Skulls Without Number - Session 6

24 Jun, 2025

My players completed their sixth session of Skulls Without Number!

Sixth Session

Dramatis Personae

• Sebastion Echerole: Missionary, Chief Chirurgeon, and point man with a flamer
• Gallius Vax: Heretek techpriest and enginseer finally in his element
• Lady-Captain Matilda Ysolde of House Montague-Kurtz: Rogue Trader and fearless leader
• Os du Randt: The "strong silent type" of Astropath
• With a cameo by dear gunners' chief Rassolvov van Law.

Summary

When we last left our heroes, they had landed in a mysterious complex on a dead moon, meeting a band of pirates stuck in the hanger after crash-landing. As the session began, the party was in the hanger bay, with its two exits, each going into long corridors. They decided to head to the southern exit, leaving the household troops and the pirates in the relative safety of the hanger. After a long walk, they came to a stripped-bare warehouse. They investigated the aftermath of a battle that must have occurred here - patches of high radiation, broken pieces of Rak'gol bodies, shell impacts, laserburns. Curiously, there were few remains. The bits and pieces of Rak'Gol appeared roughly handled, while any human remains had been removed with care.

The only exit to the room had been barricaded by the pirates. Removing it was going to be a long, laborious task. Lacking tools and peons, the party set to work disassembling the barricade by hand. They reasoned that they didn't want to expose their work crews or the pirates to elevated radiation (how sweet!) Of course, this meant the process (which truly would require a 20-man work crew) was exhausting. Os's telekinesis helped, but the deconstruction still took its toll.

The barricade down, the party proceeded to the reactor room. Unlike the battle-scarred and bare warehouse, this room appeared mostly intact, apart from some ad-hoc gun placements. They searched the room and the controls for this reactor, reasoning that it controlled the defenses (and perhaps the rest of the base.) However, they were unable to read the language, and the semiotics were unclear. The party opted to leave it alone until they could understand. They did fiddle with the doors at the west and south exits to the reactor room, getting the western one stuck open and breaking open the stuck southern door.

Going west, the party found themselves in a warrenlike maze of offices and rec rooms, with a mess hall at the center. It didn't take them long to realize it was trapped - just after entering, they found a dead pirate sliced by razorwire. What they thought were garrote traps turned out to be tripwires attached to monofilament grenades. Many had been set off, but some were still active, as the dead pirates attested.

Carefully making their way through the narrow halls, they were suddenly confronted by a few of the fortress' guardians - silent metal machines, shaped in the image of a man but undeniably mechanical, soulless and cold, with no face but a smooth rounded plate. The very haunted machines the pirates had warned them about.

The crew wasted no time wasting these machines, and hauled their corpses back to the guncutter basecamp for Gallius to examine. They spent the rest of the day and night mingling with the Pillards, while Gallius tore the inert machines apart, looking for clues. It was all archeotech technology, yet it appeared that it had been produced mere decades ago. He was not able to understand much with such short time and few tools, but he was able to figure out that these machines were not being controlled etheric waves of any sort - they were acting for themselves. The specter of silica animus grew larger. Gallius grew more excited.

The next day the team set out once more, again leaving their household troops to guard the guncutter. South of the reactor room they found barracks. There were a handful of corpses, decades old. These were no pirates. All of them were lying in bed, peaceful, except for one who had propped themselves against a wall. Sebastion performed an abridged funerary rite (for whatever good it would do these heathen souls) and began checking for causes of death. Poison - cyanide, as it turned out, and with no signs of struggle, it appeared to have been voluntarily ingested. Searching through suites and lockers, they managed to scrounge four intact uniforms. They exited the barracks using the western door to a new room.

The party found themselves in a bare, reinforced hallway. At the end was an interior room, made of completely opaque black metal. Though they did not know it yet, this was the security center, and they were staring at a panopticon-like structure that would allow those inside to observe and fire upon those approaching down the pre-sighted kill lanes of the hallway. There was little time to contemplate this - five soldier bots approached them, and gaining the initiative, chased the explorers back into the barracks. The soldier bots moved with greater aggression, blasting the them with a volley of lasers. Only with a liberal use of fate points did they save themselves from being mercilessly cut down. The counter-attack of Montague-Kurtz was equally ferocious, with Os telekinetically crushing bots left and right, Matilda and Gallius firing on the assembled bots, and Sebastion pouring holy flame in the name of the Emperor. They finished the session exhausted, but victorious.

Takeaways

• Dungeon exploration. I didn't think I was going to do a dungeon when I started this campaign. However, it's a well-trod path for a reason. I had an unexplored space that was dangerous, largely abandoned, and filled with treasure. I think it went well! My players said the they had fun. However, this dungeon was quite different from more standard dungeons I've used before. I abstracted the space significantly. Early on, I decided I was not going to map out battlemaps or a traditional 10'-square dungeon map. The chance that my players return to this dungeon as a dungeon is slim to nil. They're either going to take control or leave after extracting the treasure. Therefore, any highly detailed map would be wasted.¹ Instead, the dungeon exists in my notes as a pointcrawl, just room descriptions and connections on a map. I used Traverse Fantasy's Bite-Sized Dungeons to set up the types and structure of each room. I think it worked very well! There was some roughness as I drew each room on the Owlbear Rodeo map, but overall I think the players adapted very well. I personally feel like barebones, abstract maps can generate good play. I wanted my players to focus on the description I gave them, but also track the broad strokes of their positioning. I think this mostly succeeded - each room was 5x5, and later on, my players started drawing the internal structures and making notes to help them recall the contents. For positioning, we moved tokens around the square rooms to show where they were, roughly, and that was enough to keep everyone on the same page. I used my own semi-abstract dungeon exploration rules that I half-cribbed from Worlds Without Number. The characters were all wearing voidsuits with built-in lights, and they were not there long enough to need rations,² so I only marked turns for purposes of generating random encounters. I considered hour-long turns but I ended up with fifteen-minute turns; the facility was just not that big in my final conception. I learned from this experience that dungeoncrawling is pretty simple - count turns, deplete resources, add random encounter rolls to taste. You don't need a fifty page rulebook for this stuff; if you know what you're doing and you're willing to be flexible and negotiate, you can write it on a napkin.
• Obstacles as construction projects. Something I tried out on this map was structuring some obstacles and treasure as "caches", basically big piles of stuff that need work teams or special tools (hauler vehicles, demolitions) to get through. My goal was to create a "stuck door" or "heavy piles of treasure" that allow for a bit more of flexibility in their approach.³ I thought this would be a great idea; I think it mostly worked out in play but needs some more testing. One frustration was that the players didn't really have the tools to tackle the caches, but they also didn't want to bring their servants with them (valid, given the threat of radiation.) They did smartly use Os's telekinetic powers⁴ to help address obstacles. This might just need another test now that the players know how they work, but overall, I do not feel like this achieved the goal of creating resource depletion and logistical challenges. We'll see what happens in the next dungeon.
• Fate points. These were kind of a relic, something I adapted from the FFG game without really thinking about how to use them.⁵ I figured out real quick once the players started dropping! I settled on one Fate Point allowing a player who was Mortally Wounded to stabilize immediately, another Fate Point could bring a Stabilized character back with 1d6 hp, and players could only use one Fate Point per combat round. I've had a few additional ideas for Fate Point abilities, but I think using them to keep a character from dying is absolutely their key ability.

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