Source GM Core pg. 95
Maintenance tunnels in Starfall are the veins and crawlspaces of civilization—where heat, air, data, and secrets actually move, and where only fools assume nobody is watching.aonsrd+1
The Real Guts of Starfall
For most citizens, a station, tower, or ship is clean corridors and public decks. For the people who keep it alive, the real structure is the tangle of maintenance tunnels behind the walls: shoulder‑width runs of piping, cable trunks, coolant mains, and Metronome relays humming in the dark.
In the Inner Sphere, these tunnels are color‑coded, tagged with QR sigils, and patrolled by drones and Chronologist techs in smart coveralls; they’re still cramped, hot, and loud, but at least the schematics mostly match reality. In Outer Sphere scrap‑hulks and Frontier rigs, maintenance tunnels are half‑mapped folklore—some sealed for decades, others widened by smugglers and squatters, all of them thick with improvised fixes and illegal taps.
The panels and grates that hide tunnel mouths are as important as doors: two quick Interacts becomes you vanishing from a patrol’s line of sight into a shoulder‑wide shaft that only locals and rats use. Over time, whole communities—refugee clades, Syndicate runners, Viridian cult offshoots—learn the “hollow ways” of a station better than its official transit grids.
Implications
Smuggling & Black Routes: Contraband, fugitives, and forbidden tech flow through service runs that bypass customs, cameras, and Accord choke points. Knowing which panel opens where is a major underworld asset.
Maintenance & sabotage: Engineers, Chronologists, and saboteurs all live in these spaces—regulating heat loads, Metronome cabling, or Rift dampers; or planting charges and backdoors where nobody will look until it’s too late.
Shelter & hidden enclaves: Micro‑shrines, hacker dens, and off‑grid communities wedge themselves into widened nodes where multiple tunnels meet, venting off main lines for air and power.
Tracking & investigation: PCs can follow heat signatures, coolant traces, or boot scuffs through the tunnel web to find leaks, intruders, or lost workers.
Because tunnels are difficult terrain and often require Squeeze, they naturally give stealthy, small, or agile characters a spotlight, while big armor and large frames pay a tax for using the secret routes.