Dead Air — the bridge campaign (campaign frame)

A frame for a directed, fifteen-session crossing: a crew comes into one small thing that a power older than the Shore will kill to keep buried, and has to carry it across the dark gap between two sectors while that power closes the distance behind them. This file is the whole campaign at a glance — the premise, the "now," the relay the crew carries, the corridor they cross, the two powers that hunt them, the clock that tightens the chase, and how to run a railroad that still breathes. The detail lives in the files beside it: the three acts in 01, 02, and 03, the powers and the people in 04, and the player-facing documents in 05.

Everything here is built from the rulebook's own engine. No new rules — not even for the pursuit; where a roll comes up, the owning chapter is cited, and the chase is an ordinary faction clock (Chapter 34) plus the law of distance (Chapter 27), never a new subsystem. Dead Air is independent of False Light (WC01) and of The Frozen Crown (WC03) — it assumes no prior campaign and stands entirely apart from the canon worlds of Chapter 30, sitting beside that map rather than on it. It is, however, built to be the bridge between the two: a crew can arrive from WC01 and leave into WC03 without a seam (see Standalone, and the bridge, below).

The premise in a paragraph. Out at the rim of a settled frontier, the crew pulls a sealed courier relay from a wreck — a message-drone carrying a fragment of the Last Transmission, the final word Wanderstar flung ahead of itself as the rogue planet fell out of range forever (Chapter 29). The moment they have it, a soft-spoken buyer who signs only "N." offers far too much for it; the people who held it before them are turning up dead. To decode it, to sell it somewhere safe, or only to live through the week, the crew has to run it across the Throat — the long, beacon-poor jump-corridor between their sector and the next — while NULL, the company doing the buying and the killing, draws its net closed behind them. The question the whole campaign turns on: you are carrying the last thing a dead world ever said — and once you know what it says, what do you do with it?

What this campaign is§

Dead Air is a directed campaign — a railroad, said without apology, of the gracious kind. There is a throughline the crew does not get to refuse: they hold a thing that is hunted, the only road runs one way, and at the end of it they will have to decide what the thing is worth. That is different from both of its neighbours. The Cold Lantern (Chapter 36) teaches the engine in a single sitting; False Light (WC01) is a loose suite of one-session lessons in any order; The Frozen Crown (WC03) is an open sandbox with no plot written in advance. Dead Air is the line's one fixed spine — three acts, set-pieces that will happen, a clock that guarantees a reckoning.

What keeps a fixed spine from being a cattle-chute is that it fixes only the nodes, never the route between them (Chapter 32). The crew never chooses whether to cross the Throat; they choose how — which stops they make, which power they borrow help from, what they learn about the thing they carry, and what they finally do with it. Every set-piece has more than one way through and more than one way out. The clock (below) decides that a reckoning comes; the players' fifteen sessions of choices decide whose terms it comes on. Run it the way a good film railroads: the train is on rails, but everyone aboard is making decisions the whole way.

The "now"§

The Shore has no fixed date; you set the era for your table (Chapters 29, 33). Dead Air's default "now" is a working frontier at the quiet edge of things — old enough to have law and registries and debt, loose enough that the law thins to nothing a jump or two out, and crossed by a corridor that nobody governs because nobody has found a reason to. Two settled clusters sit at either end of that corridor; in between is dead air — hexes with sparse beacons, no relay worth the name, and the oldest rule of the Shore made into terrain: no word outruns a ship (Chapter 27). A message can only cross the Throat the way the crew is about to cross it — carried, in a hull, in person, with whoever wants it silenced free to wait at the far end.

That setting does the campaign's work for it. It makes the relay precious (a fragment of a signal is worth carrying only where no signal travels on its own). It keeps the law thin enough that a corporation, not a court, is the thing to fear. And it turns every jump into a week the hunters can use — the crew learns what changed behind them only when they make port, and arrive onto a map already going stale (Chapter 27). Lean on that lag; it is the engine that lets the net tighten in ways the crew could not have prevented.

The crew, the ship, and the relay§

The campaign is party-agnostic. Build your Wanderers the usual way (Part III); nothing here needs particular characters, careers, or peoples. Read the party's sheets before the first session and hang the opening on what you find (Chapter 33) — a debt makes the courier job necessary, a Maimed node makes a corridor wake-station unavoidable, a Companion in the crew makes the small ark's frozen cargo personal. The Throat gives any crew a reason to run it.

Two things need to be true for the frame to bite, and only two:

The crew can move, and owes for the privilege. A ship does it — a mortgaged free trader is the classic Wanderstar hull (Chapter 28), and the note that comes with it is a gift, because it makes the next job necessary and every stop a place they have to earn. Tables that want to start fast can take the canon pregens and the mortgaged free trader Long Account straight off the shelf (Appendix A6; Chapter 25), exactly as the rest of the book flies them. There is no base to build in Dead Air — the ship is the only home, and the road is the campaign. (Base-building belongs to WC03; this is the crossing.)
The crew is holding the relay. How it came to them is the first session's business (see Entry points). However it comes, the moment they have it they are prey — and that is the campaign.

The relay — what they carry§

The relay is a courier drone the size of a footlocker: a hardened message-core built to be flung between worlds and wait, dark and patient, for someone to come and read it. This one has waited a very long time. Its core holds an encrypted fragment of the Last Transmission — the signal Wanderstar sent ahead as it left the Shore's reach for good, caught and stored and never delivered (Chapter 29). The crew will not know that at first; they will know they are holding something that decrypts slowly, reads as older than it has any right to be, and is flagged, when they crack the first layer, with one impossible source: Wanderstar, final window.

Treat the relay as the campaign's spine made into an object. It is the reason for the journey, the thing the hunters want, and a slow reveal in its own right — let the crew decode it by degrees (an extended effort across the acts, Chapter 5; resolved with the skills on their sheets, Chapter 23), and let each layer raise the stakes rather than answer them. Early, it is a curio worth clean credits. By the midpoint, it names a place across the dark and reveals that the buyer is not a buyer at all but an owner, holding a claim that should not exist. By the end, it is the one thing that could undo what that owner has spent an age burying — which is why the owner would rather see the crew dead than delivered. The fragment, the partial decryption, and what it finally says are in 05.

The Throat — the corridor in brief§

A sector is a handful of systems and the powers whose reach spans them (Chapter 37). The Throat is not a sector — it is the gap between two of them, a thin string of unsettled hexes that the crew must cross one jump at a time, one parsec to a week (Chapter 27). Only a few stops are keyed; sketch the rest as names on the chart and build them in minutes on the Chapter 37 tables when the crew sails somewhere new. Full detail rides in the three act files; this is the road at a glance.

Stop	What it is (Chapter 37)	The hook riding on it	Act
Greywell	A graveyard of derelicts in slow orbits at the home sector's rim	Where the relay surfaces, and the buyer first reaches out	I
The Reach mouth	A thin customs-and-relay post at the last settled hex before the dark	The break-out: the net's first cast, and the choice to run into the Throat	I → II
Halflight Station	A cryo-revival way-station at the corridor's midpoint	Something is wrong with who it wakes; a stop the crew can't skip	II
Stillreach & the Pale Mercy	A smaller ballistic ark adrift in a dead hex, mostly dark	A salvage-crawl gone wrong, and the first taste of what an ark is	II
The Sill	A garrison hex where the corridor narrows to one lane	The net turns institutional — a forged hold, a bought officer	II → III
Saltgate	A free port that answers to no one and sells that fact	Journey's end: the reckoning, and what becomes of the word	III

Greywell and Saltgate are the corridor's two mouths; the four stops between them are the crossing. None is a canon world of Chapter 30 — the Throat sits beside that map, not on it.

The two hunters in brief§

Dead Air runs a two-power pursuit, deliberately lighter than the seven-faction board of WC03 — a chase needs hunters, not a parliament. Full dossiers and trackers are in 04; in a line each:

Power	What they are	What they want	Pressure
NULL	A shell company rumored to predate the Ejection (Chapter 34, roster 16)	The relay, buried — and the crew silenced for having read it	The Net (below)
Lumen Sleeper Trust	A cryo-trust banking the fortunes of the still-frozen (Chapter 34, roster 52)	To keep its wake-station's secret, once the crew stumbles into it	Feeds the Net when provoked

NULL is the hunter; the chase is its. Lumen is the complication the corridor puts in the way — its way-station is the one stop the crew cannot route around, and crossing it badly hands NULL another step. Only NULL carries a tracked clock; Lumen presses through standing and obstacle (Chapter 35), and when the crew makes an enemy of it, that enmity tightens the Net (04). A third name — GANYMEDE Salvage (Chapter 34, roster 26) — works the Greywell graveyard where the relay surfaces and serves as the find's cover, but it is a face, not a thread.

The Net — the clock that closes§

One clock gives the railroad its tension: the Net — NULL's pursuit drawing closed — an eight-segment campaign clock (Chapters 33, 34). It measures how near NULL is to taking the relay and burying it, and it is built so a reckoning is guaranteed while the outcome is earned:

It advances on the pulse, whether the crew hurries or dawdles. Every jump-week across the Throat, NULL's reach catches up a step — tick forward one by default (the corridor is long, NULL has money at every relay, and no word outruns a ship, so the crew can neither warn ahead nor run silent forever). Tick forward one more on a decisive NULL move or a crew mistake that leaves a trail: spending loud, selling a lead, trusting a bought contact, making an enemy of Lumen.
The crew can slow it, never stop it. Tick back one when they break contact cleanly — ditch a tracker, lay a false trail, cover a transaction, take the harder beacon-dark route. Good play buys time and a stronger position for the reckoning; it does not cancel the reckoning. The players never roll against the Net — they act in the fiction against 8, and the GM keeps the clock (Chapter 34).
When it fills, NULL closes — at the threshold. The Net is built to crest in Act III at Saltgate, where the pursuit becomes a confrontation. A full clock does not mean the players lose; it means the question resolves, and the crew's accumulated deeds — what they decoded, who they allied with, how much of the word they copied or spread — decide who walks away with the last light. The clock guarantees the reckoning, not its result.

That is the campaign's only tracked clock. Beneath it runs a quieter pressure with no track of its own — the note, the mortgaged hull's monthly debt (Chapter 28), which is why the crew takes the courier job and why they keep having to stop and earn. Set the Net's starting fill and run it on the faction turn from 04.

How the campaign runs§

The loop is the standard Wanderstar rhythm (Chapters 33–34), bent to a chase:

The crew acts at a stop — they salvage, deal, decode, fight, or talk their way through whatever the act puts in front of them. You narrate, they choose, the dice settle the forks against 8 (Chapter 32).
They take the only road on. The next stop is a jump — a week (Chapter 27) — so the faction turn fires: the Net ticks (above), NULL makes its move off-screen, and the crew arrives onto a stop that has shifted since they plotted for it.
You run the set-piece they reach — read the act file, or roll the corridor fresh on the Chapter 37/38 tables if they've struck off the keyed road — and the loop repeats, one stop nearer the threshold.

The three acts give the GM the shape of the escalation: The Find (Act I, ~sessions 1–5) — come into the relay, feel the first net, commit to the crossing; The Crossing (Act II, ~6–10) — the corridor's body, the wake-station and the small ark, the midpoint turn when the crew learns what they truly carry; The Threshold (Act III, ~11–15) — Saltgate, the reckoning with NULL, and the choice of what becomes of the word. The acts are a description of where the campaign goes, not a leash; inside each, the crew steers (Chapter 32). The full beat-by-beat is in 01–03.

Standalone, and the bridge§

Dead Air needs nothing before it and nothing after it. Run alone, the relay is simply a thing powerful people want buried, the Throat is a self-contained frontier gap, NULL is a complete adversary, and the ending resolves on its own terms.

It is also built to bridge the two campaigns on either side, for a table that wants the long road:

From False Light (WC01). A crew can arrive straight out of the Coldwake Reach: same hull, same note, the same salvage life, and the relay turns up in exactly the kind of wreck that sector is full of. Nothing in WC01 has to have happened; if it did, the crew crosses in already owing and already wary.
Into The Frozen Crown (WC03). Whatever the crew decides at Saltgate, they end Dead Air at the Driftmarch's front door, with NULL now a known enemy and a decoded fragment that names a place across that sector. That is precisely where WC03 opens. The hand-off is ending-agnostic — all three of Dead Air's resolutions deposit the crew at the same threshold (Act III, 03).

These connections are optional throughout; the seeds that wire them into the neighbouring campaigns are a separate matter, kept out of this file so that Dead Air reads clean on its own.

Entry points — three ways to open§

Because the relay is the hook, a table can open wherever suits it. Three ready on-ramps (the full openings are in 01):

The find. The cleanest cold open, and the one Act I assumes: a routine salvage or courier job at Greywell turns up the relay, and within a session the crew has read enough to be hunted. Hand them the work, let them pull it, and spring the buyer.
Already holding it. Play opens with the relay aboard and the first body already cold — a previous courier the crew was meant to meet, dead on the dock. The net is cast; the choice is only which way to run.
Hired to carry it. The crew are a courier outfit paid to deliver the relay across the Throat, no questions, and they discover en route what they're really carrying — and that their employer may be the very thing hunting them. The strongest opening for an intrigue-leaning table.

Whatever the on-ramp, the first session's real work is the same: put the relay in their hands, put one cold proof that someone will kill for it on the table, and let them feel that the only way out is across.

Pre-filled record sheets (Appendix A4)§

Ready to run. Copy into your A4 sheets, or use as-is; the full faction records are built out in 04.

CORRIDOR: The Throat        The "now" (era): A thin-law frontier, quiet at the edges

Stops (name — one-line character):
  • Greywell — derelict graveyard at the home sector's rim; where the relay surfaces
  • The Reach mouth — last customs/relay post before the dark; the break-out
  • Halflight Station — cryo-revival way-station; something wrong with who it wakes
  • Stillreach / the Pale Mercy — a smaller ark adrift; salvage gone wrong; the ark foreshadow
  • The Sill — a garrison chokepoint; the net turns institutional
  • Saltgate — free port at the far mouth; the reckoning; journey's end
  • (sketched) name the next hex on the chart when the crew strikes off the road

Powers in play (name → Ch 34 tracker):
  • NULL — the hunter; wants the relay buried and the crew silenced (the Net, clock 8)
  • Lumen Sleeper Trust — wants Halflight's secret kept (feeds the Net when provoked)
  • GANYMEDE Salvage — works the Greywell field; the find's cover, not a thread

THE NET — HOW NEAR NULL IS TO TAKING THE RELAY (8):
  [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
  +1 every jump-week (default); +1 more on a decisive NULL move or a trail left;
  -1 on a clean break of contact. Crests in Act III at Saltgate — the reckoning.
  When it fills, the question resolves; the crew's deeds decide who walks away with it.

Open threads / rumors running:
  • A courier drone came up out of Greywell with something live still in it
  • A quiet buyer is paying stupid money for old message-cores, and won't say why
  • The couriers who carried it before are turning up dead, one port back
  • The note is due, and the only road that pays runs the wrong way — across the Throat

FACTION: NULL
  Kind: A shell holding company rumored to predate the Ejection (Ch 34, roster 16)
  Agenda (hidden): Take the relay and bury it; silence whoever read it
  Reach & methods: Secrecy, deniability, money at every relay; an intermediary, "Mr. Ashford"
  Pressure point: A claim it should not be able to hold — the lever must be MADE (Ch 34)
  Standing toward the crew:  Unknown  (→ Enemy as the truth surfaces)
  The Net (8):  [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]   (start per Act I — suggested 1)
  When it fills → NULL closes at the threshold. The reckoning; the crew's deeds set its terms.

FACTION: Lumen Sleeper Trust
  Kind: A cryo-trust banking the fortunes of the still-frozen (Ch 34, roster 52)
  Agenda: Keep what happens at Halflight Station off the record
  Reach & methods: Law, debt, the wake-station; a triage apparatus that decides who thaws
  Pressure point: A wake-record that proves the lists are rigged
  Standing toward the crew:  Contact  (patron-and-threat — until they see too much)
  No tracked clock: provoke Lumen and it feeds the Net +1; help it stay quiet and it pays.