Source GM Core pg. 95
In Starfall, sewers are the underlungs of a settlement—where waste, runoff, industrial slurry, and forgotten things all flow together—and sewer gas is the invisible spark waiting for one idiot’s open flame.
Starfall’s Underbelly
Below Starfall’s neon streets and station promenades lie the sewer levels: tunnels of slick ferrocrete and pipe forest, echoing with the drip of runoff and the grind of old pumps. In the Inner Sphere, these systems are semi‑sanitized—waste processors, gray‑water reclaimers, bioreactors—but they’re still dark, cramped, and full of things nobody wants to see in daylight.
In the Outer Sphere and Frontier, “sewers” can be anything from carved rock culverts under fortress‑towns to jury‑rigged runoff tunnels bolted onto the undersides of ring‑habitats. Some routes have proper walkways and maintenance lights; others are just waist‑deep sludge held back by prayer and rusted grates. Workers know which stretches you can cross dry‑booted and which ones mean wading through infectious muck that breeds oozes, vermin, and worse.
Sewer entrances double as social markers. Grates in rich districts are bolted, alarmed, and patrolled; in poorer zones they’re loose, half‑welded, or already lifted, feeding a constant trickle of smugglers, runaways, and scavengers into the tunnels below.
Implications
Smuggling routes & hideouts: Sewers connect docks, markets, and back‑alley grates, forming ready‑made smuggling corridors and secret meeting spots away from camera grids.
The Gas Line: A Syndicate crew has been using sewer gas pockets as improvised trip mines; the PCs must navigate or repurpose these hazards without incinerating half a district.
Under‑Market: Beneath an Accord‑policed plaza lies a thriving black market built on old walkways above a roaring waste channel; one bad explosion or structural failure could drop the whole bazaar into toxic flow.
Plague in the Pipes: A new disease is spreading through a station’s lower decks; following it leads into off‑map sewer branches where someone has been dumping failed bio‑experiments into the flow, and where the air itself is one spark away from combustion.
Infrastructure & sabotage: Chronologists, engineers, and saboteurs alike use sewer access to reach buried lines—power, data, or even Metronome trunk cables—without crossing main corridors.
Ecologies & cults: Viridian offshoots grow engineered fungi gardens in warm, nutrient‑rich runoff; Riftsworn sects hide shrines where planar bleed trickles into forgotten sumps.
Investigation: Tracking footprints, chemical residues, or distinctive trash through sewer branches is a classic way to find hidden labs, Syndicate dumps, or monster lairs.