Welcome to the Lonely Heart of Lune

This is a 122-hex sci-fi hexcrawl, with a dungeon in a space trucker's floating castle, a city under the regolith of the moon, and a godlike psychic entity making moves behind the scenes. I first had this idea for a sci-fi hexcrawl on a round world with something crazy inside it last year, and when the Below a Bad Moon Jam came along, I got inspired to sketch out some vague ideas for encounters & aesthetics. Using the Hex Globe Template by Guy MacDonnell and a modified version of Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast hexfill procedure, I generated a map of interesting locations, and added the terrain according to vibes. Since then, I have been fleshing out hexes and NPCs, utilizing Adam Hensley's Monolith system. In the spirit of the 2025 Beta Challenge, I've published an early draft of the hex fills, and I plan to update devlogs as the project continues.

Setting Pitch

A devastating solar flare stranded thousands of colonists on the rocky moon of Lune, cut off from decades-distant Earth and the rest of the Ingvar system. No longer protected by solar sailors patrolling the local gravity wells, a controversial warlord has asserted control - Neamo Paleto, chief of the space truckers. In geosynchronous orbit over Lune's only spaceport, Chief Paleto's dreadnought blockades all spaceflight, turning the screws on regular people just trying to survive in the subterranean city of Absence. Meanwhile, Lune's hinterland is riddled with corrupted monsters, insane robots, restive proles, and mysterious winds stirred by a godlike psychic entity in Lune's core. Are you a brave enough adventurer to light a spark of warmth in the Lonely Heart of Lune?

Historical Milestones

Time in the Ingvar system is relative to the standard Earth human experience - one day is the time between wakings, one week 7 wakings, and so on.

Cosmic Background -- 3.8 billion years ago

A small rocky planetoid jostled its way into a stable orbit around the gargantuan gas giant that would later come to be called Secluda-2. Microscopic crabs living inside the newcomer thrived on scraps of atmosphere stolen from Secluda-2, and in time they evolved.

Founders -- 200 years ago

Secluda-2 turned out to be a key slingshot planet for shipping routes through Ingvar and beyond. Thus, Earth's top commercial space agencies chose the rocky moon of Lune to build a "rest stop" colony - refueling, logistics, shopping, tourism and good ol' R&R. The Earthlings who landed there found a thin nitrogen atmosphere and little in the way of flora, fauna, or intelligent life. A mile-long, millennia-dormant centipede was detected lurking inside the north pole, and seismic activity in the south demanded investigation, but the Founders' attitude towards space was profoundly optimistic. So they put on a rugged smile, picked up their shovels and carved out a city, a mile deep into the face of Lune. They called their city You Betcha!, to inspire hope.

Lune Alone -- 140 years ago

Outposts popped up all across Lune, but on Earth, the Founders lost control. Disorder and war consumed them, leaving Lune cut off and forced to survive on its own. Thousands died, but the hardscrabble hundreds that hung on, hunkered down in the dark, they were able to keep going. The optimism faded, of course. Nobody called it You Betcha! anymore - its denizens adopted a simple name, one that summed up its form: Absence. But even in this crushing isolation, independent spacefarers never forgot about Lune - over time, with space truckers facilitating trade relationships between Ingvar's other extraterran colonies, Absence's population managed to grow.

Solar Society -- 80 years ago

When Earthside political realignments led to a new global consensus, the Solar Society arose as a uniting democratic formation. Buoyed by in solar sails and robotic minds, Earthlings arose once more into space to reclaim their distant holdings. Settlers poured through Absence's immigration offices and into sleek glass domes that were raised on every face of Lune. But development brought increased taxes and production demands, irritating those old-timers and native princes who lionized their moon's self-sufficiency after the fall of the Founders.

The Flare -- 2 weeks ago

The Solar Society were fools to put their trust in the sun. They never foresaw the explosion of high-energy particles that scoured the Ingvar system, frying the solar gear and meddling with the robot minds the Earthlings so relied on. Into the power vacuum stepped Neamo Paleto, chief of the space truckers and would-be warlord. Holding court in a massive dreadnought in geosynchronous orbit over Absence's spaceport, Paleto has begun playing favorites with Lune's far-flung dome populations, and threatening those who still show undue deference to the Solar Society.