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Campaigns

Playing the Sunless Saga Straight Through

The four campaigns of the line — WC00 The Cold Lantern → WC01 False Light → WC02 Dead Air → WC03 The Frozen Crown — are built to stand alone, but they're also written to run as one long arc with a single crew. This is the guide for tables doing the latter. Nothing here is a new rule; it's how the rulebook's own engine behaves when you point it at thirty-plus sessions instead of one.

Or play any one cold. None of this is required. Each part assumes no prior campaign, opens with its own on-ramp, and resolves on its own. Skip straight to the part you want; the seams below simply reward a table that doesn't.

The shape and the length§

The arc is a slow zoom out — one lantern, one reach, the dark between, a crown over the dark — and it climbs in length the same way. The Cold Lantern is a single session, False Light three, Dead Air about fifteen, and The Frozen Crown a year or more. A crew that runs the whole thing is looking at well over thirty sessions before the sandbox even opens, then as long again inside it. Treat WC00–WC02 as a nineteen-session "first book" that delivers the crew, the ship, and a history to the Driftmarch's door, and WC03 as the open campaign that history feeds.

It is also a line drawn across the map: the Coldwake Reach (WC00–WC01), then the Throat that bridges sectors (WC02), then the Driftmarch (WC03). The crew travels it once, in order, and never doubles back — every part hands the next a wider sky and a farther shore.

One crew, one ship, one note§

The continuous thread is the mortgaged free trader Long Account (Rulebook Ch 25) and the debt that hangs on it. Carry the same hull and the same five Wanderers (or the table's own crew) from part to part; the note never gets paid off across WC00–WC02, and it's why the crew keeps taking the next dangerous job — the Cold Lantern contract, the Coldwake freight runs, the courier relay. Let the monthly payment keep biting straight through. It's the cheapest possible campaign engine and it's already in the fiction.

If a table wants fresh faces between parts, that's fine too: each campaign re-offers the pregens and can take a newly built crew. But the saga lands hardest when the people who walked away from a freezing station are the same people standing on the Concord's ice a year later.

How advancement carries§

Nothing resets between campaigns — advancement is continuous by default, and that's the point. A Wanderer earns +1 XP per session and marks skills they fail at Trained+ (rolled off at session end, 10 XP = +1 rank); Banes keep paying XP when invoked. None of that pauses at a campaign boundary, so a crew that starts WC00 around the Trained threshold will be solidly Experienced, with a few skills at Professional or Expert, by the time they reach the Driftmarch — which is exactly the power level WC03's seven-power board is pitched at. Don't re-roll characters or rebuild at the seams; just keep the same sheets and let them grow.

Two practical notes for a long arc:

  • Trauma and Banes travel; the light wounds don't. Maimed and Broken nodes carry across sessions and parts until a full session clears them (Jinx's standing Maimed leg is meant to ride the whole way). Wounded and Shaken clear at the end of each session as usual. Momentum is per-session throughout — it never carries, in any part.
  • Aging is flavor, not math. Character creation ages a Wanderer +4 years per term with no mechanical effect, and the same spirit holds in play: months pass across jump-weeks and a year-plus sandbox, but time costs nothing on the sheet. If a player wants to retire a Wanderer who's been through enough, rotate a fresh pregen (or a built character at the party's rough XP) into the crew between parts — a natural beat at any seam.

What carries besides the sheet — the seams§

The parts are wired to each other so that what the crew did precedes them. Each seam is optional and skippable, but if you're running straight through, honor them:

  • WC00 → WC01. The Cold Lantern's ending — station saved, sold, or walked — sets False Light's opening faction clocks and the state of the station, via the frame's Carrying the Lantern forward table. The crew's first choice is already shaping the sector.
  • WC01 → WC02. One wreck in False Light's Greywell graveyard isn't a ship — it's the sealed courier drone that opens Dead Air. A crew that pulled that thread walks into WC02 already holding the thing NULL will hunt them for. (GANYMEDE's manufactured-wreck field is the natural cover; the drone is the real hook.)
  • WC02 → WC03. Dead Air delivers the crew to Saltgate, the Driftmarch's front door, with NULL already knowing their faces, "Mr. Ashford" a known name, and a partial of the Last Transmission already in hand. For a continuing crew this is their own history, not backstory — a head start into WC03's slow burn, deliberately kept short of spoiling it.

Beyond those built-in seams, let earlier wins ripple in small ways: a name the crew made in the Coldwake Reach is worth a rumor or a contact two sectors on; a salvage firm they crossed remembers; a Sleeper they woke or failed to wake is a face that can return. None of it needs a subsystem — it's just the GM honoring what the table already did.

Running the bridge between sessions§

Every part runs its between-sessions faction turn the same way (Appendix A4 checklist): a few minutes keeping the powers and clocks moving on their own. When you cross a seam, you're really just handing one part's ending state to the next part's starting clocks — the Long Account's note, the crew's reputation, NULL's awareness — and letting the new sector take it from there. The engine doesn't change at the boundary. Only the sky gets wider.