The Sap ran thin. A dozen generations grew up on it and were taught to revere and thank it for powering every light, every engine, every terminal. They probably would have fed it to us if they were slightly less certain about its carcinogenic properties, properties that are shameful to even mention in polite company. Most people chose to ignore the sky getting more gray, the crops getting more brown, and the waters getting more black as long as prosperity and convenience were maintained as the avatars of success.
Now the Regulators are working like mad to keep quiet the fact that the pumps are turning up dry, and sheer panic lies just a single press leak away. As the Khefnari Empire’s logistics corps were discussing whether to run the Colony to the last drop or preemptively scorch it to avoid the headache of blackouts, famine, and uprisings, an alert from a new monitoring satellite broke them from their deliberations. The massive asteroid BX-319 is returning on its millennium-long orbit. With contemporary scanners, an unthinkable analysis presents itself: The asteroid’s core might be teeming with Sap.
With just a week before BX-319 slingshots back toward the darkness for many more centuries, and with the Regulators’ best survey teams already busy scouring the oldest pump sites for the last hard-to-find pockets of Sap, they’re dispatching the V-Dailies, a ragtag team with that perfect mix of expertise and expendability, to confirm the site, set the drills, and establish production. You never much liked these fellow roughnecks by your side, but if you can pull this off, you just might be able to retire on the glory of saving the Colony from energy extinction and never have to deal with the rest of these sloggers, or even this backwater planet, again. But if you can’t, well, you know just how little the Khefnari are willing to spend to extract some blue-collars from a piece of rock already set to fling their failure out of the realm of their concern.
Penumbra is a contemplative one-shot adventure for Jesse Ross’s Trophy Dark in which the players, a rag-tag group of burnt-out Sap drillers forced into the role of last-minute heroes, will struggle to cross a desolate asteroid and add a few final grains of sand to the Colony’s proverbial hourglass. A bleak and lonely exploration of whether to fight the end, this book contains all of the rules you need to play, including all-new character creation options.
Grab a copy here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/penumbra
Source: itch.io