Prime Base, Old vs New

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

I can see that with the date of the war changing the old Prime Base would get mothballed. Everyone there is frozen and the role goes to a much smaller facility that is primarily automated. I could see it being a distributed network type of facility, with several mutually redundant and interconnected nodes. That makes it much more survivable. I'm trying to figure out how such a facility would be designed, operate and fail.

I think you would need to spell this out more before I could comment. Bear in mind that I have not read 4ed but have had significant problems with most of what I have seen, but in terms of revising Prime Base I could see a lot of improvements.

Originally Posted by tsofian

To make the classical module more interesting I have a lot of options.
In one of the works cited as original source material Hiero's Journey the good guys (A Priest, A Princess, A Druid(ish) an Intelligent mutant bear a somewhat intelligent mutant moose and some sailors are attempting to find a huge "Pre-death" facility. They find one entrance at the same time the bad guys find another one. It becomes a race to search the facility AND not get discovered by the bad guys. Also the facility has some interesting "residents" to contend with.

First, PB does not need to be an adventure module. It helps, but it can be a sourcebook and be just as relevant.

Second, introducing antagonists introduces one giant problem: someone else knows the location of Prime Base. If it is an entirely contained group (a cult that is sheltering there, miners who come across it by accident, etc) then there is a chance to eliminate the group (who therefore had better be uniformly hostile and worthy of execution!) and preserve secrecy. But if it is occupied or discovered by Krell or some other decent-sized group with communications, then the group finding PB is almost certain to be followed by the group abandoning, destroying, or otherwise losing PB. So if you want to include a group, go ahead and ensure that it is self-contained.

Personally, I like the idea of Morlocks. Perhaps some time after the war, some group got into the base, got trapped, but found a way to survive (emergency facilities, rations, etc.) and continue through several generations. The team is now contending with a group that considers the base their ancestral home, outside a religious concept, and actually knows the facility. Make them suitably awful, though.

[tsofian]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

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Second, introducing antagonists introduces one giant problem: someone else knows the location of Prime Base. If it is an entirely contained group (a cult that is sheltering there, miners who come across it by accident, etc) then there is a chance to eliminate the group (who therefore had better be uniformly hostile and worthy of execution!) and preserve secrecy. But if it is occupied or discovered by Krell or some other decent-sized group with communications, then the group finding PB is almost certain to be followed by the group abandoning, destroying, or otherwise losing PB. So if you want to include a group, go ahead and ensure that it is self-contained.

Personally, I like the idea of Morlocks. Perhaps some time after the war, some group got into the base, got trapped, but found a way to survive (emergency facilities, rations, etc.) and continue through several generations. The team is now contending with a group that considers the base their ancestral home, outside a religious concept, and actually knows the facility. Make them suitably awful, though.

Morlocks might work. I see a number of ways that other searchers would not develop into the situation you describe. They might not know where the base is, but are willing to follow a hunch that the players' party must be headed to some serious treasure and follow them. The "antagonists" might actually not be bad guys, maybe they are the kind of people the Project would hope to recruit.