Vast & Curious

 Here's a blurb that never amounted to anything.  Vaguely gameable, got some chuckles on G+ years back, but I never did anything with it.

Our first real alien contact in the twenty-third century was with the necropolis of a dead civilization.

An immense Texas-sized hunk of alien planet tumbled out of warpspace and just hung there near Mars orbit - a honeycombed piece of a dead world, the size of an entire country.  The press dubbed it Cloudcuckooland.

Initial explorations revealed two important facts.  First, Cloudcuckooland was a vast conurbation - forgotten, decaying sprawl and subterranean complexes as far as the eye could see or radar could penetrate, all scaled for aliens three or four times the size of a man. 

And whoever had built the place left behind valuables - rare earth, precious metals, chunks of mind-boggling tech.  Things worth scavenging.

And second -- Cloudcuckooland was inhabited.  Chitin-clad, hive-building quadrapeds, something between a spider and an anime robot.  Our pilots called the little ones on the surface “goblyns” and it stuck, but the beasts came in many sizes and shapes.  They had their own ecology, they’d been living off this colossal alien corpse-city for millennia, and they were more than happy to attack and eat humans.

A deadly and dangerous place, unexplored and unmapped, yet teeming with untold riches.  It’s a place for an independent contractor - someone willing to get killed, an expendable thrillseeker - to make a fortune.

So here’s what you do.  You piss away your savings into a sweet ride with all the right modifications and an air supply, and you weapon it up bigtime.  You throw your lot in with a handful of comfortably psychotic like-minded treasure-hunters.  And you get a military dropship to plunk you on the surface of Cloudcuckooland in exchange for a cut of your haul upon pickup.

Gotta explore, get in there, dip into the labyrinth.  Go deep.  Go fast.  Map what you can.  See what’s down there.  Outrun and outgun the goblyns and any other alien critters lurking down there.  Grab something worth selling and haul ass out of there as fast as you can.  Stay frosty.  Stay loyal to your crew.

You’re not a soldier, or an archaeologist.  You’re a daredevil idiot with a fast car looking to score by drifting through the cyclopean halls of a long-dead alien civilization.

Hell to the yeah.

the VAST and the CURIOUS

A campaign guide and kit for turning any old dungeon into an insane stunt-driving sci-fi action flick.

Get out your dungeon tiles and Hot Wheels.  This is going to get weird.

It's about fam-- no, screw that, it's about XP.