Spaceport, Or Mall Of America?

Michael Pollock, Architect

In the third session of the Alwyn Campaign, the players in the Thursday Night Group decided to explore the ruins of the John M. Ford Minneapolis-St. Paul Interstellar Starport. They trundled over the ruins of Highway 5 and approached the main terminal's eastern entrance.

The embankment below the terminal building was riddled with holes. They went in one, and found themselves in seemingly endless galleries filled with piles of luggage. Many of the cases were open and the piles, which seemingly had no particularly obvious pattern of spacial distribution were filled with various items: a pile of suitcases with clothes, a pile with cheap jewelry, knives, and so on and so forth.

Scrabbling about in these materials, they were soon greeted by an old raggedy-man named Virgil. This strange fellow carried a curious makeshift spear with supersharp oldtech on the delivery end, and was wearing a number of other improvised pieces of ancient tech, possibly as jewelry. Virgil also wore lamellar armor made of tablet devices. His mode of speech was rather peculiar too, and his sense of time and space was rather off. Where have we seen this before?

Virgil kept on referring to the terminal as the Mall of America, and to himself as having been here since the Great Burn. The PCs got a tour, and discovered that the terminal's mall was rich in a wide variety of ancient and exotic commodities.  The main challenge would be limiting the introduction of these commodities so as not to either flood the market and therefore devalue the commodities, or attract undue attention from other ruin delvers.

When Virgil mentioned that he knew where Plasma Pulse Gun Pistols (PPGs) were stored, the PCs decided to trade a bottlefull of Napoleon Ants for a couple PPG pistols.

As the PCs were about to head back to Fort Snelling, they decided to check out one other tunnel near the entrance to the starport. Going in a ways, the encountered subterranean canids with lightning projection powers. The PCs killed a few, and the rest of the pack fled deeper into the tunnel system.

The players decided that for next session, they want to go out on the starport fields, and see if they can get onto one of the ancient grounded ships!