Wanderstar Campaigns

Play material that lives outside the numbered rulebook spine — starter adventures, connected campaigns, and sandboxes. Each is built from the core rulebook's own engine (no new rules unless flagged), runs the canon pregens aboard the Long Account or a crew of your own, and can be played GM-led, co-op, or solo. They're numbered WC00, WC01, … in rough order of scope, from a single evening to a year at the table.

Together they form The Sunless Saga, the line's connected through-arc — named for the Wanderstar itself, a people with no sun tending their own light across the dark. Each part is a flame against that cold: a dying lantern, a false light, dead air, a frozen crown. Play them as one continuous saga in order (WC00 → WC01 → WC02 → WC03), or take any one on its own.

The shape of the saga is a slow zoom out. It opens in a single freezing room and ends over a whole sector's politics: one lantern going dark on one station (WC00), then one reach of four worlds to keep a ship alive across (WC01), then the dark between sectors that a crew must cross with something the powerful want buried (WC02), and finally a crown over the dark — a moon-sized ark and the seven powers fighting to hold it (WC03). One station, one sector, the corridor between sectors, a sector entire. The stakes never change scale by accident; each part hands the next a wider sky.

And under all four is one question: who controls the keeping-alive? This is the setting's own spine (the "new nobilities" of Rulebook Ch. 30) — in a sunless people, whoever owns the heat, the light, and the waking owns everything. The saga is four faces of that one fact: the lease-holder who would foreclose a dying station rather than fix its heat; the salvage firm that has learned not to wait for a ship to die; the company that buries the last word a lost world ever sent; and the powers that would crown themselves over tens of thousands still frozen and unwoken. A table never has to name the theme to play any part — but it is the thread that makes the four feel like one.

One artifact spans the whole arc: the Last Transmission, the last word Wanderstar flung ahead as it left the Shore's reach for good. Each part opens on a line of it, decoded a little further than the last — from near-static at the lantern to a legible fragment at the crown. The crew doesn't hold it until Dead Air; the epigraphs are the reader's thread, not the characters'. The recording stays unfinished on purpose — the blank at the end is the doorway past the saga.

Running all four with one crew? See Playing the Sunless Saga Straight Through — the ship-and-note throughline, how advancement carries across thirty-plus sessions, and the seams that make the crew's history precede them.

The Sunless Saga

WC00 — The Cold Lantern§

Folder: WC00 The Cold Lantern — a verbatim copy of Rulebook Ch. 36.

Premise. A dying frontier station is freezing to death: the radiothermal tap that keeps it warm is failing, its decks are going dark, and the company that owns the lease would rather foreclose than fix it. The crew is hired off the dock to get into the sealed engineering deck, recover what the station's own engineers need, and find out why the heat is failing.

Style of play / purpose. The game's on-ramp — a complete, ready-to-run teaching scenario that shows the personal-scale engine running in a single sitting: the 2D6 core loop, the Momentum economy, and the "players roll, the world doesn't" combat. The "session 0" of the campaigns line, and the doorway into False Light.

Expected length. One session — nominally two to four hours; realistically about three to three-and-a-half for a first-time table learning the system, so plan for four.

WC01 — False Light§

Folder: WC01 False Light — set in the Coldwake Reach sector.

Premise. Picking up after the starter, the crew works a mortgaged free trader across a thin-law frontier sector of four worlds a jump apart, warmed by a dying core-tap and watched by a salvage firm that has learned not to wait for ships to die. Three lean scenarios — a freight run gone wrong, a speculative cargo gamble, and a derelict crawl — chained by a light faction frame.

Style of play / purpose. A small connected campaign that gives a table "training wheels" on the major modes The Cold Lantern doesn't cover — jump plotting and ship combat, the merchant loop, and salvage with layered hazards — plus the between-sessions faction turn. Scenarios stand alone and reorder freely.

Expected length. Three single-session scenarios, roughly three to four-and-a-half hours each — about ten to twelve hours of play across three sessions.

WC02 — Dead Air§

Folder: WC02 Dead Air — the bridge between the Coldwake Reach and the Driftmarch.

Premise. The crew pulls a sealed courier relay from a derelict at the frontier's edge — a message-drone carrying a fragment of the Last Transmission, the final word Wanderstar flung ahead as it left the Shore's reach for good. The moment they hold it, a buyer who signs only "N." offers far too much for it, and the couriers who carried it before start turning up dead. To decode it, sell it somewhere safe, or only to live through the week, the crew has to run it across the Throat — the beacon-poor corridor to the next sector — while NULL, the company doing the buying and the killing, draws its net closed behind them.

Style of play / purpose. The saga's one directed campaign — a graceful railroad between False Light's loose suite and The Frozen Crown's open sandbox. A fixed three-act spine (the find, the crossing, the threshold) paced by a single tightening clock, with real local choice inside every beat: which corridor stops the crew makes, which power they borrow against, what they learn about the word they carry, and what they finally do with it. Foregrounds the chase, intrigue, and salvage; gives the rest a beat or two. Zero new rules — the pursuit is an ordinary faction clock.

Expected length. About fifteen sessions of two to four hours, in three acts of roughly five — a medium-length campaign, larger than False Light and well short of The Frozen Crown.

WC03 — The Frozen Crown§

Folder: WC03 The Frozen Crown — the Driftmarch sandbox.

Premise. A frontier sector where the lost still wash up out of the dark — and the largest thing ever to drift in is a moon-sized Sleeper ark, fallen silent after a crossing of millennia, with tens of thousands still frozen aboard and its reactor barely ticking. The crew comes into a contested claim on it, and every corporation, court, and cause in the sector means to take it from them.

Style of play / purpose. An open, party-agnostic sandbox — no scripted plot, no ending written in advance. The sector generates its own pressure through seven powers pursuing their agendas and a metaclock counting toward a reckoning, while the crew decides what to do with the ark. Gives every pillar of the game recurring room: fights, the ship and the jump, trade, salvage and exploration, intrigue, and the slow politics of holding something too big to hold alone. Carries one flagged optional subsystem — base-building, for rebuilding the ark.

Expected length. A long campaign — built to run a year or more of regular sessions.