Glogmas for TLN: Craterton
Happy Glogmas! For this most august and weighty celebration, I have taken TLN (TheLawfulNeutral)'s Craterton and have mapped and adapted it in my style.
There were two phases of settlement in the Crater: The first, now called Brokentown, hosted no mine, only a church and a few small stores. It served the small agricultural community in the crater for years. It gained its name when a locomotive careened out of control off the in-construction railway and smashed through the length of it, obliterating the church and killing scores, including the mayor and the priest. Old Cratertown lingers on but its denizens are utterly marginal. That railway, spiralling down from the surface, is now finished: It was built to service the mine and the new company-town Craterton thrown up to serve it.
Let us navigate Craterton like it is a clock, with 12 o'clock being the northernmost point of it. A miner begins at 9 o'clock, arriving on train at Upstation. A decent wage is advertised, for Craterton boasts the most profitable silver mine in the region. A large switching yard, overseen by a control tower that projects over the rim of the crater to bring even it within its vision. The ticket takes one only here, and a choice is presented:
- Pay 15s and endure a d4-1 hour delay while a train carrying silver up or industrial material down makes its slow progress on the Spiral. Passenger trains up or down are always second priority, tacked on if and only if it doesn't delay the mine. This is ridiculously unsafe, and there is a 1in100 chance each journey of the passenger car being crushed, derailed, or running down uncontrolled. In such a case each passenger has a base 1in20 chance of survival if they do no more than clutch their seat and scream.
- Pay a 5s toll to use the switchback road. Exhausting, even going down.
- Follow the grizzled miner surreptitiously south and east, along the ranch road, past the last farmstead - make your way carefully, from copse of low trees to copse of low trees, for you are trespassing. There is a house on the hill, and there is a 1in10 chance Granny Sharpshot is taking potshots at trespassers today. She's killed several, but the authorities (the mine manager) care neither to prevent her from doing so nor to prevent miners from making their way along, for on her property is the upper entry to the 'Scree Stairs' - the only part of the rim sufficiently shallow a non-specialist can climb it up or down. You may be brained by falling rocks, or deprived of your bones or skin by tumbling or sliding down.
Locations
Craterton: A railway station in the north with a telegraph office (ever message in and out is recorded for the Pinkertons to consult - they have an office in the station just for that). Emanating from the station, a single street of mud with wood cast overtop it, either side saloons and seedy shops: At the end, built into Uplift Hill, the town hall. Of note: Ma Lubbik’s General Store has about a tonne of stolen dynamite in the basement. Behind the shops are the miners shacks and bordellos. The folk of Old Craterton keep away. The Pinkertons do too unless there's a riot. A road heads south est, skirting Uplift Hill, beside the freight rail tracks to the mine.
Mine Rail Yard: Scores of cars wait: They come down laden with machinery and material, they go up in high security, Pinkertons at either end and silver in the middle. Going up takes three hours at little more than walking pace. The rail is at ground level on the crater floor but is up on trusses as it approaches and as it goes onto the craters scree-walled edges.
The Stockyard: In the east of the rail yard, cattle are disgorged in their hundreds into chutes for the Ranch that takes up the 3 to 4 o'clock portions of the crater. There's constant turnover, where they go is not remarked upon and curiosity is sharply discouraged.
At the south of the rail yard is the loading area and the mine proper.
Craterton Mine Head: A great building, directly south of Uplift Hill, thrumbing ever with ventillation fans and elevator motors. At each whistle-called shift change legions of miners emerge, dust covered, from the double-decker elevators which replacement legions enter. They descend: The mine itself is a warren of tunnels and shafts. Within crews use dynamite at almost every shift change to blast new tunnels open, and crews use pneumatic tools - powered using thick hoses that snake all throughout the tunnels - to pulverise and move rock.
Leaching Tanks: South of the assembly of mine buildings are the leaching tanks: Round and wood walled, reinforced with earth, therein a bath of cyanide leaches the silver from the ore. A great tower of worthless spoil is being erected to the west of the mine, encroaching onto the dying farm plots still there. The tailings go into a pond to the east, retained dubiously by a berm between it and the cattle ranch. Malformed birds land on it, and rocks dilodged by the rumbling of trains above splash into it.
Cattle Ranch and the Second Head: North of the tailings pond. The ranch: The cowyboys who herd its flocks are more skilled in shooting and killing than in animal husbandry, and were recruited for the former during the railway's western expansion, but serve their purposes well enough: 1 - to act as a counterweight to the Pinkertons, should they prove inadequate or spirited. 2 - to guard the Second Head with deadly force. And 3 - to herd vast quantities of cattle into a chute built into a Second Head beside the elevators and ventillation (it has been decorated with teeth and is called 'The Maw'), a mere vertical drop into oblivion. About five-hundred cattle disappear a week. The cowoboys have a house beside the lake and forest at the north of the ranch.
The Second Head: A structure of elevators identical in construction and type to the Mine Head, but not used according to a regular schedule. It descends to the Mirrored Chambers.
Dynamite Magazine: Built on a tiny artificial island in the lake, accessible via a short causeway. Contains tonnes of dynamite. Thieves have removed about one tonne from this stash to Ma Lubbik’s General Store.
Pinkerton Compound: Contains barracks, a brig, three trucks, and an armoury.
Farm Plots: Constantly crossed over by miners or Pinkertons, the expanding spoil hill is rendering the southern ones unusable. Each contains a small farmhouse.
Van Tassel's House, at 9:30 has a newer and sturdier wall than those of the plots around it: She breeds 700 lb Schnappshunds.
East Forest: Formerly the eastern half of the crater was filled with forest: It is much reduced. Outlet Lake is fed by a waterfall from the Lower Power Station, and stairs beside and behind the waterfall lead up to it. Miners like to swim in it, though the woods are dark and lawless, and conflict with the cowboys is certain for those who venture into the south of the forest, or on days the cowboys decide they will use the lake. The water flows down into the dirtier Large Lake.
Power Station (Lower) or, The Galvanic Shrine of Edison. A water turbine, fed by the canal above, powers the mine and the rest of Craterton. unobtrusively above the entryway: The water discharge can be rerouted through this, and it used as a turret of high pressure water to wash away any who approach. It could even be used to destroy the trestles of the railway. A spiral staircase of open iron wraps around the vertical water piping to the upper station
Power Station (Upper): Defended by more conventional means: Initiates with shotguns, lead by Mother Ion. Stained glass art deco skylights. The canal's capacity is far in excess of what is necessary to power the station or craterton, and if the power station were damaged to the point where it flowed at full capacity through it, into the crater, the crater would flood in weeks (this would be disastrous for towns downriver)
Tagaq River: Infested with walruses. Otherwise not travelled, except by smugglers.
Overhang House: Perimeter road leads east to the upper power station, and west to the railway. The house is surrounded by a wall, with Pinkerton-guarded gates, and then a well manicured garden. The house itself has a cantilevered ballroom overhanging the crater with a glass floor. Mr. Van Orton owns Craterton and the house and visits every few months: This is the source of his wealth and his wealth is his springboard into politics, he will very shortly run for governor.
Golf Course: Abuts the forest. Kept manicured, but used by Van Orton perhaps twice a year. The lodge house is surrounded by a security perimeter that reaches into the forest.
The secret of Craterton: The ore is of poor quality and precious little silver can be got from it. There are, however, the Mirrored Halls. Formerly a Lunar-Resonance Mirror Station of the Serpent Kingdom a vast quantity of mirrors formed the moon's rays into glyphs of regional magical potency. The dragon Halvom was deployed, and its deployment from orbit produced the crater and quished and melted the halls. Halvom now makes its lair there.
Its mind is slowed by lethargy, but smarter than the average man and infinitely patient: it is as big as three busses end to en, wingless, and serpentine. It rovers the mirrored halls and blends easily in the chaos of reflections, for its hide is exactly like the shards of silver glass. It was deployed as a punishment for serpent hubris, and did indeed scourge them for some decades after its landing, but returned to this its lair and has here slumbered for millennia. Its breath causes exposed blood to ignite like napalm after a round, and its claws are of extraordinary length and fineness: Its thin forelegs an reach out of the glittering dark to cut someone open with a flick.
It was injured: Shot through by a coilgun flechette millenia past. It cannot move faster than a walk, nor can it do so for more than a few hours a day. It's healing rapidly with its diet of cattle, though, and within weeks will be more than capable of makings its way on the surface. In the meantime it is content to accept a few hundred cattle at a time then sink into recuperative lethargy. During its lethargy the Pinkertons and the Cowboys send adventurers down to seize pieces of melted silver mirror as quietly as possible, as long as possible: These are laundered into the poor ore of the mine. Halvom believes it will make this and more back when it is healed, so it only kills about half the adventurers sent down.
The ancient flechette is still sticking out Halvom's back: What protrudes is two metres of an arrow of tungsten and depleted uranium with a high explosive charge in the hollow of its arrowhead. Though it filed to explode it is still live. Removing the flechette would enable Halvom to move with speed immediately and free it of much pain.
Van Orton has built up a shocking amount of cyanide tailings, and plans to reroute them down the Maw and, hopefully, kill Halvom. This will make recovering the silver more difficult, it's true, but should remove a source of considerable risk.
Hooks
- Deliver these canisters of compressed gas to Mayor Godfrey Burp: Without them, he will become lethargic, then dormant, then dead. Make sure you negotiate a favour for them: They're not available in Craterton.
- A shipment of silver bullion is being moved out by the Pinkertons in a week, on the 12:00 train. Intercept it.
- A miner, Nathaniel Haulit, was shot by Pinkertons. No one wants this to be investigated: Not the mine, not the Pinkertons, and not your newspaper. Do it anyway.
- Van Orton cannot run for Governor without the wealth Craterton gives him. Stop his campaign before it even starts. He is organising a ball in Overhang House in three days.
- The miners wish to unionise and need organisers.
- Earthquakes and rumblings afflict Craterton, but not its surrounds. These do not correlate with mine blasting: Something vast is under the crater, stirring. Make sure this won't become a problem.