Trouble on Dpok

A lonely planet far from the core worlds, now little more than an obscure watering hole before you reach the long rim, Dpok was once a planet of dazzling forests and snowy mountains peaks. Now barren and dry, the planet shows the indelible marks of its history as a TBK testing ground. While the planet was left inhabitable by the researchers and military personnel who populated it, massive resource extraction, kinetic impacts, and 500 years of leaking radiation have been slowly turning the planet over to desertification and an increasingly unbreathable atmosphere.

These days, there's just one major population center left, the city of Skarth. Skarth is a relatively small city of just two million people, nestled into a valley in the once-verdant Emerald Majesty Mountains. Originally build for researchers and their families, Skarth is a declined metropolis, filled with the whine of broken advertisment holograms and failing printers. To the southwest of Skarth, following the dry river, is a chain of small farming towns. Most are now abandoned unless they, by chance, happened to be built over an underground water reservoir. Roughly 650km past the final farming village is base K-493.0.8, affectionately called New Home by it's former residents.

New Home was the staging ground for research on Dpok, a massive and imposing walled complex rising behind some vacant satellite labs. The base is local legend, a SECCOM charnel house, filled to the brim with valuable scrap and deadly automated systems, including a powerful anti-air battery that prevents orbital drops and atmospheric scans of the complex. Recently though, strange lights and houses have been echoing from the dead base. Alarm sirens blare at odd hours and rumors of a long-dead General Alexandria are heard among the scrappers that scurry from the tomb.