Death Garage!

          In the next few entries, I’m presenting several ruins for your PA game or campaign.  My own setting is Pugmire meets Other Dust; change the setting details to suit your needs.

          I designed the ruin using the “What Is That Ruined Structure?” table in The Sandbox #1 with a flourish from Monte Cook’s Injecting the Weird. The tube-as-dungeon idea came from Runehammer’s video “Dungeon Building 101: Part 2”.

          The table uses all the standard dice to answer several questions.  Here are my results:

1.       Entrance: Wall or window has given way; Visible damage: outer sheathing is decaying and falling away; Original function: Entertainment (club or theater), What’s valuable inside: a functioning vehicle of some kind; What’s the threat: something waits for those who emerge; What’s unusual about this place: a vicious combat was here. Once a tower; now laying on its side(From Injecting the Weird). All checks are DC 15 (an idea from Runehammer.) The Runehammer channel also recommends each location has a Threat, a Timer, and a Treat, which I have included in this location.

The Death Garage

Surrounding Area

Steel splinters of a broken city loom around the ruin. A wooded sward trails behind it in a verdant wake.  Its entrance yawns like the broken-toothed maw of an idiot god, an amphitheater of destruction choked with rubble. The implacable agents of decay-rust, vines, lichen-penetrate every crack and fissure.

A one-mile halo of mayhem encompasses the ruin. The fragments of war machines and fused automatons testify of a long-forgotten battle. There is little to salvage.

Getting In

The way to the entrance is difficult and close; only one character at a time can make their way into the ruin. Characters must make few Strength or Dex saves to see if anyone takes 1 hp of scrapes and bruises. Once inside, they are in near-total darkness, standing on the edge of a fifty-foot drop.  This is the parking level of an entertainment complex. The complex, a high tower filled with clubs and restaurants, toppled over in the battle. The parabolic entrance is the tower’s bottom edge, ripped from its foundation. In the intervening years, time has buried the bulk of the tower and plants have taken hold on the land above it.  This is the green sward that cuts through the rubble of the city. This bastion of nature presents its own set of adventuring opportunities.

Standing inside the ruin, the PC’s can see a few blinking lights at different levels below them in the darkness. These are running lights of the few grav cars whose batteries are still good.  Some of them float in pairs forming platforms. Others hang from one corner as if pinched by a giant's fingers. They pirouette like demented party lights.  The "floor" is a thick layer of wrecked and rusting vehicles that slid to the ceiling when the garage toppled. The treat hovers above the wreckage: a pristine black grav car, its stereo thumping.

Descending the Tower

Once all the PC's have all reached the first floating car, roll a d4. Describe a terrible grinding sound. An ancient robot from the battlefield had powered up and is trying to chase them into the garage!  In up to four rounds it will tear an opening in the ruin large enough to get itself in (and to get the grav car out). It will then enter the ruin and attack the characters, trying to destroy them as they leap from car to car.

If the players leave a guard at the entrance, the robot ignores the guard. It focuses on getting into the tower to attack the group. If you must, give the robot a dying shield that lasts as long as the timer.

Characters make 3-5 checks to get to the lower level and reach the Treat.  The floating cars are between eight and fifteen feet apart, but most of this distance is vertical.  Failing the check for moving from car to car results in a character hanging from the target car for dear life. Critical failure means the car’s battery dies it plunges to the floor!  Anyone of a falling car takes 2d6 damage as the vehicle drops. Crashing into other grav cars on the way down slows the vehicle's fall.  This can send cars spinning off in other directions, re-configuring the battlefield!

The Robot

The robot can be expressed in several ways, depending on the group’s level and makeup.  It leaps and climbs like a gorilla, charging the PC’s to knock them off the cars.  Add a climb speed and construct qualities to the following creatures and ignore irrelevant abilities:

Minotaur Skeleton (CR 2)

Minotaur (CR 3)

Gorgon(CR 5)

Clay golem (CR 9)

Girrilon (Volo’s Guide to Monsters) (CR 4)

Ogre, add the pounce ability from a tiger (CR 3)

Iron golem (CR 16)

Other Monsters

On every round that someone stands on the wreckage at the bottom of the garage, 1d4 rust monsters appear. They live in the strata of rusty cars and are hungry for fresh metal.  If the PC’s are clever, they can kite the robot onto the floor and let the rust monsters swarm it. The rust monsters ignore the black car because they hate the taste of its nano-enhanced body. (or because of the vibrations of the stereo.  If the players turn it off, the rust monsters swarm the car!)

Besides to the rust monsters, there are three darkmantles living on the ceiling of the ruin.  They drop on prey and use darkness to make leaping or climbing between grav cars much more hazardous.

The Car and the AI

Hooks to retrieve the treat car could include an assignment, a map, or a happy accident. It may have led the PC's to itself via a key card with GPS.  Emphasize that the car looks badass: black, aerodynamic, expensive.  Make it drool-worthy. Emphasize that the hole the robot tore in the entrance is big enough for the car. The car may contain a personal possession of the former owner or a key card to an executive suite higher/deeper in the tower. In a post-recording world, the sound system is a priceless treasure.

Nigel, the car's friendly AI, is unclear about what’s happened in the last several centuries. It can tell PC's a little about life before the fall, but it has no news of the years it spent hovering in the dark. Nigel is politely curious about who is driving the car and why they smell like dog. The GM can decide how keyed into the internet of things Nigel is, and whether it can access the net at any given time. Nigel can maneuver the car out of the garage if asked. The PC’s can make Nigel an ally if they treat it with a modicum of respect.  It will do its job regardless of treatment, but no more if the PC’s abuse it.

The car can’t fly, but it can levitate up to one hundred feet with limited mobility and speed.  Consider its Speed score to be 0 when levitating, with a fly speed of 20 feet. (Speed is a Sine Nomine quality of vehicles seen in Stars Without Number and Other Dust.)

The Rest of the Tower

The rest of the buried tower awaits exploration.  It is an entertainment complex full of holo-suites, dance clubs, bars, restaurants and private rooms. Populate it with vermin, mutants, and fungal threats, as well as demented companion, service, and security bots.

       

The Death Garage!

          

The garage and the rest of the tower.  The small maps are extras.

          Any questions or comments that could improve this encounter and location are welcome.  I'm always trying to improve as a GM and designer, and I sure as shootin' don't have all the answers.