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⚠ Work In Progress

USCSS Poruka

Overview

The Poruka is a small flight-crew vessel attached to the much larger Affiance colony hauler. The Affiance carries colonists and cargo; the Poruka carries the mission flight crew in two shifts.

Due to its small size, the Poruka does not have its own reactor. It runs off rechargeable power cells that are normally trickle charged by the Affiance reactor. That feed is no longer available. The Poruka is cold, dim, and operating on emergency reserve.

Everything is covered in an icy layer of dust.

Schematics

Upper Deck

Poruka upper deck schematic

Credit: IncubiMaps

Lower Deck

Poruka lower deck schematic

Credit: IncubiMaps

Special Rules

Doors

🚪 Doors

📖 Description

Most doors aboard the Poruka are ordinary internal bulkhead doors. With the ship on near-zero power, they are offline and unresponsive, but they are not sealed security barriers.

🔒 Opening Requirements

🔍 Clues

  • When a PC tries to force a dead internal door for the first time, they unlock the following memory:

    You remember a maintenance instructor slapping the side of a dead bulkhead door.

    "Power goes out, these fail dumb. Not locked. Dumb."

    The trick was leverage, patience, and not putting your fingers where the mechanism wanted to bite.

    Most doors on the Poruka can be forced if someone has the muscle, tools, or time.

    The bridge is a different story.

Vents

🌬 Vents

📖 Description

Vents can be used as shortcuts throughout the Poruka and can bypass some difficult-to-open doors. They are narrow, dark, and brutally cold. The vents are also the only way to reach the ship's various service areas.

⚠ Traversal Requirements

  • Players entering a vent must pass a 🎲 Wits Roll or they will gain one die of stress.

🔍 Clues

  • When a PC enters a vent for the first time, they unlock the following memory:

    You remember basic maintenance before cryo.

    Crawling through this same service route, sweat running down your neck, the metal hot against your palms. The vent was so close and overheated that every breath felt used before it reached your lungs.

    Back then, the Poruka was loud with power: conduits humming, fans moving air, people talking through the walls.

    Now the metal is brutally cold, and the only breath you hear is your own.

Service Areas

🔧 Service Areas

📖 Description

Service areas are small crawlspaces used for maintenance tasks. They are not normal rooms and are not meant for routine movement through the ship.

A service area can just barely fit one person at a time. Anyone inside is cramped, awkwardly positioned, and unable to move quickly unless the room description or event says otherwise.

Rooms

Upper Deck

Captain's Quarters

📍 Captain's Quarters

📖 Description

The captain's quarters are cramped, cold, and more carefully appointed than the rest of the Poruka. Frost rims the mirror above the washbasin. A dead terminal sits half-buried under loose papers, duty receipts, and personal effects. The bedding has been dragged onto the deck and left there in a stiff, frozen heap.

The room has been searched once before and left in disarray. Drawers hang open, locker panels have been pulled loose, and the captain's belongings are scattered across the floor. Whoever did it was looking for something specific and did not care about covering their tracks.

📝 GM Context

👤 Company Agent Kris Gallo searched this room for 👤 Captain George Conway's sidearm. He found it in the captain's lockbox, then used it to kill the original 👤 First Officer Thomas Payton.

Gallo ignored the backup MU/TH/UR access card because he already had access and did not need it. It is still on the floor where it fell during the search.

📦 Items

🔍 Clues

  • A large framed mission picture is impossible to miss:

    The picture shows the USCSS Poruka attached to the much larger USCSS Affiance colony hauler. The picture unlocks the following memory for all players:

    You remember the basics all at once, though the rest is still muddy.

    You are aboard the USCSS Poruka, a flight-crew hauler attached to the Affiance. The Affiance is carrying colonists, cargo, and prefab colony systems to a new world called Tanis-3.

    A-shift handles the first leg. B-shift sleeps until the midpoint handoff.

    You are B-shift.

  • Scattered among the belongings is the captain's private log unit:

    If the players bring it to 📍 Poruka MU/TH/UR Mainframe, MU/TH/UR can read the unit and display the captain's last local logs. The unit can also be reactivated with one charge from the 📍 Engineering Station power diversion.

    CAPT. G. CONWAY - PRIVATE LOG

    ENTRY 01

    Woke to a course alert. MU/TH/UR flagged debris and drive telemetry matching the lost USCSS Covenant. Odds are poor, but not poor enough to ignore. Authorized a short deviation and woke A-shift for inspection duty.

    ENTRY 02

    Gallo has been in conference with MU/TH/UR since the wake. Company protocol, he says. I do not need every word of it. If there is salvage value here, Legal can sort it after Tanis-3.

    ENTRY 03

    Boarding team reports biological contamination aboard the Affiance transfer route. Varek has three sealed specimens in Poruka medlab for cold storage and baseline sampling. No one is to handle them without my authorization.

    ENTRY 04

    Covenant debris field is worse than reported. Navigation says the redirection has cost us days, not weeks. Acceptable. I want the survey finished, the samples secured, and everyone back in their pods.

    ENTRY 05

    There was a containment problem during the last sample cycle. I am not putting details in a private log until I have complete reports from Varek and Hale. Gallo says the matter is containable.

    ENTRY 06

    I have ordered no general wake. Most of B-shift stays down unless I say otherwise. The colonists stay down. We do not turn one bad incident into a shipwide panic.

    ENTRY 07

    Search parties are still aboard the Affiance. Comms are poor. Gallo wants to wake Shaw and start writing formal incident traffic. I told him to wait.

    ENTRY 08

    If this becomes a Company matter, it will go through Company channels. If it becomes a command matter, I will handle it. For now this log is for course deviation, sample transfer, and crew status only.

    ENTRY 09

    I am going aft to settle this myself. Affiance aft systems still show intermittent movement and I am tired of getting fragments from frightened people over bad comms. The Poruka can manage without me for a few hours.

🚪 Egress

Crew Quarters

📍 Crew Quarters

📖 Description

The crew quarters contain bunks, lockers, and personal belongings from both shifts. 👥 A-shift lockers are open and mostly stripped. The A-shift crew woke, dressed, took their duty kits, and never came back.

Most 👥 B-shift lockers are also open. They have been searched, but not ransacked. Uniforms, spare clothes, boots, and personal effects are still mostly in place.

📝 GM Context

👤 Company Agent Kris Gallo searched the other lockers for a weapon or emergency tool after the original 👤 First Officer Thomas Payton tried to wake the rest of 👥 B-shift. He did not tear the room apart because he only needed to check the obvious places.

Payton's locker is missing one uniform, but each locker contains multiple uniform sets. Unless the crew is already suspicious enough to audit every locker, there is no obvious way to notice this here.

📦 Items

  • All of our PC and NPC's 🧥 Crew Uniforms are here
  • All of our PC and NPC Personal items are here

🔍 Clues

  • A successful 🎲 Observation Roll unlocks the following memory:

    You remember getting ready for cryo.

    Most of B-shift packed badly: spare socks shoved into corners, keepsakes tucked behind duty gear, half-folded uniforms, personal junk left wherever it fit. Everyone was tired, nervous, and trying to pretend the pod waiting down the hall was not bothering them.

    Kris Gallo's locker was different. Pristine. Sealed. Everything squared away like he had never really moved in.

    Looking at the lockers now, the pattern is obvious. Most of the B-shift lockers have been rifled through, but Gallo's locker is still pristine.

    Whoever searched this room left his alone.

🚪 Egress

Cryo Bay

📍 Cryo Bay

⚡ Events

The mandatory event ⚡ A Rude Awakening takes place here.

📖 Description

This is the starting location for ⚡ Act I.

The Poruka cryo bay contains 24 sleep pods which is enough for both an 👥 A-shift and 👥 B-shift crew. There are A and B counterparts for each position on the ship except for the Captain and First Officer. The Captain is on 👥 A-shift, and the First Officer is on 👥 B-shift.

Upon waking, the 👥 B-shift crew finds that all of 👥 A-shift is missing, there are empty pods for:

There's also a 👥 B-shift pod that contain the required NPC:

And any roles not filled by our PCs can be made up with these optional NPCs:

📦 Items

The Cryo Bay contains a Medkit that has mostly been picked over, but still contains:

🔍 Clues

  • A 🎲 Medical Aid Roll on any of the dead NPCs unlocks the following memory:

    You remember the pre-cryo medical briefing.

    The ship's medic stood beside an open pod, tapping the rim with two fingers while everyone pretended not to stare into it. A normal wake cycle, they said, was gradual: temperature first, then circulation, then stimulants, then consciousness. Slow was safe. Slow meant the body had time to remember it was alive.

    Emergency wake was different. Emergency wake was ugly.

    Looking at the dead crew now, the signs line up: ruptured vessels, cardiac shock, nervous system overload. They were not killed by poison, violence, or disease.

    The ship woke them too fast.

  • A 🎲 Comtech Roll at the pod control panel unlocks the following memory:

    You remember the B-shift cryo board on departure day.

    One by one, the pod indicators turned green as the crew went under. Names, roles, vitals, coolant status, wake schedule. Everything clean. Everything routine.

    Your own pod was listed for the midpoint handoff, years from Earth and years from Tanis-3. The whole point of B-shift was that you did not wake unless A-shift needed relief or something had gone badly wrong.

    Now the panel shows every B-shift pod tied to the same emergency wake sequence. The trigger was catastrophic coolant failure.

    That should not happen on a long-haul flight like this.

🚪 Egress

The Galley

📍 Galley

📖 Description

The galley is frozen and lightless. Ration drawers hang half-open, but the contents are crystallized, split, or reduced to grey paste. Coffee bulbs have burst in their rack and left brown ice across the counter. With the power offline there's no way to dispense additional ration packs or water bulbs, but there are still some of each laying around.

At first the floor appears to be covered in ice like the counters, but when our PCs enter they realize there are dozens if not hundreds of discarded ration wrappers scattered on the ground throughout the galley.

📝 GM Context

👤 Company Agent Kris Gallo was eating ration packs here for years between his cryo sleeps.

📦 Items

Searching this room will reveal:

🔍 Clues

  • An 🎲 Observation Roll in The Galley unlocks the following memory:

    You remember the last crew meal before entering cryo.

    The galley was too small for everyone, warm from overworked recyclers, and loud with people pretending they weren't nervous. Someone raised a bulb of bad coffee and tried to make a toast to the mission. Someone else complained that the ration paste tasted like wet cardboard and old pennies.

    You were only half-listening. You were checking inventory numbers on the dispenser terminal: emergency rations, sealed water, stimulant packs, recovery meds. Enough for a failed wake cycle, a delayed handoff, maybe a short quarantine.

    Now the dispenser is powerless, but its manual gauge is still visible. Between the low stores and the wrappers on the deck, the math is obvious.

    Someone has eaten through years of supplies.

🚪 Egress

Hallways

📍 Hallways

📖 Description

The Poruka hallways are narrow, frozen, and quiet. Emergency strips glow only when someone is nearby, and even then they flicker like they are deciding whether to spend the power.

A worn ship map is mounted on the wall beside each midship deck ladder. Both maps are scratched, age-yellowed, and clouded under a film of frost, but the Poruka's basic layout is still readable.

🔍 Clues

  • When the crew first enters the hallways, give the players access to the Poruka ship map.

🚪 Egress

Storage Hold

📍 Storage Hold

🔒 Access Requirements

  • For safety reasons, the airlock doors can be operated without power from within the Poruka when there is pressure on both sides, so no roll is required.

📖 Description

The storage hold is a compact cargo bay built around a heavy lift platform set into the center of the deck. Cargo can be loaded through a giant ceiling hatch, lowered by the Poruka's exterior crane, then dropped into the hold on the lift for final stowage.

With the Poruka on emergency reserve, the whole system is dead. The large airlock, the central lift, the ceiling hatch, and the exterior crane controls are completely unusable until power is restored.

📦 Items

🔍 Clues

  • An 🎲 Observation Roll in the Storage Hold unlocks the following memory:

    You remember loading the Poruka before cryo.

    The hold was warmer then, loud with crane motors, cargo warnings, and crew yelling over each other as another pallet came down through the ceiling hatch. Something in the rigging snapped. A black industrial case swung loose and dropped straight toward you.

    The ship's android moved before anyone else did. They shoved you clear and caught the worst of the impact against their own body. The case crushed one arm at the shoulder, tearing synthflesh, cabling, and white fluid across the deck.

    You remember scrambling up, shaking too hard to stand straight, and saying, "Thank you, Gordon. Thank you."

    Gordon only looked at the ruined arm, then at you, and said they were pleased no crew injury had occurred.

🚪 Egress

  • 📍 Hallways can be accessed via the storage hold ⚠ door
  • The cargo hatch in the ceiling connects to the Poruka exterior, but it is unusable without power.

Lower Deck

Affiance Umbilical Airlock

📍 Affiance Umbilical Airlock

🔒 Access Requirements

  • For safety reasons, the airlock doors can be operated without power from within the Poruka when there is pressure on both sides, so no roll is required.

⚡ Events

The mandatory event ⚡ I'll Keep It Warm For You happens here when the crew is ready to leave the Poruka and cross into the Affiance.

📖 Description

The Affiance umbilical airlock sits at the back of the Poruka. It is attached to the umbilical linking the Poruka to the Affiance.

Although the airlock cannot be opened from the outside during a power outage, it can still be opened from the Poruka side with 🎲 no roll.

🔍 Clues

  • An 🎲 Observation Roll unlocks the following memory:

    You remember standing under this same cable bundle during orientation.

    Someone from systems called it the Poruka's nerve cord: power, telemetry, command sync, all bundled through the umbilical and into the Affiance.

    The armored line above the airlock is still here. It vanishes through the bulkhead exactly where it should.

    If the SI/ST/ER connection is dead, the break is not in this room. It is somewhere inside the Affiance.

🚪 Egress

Engineering Station

📍 Engineering Station

📖 Description

The Engineering Station is the best place to understand the Poruka's immediate survival problem. Its local backup circuit is still active, though the screen refreshes slowly and most commands return power-failure errors. The engineering station's terminal outputs the following status:

USCSS PORUKA / ENGINEERING LOCAL
POWER STATE: EMERGENCY RESERVE

MAIN BATTERY ARRAY: CRITICAL
AFFIANCE REACTOR FEED: UNAVAILABLE
BRIDGE ACCESS: PRIORITY ONE LOW-POWER LOCKDOWN
SI/ST/ER HARDLINE: NO RETURN SIGNAL
AFFIANCE UMBILICAL: PRESSURIZED

The two small storage vestibules near the 📍 Affiance Umbilical Airlock are meant for routine EVA gear, suit patches, emergency lines, and emergency first aid. Both can be opened with 🎲 no roll.

⚡ Power Diversion

  • The engineering terminal only shows ship status. If the crew shuts it down, they can divert its backup power into the station charging bus.
  • This fully charges the 6 X 🧰 Coleco CB-40 Radio Communicators for free.
  • The crew also gains 🎲 2d6 charges that can be added to other rechargeable items.
  • No item can be charged above the maximum Power Supply or charge rating listed in its item description.
  • Unused charges can be left in the Engineering Station and claimed later.

📦 Items

🔍 Clues

  • A 🎲 Comtech Roll unlocks the following memory:

    You remember the systems handoff before cryo.

    The Poruka does not have its own reactor. The Affiance feeds it power through the attached systems. If that feed fails, the Poruka becomes a battery with beds attached.

    But the MU/TH/UR hardline was a different system. The SI/ST/ER network was the link that let Poruka MU/TH/UR access the Affiance MU/TH/UR system for telemetry, command sync, and shared control authority.

    Looking at the engineering readout now, both are dead.

    One failure could be bad luck. Two separate failures means the problem is on the Affiance side, and it is worse than a blown fuse.

🚪 Egress

Medlab

📍 Medlab

📖 Description

Located on the lower deck near the 📍 Poruka Bridge, the medlab is cramped and colder than a morgue. Most supplies are expired or frozen solid. Three mummified husks sit in sealed sample tubes inside an insulated case. Their surfaces are shriveled, split, and dusted with frost. The case is labeled as Affiance Bio Lab transfer material, but there are no other details about the specimens.

📝 GM Context

These husks are ☣ fossilized alien eggs from the early disaster. They rotted, mummified, and then froze inside the tubes. They are here as a quiet sign that 👥 A-shift brought material back from the 📍 Affiance Bio Lab before everything collapsed.

📦 Items

🔍 Clues

  • An 🎲 Observation Roll or 🎲 Medical Aid Roll on the mummified husks unlocks the following memory:

    You remember these cases from the pre-launch inventory.

    Portable specimen tubes. Colony survey equipment. Sterile, numbered, empty. They were meant for soil cultures, water samples, native microbes, anything the first survey teams found on Tanis-3.

    Not this.

    The tubes in front of you are labeled as Affiance Bio Lab transfer material, and the remains inside have been dead long enough to dry, split, and freeze.

🚪 Egress

Poruka Bridge

📍 Poruka Bridge

🔒 Access Requirements

  • The bridge is under priority one lockdown. Its blast doors are closed and cannot be opened until power from the reactor is restored in ⚡ Act III.

  • When the crew reaches the bridge doors, one player unlocks the following memory:

    You remember anti-piracy training before cryo.

    Commercial vessels like the Poruka use bridge denial systems to keep raiders, mutineers, or boarders from taking command during a power failure. If main power drops below minimum operating levels while command staff are present on the bridge, the blast doors seal automatically.

    They stay locked until the ship has enough power to verify authorized flight crew access.

    These are not ordinary bulkhead doors. Nothing aboard the Poruka is meant to bypass them. A shipyard breaching rig or thermal lance might do it, but B-shift does not have that equipment.

⚡ Events

The mandatory event ⚡ The Final Confrontation happens here.

📖 Description

Once opened, the bridge is a narrow crescent of dead consoles, frost-rimed flight chairs, and black forward glass. The command displays wake slowly on restored power, but most of the panels remain dark.

The mummified body of the real 👤 First Officer Thomas Payton is slumped near the command station. His uniform is stiff with age, and a gunshot wound is clearly visible in his skull.

📝 GM Context

When the Affiance reactor is restarted in ⚡ Act III, this lockdown releases. 👤 First Officer Thomas Payton wants that. If he stayed behind as overwatch, he will head here as soon as he can.

🚪 Egress

  • 📍 Hallways can be accessed via the fore bridge blast doors

Poruka MU/TH/UR Mainframe

📍 Poruka MU/TH/UR Mainframe

🔒 Access Requirements

  • Unlike the dead bulkhead doors elsewhere on the Poruka, the mainframe door still has power. Its lock accepts only a 🧰 MU/TH/UR access card, and rejects manual bypass attempts with a flat red authorization light.

  • If the players do not yet have a key card when they approach the door, one of them unlocks the following memory:

    You remember the access briefing before cryo.

    Captain, First Officer, Company Agent. Command authority, mission authority, corporate authority. Those badges opened MU/TH/UR.

    The Captain, First Officer, and Company Agents from both shifts would have key cards.

  • A spare card can be found in the 📍 Captain's Quarters.

  • A 🧰 Cutting Torch could also breach the door

📖 Description

Located on the lower deck near the 📍 Poruka Bridge, the MU/TH/UR 2000 mainframe is running on an isolated backup battery. To conserve what charge remains, MU/TH/UR has shut down all nonessential functions. The room lighting is in low-power mode, but the terminal remains functional.

Upon booting the terminal, it becomes clear the system has been reset to factory defaults. MU/TH/UR has no mission history, no crew records, no navigation logs, no prior event logs, and no configured date.

MU/TH/UR can provide only limited telemetry:

USCSS PORUKA / MU/TH/UR LOCAL TERMINAL
INSTALLATION MODE: ACTIVE

Current Date: <UNCONFIGURED>
Mission Parameters: <UNCONFIGURED>
Crew Complement: <UNCONFIGURED>
Historical Logs: 1 ENTRY FOUND
- 0000-00-00 00:00:00 / FIRST BOOT / INSTALLATION MODE

External Ship Sensors: DESTROYED / INOPERABLE
Long Range Antenna: DESTROYED / INOPERABLE
Mean Internal Temperature: -15 C
Poruka Battery System: CRITICAL / EMERGENCY RESERVE ONLY
Affiance Reactor Trickle Charge: UNAVAILABLE
Security Status: PRIORITY ONE LOCKDOWN
Local Ship Control: INSUFFICIENT POWER
Remote Affiance Control: OFFLINE
Door / Lift / Bulkhead Control: INSUFFICIENT POWER
SI/ST/ER Network: OFFLINE

SI/ST/ER Network

  • If questioned about the Affiance or the lack of data available to this system, explain that the Poruka is part of a SI/ST/ER network. Paired MU/TH/UR systems use it to share telemetry, navigation data, and emergency control authority.
  • The connection to Affiance MU/TH/UR is offline. MU/TH/UR cannot determine whether the fault is local, remote, or physical.
  • If asked how to restore the SI/ST/ER connection, MU/TH/UR says the hardline should pass through the 📍 Affiance Umbilical Airlock. She cannot provide schematics because no vessel layout has been configured since the factory reset.

Power Issues

  • The Poruka main batteries are normally trickle charged by the Affiance reactor.
  • That feed is unavailable because the Affiance reactor is failing or offline.
  • This power failure is separate from the SI/ST/ER hardline fault.
  • The MU/TH/UR backups power supply cannot be used to redirect power to and restore other ship systems.

Ship Access

  • The bridge is on priority one lockdown due to insufficient power.
  • Priority one lockdown is an anti-piracy bridge denial protocol. During a severe power failure, it seals the bridge until the system can verify authorized flight crew access.
  • Restoring power to the Poruka will reset the lockdown and allow access to authorized flight crew.
  • Other doors, lifts, and bulkheads are inoperable due to insufficient power but can be manually bypassed if necessary.

🔍 Clues

  • When the crew sees MU/TH/UR in installation mode, one player unlocks the following memory:

    You remember the pre-cryo systems check.

    MU/TH/UR knew the mission profile, crew roster, departure date, navigation plan, wake schedule, and every ugly little maintenance delay logged before launch.

    This terminal has none of that.

    No mission history. No crew records. No configured date. No prior logs except first boot.

    This is not ordinary damage. This system was wiped clean.

📝 GM Context

What happened to MU/TH/UR?

👤 Company Agent Kris Gallo factory reset Poruka MU/TH/UR to prevent a corporate override from taking control of the ship. Until recently, however, the sister connection to 📍 Affiance MU/TH/UR AUX was still operable, and Gallo used that remote access to keep working through the Affiance while the Poruka remained blank.

For the wider chain of failures, see 📖 How Did This All Go Wrong?.

🚪 Egress

  • 📍 Hallways can be accessed via the mainframe door