Trident

Tabletop Adventures Presents:

DSESTINATIONS
:
PACEPORT TRIDENT VESPA
By Martin Ralya

Introduction
Trident Vespa is the first spaceport in the
Destinations line from Tabletop Adventures. This
mini-PDF presents a fully described spaceport that
can be dropped into any sci-fi campaign that
features space travel. It needs little or no prep just
read the overview, and you are good to go. Trident
Vespa is 100% description (no rules material or
crunchy bits), making it entirely system-neutral.
Throughout this PDF you will find sections of text
that are designed to be read aloud to your players.
They follow this format:

Scene Name
Read-aloud text. [Notes for the GM, not to be read
aloud.] Additional read-aloud text.

Where Can I Use This Spaceport?

Trident Vespa is written with the following
conditions in mind: the spaceport is situated on a
world with a breathable atmosphere and Earthlike
gravity, and in an area with a lot of atmospheric
and trans-atmospheric (space) traffic.
If you want to use the Trident on an airless world,
or one with non-Earthlike gravity, all you will need
to do is tweak the descriptions slightly. For
example, on a planet without a breathable
atmosphere, everyone walking around the spaceport
would be in a spacesuit.

Overview
A sprawling spaceport built to accommodate cargo
ships, smaller vessels and atmospheric craft, all in

one spot, the Trident Vespa, was a commercial

venture established by a progressive collection of
owners with space commerce in mind. Little did
they know what they were getting themselves into.

Trident Vespa from the Air

Seen from above, Trident Vespa lives up to its
name it looks like a vast pitchfork, with
permacrete and ferrocrete lanes forming the
tines, and buildings around all the edges. The
outer two lanes are longer than the one in the
center, and dozens of spaceships of all shapes
and sizes gleam and flash in the sunlight
[starlight]. After a few seconds of taking in the
main shape of the spaceport, you start noticing
the details: ground cars moving between ships,
rotating gun turrets atop the largest buildings
and small atmospheric craft landing and taking
off on the far lane. Even from the air, though,
you can tell what you are getting into the
ships may gleam brightly, but the station itself
does not. This is no glittering commercial hub,
clean, safe and corporate it feels a bit more
like the frontier.

About the Author

Martin Ralya has been a freelance writer since 2004, and
has worked on several other projects for Tabletop
Adventures, including Bits of the Boulevard and Bits of
the Wilderness: Into the Wildwood. Martin also writes
Treasure Tables, a daily weblog for GMs, and runs the
GMing Q&A Forum (http://www.treasuretables.org).
Martin is writing a series of space stations and spaceports
for TTA, and would like to dedicate it to 2001: A Space
Odyssey, Firefly, Outlands and of course, Deep Space 9,
which did it best.

Trident
Trident Vespa or just the Trident, as it is more
often called started out as a good idea: a
sprawling spaceport built to accommodate cargo
ships, smaller vessels and atmospheric craft, all in
one spot. But in the first three months after Trident
Vespa opened for business, there were three major
accidents at the spaceport: the Black Spark
exploded on its launch pad, the Iron Shamans
computers went haywire and launched her payload
of missiles while she was coming in for a landing
and a large storage building simply collapsed,
killing four technicians and destroying the delicate
and expensive electronic components stored
there.
These three accidents were nicknamed the Trifecta,
and sometimes just called the Three Nails
because they were nails in Trident Vespas coffin.
Three accidents within three months at a spaceport
named Trident was an irony lost on no one and
spacers, always a superstitious lot, began finding
ways to avoid the port. Half of the Tridents owners
wanted to move on, invest in another venture; the
other half stood to lose everything, so they took the
only option that seemed available to them: they
made Trident Vespa a smugglers haven.
A week of suspicious accidents, mysterious
disappearances and one outright murder (still
unsolved) took care of the owners who had cold
feet, and the Trident grew into the bustling hive of
seedy commerce that it is today. The curse of the
Trifecta stayed with the Trident, though, and
accidents some large, some small have
remained a fairly regular occurrence at the
spaceport. For the many smugglers, rogues,
mercenaries, adventurers and scoundrels who use
Trident Vespa every day, though, it is worth the
risk.

The Curse
How unlucky the Trident is for the PCs is up to
you. You can incorporate the spaceports curse
into your campaign in a variety of different ways.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the
curse should be fun for the players (if not for their
characters), and should add spice to the game.

The simplest approach is to use the curse to provide

a bit of extra flavor: perhaps the occasional tool
goes missing from their ship, or the PCs witness a
terrible accident while conducting business at the
port.
You can also turn the curse into a springboard for
adventure, either as a hook to get the party involved
or as the heart of the adventure itself. (The Plot
Hooks section, below, features a hook for each of
these options.)
Lastly, you could introduce a mechanical element
that reflects the effects of the curse. For example,
you could impose a penalty on repair rolls, give
tools a small percentile chance to break every time
they are used, etc.
One byproduct of the spaceports past that is
immediately obvious to most visitors is the
tendency of its staff and regular customers to avoid
things that come in threes. The general consensus
seems to be, Why invite bad luck? and if that
means never designating any buildings with a 3
(or 13, or 33, etc.), and turning away ships with
three in their names, so be it.

Superstitions:
As you move through a busy section of the
spaceport, you see a group of mercenaries in
flight suits heading your way, deep in a heated
conversation with two Trident guards. As they
pass by, you hear the guard say, Like I said,
no threes. I do not know how you got past
landing control, but no ship named Three Suns
is going to be in my spaceport for long.
People pause as the group moves through the
crowd, and several exchange knowing looks
before returning to their business.

A Terrible Accident:
You hear a tremendous roar from up above
louder than any of the ships around you.
Looking up, you see an outbound freighter
trailing thick, reddish smoke from its main
drive. Within moments, it begins veering to the
right, and you spot flares and small explosions

Trident
deep within the smoke. The people around you
start to point and shout, and port personnel
begin running in that direction.

Lane One: Atmospheric Craft

Seconds later, the freighter comes crashing to

earth in a blinding fireball so bright that its
outline is burned into your retinas, making you
wince. A thunderclap of sound hits you an
instant later, washing over the whole
spaceport. People begin to scream, and many
run for their ships. A Trident guard bolts past
you, headed for the crash site, and you hear
her mutter under her breath, That is another
nail in this places coffin.

As your ship closes with Trident Vespa, you see

three distinct landing areas up ahead. On the
far side are small and midsize space vessels,
ground crews crawling over their hulls. The
center lane is a line of wide landing bays for
large spaceships, each surrounded by massive
blast shields. Several ships are docked there,
dwarfing the rest of the spaceport. The lane
you are approaching is divided lengthwise into
two sections: A row of buildings and ground
vehicles, and a lengthy stretch of landing strip,
open save for the dozens of vehicles that dot its
surface.
As you get closer, a string of small skiffs takes
off, heading in the opposite direction and
trailing arcs of white smoke. Another small
aircraft is approaching to one side of you, its
landing lights blinking steadily. The closer you
get, the busier it looks and after a few more
seconds, your landing gear hits the ferrocrete
with a jolt, and you are coasting down Lane
One between ground crews, rows of fighters
and other small craft.

Spaceport Layout
Trident Vespas name is no accident: The whole
spaceport is laid out in a trident shape, with three
long, parallel lanes where ships land and take off,
and the hub at the point where the landing areas
join together. Each lane is built to handle a different
type of traffic.
One outer lane is for atmospheric craft, with small
hangars and other buildings on the inside edge.
Because many atmospheric craft require runway
room, the rest of the lane is left open for takeoffs
and landings (much like the deck on a present-day
aircraft carrier). The center lane is for large ships:
Cargo freighters, warships, mining vessels, factory
ships and the like. It is the shortest and widest of
the three lanes, and each landing area is surrounded
by thick, curved blast shields that protect the other
two lanes. The other outer lane handles smaller
spacegoing vessels, and it is the most active of the
three lanes. All manner of smaller craft land here,
from pleasure cruisers and brothel ships to
mercenary fighters, blockade runners and shuttles.

Landing:

On the Ground:
Looking down the length of Lane One, you can
not see more than a few hundred feet. After that
point, there are simply too many people,
taxiing aircraft and ground vehicles in your
way to see any further. The air smells like jet
fuel, hot exhaust and scorched ferrocrete, and
between the roar of engines, the shouts of the
ports personnel and the rumble of ships taking
off nearby, there is never a moments silence.
All around you, people are quietly wheeling
and dealing, swapping manifests and
arranging passage for their goods. Nearly
everyone is carrying a weapon of some sort,
and many of the grounded fighters, scout ships
and other craft look like they have seen better
days clearly, Lane One is a rough-andtumble sort of place.

Trident
Lane One is Trident Vespas second-busiest section
less active than Lane Three, more active than
Lane Two. Commercial craft ferry people from all
over the planet to the Trident, and from Lane One
those travelers catch a flight on an outbound ship
from one of the other lanes. Smugglers and other
rogues also land here to conduct their business, and
to transfer goods from the spacegoing vessels for
distribution to planetside destinations (as well as to
those same vessels, for distribution offworld).
Lane One is a mile long and 300 feet wide, with
roughly one-third of its width taken up by parked
vehicles, outbuildings, hangars and pedestrian
traffic. The rest of the lane is devoted to takeoff and
landing space for the dozens of aircars, skiffs,
hovers and other small craft that use Lane One
every day. The landing surface is very well
maintained, but the other third of the lane is in
much worse shape. When the Trident became a
smuggling waypoint, the focus shifted away from
providing exemplary service to facilitating swift,
secretive transactions and truth be told, most of
the Tridents clientele do not worry too much about
the spaceports appearance, either.
Some of the buildings adjacent to Lane One are
held by the spaceport, while the rest are rented out
as needed. At any given time, up to a quarter of the
hangars and other buildings here are available for
rent. Front organizations, cartels and other groups
rent about half of the buildings on a more or less
permanent basis, while the remaining quarter are
used by individuals, adventuring groups, mercenary
companies and the like.
Lane One is hectic, rough-and-tumble place, and
offers plenty of danger in the form of ships
landing and taking off (a process that is much less
controlled than it is at a present-day airport), and
due to the spaceports fine selection of customers.

Smugglers who can afford spaceships are not too

likely to start fights when they are in port, but
nearly anyone can afford the docking fee for Lane
One

Lane Two: Large Spaceships

Landing:
You are coming straight down, and fast, all
engines burning, like a massive boulder sitting
atop a falling star. As you near Trident Vespa,
you see the spaceport on the monitors [through
the viewports]: three long landing areas joined
at one end by a cluster of buildings. Your ship
is dropping down towards the center lane,
which is divided into nine circular landing
bays sitting end to end. The bay you are aiming
for is surrounded by a ring of heat-seared blast
shields, and its center is a black expanse shot
through with cracks, scorched by the engine
flares of countless ships. While the other two
lanes are buzzing hives of activity, the center
lane appears lifeless by comparison there are
no techs running from ship to ship, and no one
is standing near the landing area and looking
up at your ship.

On the Ground:
To get anywhere on Lane Two, you have to
travel through tunnels just like this one. It has
a very functional appearance, all bare, brushed
metal and directional markings, but there are
also touches that reveal the wealth behind it
like the monitors every fifty feet, which display
views of the nearest docking bay, as well as the
two adjacent to it. The light in here is soft and
oddly soothing, in marked contrast to the rest
of the spaceport, and there are guards every
couple hundred feet. They nod politely as you
pass by, but you also catch them sizing you up
the landing bays around you accommodate
the spaceports elite, and Trident Security is
responsible for their protection.

Trident
Lane Two is shorter and wider than the other two
lanes at Trident Vespa, and it sees a lot less activity.
This lane is built to handle all but the largest
spaceships, with room for up to nine vessels on the
ground at a time. Seen from the air, it looks like a
row of circles, each circle connected to the next by
a series of tunnels, with small buildings around the
edges.

comes up amazingly fast before your descent

levels out, and then it begins streaking by
beneath you as you speed towards the
spaceport. Up ahead, a heavy freighter is
maneuvering its bulky frame into a landing
berth, and a cloud of sensor drones darts out of
the way as you near your landing area.

The circles are the landing bays large spacecraft

that are capable of landing most often come in
straight down, braking with their main engines,
which is why there is no runway space provided on
Lane Two. The center of each bay is scorched black
from the heat of countless fusion engines, and
heavy blast shields 40 feet tall run around the
outside. These shields protect adjacent bays as
well as the rest of the spaceport during takeoffs
and landings.

You come in hot, forward attitude jets blazing

as you brake, and then drop down on a dime
in an area barely twice the size of your ship. A
truck trailing hydraulic hoses pulls up to the
ship, and other visitors close in around it on
their way to destinations elsewhere on the lane.
In under a minute, you would not know that
your ship had not been here all along, so
quickly does it become just another part of the
spaceport.

Shielded tunnels join each bay to the ones on either

side of it, and tunnels run along the exterior, as
well. These tunnels are wide enough to
accommodate most small ground vehicles, and they
allow the crews of vessels docked here to go from
the lane to the hub in safety. The exposed central
areas of each bay are almost exclusively the
province of Trident Vespas repair techs and
service people, and seen from above there is very
little human activity in this lane.
The clients who use this lane are the richest and
most powerful people at the spaceport, and as such
Lane Two is in great shape it has the newest
equipment, everything works (and works well) and
the Tridents staff are very attentive. It is also the
best-guarded lane, and the one where the PCs
would be least likely to get themselves into trouble.

Lane Three:
Small Spaceships
Landing:
Coming in for a landing on the Tridents Lane
Three would make an ordinary person want to
close their eyes there is so much activity in
the air and on the ground that it looks like it
would be impossible to land there. The ground

On the Ground:
You can see why they say this is the busiest
section of Trident Vespa it is not the volume
of ships, because there are two or three times
as many on Lane One, it is the combination of
scale and diversity. Scale because the ships
here are relatively large ranging from
cruisers, gunboats and small freighters all the
way down to personal shuttles and little scout
ships that barely qualify as trans-atmospheric
and diversity because there are ships and
people here from dozens of worlds. Lane Three
is awash in color and sound, and it never stops
moving. Even when ships land and take off,
their engines rattling your teeth and shaking
every building on the lane, no one here pays
much attention.

Trident
The busiest section of Trident Vespa is Lane Three,
the lane that handles the ports small spacecraft
traffic. This lane is used around the clock, and it is
nearly always a bustle of activity, with ships
landing and taking off, personnel servicing
grounded vessels, loading and unloading, etc.
Lane Three is dotted with walls and barriers, which
are interspersed between stretches of open landing
area. It is designed to accommodate spacecraft that
require short runways (shuttlecraft, for example), as
well as ships that take off and land vertically, and
need only a small footprint. Service buildings and
storage areas are scattered throughout the lane, and
the noise of ship engines here is just incredible
earplugs, helmets or other headgear are more or
less required.
While Lanes One and Two are fairly uniform in
appearance from end to end, Lane Three is a hodgepodge of new and old buildings and equipment, as
well as the most diverse population of ships.
Spaceships come here from all over the galaxy, and
Lane Three features a range of bars, brothels, stores
and small hotels, all designed to cater to the crews
of these ships.
Lane Three is also the center of the spaceports
illicit activity. This is where the most deals are
struck, and the most money and smuggled cargo
changes hands. It is not cheap to land on Lane
Three, since a sizable portion of the docking fee
goes towards bribing local officials, customs
inspectors and other bureaucratic irritants. For most
of the spaceports customers, the high price is
worth it there is no other spaceport like the
Trident within a hundred parsecs, if in fact there is
one like it anywhere.

The Hub
Approaching the Hub:
Heading across the ferrocrete towards the
Hub, you see a collection of low, boxy metal
buildings rising up ahead of you. They are not
in great shape, but they look well shielded
and well protected, too: large gun batteries sit
astride their roofs, swiveling to track incoming

ships. The Hubs buildings are dotted with

small, thick windows and covered in signs in a
multitude of languages. There are cameras at
every corner, and dozens of people are coming
and going through the many doors on ground
level pilots, spacesuited traders, Trident
guards, customs inspectors. The spaceports
logo, a golden trident, is over the doors of the
main building, and you can see where someone
has spray painted over one tine, leaving the
other two untouched.
Located at the base of Lane Two, the Hub is the
Tridents nerve center. This collection of shielded
buildings houses all of the spaceports offices,
meeting rooms and other administrative areas, as
well as living quarters for personnel. Since most
docking fees are handled by computer, it is quite
possible to land at Trident Vespa, offload some
smuggled goods, acquire new cargo and take off
again without ever setting foot inside the Hub.
Docking fee transactions are transferred
independently from any manifest data or cargo
identifiers; and a complex system of accounting is
used at the port that is more than one auditors
nightmare. If the Trident had been successful as an
honest port of call, these flaws would obviously
have been fixed, but as such, it is a haven for any
type of illicit business.

Trident
Apart from supporting the day-to-day activities of
the spaceport, the Hub has a secondary and
arguably more important function, too:
obfuscating the customs process as much as
possible. While Trident Vespa is widely known to
be a smugglers paradise, proving this is much
more difficult and that is where the Hub comes
in. The Trident employs a whole layer of staff
solely for bribing inspectors, misdirecting
government officials and otherwise keeping the
wheels of the spaceports illicit commerce well
greased.
The Hub is also home to the spaceports defense
system: eight large gun batteries, each capable of
accurately striking targets up to three miles away.
These are mounted on the roofs of several of the
Hub buildings, and they are manned around the
clock by port personnel. At least four batteries can
be brought to bear against any part of Trident
Vespa, including the furthest sections of any lane;
all eight can be fired at any airborne target. A small
fleet of spotter drones hovers around the port at all
times, relaying images to the Hubs gunners.

Cast of Characters
Roughly 250 Trident employees are onsite at any
given time, broken down as follows: 50 bureaucrats
and officials, 50 repair technicians, 100 service
staff (loaders, drivers, etc.) and 50 guards. About
20% of the staff will be at the Hub, with another
20% on Lane Two and 30% each on Lanes One and
Three.
On an average day, 500-1,000 visitors pass through
Trident Vespa, with about one-half of that number
present at any particular moment.
All of the guards are well armored, and each one
carries a light, hull-safe rifle (a weapon that will not
penetrate an average ships hull, but has no trouble
against soft targets like people). In addition, 10 of
the 50 guards also carry a hull-penetrating heavy
weapon as a last-ditch measure, just in case a
hostile inbound or outbound ship makes it past the
spaceports defenses.

Bringing Trident
Vespa to Life
The Trident can feel like a pretty lawless place to
first-time visitors, and there is a sense of barely
controlled chaos about the place. Lanes One and
Three are always buzzing with activity, and you
can emphasize this by focusing on motion and
colors as you describe them to your players.
Observant PCs will also notice shady dealings
going on everywhere (except right in front of the
Hub), almost but not quite out of sight.
Trident Vespa also looks and feels very lived-in. It
has been a long time since anything here was new,
and countless crews have personalized their
favorite landing areas with graffiti, additions,
murals and other touches. The only exception is
Lane Two, which feels like a different world
sterile, clean and somehow lifeless. It stands out
from Lanes One and Three in every way.
Interestingly, almost no one takes the short way
between lanes simply turning left or right and
cutting across the open ground that separates the
landing areas. Some spacers will say that this is
superstition, that on the Trident it is bad luck to
cross between the lanes, but more pragmatic folk
will make the point that all of the really good stuff
happens along the lanes and why would you want
to miss that?
There are lots of superstitions on the Trident, most
(but not all) of them involving the number three.
They are part of the spaceports culture, and they
serve as a good way to tell new visitors from old
hands. Bored spaceship crews often use this to their
advantage, playing jokes on new arrivals who they
do not recognize either by passing on fake
superstitions, or by tricking spacers into breaking
some of the Tridents unwritten rules.

Trident

Plot Hooks
Cursed? Yeah, Right:
Shortly after landing at Trident Vespa, the PCs hear
about the spaceports curse. The next day, their
ship stops working entirely, all at once, and with
no apparent cause. There is a cause, of course: A
handful of small malfunctions in specific, essential
parts of the ship. But were they the result of
sabotage (and if so, by who?) or were they caused
by the curse?

Cleanup on Lane Two:

Currently, Lane Two the most prosperous section
of the port sits empty, all because of space bugs.
Or space mold. Or the curse. Or well, or
something, although no one knows exactly what.
What is known is that the last spaceship to dock on
Lane Two, the Eye of Argon, left something behind
something that made everyone else on Lane Two
sick within two days of its departure. Port officials
have evacuated the lane, and since then a greenishred growth has started appearing on the outside of
Lane Twos buildings. A hefty reward is offered for
anyone willing to investigate are the PCs up to
the task?

Enough is Enough:
In the past week, the Tridents curse has struck 13
times and the last one was a doozy: A merchant
ship crash-landed on Lane Three, damaging or
destroying three other ships in the process. One of
the Tridents owners in particular has had enough,

because she has recently uncovered evidence that

the curse might actually be a conspiracy of
sabotage perpetrated by members of the spaceports
staff. Not wanting to involve insiders, she involves
outsiders instead the PCs, who are tasked with
getting to the bottom of the infamous Trident Vespa
curse.

Tangos at Five OClock:

While the PCs are docked at the Trident, the port is
attacked by a fleet of mercenary fighters fast,
lethal atmospheric craft, nimble enough to avoid
the Hubs defensive fire. Several of them strafe
each lane, firing indiscriminately, but another
contingent seems to be going after a specific target:
A large steel spire of a ship, docked in the center
bay of Lane Two. There are several unoccupied
gunships parked right nearby, and just as the PCs
are thinking over their options two of the merc
fighters break off and head in their direction, their
nose guns strafing the surface.

You Like it? Its Yours:

During the course of a visit to Trident Vespa, the
PCs are approached by a stranger a wealthy trader
and the owner of the Vector Omega, one of the
massive ships docked in Lane Two. He introduces
himself, makes a bit of small talk and then offers
the PCs his ship. As a gift. No strings attached, here
are the keys, its yours. Who is he really? And why
on earth would he do this?

Credits
Writer:
Project Manager:
Layout:

Martin Ralya
Vicki Potter
Marcella Ganow
Elizabeth Brakhage

Editor:
Vicki Potter
Border Art:
Danillo Moretti
Interior Art:
Gillian Pierce
Fonts: 2006 Jupiterimages.com

2006 Tabletop Adventures, LLC

http://www.tabletopadventures.com

Spaceport Sections:

Lane One: Atmospheric Craft

Lane Two: Large Spaceships
Lane Three: Small Spaceships
The Hub
The Tunnels
(Around Lane Two Landing Bays)