In this article series, we’ll be revisiting and reviving the Insomnia project, a book designed to bring horror to your D&D game.
The second of our three settings is Blackpost, a location that has always been waiting at the edge of Dark Matter for the right time to take center stage. It’s as far as you can go on the galactic frontier, the very furthest outpost of humanity. We hope it will enable adventures inspired by Alien, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
We wanted to double-down on the recurring themes of remoteness and slow degradation in all three of our Insomnia settings, as having those throughlines will help us craft monsters that can be used between them without much adaptation. However, in Blackpost, the feeling of remoteness takes on a special chill — the sense of living at the edge of the unknown.
Naturally, we intend to include snippets of Dark Matter rules, including skills, blasters, and some basic snippets of the universe, but we’ll omit some of the important components, like the new races and spells. If you want to include those, you’ll want to refer to Dark Matter directly.
Blackpost
The nature of humanity is gazing up at the night sky and wondering if someone else is gazing back. Yet, whenever we find eyes staring back at us from the darkness, we feel nothing but a sickly pit of fear forming in our guts.
Perhaps, this is why the Hegemony of Man founded Blackpost. The remote colony was established as far as possible from the faction’s magnificent mega-cities, industrial starship docks, and interstellar trading hubs—on the very edge of the ‘Verse. Ostensibly, the colony is a listening station directed toward an ocean of endless, lonesome nothingness. Its directive is to collect data from distant galaxies to paint a better picture of the universe as a whole. but it’s no secret that Blackpost also acts as a first-warning system for intergalactic threats, as improbable as that may be. If something more distant and terrible sets its gaze on the Milky Way, humanity will be the first to gaze back.
On Blackpost
Blackpost was originally discovered by Lakshayan explorers who dubbed its faint, red dwarf star Yomi. Therefore, the planet’s official designation is Yomi I, though most people simply call the entire planet Blackpost.
The planet is frigid, its atmosphere is thin, and its soil is barren—habitable, but just barely. In fact, it is perhaps the furthest habitable planet from the galactic core. An endless desert, whistling with a cold wind stretches out in every direction from the Blackpost colony, interrupted only by plateaus and jagged mountain ranges that dot the horizon like a set of teeth.
Days stretch on for weeks on end, exacerbating the planet’s surface temperatures. Nights coat everything in a layer of frost, while days transform the surface into a sun-baked desert. For comfort alone, most colonists wear lifesuits while outdoors.
Worse still, the surface of Blackpost is ravaged by occasional Wild Magic Storms, sandstorms that kick up churning magic auras in their howling winds. These storms knock out communications and occasionally cause “spell strikes”—lightning imbued with magical fire, frost, or force. The colony is hardened against these storms and long-term colonists pay them little heed, but they pose a serious risk to anyone who would take a hover car far from the colony.
The Colony
In addition to its scientific facilities and conspicuous antenna dishes, Blackpost is equipped with the fundamentals of any human colony: a starport, homes, shops, a school, and a guard post. However, most of the colony is submerged underground, with individual structures just peeking out above the dusty surface. Beneath lies a gloomy maze of interconnecting corridors perpetually cast in artificial illumination. Gunmetal steel, accented by specks of rust and cheaply produced plastic paneling is the decor of choice, both above and below the surface.
Unlike other colonies, Blackpost isn’t self-sustaining. Monthly supply deliveries from the 1212 Freighter provide Blackpost with critical components, provisions, and personnel. Without it, the colony would starve within months. Few vessels ever trek for months through the hostile, barren space of the far galactic frontier to reach the colony, and nearly all of Blackpost’s residents arrived via the 1212.
This harsh, oppressive environment demands a certain type of colonist, one that is willing to wait out the bitter weeks of night and endure the scorching days; one preoccupied with solutions using whatever at hand, rather than dwelling on problems; one that finds comfort, rather than dread, at being at the very edge of space. Unsurprisingly, Blackpost has a monumental challenge in retaining colonists. Those unprepared for the colony’s rigors are dubbed “monthers” for how long they are likely to last before taking the 1212 back to the core worlds.
Landmarks in Blackpost
The austere colony is flanked but majestic, nearly untouched vistas on all sides, offering a few points of interest to colonists.
Arcto Institute
The remote colony of Blackpost has not one, but two schools: the public Blackpost Academy attended by most of the young colonists, and the private, reclusive Arcto Institute with only a few dozen students. From the outside, the Arcto Institute looks like any other cluster of buildings peeking out from the sand, but inside, the halls resemble a refined Victorian manor, with hardwood floors and a resplendent chandelier adorning the entry hall. Students are polite, if quiet, and dressed in uniforms complete with suit jackets. The institute is a curious anomaly in the otherwise working class colony, but few pay the reclusive school any mind; after all, none of their children have ever been invited to attend.
Only a select roster of gifted students have been invited to the school — students gifted with psionic or magical talents. Between classes, their powers are measured, practiced, and experimented upon, all in service of the headmaster’s and the Hegemony’s cryptic ends.
Epsilon Station
The locals would rather forget the early days of Blackpost, before the World Engine mediated the weather and steadied the temperatures. The foremost colonists arrived with little more than prefab structures and a flag—and unspeakably dark times followed. One such window into that period of Blackpost’s history lies in the skeleton of the Epsilon Weather Station, almost an hour from the current colony.
Half-buried by dust and high winds, the rubble of steel and composite walls somehow stands defiantly against the hostile landscape, though every antenna dish has been blown to the ground. The small Epsilon Station was an outpost from the outpost, intended to gather data for terraforming efforts that would follow in the decades to come.
However, resupply shipments to Blackpost failed for a full year after the colony’s establishment. Most of the main colony survived on the dregs of emergency rations and desperate agriculture efforts, but Epsilon Station has no such luck. Nobody dares imagine the station’s final days as starvation gripped the colonists, and now only bones tell the story of the ghastly choices that followed.
Ol’ Boomer
Despite its size and remoteness, Blackpost isn’t entirely defenseless. Alien raiders such as the dreaded wrothians roam the Galactic Frontier, so among the first constructions on the colony was a Bombard-class Emplaced Railgun, capable of shooting almost any vessel short of a cruiser out of the sky. The gun-structure looms over Blackpost like a steel sundial, and test-fires a single blast into the night sky each month, earning it the moniker “Ol’ Boomer.”
The railgun facility is cordoned off from the rest of the colony by reinforced doors and barbed wire fences. Only a small crew of marines from the Hegemony Defense Force are allowed inside, and they rarely venture into the colony beyond. Most space marines consider being stationed at Blackpost a punishment, and those assigned to this remote post often carry the grim countenance of those who have left their worlds behind.
Rathaus
Established in a cellar beneath the commissary, the Rathaus or “rat house” looks like it was plucked from a maw station nightclub or the rowdiest hearthstations around High Terra. Though unofficial policy frowns on such drinking establishments, especially on scientific outposts, the remote nature of Blackpost means there’s little anyone can do about it. The Rathaus enjoys its status as both an open secret and a tidy monopoly. A surprisingly vast array of drinks can be ordered from the neon and glass bar for a steep markup, and practically any local can be found pulling up a stool.
Tower Lodge
Spacers harbor countless suspicions about the Tower and its arcane dealings. They speculate that this organization of mages secretly hoards magic artifacts, conceals galaxy-wide conspiracies, and even orchestrates interstellar politics from within the highest levels of government. Indeed, the Tower is run by mages, but all that’s certain is that it’s a fraternal order of mages, a clubhouse with a restrictive membership and obscure but unremarkable induction ceremonies. Perhaps it’s harmless.
Yet no one on Blackpost can explain why the Tower has a fraternal lodge built on the colony’s edge. It’s taller than the other buildings, with two floors above ground and fine mahogany furnishings from High Terra. And nobody has even been seen inside.
The World Engine
A sprawling mass of pipes and smokestacks called the World Engine billows a stream of gasses into the atmosphere. The Engine dominates a forlorn mountaintop, one of the tallest peaks on Blackpost, and works endlessly to terraform the planet beyond with its grayish smog. For its efforts, the winds are slackened and the extremes of temperatures are marginally less lethal—enough to call the planet habitable, but nothing more.
The World Engine is the largest terraforming engine of its kind, an entire automated facility with mechanized caretakers and a fastidious AI overseer. No living thing has set foot in the Engine since its activation, for maintenance or otherwise. Voyaging there would require a specially-developed ship, capable of withstanding the unpredictable gales, or a lengthy trek up the unexplored mountains.
The colonists sometimes ponder what would happen if the World Engine stopped working entirely, but such exercises tend to spiral toward certain doom. As such, it’s easier to ignore the tenuous thread of safety that secures the colony and reckon with that scenario only if it arises.
Wreck of the Valkyrie
A jagged line on the horizon, the desolate shell of a once-proud avia-ra cruiser lays wrecked against the Blackpost mountains. History shrouds much of the Valkyrie’s story in mystery, but this much is clear: at the onset of humanity’s race to claim the Galactic Frontier, a zealous avia-ra admiral sought to beat the Hegemony of Man to the galaxy’s edge. The Valkyrie’s crew, accustomed to the comforts of the galactic core, were ill-prepared for the predators of Frontier space, especially the merciless wrothians. Their brutal voyage pitted the ship with holes and consumed its crew until only a handful remained at the helm. At the last possible hurdle, before reaching the Black Ocean—the endless expanse between galaxies—the Valkyrie crashed on Blackpost and beached against its mountain peaks.
The abandoned vessel has gone mostly unexplored for centuries, despite being a short flight from the Blackpost colony. None who venture there and explore within return. Perhaps the vessel plays host to a slumbering alien threat, a vicious force that once devoured the avia-ra crew wholesale. Or perhaps a few defense systems remain active and vigilant, placing blaster bolts into any craniums within sight.
Yomi’s Ribs
As if the world itself had fallen dead and rotted on the spot, a set of enormous, geological ribs extend skyward from a desolate valley. The view from orbit paints an even more convincing picture: a bulbous hill to the north grants the appearance of a skull, while outlying ridges complete the outline of an unearthed grave.
Lakshayan explorers named the stone formation to personify the planet, but it would be decades before anyone saw the ribs up close and discovered its secrets. Sandy tunnel mouths within the valley plummet down into the bowels of the planet, leading to a series of labyrinthine caverns. An explorer to these caverns once emerged—frostbitten and starving—with ravings of cyclopean ruins beneath the ribs, possessed by an invisible, alien sentience. He died shortly thereafter, and none have returned to the Ribs or Bowels of Yomi since.
