Dead Air
"…if you are hearing this, you reached the Shore and we did not. Good. Carry it…" — the Last Transmission · 17% decoded
A medium-length, directed campaign for Wanderstar — the line's one graceful railroad, set in the Throat, the beacon-poor jump-corridor between two sectors of the Shore. A crew comes into a courier relay carrying a fragment of the Last Transmission — the last word the rogue planet Wanderstar ever sent — and has to run it across the dark from one settled cluster to the next, while NULL, a company older than the law, draws its net closed behind them. Three acts, a single tightening clock, and at the end the choice the whole crossing bends toward: what becomes of the last word a dead world ever sent?
In the Sunless Saga (WC02 of four). Dead air — the dark between sectors, the bridge that carries a crew out of one reach and toward the next. Third of the four-part arc (WC00 → WC01 → WC02 → WC03); the one directed campaign between False Light's loose suite and The Frozen Crown's open sandbox, and standalone either way.
Built to run about fifteen sessions in three acts of roughly five — larger than False Light, well short of The Frozen Crown. Everything is assembled from the core rulebook and cites the owning chapter at every roll; zero new rules, not even for the pursuit (the Net is an ordinary faction clock). Runs GM-led, co-op, or solo (Rulebook Part X); party-agnostic, with the canon pregens aboard the Long Account as a fast-start option.
Reading order§
Read 00 first, then run the acts in order; 04 and 05 are reference you keep beside you.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| 00 — Campaign Frame | The whole campaign at a glance: premise, the "now," the relay, the Throat, the two hunters, the Net, and how a railroad still breathes. Read first. |
| 01 — Act I: The Find | The crew comes into the relay, learns it's hunted, and commits to the crossing. ~Sessions 1–5. |
| 02 — Act II: The Crossing | The corridor's body — a wake-station, a dead ark, the reversal that turns the journey over. The densest act. ~Sessions 6–10. |
| 03 — Act III: The Threshold | Arrival at the far mouth, the reckoning with NULL, and what becomes of the word. ~Sessions 11–15. |
| 04 — Faction & NPC Dossier | NULL and Lumen, the corridor's minor powers, the hinge people, and the Net in detail. |
| 05 — Handouts & Leads | Player-facing documents — the relay, the transmission, the lien, the wake-record — a rumor table, and three ways to open play. |
Running the campaign§
- Pick an on-ramp and put the relay in their hands. Choose an opening from file 00 (the find, already holding it, or hired to carry it), hand the players one document and one rumor from file 05, and let them pull.
- Run the Net on the faction turn. The campaign's one clock climbs a step every jump-week and on every loud break; a few minutes with the Appendix A4 checklist (file 04) keeps NULL closing whether or not the crew is looking. It crests at the threshold — the reckoning.
- Fix the nodes, never the route. The set-pieces will happen; how the crew gets through each, and what they do with the word, is theirs. Give every beat more than one way through (the acts show the keys).
- Solo or co-op? Use the Part X procedures (Rulebook Ch 42–45) and the A4 solo/co-op sheet; every act carries a GM-less note.
Dead Air is WC02 in the campaigns line — the bridge between False Light (WC01, the Coldwake Reach) and The Frozen Crown (WC03, the Driftmarch). It stands entirely on its own, assumes no prior campaign, and sits beside the canon worlds of Rulebook Ch 30, not on top of them; a table running the whole Sunless Saga can carry a crew in from WC01 and out into WC03 without a seam.