The Cold Lantern
"…st—… if you are… [signal]…" — recovered fragment · source flagged WANDERSTAR, final window · 4% decoded
The Wanderstar starter adventure (Rulebook Ch 36), relocated here as WC00 — the "session 0" of the Campaigns line. A complete, ready-to-run single session: a dying frontier station whose core-heat tap is failing, a crew hired to get into the sealed engineering deck and find out why, and the discovery that the failure is sabotage and the saboteurs are still aboard. Roughly two to four hours, three to five players, no prep beyond a read.
In the Sunless Saga (WC00 of four). The dying lantern — the saga at its smallest scale: one failing heat-tap, one room going cold. The on-ramp and "session 0" of the four-part arc (WC00 → WC01 → WC02 → WC03), and complete on its own.
Built entirely from the core rulebook; where a roll comes up, the owning chapter is cited. Hand out the five pregenerated Wanderers (Appendix A6) aboard the mortgaged free trader Long Account (Ch 25), or let the table build their own.
Reading order§
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| 00 — The Cold Lantern (Starter Adventure) | The full scenario: three acts (the cold dock, the engineering deck, the saboteurs), three honest endings, and a GM cheat-sheet. |
Where it leads§
The Cold Lantern ends three ways — the station saved, sold, or walked away from. Any ending feeds straight into WC01 — False Light, whose frame reads your ending across to set the starting faction clocks and the state of the station. Play WC00 first, then continue into the Coldwake Reach.
This is a verbatim copy of Rulebook Ch 36; the canonical version still lives in the rulebook spine. Internal cross-references (and the "Chapter 36" heading) point at rulebook chapters by design.