Frost Maw Mine
Frost Maw Mine is the engine of Hiemal Vellum's economy and the colony's most dangerous civil works project.
Rules Reference
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Aesthetic | outpost |
| Anchor System | HIEMAL-VELLUM |
| Fold Bleed | medium |
| Population | 2500 |
| Role | satellite |
| Zone | Rim |
Notes
Controlling Faction: Independent
Dangers: The permafrost layer holds things; melt a gallery with a plasma lamp and the gallery is no longer empty., Deep tunnels are below the cold-pressure ceiling; breathing apparatus failures happen quietly and quickly., Mine crews are paid in scrip redeemable only at colony stores; desertion ends in ice-walk exile.
Hooks: Run a fresh survey crew into the deep tunnels to map which galleries are still safe after the last thaw-shift event., A strike team is needed to recover a trapped foreman who knows where the council's off-ledger Rek is buried., Find out which off-world buyer is paying for cold-preserved Fold artefacts pulled out of the permafrost layer.
Lore: Frost Maw Mine is the engine of Hiemal Vellum's economy and the colony's most dangerous civil works project. The mine is cut into the permafrost layer because the rare isotopes the off-world market pays Rek for only exist in the sub-glacial strata, and those strata are precisely the layer where the cold has been preserving Fold artefacts and bleed-through for centuries. The mine therefore causes a careful, causal problem: every shaft dug is a shaft into frozen Fold residue, and every plasma lamp carried down is a heat source that softens what the cold was holding. The colony's medium Fold veil is in part the veil of a freezer; below the permafrost, the veil thins, and what the council calls "frost-madness" is what the off-world doctors call early-stage Fold exposure. The mine crews know, and the council knows the crews know, which is why the council pays in scrip and watches who comes back up. The off-world Rek price for cold-preserved Fold artefacts is the second engine of the colony's economy and the part nobody admits.
Notable: A sub-glacial mine complex cut into the permafrost layer of Hiemal Vellum's equatorial arc. Pressure-walled shafts descend in a spiral beneath the colony's main dome; the deepest galleries reach the rare-isotope strata that the off-world Rek market prizes.