HELP NEEDED: Crossover Event with Die by the Dice Podcast

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Alright, I ran the poll on Twitter, first place went to the name of the domain, the second to the name of the station. Congrats on second place, Dust Bunny!

I wanted to give them as much to work with as possible, and I couldn't put off the spell any more, so here's what they got:

Dalen Reven is in the Generator Room of the Electro-Induction Center, Quadrant Arphad-Six, Carogalta Station, State of Averous, Void Cluster, Plane of ------.

I'll look at those various station models, but for now I know two things: there will be a predominance of androids among the station inhabitants, and the Void cluster is a cluster with Bleutspur, which is on the moon IMC. I may take the opportunity to foreshadow the upcoming Man Who Lost His Mind adventure.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Just confirmed with the DM of the other setting: Revain (I've been misspelling his name) is a transhumanist, but he was actually seeking a more mystical apotheosis; he saw technology as too limiting. And yes, he's deeply racist against androids.

So he's going to be techno-omniscient, but dependent upon androids, along the lines of Wolfglide's ideas. Still considering whether/how to give him an option to "unplug" and run around on his own. He had an arm of living wood due to some of his previous experiments; should that be replaced with tech? I'm not sure.

And now, we need more details of the domain, and a curse.

I decided it was a space station because that was slightly less ridiculous than a planetoid.

Okay - starting with the beignning, what sort of space station?

Hamster wheel?
Bernall Sphere?
O'Neill Cylinder?
Dyson sphere? May not count as it is very close to a planetoid, just inside out.
Mix of hamster wheel and O'Neill cylinder
A giant ship cruising endlessly through the void/mists
Typical Trek - Almost indistinguishable from a ordinary shopping complex regardless of shape.

Next will the station be 'in the void'/'mists', floating above the Ravenloft Core, or orbiting a 'generic moon/planet/sun'?

Well as I said above, it's going to be part of a cluster with Bleutspur, which is on the moon IMC. This station will be facing the opposite side of the moon from the Core, so the Core will not be visible at all from the station. In this "Void" cluster, the Misty Border appears as a starry frontier, but it plays all the same old tricks if you try to leave when the borders are closed.

I'm not sure what design is best for that situation, but I'm personally partial to the Bernall Sphere and the O'Neill Cylinder. I want something with enough volume to have mazes of hallways, but still not feel just like a generic shopping mall.

I've given it a generator room in an electrical induction center, so...this place runs on electricity. Not sure if fusion or solar or something else as the source.

It will be interesting to imagine how the illithid react to this station hanging over them. Start building nautiloids, perhaps? This could easily kick off a whole new level of Ravenloft intrigue. Starfinder androids would almost certainly be immune to ceremorphosis and/or brain extraction.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

I've given it a generator room in an electrical induction center, so...this place runs on electricity. Not sure if fusion or solar or something else as the source.

As I have read, nuclear fusion requires particular conditions that must be carefully maintained. If you lose control, the conditions quickly fall apart and fusion stops. This makes them generally safer than fission reactors. If you want to make it possible for the reactor to melt down, fusion would not be the way to go. The waste material tends to be dangerous for hundreds of years as opposed to thousands of years, so that's another safety bonus over fission. That being said, I would still never call it clean energy. Also, the waste management section of the Fusion Power Wikipedia page has a warning about needing more citations, so take all of that with a grain of salt.

If you want to go with an exotic and dangerous-sounding power source, you can have the station powered by black-body radiation from a small black hole. The power output increases as the black hole gets smaller, so if you fail to feed it fast enough, it will eventually explode. That could take out the station, and it might even threaten other things in the cluster if they are too close. There is a paper on the concept on arXiv.

If you go with a spherical station shape, then it might be possible that the black hole could provide artificial gravity. I would not be too surprised if constraints on the power output, black hole mass, and station size would render this infeasible, but you could always just say it works regardless of the math. If I do a rough estimation, I will let you know what I find. I am rather partial to artificial gravity through rotation, myself.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

If I do a rough estimation, I will let you know what I find.

I did a computation, relating the surface area of a spherical space station to the power output of a black hole of the size necessary to give Earth gravity to the station. As a baseline, I took a town of less than 10,000 people that covers an area of less than 4 square miles (about 10 square kilometers). Using the math from the paper and at least one liberal assumption, I found that the black hole would only put out about 3 watts of power. That is certainly not enough.

If we assume the androids consume as much energy as humans on a daily basis (2000 kilocalories), then we need 96.85 watts per android. Rearranging, we find that the area of the station is the quotient of 20 million square feet and the square root of the android population: A = (20 million sq. ft.)/sqrt(pop). If you want to sustain ten thousand androids, the station could only have 200 thousand square feet of surface area. Further, it would be less than 250 feet across. Unfortunately, that is a population density of about 1.4 million per square mile, which is far higher than that of New York City (27,751 per square mile), without the skyscrapers to help with stacking.

If you have concerns about scientific accuracy, you might want to keep the black hole power source separate from the artificial gravity on the station. It could really set off some anal-retentive lunatic.

[DustBunny]

Idle speculating...

I was thinking the power source would be more along the links of some 'mystical' power source, but the energy is controlled/extracted by tech.

'Off' - Stargate Project Arcturus
'On' - Stargate Project Arcturus

He wants to ascend or whatever using the mystical source, but the tech powers the station and keeps it contained.
And he has to constantly control the tech to keep it from going 'boom' (he acts as an organic computer prehaps? The droids cant do it).
He cant use the source to ascend, because he would get blown to bits before he could, and he is keeping the android society he dislikes so much happy. He cant do any research either as keeping it stable requires constant attention. Not enough of a distraction he cant walk aorund, but enough he cant concentrate too hard on things.

But maybe he can find some silly adventurer to take over for 'just a moment'?

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Okay, so more information: this place will basically be the RL reflection of Absalom Station, the major space station of Starfinder:

https://starfinderwiki.com/sf/Absalom_Station

So...whatever kind of station that is, that's what this is.

I may or may not crib a map of Absalom for this adventure, but the idea will be that this is like the Nedragaard to Absalom's Dragaard.

Let's see: to increase pathos and make bookkeeping easier, I may say that the central dome was shattered, killing a huge majority of the inhabitants. That would further explain why the androids are prominent, because they would be the majority of the survivors, AND they can enter those areas where others would suffocate.

And just to confirm, Starfinder androids do not need to breathe and are unaffected by being in a vacuum. They do, however, need to eat and sleep due to their biological components. They also have excellent vision, especially in places with little or no light.

Apart from the occasional undead, that sounds like they would quickly become masters of such a crippled station.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Okay, here's more: Revain tried to steal the Starstone power core of Absalom many years ago. He was unsuccessful, but RL has created the domain as if he succeeded, sort of.

The Starstone has the ability to grant apotheosis, BUT it subjects candidates to tests to see if they are worthy. So when he finds himself in an exact duplicate of the station without a Starstone, where he has near-godlike power but has to sacrifice it to replace the lost energy supply, he thinks he's being tested. If he keeps all the god-energy for himself, he'll eventually lose the vast majority of the people left on the station, including his fledgling cult of worshipers. So he keeps draining himself, trading power for worship in the hopes that eventually have both, when he passes the stone's test. Which, of course, will never happen, because he's not being tested for godhood, he's been tormented as a DL.

That about does it for the DL and his curse.