[tsofian]

Sorry for the original "stream of consciousness" post.

In the original module there is basically only a single way to get into the base. If the players don't find it they are screwed. In this revision there are several possible ways to get in.

Traditional Entrance
There is the "traditional" entrance used between the time the base is finished and when the main entrance gets uncorked. This entrance goes through the decon facility. It doesn't have to be very big, because no heavy equipment will use it. It does have to be able to be kept secret, both before and after the war starts. Between the end of the construction period and the time the bombs fall people will go in and out of the base, how can this be kept hidden? I've made a couple of suggestions, but ymmv. No matter how you "cover" this entrance I'm putting it at the end of half a mile of horizontal hard rock mine gallery. The gallery has several side tunnels, one of which appears to end in an underground lake. The main gallery ends at the face, where digging ended when the mine was closed.

The underground lake can either be swum through, with scuba equipment to be safe, or without for risk takers, and that comes up in a tunnel that bypasses the face and enters a modern tunnel leading to the decon facility. The face is designed to be removed at some point. The underground lake can also be drained in about half an hour with pumps, or the deeper part of the gallery can be flooded to a higher level. This gives the PD an option. The underground lake could be an insignificant puddle or it might be twenty feet deep and a couple of hundred feet up the mine gallery. It depends upon how tough you want to make things for the players.

In any case after the two tunnels join there is a steel security door. Beyond that is another few hundred feet of tunnel leading to the security post, the decon facility and the triage area. I added a small garage to the triage area. This includes a couple of bobcats for tunnel maintenance, some motorcycles and ATVs for recon (all standard prewar manufacture to attract the minimum amount of attention) and some electrical carts set up as passenger vehicles or ambulances to haul folks around the tunnels as needed

Emergency Exits
The various emergency exits offer a number of failure modes that may give access into the base without going through the decon facility, since these were one way out only routes.

Sally Ports
The one or two "sally ports" can have enough surface erosion to expose the pre-drilled holes designed to accept explosive charges to blast. Characters might notice these perfectly round holes and that any water that goes in drips out the far end. There may even be some strange whistling sound coming from them as the wind passes over them. A really kind PD might have had the Base open a sally port during the time they were building their little social experiment. In that case there would have been a desperate attempt to conceal and seal this entrance. I would say a lot of explosives would be involved, some to drop the entrance and some in the tunnel from the sally port back into the base itself.

The sally ports themselves have a small garage with a group of ready use vehicles that were to be kept in operational condition through the long wait. These include a bulldozer. some recon vehicles and such. The idea is that these sally groups can scout around the base area.

The two ways characters will not be able to use are the original construction entrance, which was a huge mine gallery, as that was sealed with a massive cave in, and the main operational entrance, which is still at least 100 feet shy of getting to the surface.

This gives players several ways in, and gives the base some additional capabilities.

A Note of Doors
All tunnels are closed by a heavy steel door, which is gas tight. All entrances are covered with cameras and microphones. There are obvious and concealed ones. There is also at least one microphone. All doors open outwards, so any attempts to battery them will be less effective. The frames of the doors connect directly to a steel throat which effectively prevents blasting around the door and bypassing it to get into the tunnel behind it. It is easier to blast the door than the structure around it. All these doors have vision and weapon ports as well as a chute through which grenades can be ejected into the tunnel. All of these ports are gas tight. These doors are more than a foot thick and are similar to those found at Cheyenne Mountain.

In the emergency exits these doors are a few inches thick and have vision and pistol ports, and a grenade chute. These are also gas tight.