What is an Adventure Spot?

Perseverance is a world of danger, opportunity, and shifting power. To bring it to life, Adventure Spots provide focused locations packed with conflict, factions, and adventure hooks – places where players can get involved, make a difference, and shape the world. Each Adventure Spot is designed as a modular setting, ready to drop into any campaign or inspire new stories. Whether it’s a lawless mining settlement, a smuggler’s haven, or a forgotten ruin, Adventure Spots give GMs the tools to create high-stakes, narrative-rich encounters.

This first entry explores Iron Mesa, a plateau where miners dig for fortune, corporations fight for control, and the land itself threatens to swallow them all whole.

Introduction: The Harsh Wealth of Iron Mesa

Iron Mesa is a land of opportunity and ruin, where fortunes are carved from the rock, and lives are lost just as easily. A vast plateau rich in valuable minerals, it is the beating heart of Perseverance’s mining industry, its veins running thick with iron, lanthanum, and rarer, more mysterious elements. But wealth comes at a price.

At any given time, a dozen pits are actively worked, some operated by corporate juggernauts, others run by small, fiercely independent mining guilds. The mesa is a battleground – not just for resources, but for control, power, and survival.

“Every pickaxe that hits the rock in Iron Mesa brings either fortune or disaster – and no one leaves untouched.”

The Ever-Shifting Pits: A Living, Breathing Battleground

Iron Mesa is not a static terrain – it is a shifting, treacherous landscape where pits open, collapse, and change hands with alarming frequency.

The Three Faces of an Iron Mesa Pit

• Boom Pits – Rich veins discovered, setting off frantic rushes. Every miner in the sector wants a piece, and companies will pay – or kill – to get their hands on it.
• Bust Pits – Mines that have dried up or been abandoned due to cost, disaster, or legal disputes. Sometimes a pit is left alone because it’s empty. Sometimes because something was found that shouldn't have been.
• Ghost Pits – Collapsed shafts, rumored to hold buried miners, lost artifacts, or hidden truths. Some say they breathe at night.

Who Holds the Power in Iron Mesa?

The Corporate Giants:

• Perseverance Metals – The Old Guard, a once-dominant force fighting to maintain its hold on its legacy pits.
• Dawes-Kessler Mining Consortium – The Commonwealth-backed industrial powerhouse, pushing automation and efficiency over people.
• Orion Geotech – Their interest in the mesa is… different. They extract minerals, but also dig deeper than anyone else, for reasons only they seem to understand.

The Independents and the Guilds:

Small but fiercely independent miners form guilds to protect their claims from hostile takeovers. Some work under the radar, smuggling rare ores off-world before corporations can claim them. Others strike uneasy alliances, hoping to survive corporate sabotage and gang violence.

The Law, or Lack Thereof

The Commonwealth Rangers try to keep order but are too few and too stretched to hold real power. Corporate enforcers act as de facto law, running protection rackets, shutting down resistance, and ensuring their bosses always get what they want.

Justice in Iron Mesa is personal—delivered by hired guns, desperate workers, or a dynamite charge in the right place at the wrong time.

Scene-Setting Details & Random Encounters

Sights & Sounds:

• The wind howls through the canyons, kicking up stinging dust.
• The distant thunder of controlled explosions marks a successful excavation – or a deadly collapse.
• The neon-lit offices of corporate overseers stand in stark contrast to the ramshackle bars and dorms of the miners.

Encounters:

• A group of bruised miners accuse a rival pit of foul play and need backup.
• A lone ranger—outnumbered and outgunned – seeks help in stopping a lawless takeover.
• A half-mad survivor from a collapsed pit whispers warnings about “something alive down there.”
• Corporate enforcers are loading up for a midnight raid on an independent mine—get involved, or stay out of it?

Adventure Hooks: Trouble Beneath the Mesa

• The Pit That Won’t Stay Dead – A once-collapsed mine is reopening. But someone doesn’t want it unearthed. What’s really buried beneath?
• The Last Hope Gambit – A small mining guild hires the PCs to save their claim from a corporate takeover. Are the corporations playing fair? (Spoiler: Probably not.)
• Blood in the Dust – A foreman was murdered, and three factions blame each other. The town is about to explode. Can the PCs find the truth before the bullets start flying?
• The Preceder Artifact – A strange device was found deep in a shaft. What does it do, and why is Orion Geotech offering so much for it?
• Smuggler’s Run – A rare ore shipment is moving out of Iron Mesa—who wants to steal it, who wants to stop them, and who will pay the PCs the most?

“They say the mines’ll make you rich. That’s half true. What they don’t say is the dust’ll kill you first.” – Jesse Hale, pit boss, Iron Mesa Mine

This first entry in the Adventure Spot series turns Iron Mesa into a living, breathing conflict zone—ripe for PCs to profit, protect, or tear down. The balance of power is constantly shifting, and no one stays on top forever.

Where will your players stand?