I really enjoyed writing the earlier extra locations for Mos Shuuta, and I knew there was more I could do with the mesa…
Surveillance Bunker
Beyond a vague customs presence, and the imperial appointed spaceport overseer, Brynn, the Empire has very little influence in Mos Shuuta, leaving it to Teemo and his Gammorrean guards to maintain piece. That is not to say that the Empire doesn’t ignore Mos Shuuta in its entirety… It’s elevated location on the edge of the Dune Sea give it commanding views across the terrain, and unbeknownst to most Mos Shuuta residents, a heavily armoured and well camouflaged surveillance bunker is built into the cliff face below the spaceport communications building. The bunker is manned by a rotating shift of 3 groups of 3 stormtroopers, all of whom have survival and battle experience in the Jundland Wastes, and most are trained spotters and snipers. Most residents presume the Stormtroopers they see occasionally patrolling the streets are part of the spaceports security staff.
Medical Center
While Teemo has his own medical centre, as do the stormtroopers garrisoned in the armoured bunker, the general population of Mos Shuuta have to make do with this rundown facility. A victim of one to many mob attacks, with gangs of residents attempting to get at the injured parties within its walls have left the windows smashed and boarded up, and the heavy blaststeel door hanging from its hinges. Within the room is a small waiting area, a reception office, a medical officers office, and the main surgery room. Wind blown sand is heaped into every corner, and the remaining recovery bed and bastca tank have seen better days. The centers’ Bothan doctor, El’Jaameer, inherited the facility from her father, and is struggling to cope with such rudimentary facilities. With dwindling supplies, and limited funds to release her ‘contraband’ drugs from the customs, her bedside manner borders on furious.
Bunkhouse
Mos Shuuta doesn’t have much of a transient population, visitors find there is little to interest them and quickly move on. The few travellers that the mesa receives are generally ones stranded here due to dust storms, or technical difficulties with their craft. Indeed, Mos Shuuta is the last safe location before the wide expanse of the Dune Sea.
There are few options for where to stay… You can attempt to woo the attentions of Teemo the Hutt, and potentially find yourself contracted to a lifetime in servitude to him for a single nights’ accommodation and entertainment… You can get stupidly drunk in the dingy cantina and pass out, and hope the bartender doesn’t throw you out over the mesa’s edge. Or you can pay to sleep in the bunkhouse. This moderate, two storey building is not in the most hospitable location, the thick acrid smoke from the slagworks blankets the building day and night. The ground floor is a modest eatery, run by the bunkhouses owners, while a separate external staircase leads to the bunkhouse, a long room, devoid of any features beyond the sleeping cots and air shower cubicle.
The Mine Shafts
The Slagworks is currently located on the southern edge of the mesa, with a single shaft descending 50 feet into the stone, the working faces of ore not much deeper than most buildings cellars. But the slagworks hasn’t always been there. In earlier, less populace days, the slagworks was located closer to docking bay Besh, and descending in 3 different shafts upto 500 feet deep. A network of tunnels runs between the old workings, descending across many levels, with occasional air shafts sunk from the mesa’s ground level into the upper tunnels. Inside these tunnels the air is dry and stale, devoid of power the pumps no longer cause the air to circulate, and the darkness has allowed creatures such as mynocks and womp rats to thrive. Long forgotten, there is little chance of the current rich vein of ore in the modern slagworks digging deep enough to link to these tunnels.
Traders Ledge
Hanging from the northern side of the mesa, in the shadow of Docking Bay Aurek is a series of rickety wooden platforms, held aloft by gigantic gas balloons. On the canyon floor hundreds of feet below are piles of dewback dung, sweating and rotting in the sunlight of Tatooines double suns. A small processing plant pumps the gas up to the ballons, providing a floating platform for the Verpine trader Vl’grax to land his small freighter shuttle on. Vl’grax runs an irregular cargo service to other cities on Tatooine such as Mos Espa and Mos Eisley. Because he doesn’t land on the mesa itself, Overseer Brynn is unable to restrict his movements or his carrying capacity, and Vl’grax would be the easiest way of retrieving illegal items if his insect-like sensibilities would extend to transporting anything other than food and water.
Moisture Vat Pumping Station
What looks at first glance to be a tin roofed garage adjacent to the mesa’s important water tower is perhaps the more important building. Designed to accommodate even the largest hover-transports and small landspeeders used by the outlying moisture farms, it contains all the equipment needed to pump water supplies from the vaporators used by the farmers, purifying and storing the water as it does so. Surveillance cameras feed video and sound to both Teemo’s palace and the spaceport control tower, so both know when a delivery is made and by whom.
Bath House
Sand gets everywhere, and most species that call Mos Shuuta home are un-adapted to the coarse substance. The bathhouse is a communal building, with a large central pool of diethyl ether peroxide for bathers to cleanse themselves in… Surrounding the central pool are air-shower cubicles, useful for either a pre-bath cleanse (to remove most of the sand), or a post-bath cleanse (to remove the acidic residue).
Banking Terminal
The flickering cracked screen on the out-dated terminal can dispense both standard galactic credits and information reports… If you can get it to work reliably… Poor quality communications links, decaying chips, and reduced power availability makes the transmission speed incredibly poor, and its not uncommon for the data to timeout before transactions complete or before all of an article are displayed.