Welcome to another edition of There’s an Adventure in That! brave traveler. Inside these pages you will find the call, and the means, to adventure. This installment will take you far beyond the stars in your quest… if you’re brave enough to heed the call. Read on and find out.
Anyone familiar enough with North American folk music will probably recognize the song title The Old Polina*. It is a simple song that tells the story of a whaling ship by the same name. Every year, ships from the Dundee Seal and Whale Fishing Company would sail from Scotland to Newfoundland in order to recruit whalers for their ships. Whoever got there first would get carte blanche to pick the most experienced crewmen for their boats, and so it started to become a competition among the various ship captains. The song tells of the Polina and several other ships as they race across the ocean to be the first to land, and how none could match the Polina.
While the song doesn’t go into much historical detail, the Polynia, the ship that the title vessel was based on, was an actual ship in the Dundee Seal and Whale Fishing Company, captained by William Guy between 1883 and 1891 when it was sunk by ice while traversing the Davis Strait, a popular place for whaling between Greenland and modern day Nunavut. The crew was rescued by the Aurora, another ship mentioned in the song and also in the employ of the Dundee Seal and Whale Fishing Company.
Now… that’s the real story. But that doesn’t necessarily make for a good adventure. And while there’s a lot that can be done with a race type of situation, I think that there’s a lot more that can be done if you start to extrapolate on the edges of the story.
What if the Polynia was lost and never heard from again? What if she was carrying secrets or technologies that helped to make her the fastest ship in the company fleet? What of Captain Guy and the rest of the crew? Did they manage to escape or did they suffer the same fate as their ship? And while the basic story would fit quite well in a fantasy setting, it can really be fit into any genre. As such, I’ve decided to go science fiction.
Years ago the D’unndey Mining Consortium had a private contract with a nearby sector government for what proved to be an extremely lucrative mining operation in an asteroid belt in the outer edges of the system. The field was unique in that it was incredibly stable due to ancient technology that sat in the center of the field and powered an isolated gravity field that kept the field locked in place, making traversing the field much easier by cutting out the need to calculate orbital drift. The only problem was that the field created numerous gravitic anomalies in the space around the system, cutting access to only a few narrow routes. Add in frequent ion storms in the system and travel into the field was risky at best, and deadly at worst. But, very little drift meant less time prospecting each time a ship made it out and more time working the various ore veins. The fact that the contract was privately owned by a single business meant that was no outside competition, and so the competition turned inwards between ship captains, with the first captain to make it into the asteroid field each season winning bragging rights, as well as being able to grab the asteroids with the more active and lucrative ore veins. The best at this was Captain Will’em Guy, captain of the Polynia, one of the longest serving ships in the company.
What the other captains didn’t know is that his ship was equipped with prototype technology that allowed him to better withstand the gravitic anomalies, allowing him to take the more direct, but more dangerous route into the field. The Consortium heads of course knew – they were actually being paid to test the technology for government entities. Guy’s daring finally got the best of him though. On one journey in, the prototype was fried by an uncharted ion storm and the Polynia was battered around by the fluctuating gravity fields, her shields and then her hull torn apart as she drifted into the outskirts of the asteroid field. The Mining Consortium did everything in it’s power to launch a rescue mission for the ship, but it was caught in between too many shifting gravity fields. Without the prototype technology, the other ships would have been torn apart. The Consortium went bankrupt shortly thereafter as several of the more experienced captains left to find safer work and the government agency pulled various strings in order to blacklist the D’unndey Mining Consortium from getting any more big contracts. They faded into obscurity.
Years later, the PCs are contacted by an employer. The story of the Polynia has resurfaced along with the tale of the technology it was carrying. This person wants the tech that was aboard the ship, and he’s willing to pay the PCs handsomely for their help in procuring it for him. His sources have confirmed that it was finally thrown out of the shifting gravity fields into the actual asteroid field where it drifted for years until it finally came to a rest. The PCs just need to find a way to get into the asteroid field, find the ship, extract the technology, and make it back out safely. Easy, right? Yeah… easy.
Join us next week as I discuss system and adventure specifics. Until then, remember to heed the call to adventure wherever you may hear it.
*The Old Polina as performed by Great Big Sea. Many other renditions of the song exist out there. This just happens to be my favorite.
Ben Erickson
