Imagine the pressure at bottom of the ocean. The claustrophobia, the isolation, the darkness. The cold. And then imagine the sudden and absolute knowledge that there’s something near you in the dark, something ancient, alien and malevolent. Imagine your heart racing as you feel something bristly glide past your legs…
The latest stop on our tour of storyworld overviews is SUBMERGED. It’s a bit creepier than our previous destination (or the one before that) but I think you’ll find it an exciting place to visit, even if you wouldn’t want to live there.
In the horror sci-fi storyworld of SUBMERGED, rugged undersea explorers seek their fortunes amidst the sunken ruins of a former mining colony on alien planet.
No one knows what happened to the Deltax mining colony. What is known is that it stopped sending shipments of ore, then stopped responding to communications. When the authorities investigated, they found that the planet had suffered some sort of seismic event: the sea level had risen, shorelines had collapsed, and the colony’s settlements and outposts were now hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
But there were no signs of the colonists. No bodies. No frantic recordings. No indication that they’d tried to get off-world before the disaster struck. The people were simply gone.
It was a mystery, the authorities agreed, but not one worth solving when there was salvage to be had and still ore to be mined. Unfortunately, both were now buried beneath the waves. In order to reach them, they needed a new breed of laborer who was capable of working underwater for extended periods of time.
Now the word’s gone out that the mining companies are paying top dollar to anyone willing to spend 12 hours in a dive suit. Underwater salvage operations are in full swing — both for authorized recovery crews and unlicensed scavengers in patched-up submarines. Teams of independent prospectors slip between the big mining companies to stake their own claims on the ocean floor, hoping to strike it rich. Deltax is booming again, and bursting with more opportunities than ever before.
Working beneath the waves has always been dangerous, but on Deltax, it’s riskier than usual. The planet hosts a wide variety of undersea predators, many of which have taken up residence in the halls of the sunken colony buildings and the drowned mine shafts. The ruins themselves hide any number of hazards, from unseen blades of twisted steel to unsecured explosives to deadly automated security systems that remain miraculously intact. And with law enforcement lightyears away, claim-jumping, robbery, and murder are all too common on this frontier world.
But more insidious than any of these threats are the ever-present “Watchers.” No one knows where the name came from, or claims to have seen whatever is allegedly watching them. But anyone who’s spent more than a few weeks working wet-side knows the feeling of being watched — watched, and silently hated. Veterans know they aren’t alone down here, and that there are some places to avoid. Workers vanish occasionally — especially those who go deeper than most, or swim alone. Officials chalk the disappearances up to accidents, but everyone know what really happened: the watchers took them… just like they took the original colonists.
The world of SUBMERGED is full of possible stories. Here are few that have bobbed to the surface:
- While exploring a water-logged mine shaft, a team of miners accidentally collapses the tunnel behind them, trapping themselves in the shaft with a school of shark-like predators while their air supply slowly runs out.
- A team of mercenary soldiers is hired to clear out the sunken ruins of a company’s former headquarters, but what they find inside makes them question everything.
- When the mining exec’s husband swam into the trench that the miners have learned to avoid, no one was surprised when he didn’t come back up. But now his wife’s offered a reward for his retrieval, and greed may overcome common sense.
- Prospectors have found a vein of ore, but must hold off a sub full of claim-jumpers long enough for their friend to return with the authorities to authenticate their find.
- A salvage team claimed to have discovered a clue as to what happend to the original colony, but died in a mysterious accident, and now everyone they’ve talked to is in danger.
- When a miner vanished weeks ago, he was presumed dead, but now he’s back and ranting about the secret truths of the watchers.
While SUBMERGED is just as suitable for fiction or movies as any storyworld, I think it’s particularly well-suited for games of subaquatic exploration and violence, i.e., underwater dungeon-crawls. It would make a great rogue-like, or even a table-top RPG. I can definitely see it working as a setting for Savage Worlds, for example.
