absorption of null space—in essence, work that could probably be reproduced, and therefore not worth her life. She agreed to send it.

However, Lockheart informed the party that the best way then to prevent the ATC from using the research for evil was to push back on McCabe’s capture order and kill the spider god instead, as this would hopefully deactivate the holy symbols and make Gant’s probes unusable. This, along with the objectively more challenging proposition of capturing it instead of killing it, made her highly recommend that the party not try to. She added pointedly that her opinion and willingness on this mattered, as she was probably the only person in the party who wielded enough power to capture or kill the spider god. Kesdis, growing tired of the party resisting her orders, asked Lockheart to at least TRY to capture it; Lockheart agreed, if not a bit halfheartedly and unconvincingly, and started to draw up plans.

The five in the party who now led hunters went with de Vranne’s hunter deputy Irakli back to Bata’s village to recruit more fighters, while Dozir flew a ship with the remaining miners, the shamblers, and Gant’s research to the ATC drop point. Along the way, de Vranne and Gaston had a heart-to-heart about de Vranne’s hasty order to Gaston during the other day’s standoff to kill Lockheart and Abbey; de Vranne assured Gaston that it was only because he trusted Gaston above anyone else, which Gaston accepted—though reminding him that he was perhaps not the best fighter to execute those kind of orders in the future. At the village, Irakli gave a rousing speech urging more Vakhtangians to join the expedition, and added five to their number, who de Vranne immediately armed with advanced weapons and began to train.

Once Dozir returned, the party gathered its hunters and piled onto the two freighters. Setting a course for the other side of the planet to find the entrance to the feral Nocturnals’ city, they took off...

### Sessions 9 and 10

Concluding final business in Bata’s village, the party piled into its two freighters and set a course for the other side of the planet, to the tunnel where Evriksen had forced-marched a huge contingent of the Vakhtangians for sacrifice. Some in the crew finally got some much-needed sleep, but interestingly, Major Kesdis left her nap looking oddly exhausted and drained. On the other hand, the crew saw Gaston and de Vranne emerge from the same room, both looking cheerful and rejuvenated—many drew their own conclusions about the nature of the relationship.

As the freighters neared the landing zone, they flew over another prominent ship graveyard. This graveyard was not the same as the one by the ATC’s mining operation, however—ships of more makes than just Celestial and Perfect Prince, the only two groups the Nocturnals claimed had ever come to Kamens, littered the landscape. Crashes of Nipponese, Brass Cities, and even Naga craft could be seen. Seeing this, the party realized without much surprise that the Nocturnals had not been entirely truthful in briefing the ATC about Kamens. As if on cue, this guess was proven when the freighters sighted two Nocturnal ships harvesting junk from one of the wrecks. Kesdis and de Vranne hailed them, trying to threaten them to stop for questioning, but succeeded only in scaring them into taking potshots and flying away; successful piloting, however, let the party ram one into a lethal jackknife and another into a tailspin, skidding it along the planet’s surface.

Flying over the survivable wreck to investigate its occupants, the party found that the noise had attracted a swarm of spiders, which headed straight for the wreck. The party saw a Nocturnal crew get out and climb to the top of the wreckage to fend them off, and realized that unlike the feral Nocturnals of Kamens, true Nocturnals were still targets. The party extended a ladder from the freighter, and each crew member jumped for it—only one made it, while the others fell into the mass of spiders. The party watched as they were forcibly possessed, the spiders stepping straight through their bodies to coil around their spines, and de Vranne mercy killed one with a shot from the airlock. The party took the survivor’s gun and ushered him onboard.

Interrogation began immediately. The Nocturnal survivor, however, was as confused as the party. He explained that he and the others were just civilians who had shuttled over to Kamens to take sellable scrap, and seemed to think there was no problem or secret surrounding this. Apparently, he and other Nocturnals had been doing this for countless generations. Further, he thought that the party was part of the ATC mining group, and was indignant to find them on this side of the planet, where apparently the Nocturnals’ elders had told the population the ATC would not go. He had seen ships of many civilizations go to Kamens, but was under the impression that the Nocturnal elders always warned them of the danger beforehand. He was obviously aware of the spiders inhabiting Nocturne, but thought they were a natural threat and not occult; he did not know what the trapdoor spider god was.

However, when the party produced one of the spider god’s holy symbols from Gant’s work, he indicated (wondering how the party could have gotten those in the first place) that that symbol was indeed all over Nocturne, and was not known to be religious, but instead apparently a common architectural feature in Nocturne’s cities. The party was shocked to hear this about the symbols, but just as shocked to learn that there were apparently cities on Nocturne—as far as the ATC knew, Nocturne had been a backwater with only a few million residents and no major population centers. Scans of the planet by the ATC had apparently not picked these cities up whatsoever.

The party drew a few conclusions based on this information. First, the Nocturnal elders (but perhaps not the population writ large) were in league with the spider god, and had a sort of relationship where the Nocturnals would trick others into going to Kamens where the spider god could consume them, and in exchange, the Nocturnals would be able to shuttle to Kamens to harvest the victims’ scrap for technology. The elders also apparently had incorporated the holy symbol into their cities to facilitate further offerings. (This also let the party guess who had bugged them all the way back in Port Muirkirk.) Second, even if the population of Kamens was not actually witting to the true nature of this deal, as the survivor seemed not to be, their longterm exposure to the spider god’s holy symbol meant that they counted towards the number of people who believed in the spider god (or at least experienced its phenomena and drainage) and therefore were all adding to the spider god’s strength. Ruefully, the party realized that the true majority of the spider god’s power lay not in the feral Nocturnals’ city on Kamens, but in the hidden cities of Nocturne.

With this, the party (apart from Eleanor) fairly quickly committed to genocide: rather than killing the spider god to free the Nocturnals, the party would call in an orbital bombardment of Nocturne by the ATC to kill off as many “believers” as possible, to weaken the spider god enough to confront it. Under false pretenses, de Vranne solicited the coordinates of these apparent cities from the survivor and submitted them to McCabe. A strike team arrived within hours, ready to obliterate possibly millions of civilians on the party’s order. (Again, the party really didn’t particularly find this significant, and in fact had planned, instead of at least watching the event, to scavenge ships in the graveyard in their free time.)

Their plans were interrupted, however, when the bombers radioed in to say that they couldn’t see anything at the coordinates they were given. The party finally realized why the ATC had never found the cities—they were concealed by the spider god’s power over perception, probably with the help of their many holy symbols. That did not mean, however, that the cities weren’t actually there, and the party told the bombers to bomb the spots anyways, and to fly high to avoid being affected by anything occult within visual range. The party found its guess to be correct, as though the bombers could not see whether their strikes found any purchase, the party on Kamens heard a massive, planet-shaking roar of pain and anger. All knew that this would imminently psychically affect them and retreated to their respective bunks to avoid a repeat of the O’Clery incident.

De Vranne, however, was the most moved by this psychic attack. Pacing his room to find distraction from the spider god’s influence, de Vranne flipped through a box of old medals and decorations. One in particular, a four-pointed star, reminded him of some deeply shameful memory from his apparent time not as a soldier in the ATC, but in the Aeldman military. De Vranne committed to repurposing this star for a higher purpose than the shame it now represented for him, and challenged himself to embrace the spider god more deeply than before, so as to know it and destroy it. De Vranne took the star and began to carve the holy symbol into the supple sheet metal of his bunk’s desk. As he did so, the star’s points dug into his hands, drawing blood, and de Vranne began to hallucinate the blood of the fallen comrades he had failed seeping from all corners of the room and raining from the ceiling. As the buildup threatened to drown him, de Vranne sunk to his knees and said, “If this blood should rise above my mouth, I will not stand back up.”

De Vranne’s acceptance of responsibility, and choice to put justice for his actions in the hands of an apparent higher power, settled his will enough that with a cold glare he reversed the tide of blood back into the walls. As he stood back up, de Vranne realized that he now knew the spider god’s true name, and could pronounce it. More confident than ever before, de Vranne presented his symbol, and the instrument he carved it with, to the hunters guarding his bunk door from the outside. Declaring that his knowledge of the spider god was now complete enough to face it, he promised to be the last to ever learn the spider god’s name, and destroyed the medal. This show of apparent, near-supernatural willpower over the spider god enthralled the hunters, and as word spread through the ranks of de Vranne’s deed, the contingent began to see him as the reincarnation of their leader Prince Vakhtang.

As this happened, the roars continued outside, subsiding as the last bombs fell. The bombers were the first to notice what came with this conclusion—the firmament of the pocket dimension seemed to get closer. The etheric gate into the biplanetary dimension, wide and crackling with power before, shrank more and more, threatening to close completely. The engines of the bombers burned less bright as a great wind picked up on Kamens, and the party realized what must be happening: the spider god, losing its primary source of worshippers, was kicking its energy absorption into overdrive for as long as it could before it lost the energy to drain things anymore. This surge was so strong that it was shrinking the pocket dimension and closing the etheric gate into it. It also explained how the pocket dimension could have become biplanetary: the spider might have actually sucked Nocturne into its fold with a surge like this thousands of years ago.

The party flew the short remaining distance to the sacrificial tunnel’s entrance, where they found the bodies of uniformed, well-armed Nocturnals, probably military—it seemed they had been waiting for the party, but were killed by something around the time of the roars. Among the bodies, the party considered its next move. Though the situation seemed dire, the party chose patience over hasty action, believing that the spider’s throes would stop in a few hours, which would not be enough time for the party to stop them itself by killing the god. Besides, though it would mean much of their coming journey would be through null space, the spider god probably would not be able to ambiently drain energy anymore afterwards, so what was on would stay on. The party cautioned the failing bombers to land on Nocturne, as they would run out of power before the spider god was slain—all did but one. The party hunkered down, and found that the vacuum did indeed stop about six hours later.

The party devised a plan to eliminate most of its opposition en route to the subterranean city. Using the null space in the tunnels created by the surge to its advantage, the party would mimic the effect of a black pyramid, activating improvised etheric generator bombs whose power would arc through the null space and disintegrate everything in its path until it dissipated or hit an etherically charged area (which would have to be the spider god itself.) Remembering that souls don’t leave dead bodies quickly on Kamens, Lockheart runically catapulted the corpses of the killed Nocturnal soldiers to the drop point of the bomb as spider bait. The party detonated the first bomb a few hundred meters from the tunnel’s mouth, and with a characteristic thunderclap, it decimated everything for about a kilometer of tunnel.

Walking through the cleared tunnels with a convoy of generators, bombs, and a mining laser, the party saw that without the bomb, they would have been likely assailed by hundreds of spiders, which were now just charred marks on the wall and ceiling. Along the way, the party passed what looked to be an equally-destroyed feral Nocturnal camp of maybe ten individuals. In the camp, what might have once been one of the military true Nocturnals sat caged near the burnt remains of a spider, as though the feral Nocturnals were going to sacrifice the true Nocturnal for the premonition ritual. The party pushed the possible implications of this out of its mind and continued ahead quickly.

The party came upon a grand, cavernous chamber which angled down into a sort of amphitheater, the bottom of which was host to many inscribed passages in the Celestial-Elder script creole that the spider god’s name often appeared in. Gaston, able to read both languages, investigated, and found that the chamber they were in was a sort of vestibule, the inscription over which read “faithlessness belies intention.” Reading this, the party readied itself for a test of faith in the spider god. Continuing to read, Gaston suddenly saw inscribed in the wall, “Hello Gaston.” With this, the room went pitch black for everyone except Gaston and de Vranne.

Gaston and de Vranne found that they could still see everything just as clearly, and could see the rest of the party wandering around blindly, panicking. Most of the party could not see or hear the pair—Specialist Dozir, however, who had seen enough of the spider god, was at least able to hear them and transmit orders. The situation seemed to be a trap for the faithless—only the sufficiently insane were able to see the way ahead. As the blinded party formed protective groups, de Vranne and Gaston watched as Evriksen himself, the spider god’s angel and treasonous former general to Vakhtang, crawled out from behind one of the altars and came to stand before them. Garbed in spider chitin armor, with eight spider’s legs curved menacingly out of his back, he addressed the pair and congratulated them on their faith. De Vranne tried to run for the mining laser, but was psychically stopped dead in his tracks by Evriksen—de Vranne’s level of corruption made him easy to control.

Evriksen shared with the two of them a vision of his own ascent to power during Prince Vakhtang’s expedition to Kamens—shooting Vakhtang in his sleep on the spider god’s orders, taking control of the soldiers, and leading most of the expedition straight to the spider god to be sacrificed. Vakhtang commented that de Vranne’s path on Kamens was mirroring his own—de Vranne too had considered killing his commanding officer, and was already moving to take control of his expedition’s troops, the hunters. Evriksen asked if either of them had ever consumed souls; hearing that they hadn’t (though Gaston gave a convoluted explanation of an apple), Evriksen gave them a euphoric taste of what it was like. Evriksen made the two an offer: experience that forever by becoming an angel of the spider god, in exchange for restarting the cycle Evriksen had created by killing Kesdis and leading the rest of the party to be sacrificed to the spider god. Though the coincidence was striking to de Vranne, neither especially trusted Evriksen, and asked for proof of the power he could truly offer.

As all of this happened, Lockheart consulted the soul of the Saldanese academic Sadine inside her Mage Imperium-era projector, asking if she could detect anything. It was here, however, that Lockheart realized a terrible mistake; Lockheart had not checked in on the mental health of Sadine on Kamens in some time, and had failed to notice that an earlier-placed rune increasing etheric flow to Sadine’s containment device had in fact caused the ambient drain on Kamens to sap her willpower twice as quickly. Driven half-mad, Sadine responded to Lockheart’s entreaties with abject fear, and fired off her own etheric energy from the projector—headed straight for Lockheart’s runic apparatus which, when activated, would set off a shotgun spray of quicksilver pellets straight into the crowd of hunters it happened to be aimed at.

Seeing his hunters at risk, de Vranne demanded that Evriksen stop these events as a display of power; Evriksen responded with disgust that it was obvious de Vranne still cared about his people and was unworthy of his offer. With no other way to keep Lockheart’s projector from going off, de Vranne announced his intention to shoot Lockheart. Gaston sprinted at de Vranne, and made it in time to grab him and try to stop him, but de Vranne easily shrugged him off. Calling out to Dozir, Gaston transmitted orders for both Lockheart and the hunters to get down. De Vranne shifted his aim to Lockheart’s etheric projector, and everyone dropped as de Vranne shot the etheric projector, stopping the shotgun blast into his hunters.

Impressed by the display, Evriksen made his offer one last time. De Vranne called out the losing position the spider god seemed to be in, though, as even if the party failed, the pocket dimension was no longer a viable food source—why become an angel for a doomed god? At this Evriksen laughed, and asked, “You really think this is the only place?” Troubled by this, the pair watched as Evriksen raised his hand as if to conduct an orchestra, and hundreds of spiders began to swarm out of the room’s walls towards the blinded party. Evriksen offered this as proof of his power, and gave an ultimatum: submit, or the party would be destroyed by the swarm.

Gaston and de Vranne silently committed to fight, and positioning himself between Evriksen and de Vranne, Gaston distracted Evriksen and dived as de Vranne drew his shotgun, giving de Vranne the first shot against the spider god’s angel. Supernatural reflexes helped Evriksen avoid the brunt of the blast, but the incendiary shells set parts of his body ablaze. In answer, Evriksen drew his own weapon—an oversized spiked chain which he kept looped around the spider legs protruding from his back. Though the chain was much larger and heavier than Evriksen’s humanoid body could handle alone, his eight other legs added strength and provided fulcrums for controlled, vicious swings. Evriksen’s chain danced around his twelve limbs in a horrifying display of skill, building momentum for a strike. De Vranne, however, dodged an effort by Evriksen to disarm his weapon. Gaston took note of something in his notebook and steeled himself for a risky move.

Meanwhile, the others in the party heard the hundreds of spiders begin to swarm around them in the pitch darkness, and Kesdis fired off a few shots to see what her tracers and muzzle flash would show. Promptly hit in the face by spider parts, the party realized the swarm was very nearly upon them and began to fire blindly into the black. The chittering swelled loud enough to drown out even the sounds of gunfire as the spiders charged, trying to overwhelm the party. As Lockheart moved to turn on the generators for more firepower, Kesdis’s MG fire, Abbey’s wide swings, Moirin’s explosives, and Nolwen’s sniping kept the spiders at bay—temporarily. Two of the hunters’ weapons jammed, however, and the hunter line began to be penetrated as the individuals were slain.

De Vranne and Gaston continued to battle Evriksen unseen by the party. After suffering a few well-aimed shots from de Vranne, Evriksen moved to prioritize a more vulnerable target, and swung his chain wide to wrap around Gaston’s legs. With the exact motion of a spider’s limbs spinning a web, Evriksen looped his legs into the links of the chain and wound it towards himself, dragging Gaston to Evriksen’s feet. Gaston, however, rolled over and fired his pistol straight into Evriksen’s face, wounding him and giving de Vranne a chance to capitalize with a few more shots which blew off some of Evriksen’s spider legs.

The party continued to fight as Abbey illuminated the pitch dark with her flamethrower. Lockheart got the generator working and activated the mining laser, cleaving a path through one cone of the spiders and boring a hole into the cave wall. Kesdis, firing on automatic into space, accidentally ricocheted three rounds into her teammates—one into Abbey, one into Eleanor, and one into Moirin. Abbey was fine, but Eleanor was struck with enough force to send her skull-first into the rocky floor, and one of Moirin’s vertebrae was grazed. Though both narrowly avoided death, spiders overran those positions as well, and threatened to overwhelm the party if any others fell.

Seeing Evriksen begin to weaken, de Vranne made a mad rush towards him, thinking he could finish him with a short burst paired with a tackle. Though each shot rang true and blew off more legs, the tackle was short, and de Vranne essentially face planted right at Evriksen’s feet. On the verge of death and enraged, Evriksen flipped him over, looking the whole time like a spider cocooning its victim, and laced his legs into de Vranne’s armor. Taking de Vranne’s face in both of his humanoid hands, Evriksen screamed—something psychic was happening, but none, even de Vranne, knew what. De Vranne tried to blow Evriksen off of himself with a burst from his sonic gun, but fumbled the draw from his side holster and accidentally deafened himself in one ear.

Satisfied that de Vranne was handled, Evriksen rose from him and went over to Gaston, where he attempted to do the same thing. This time, however, his victim was psychically stronger: as Evriksen tried to force his way into Gaston’s mind, Gaston thought with all his might of deeply obscene images of himself and de Vranne in premarital coitus (which everyone in this universe knows is the worst kind.) Trying to push past this mental barrier, Evriksen overestimated his own strength, and strained so hard mentally that he burst blood vessels in his brain. The last of Evriksen’s strength depleted, he rolled limply off of Gaston and died. Gaston Rimm had killed the angel of the spider god.

With Evriksen’s death, the light in the room returned and the onslaught of spiders disappeared. De Vranne made a heroic speech to the remaining hunters over the body of their old betrayer, even further solidifying their perception that de Vranne was the reincarnation of Prince Vakhtang (and indeed, that Gaston might be a better, more loyal version of Evriksen.) As de Vranne healed Eleanor and Moirin’s wounds, Gaston informed the party of their exchange with Evriksen; though Kesdis was pleased to hear that de Vranne had not taken the opportunity to sell her out, all were unsettled by the knowledge that Evriksen had psychically done something to de Vranne, as well as the implications of whatever “You really think this is the only place?” meant. De Vranne checked himself for black marks of possession, but found none.

The party finally shut off the mining laser, which had been running this whole time—long enough to bore a hole onto a rocky outcropping. Stepping onto it, the party saw the feral Nocturnals’ subterranean city stretch out below them, and a path along the great abyss before them which led to it. As they surveyed the settlement, the party saw something terrible, but perhaps advantageous: the cave rock-hewn buildings of the city were somehow on fire, and Nocturnals sprinted shouting through the area. A seven-foot-tall figure in a ragged brown cloak and iron mask, with a bayoneted rifle as long as a person, loped out from one of the buildings, covered in blood. Gaston, ecstatic, recognized this as one of... the Doormen...

### Session 11

The session opened on the party overlooking the Nocturnals’ city from across a great chasm, watching as strange tall, lanky figures appeared to brutalize the population. Gaston knew what they were—a type of demon, rarely spoken of and perhaps never seen by any who had lived to tell of it: a Doorman. Doormen waited at the edge of the partition for individuals across reality to botch a summoning ritual for one of their gods. A misspoken word, the wrong offerings, an incorrect number of worshippers: any of these may part the veil—not enough to bring forth what they wanted, but enough for Doormen to slip into the liminal space and slaughter the summoners, harvesting their souls and taking trophies. Doormen stood about eight feet tall, sporting elephant guns the length of a man with swordlike bayonets and wearing iron masks fashioned from the vessels of captured offerings. Perhaps most disturbing, the Doormen appeared to constantly emit a garbled mixture of all the spoken rites they had ever interrupted, in all their languages—like slowly turning the dial of a radio, tuning into each for a few seconds.

Gaston intuited that communication with the Doormen below could be possible if the party followed the pattern of their repetition of the rites, using only words that would be found in rituals. Willing to give it a try, de Vranne fired his sonic gun to get the attention of a figure who seemed to be the chief of the Doormen in the city. Standing atop one of the taller stone-hewn structures on the edge of the chasm, the Doorman chief heard the blast, and watched as de Vranne sniped a Nocturnal in the streets in solidarity. Impressed, the chief shot another; seeming to understand each other, the party resolved to meet below and set out to cross the chasm.

The path along the cave wall kept a few more challenges for true believers, as de Vranne alone while taking point caught sight of a few web tripwires along the path. He directed Abbey where to fire her flamethrower, and the sane members of the party watched as the air seemed to burn where the otherwise-invisible web caught fire. This attracted the web’s spinners—white spiders which only de Vranne, Gaston, and Dozir could see. De Vranne again directed Abbey to launch fire into the convenient line of spiders, catching all of them and disorienting them enough to roll off the edge to their doom. During the fray, however, one of the spiders crept behind the party and tried to grapple Le Fou off the ledge with it. In a display of strength, however, Le Fou fought off the mass, invisible as it was to him, and kicked it into the abyss. The party continued its trek to street level.

The Doorman chief strode to meet the party, comically taller than all except maybe Abbey. De Vranne and Lockheart worked together, devising questions for the chief by using words in Vedlys commonly found in rituals. This worked in getting the party’s points across, and allowed the chief to answer a few questions. Most salient, the Doormen were there not to feed on the Nocturnals, but to bind and indefinitely feed on the spider god itself—they knew where the spider god was located and intended to hunt it there. They had been summoned apparently by a botched ritual by Evriksen in the immediate aftermath of the spider god’s loss of power from the bombing of Nocturne.

Even more interesting, the Doorman cryptically hinted that the spider god existed “between worlds,” implying that it had influence over more than just Kamens and Nocturne. This was somehow related to the river which the party had found in Bata’s village. However, the Doormen were not interested in closing the gateways into these other worlds, and apparently could not anyways without a great amount of power. Satisfied that for the moment it had found a kindred spirit, the party joined forces with the Doormen and headed towards the city’s church, where the two hundred-ish civilians still alive after the Doormen assault were all fleeing and gathering.

The group came under withering sniper fire from the church windows as it approached; an initial drive by de Vranne’s hunters successfully saw fourteen of them make it inside thanks to his flashbangs, but an off-target rake of MG fire by Kesdis exposed another eight, getting them killed. The shooters left their posts to deal with the intrusion, leaving the way open to the party—de Vranne set off to tank the attacks against his hunters, singlehandedly cleaving through the small cave people with his shotgun. The remainder of the party blasted through the church vestibule, finding a grand cathedral with vaunted ceilings and obsidian carvings all around of varied spider carnage. Concentric circles—but this time, four instead of three—covered the floor. In the main hall, the party found the unarmed, cowering remainder of the Nocturnals all hudded together. The bloodthirsty Doorman chief bayonet charged straight into it, skewering rows of the cave people before unsheathing her blade from chests and firing indiscriminately into the crowd.

As she did so, the furthest back of the Nocturnals began a last-ditch chant; hearing this, the rest of the party began to fire into the crowd of civilians as well, hoping to kill enough of them to disrupt whatever mass ritual was surely about to take place. They were unsuccessful however, and the party watched in horror as the Nocturnals at first appeared to simply dogpile onto each other, but then with the vibration of the concentric circles below them start to congeal into a single mass. After a few moments, the thirty-odd Nocturnals remaining had formed into a flesh monster, sporting dozens of arms and legs in a vague arachnid shape. The creature charged the Doorman chief, its closest target, but unused to its limbs it missed and rolled onto its back.

The chief, in answer, skewered the beast’s belly with her occult bayonet and followed up with a shot into the wound, killing many of the Nocturnals making up the beast’s core and paralyzing one side of its limbs. Unable now to roll over off its back, with a flourish the chief leapt into the air and impaled the flesh monster once more, executing it as the bayonet appeared to absorb its power. The creature slain, the party realized that most, if not all, of the city was now dead. A low moan rumbled across the city, reminiscent of the roar after the bombing of Nocturne and signaling the spider god’s deeper injuries after this assault. Hopefully, this was sufficient reward for the party’s second genocide against civilians this campaign.

The party took a moment to explore the church, and realized that one of the reliefs on the walls looked suspiciously like a map to a ley line, with multiple likely etheric gates on it—but rather than planets, each unit was four concentric circles. The line cut off unceremoniously, but room was on the wall for the relief to continue, as though it was unfinished or ongoing. The party realized for certain that the spider god must somehow have access to the gates of other planets, and that it was probably an ongoing process to gain access to them. The circles’ layers now made more sense: the outermost was the planet, then the circular chamber into the spider’s abyss, then the abyss—and the new, innermost fourth layer, probably an etheric gate within. Likely, this format was the same on each planet on the ley line, the same story but told elsewhere.

Passing through a hallway of Nocturnal bodies mummified by webbing into prostrate positions, the party exited out the back of the church and came upon a spiraling rock ledge down into the chasm. Gaston and the Doorman chief knew that at its end must be the chamber of the spider god. The party prepared itself for (possibly?) its final battle on Kamens, and whatever consequences would come with...

### Session 12

*This section is incomplete. You can help The Aeldrum Wiki by expanding it*.

Presumably, this is when the events of the 12th session (and perhaps the epilogue) of the **Moon's Haunted Campaign** occurred. This has been filled in to eliminate dead-end pages.

## Notes

* Campaign doc: link
* The name is a reference to this tweet: