Dead Suns: The Gate of Twelve Suns (Starfinder)

Hey there, folks, looks like the long-range scanners have picked up another Starfinder session.

.....

Wait, wait, come back, I'll never make that joke again, I swear!

But anyhow, all kidding aside, we've begun the fifth volume of the Dead Suns Adventure Path, The Thirteenth Gate.

So let's get on with it!

(again, as often happens, this is a combination of multiple sessions, so characters may appear or vanish, etc.)





So after learning the history of the Stellar Degenerator as well as how to get to the demiplane where it's contained, the group heads back to Absalom Station to resupply and upgrade the ship before heading back out. They plot a course into the Vast, and spend a couple of weeks passing through the Drift, flying by storms of quantum foam and passing by clusters of planar debris. But towards the end of the trip, they pass through a nearly-invisible cloud of dust...

Inside the ship, Virxidor is enjoying a holonovel in the recreation suite. Malesinder is calibrating some new gear he's picked up at the station while he and N1-C0 have a telepathic conversation. Zar is relaxing in private, and Kech is getting over yet another fungus-disease of some sort.[0]

The party lounging on the ship, in pawn/map form.

(for the record, this is just the ship map, there's a lot more outside of it but I can't draw all that)

Virxidor's holonovel begins glitching and lagging just a bit, and following a hunch he heads up to the bridge to check out the computer. Jack, the AI, thinks everything's fine, but Virxidor gives it a quick once-over and discovers it's being hacked. He hits the Yellow Alert button, then looks closer and discovers that the hack is literally coming from within the ship!

He hits the Red Alert button just as what looks like a cloud of glowing particles flows out of the computer and coalesces into the form of a vaguely robotic, vaguely angelic being with a glowing, flickering sword. He recognizes as an inevitable, a type of lawful neutral outsider. Specifically, it's an anhamut inevitable, which are generally dedicated to patrolling the spaceways and protecting interstellar travelers.

Which makes it all the more confusing when this one yells "In-in-in-interlopers! You will cease your transgressions and r-r-r-return to your place of origin or be d-d-d-destroyed!" and attacks.

Fortunately, before it can hit him, N1-C0 rushes down the hallway, the ship's AI opening the doors for him so he can shoot it and draw its attention long enough for everyone else to converge on the bridge (Zar and Malesinder) or provide support and covering fire from the hallway (Kech and N1-C0). Highlights of the battle include Zar unleashing his 'supernova' attack on it, and Virxidor hitting it in the face with a 'flash' shuriken, which converts into energy mid-flight and deals a buttload of damage, and in the end N1-C0 finishes it off.

The rest of the trip goes uneventfully, and the group leaves the Drift about a day's flight from the Gate of Twelve Suns. But even from there, they can see it -- twelve stars, perfectly arranged in a circle.

As they approach, Virxidor does a scan of the system and discovers a few things. He finds that each of the twelve stars is orbited by a single planet. The planets have roughly the same diameter, mass, and rotational period. Their orbits are synchronized so every so often they all face the center of the circle of stars at the same time.

Deeper scans reveal that the stars' gravitational forces are in a delicate balance, achievable only with some impossibly-precise math and more than a little magic. But a side-effect is that navigating through the system is extremely difficult and using a Drift engine within the system is impossible. The safest time to reach any of the planets is when they're the furthest from the center of the system. Fortunately, it's easy enough to figure out which one is the 'right' one to go to, because only one is capable of sustaining life -- it's teeming with it, in fact -- and has a single intact structure on the planet's surface.

Virxidor's scans also reveal that the planets give off a burst of gravitational energy when they're all pointing towards the center of the system, which he determines partially keeps the whole mess stable. Zar, reading the figures over his shoulder, points out that's enough energy to open up a large portal to another plane under the right conditions. The energy comes from a hole in each planet's crust at the equator that seems to reach all the way down to the core.

Scans of the planets themselves reveals small cosmic strings -- one-dimensional 'defects' in the fabric of space that produce gravitational waves -- mystically contained within each planet's core. These cosmic strings are maintained by massive technomagic devices kept in working condition by literal armies of maintenance bots.

So now that they've got a solid lay of the land (as it were), they begin to plot a course for the planet that likely has the key to the demiplane. But as they head that way, a red ship with skulls painted on it emerges from behind the nearest planet, flanked by a pair of fighters on an intercept course...

The comm channels screech to life, and a gaunt man leers toward the camera lens. His skin is dark but is made nearly iridescent by a swirl of glowing nanites. Long, silver dreadlocks and an unkempt charcoal-colored beard frame his face. The distortion of the lens puts a shade of menace to the man's movements and appearance.

"Are you ready for the end?" he asks, baring a mouth full of brown, crooked teeth. "I am the agent of oblivion! I am the fang of the Devourer! I am the herald of annihilation. I will sing when your bodies -- then only shells -- drift and twirl through the void, charred amid the tangled wreckage of your ship, and your journey to nothingness is nearly complete!"

They suggest that if he's the nihilist he claims he is, then he'd be just hitting the self-destruct by now, and he informs the group that he can do more than just kill himself. He invites them to join him in annihilation together, and the group is like 'Yeah, no.' Virxidor hacks his communication system, while Zar recognizes that his ranting has some sort of hidden message for the pilots of the fighter jets, though he can't decode it. Virxidor just jams the communications system, forcing future communication to take place in the form of maser weapons and particle beams.

The party aboard the Void-Crowned Queen is outnumbered by the modified ATech Bulwark destroyer ship and the pair of fighters flanking it. This makes maneuvering difficult while dealing with attacks shaving off their shields from multiple angles at once. They even take a couple of serious hits, forcing Malesinder to spend time and energy keeping the weapons and power core functional. They disable the ship, and then manage to fight off the fighters without sustaining any real damage -- though that's as much due to Virxidor and Malesinder's quick work with the shields as much as anything else. (Though the fact that Zar has turned the ship into a verifiable war machine over time certainly doesn't hurt.)

But then, just when they're debating raiding the Devourer Cult ship personally, they hear this transmission as they've managed to work around Virxidor's jamming:

"Our ship's been pushed through the Blood Door, boss. The interlopers are tougher than I thought -- may the Devourer consume them! I'm sending out a long-distance transmission for more choirs to come, slit their throats, and feast on their remains!"

They recognizes that 'pushed through the Blood Door' effectively means they're dead in the metaphorical water. Unfortunately, the only way to stop the transmission is by actually getting to the communications system on-board the enemy ship and sending an "all clear" signal (almost as if they've had to increase communications security after some recent incident). They approach and Virxidor hacks the airlock door so they can go in through the main deck.

Once they're on the ship, they smell blood and death. There's fresh corpses that look like they were killed fleeing the bridge, both stabbed and shot with a disintegrator pistol (which is a signature of the Devourer Cult). Zar takes a closer look and it's clear that this wasn't some cult mass suicide thing, these guys were cut down as they fled an attacker.

And then the attacker emerges, at the end of the hall behind them. The same man they saw on the comms -- the Jangly Man -- holding a bloody spear in one hand and a disintegrator pistol in the other.

"I punished them for their failure," he says, answering the unasked question. "I'm so glad you could join me so we can all go out together! You first. Come on out, children!"

And with that, four incorporeal humanoid shapes of inky blackness emerge from the walls into the hallway, two behind the group and two in front. They're the spawn of an undead creature called an oblivion shade, which rises from the miserable soul of someone who died in the grip of nihilism and can make more of its kind from its victims.

And the fight begins in earnest, with the group fighting the shades while the Jangly Man supports them from the end of the hall with his pistol and tactical assistance.[1] The shades drop quickly enough, between Zar's glowing hands, Malesinder's polearm, and Virxidor's force spells. Virxidor takes control of the last one with magic that lets him command undead. He sics it on the Jangly Man while everyone gangs up on him. Zar rushes in to finish him with his supernova, which also snaps the shade out of the magical control -- at which point Virx casually finishes it off with a magic missile.

They get to the computer to send out a fake 'all clear' signal, and find a recent transmission in the logs...

"If we can get the last console online, the weapon will be within our grasp, and soon the end of all things will follow. Unfortunately, the control board is shot. Zaz has no idea how to repair it, but Eltreth has told us where to find spares. Take the Singularity and patrol the system in case that inevitable managed to send for help. Bring some of Malice's children. I will contact you again to return to the control center when we have the control board."

And we leave off there, with the group ransacking the disabled ship and getting ready to venture to the outpost with the controls for the Gate of Twelve Suns...



[0]-- After what happened with the moldstorm on Castrovel, it's just become a running gag that whenever anything bad happens to Kech (or she isn't around because her player can't make it), it's somehow fungus-based.
[1]-- In mechanical terms, he's an envoy using his 'clever attack' and 'improved get 'em' abilities to buff the shades and debuff members of the party, combined with an augmentation that let him inflict the shaken condition on enemies.