Act I — The Find

The first five sessions. The crew comes into the relay, learns the hard way that it is hunted, and makes the only choice the road allows: run it across the Throat. Act I is the setup — it puts the campaign's object in the crew's hands, puts a body on the table to prove what it costs, and ends with the hull pointed into dead air and the Net beginning to close. Everything is built from the rulebook's engine; where a roll comes up, the owning chapter is cited.

The act in a paragraph. A salvage job at the frontier's rim turns up a sealed courier drone with something still live in it. Before the crew can decide what they've got, a soft-spoken buyer is offering too much for it, the last people who carried it are turning up dead, and the customs post at the edge of settled space has gone strangely interested in their manifest. By the end of the act the crew knows three things: the drone holds a fragment of a signal older than the Shore's law, somebody with very long arms wants it silenced, and the only door that isn't watched is the one nobody uses — the crossing.

Index§

• The shape of the act
• Opening the act
• Set-piece one — the find at Greywell
• The relay, and the first layer
• Set-piece two — the buyer
• Set-piece three — the break-out
• The choices that matter
• Per-pregen hooks
• The Net in Act I
• Running it solo or co-op
• Into Act II

The shape of the act§

Act I has three fixed set-pieces and one fixed ending; everything between them the crew steers. The find (a salvage crawl that yields the relay), the buyer (the first proof that holding it is lethal), and the break-out (the run for the corridor) will each happen; how each goes, and what the crew decides about the thing they're carrying, is theirs. The act ends, however the middle plays, with the crew committing to the crossing — because by then every other exit is closed (below). Pace it on the stop-and-jump pulse (Chapter 33): the find and the buyer happen in and around the home port; the break-out is the jump that seals the act and starts the Net climbing (Chapter 34).

Run it to teach the campaign's promise in miniature: a hunted object, a road that runs one way, and real choices inside a fixed frame. If a beat resolves faster than expected, let the jump-week downtime carry the rest — a decryption layer cracked, a debt come due, a rumor arriving a port late (Chapter 27).

Five sessions, roughly. The act is sized for about five sittings, though the beats compress or stretch with the table — treat this as a meter, not a schedule:

A crew that sells to the buyer in session 3 doesn't end the campaign — it bends the act, because the witnesses are still hunted and the road still runs one way (the choices section, below). The ending — committed to the crossing, the Net climbing — is the same door whichever way the middle goes.

Opening the act§

The frame offers three on-ramps (file 00); Act I is written for the first and adapts to the others:

• The find (default) — the crew is working salvage or a courier run at Greywell and pulls the relay out of a wreck. Start at Set-piece one.
• Already holding it — the relay is aboard and a previous courier lies dead on the dock; open at Set-piece two and flash back to the find only if the table wants it.
• Hired to carry it — the crew were paid to deliver the relay and don't yet know by whom; open at Set-piece two with the buyer as their own employer's rival — or their employer.

Whatever the opening, read the party's sheets first and hang the hook on what's there (Chapter 33): the note coming due makes the salvage job necessary, a Contact owed points them at Greywell, a scar to mend gives them a reason to need the money. The campaign grows best out of the crew you have.

Set-piece one — the find at Greywell§

Greywell is a graveyard of derelicts in slow, silent orbits at the home sector's rim (Chapter 37) — the kind of field where ships go to be forgotten and salvagers go to get paid. For a crew arriving out of the Coldwake Reach it is familiar ground; for any other crew it is simply the last salvage worth the fuel before the maps run out. The breakers of GANYMEDE Salvage work the field (Chapter 34, roster 26), which gives the crew both their cover for being here and their first complication: a rival outfit racing the same wreck.

The job. Run it as an ordinary salvage approach (Chapter 38): a derelict on the chart, a payday if they strip it before GANYMEDE does, the usual catch waiting inside. Plot the approach and the boarding as the situation asks; the hull is cold, holed, and slow-tumbling, so the crawl carries the layered hazards salvage always does — vacuum and a Sealed suit, killing cold, a structural-collapse clock if they cut in the wrong place (Chapter 13). None of it should kill a careful crew; all of it should cost time, and time is the rival closing.

What's behind the screen. This wreck is not what GANYMEDE thinks. It is older than the field around it — a courier hull, or a freighter that swallowed a courier's cargo, dead far longer than a manufactured wreck has any right to be. Deep in it, behind a bulkhead nobody opened, is the relay: a hardened message-core the size of a footlocker, still drawing a trickle of power, still patient. Whoever finds it has the campaign in their hands.

The forks, and the ways through. The crawl is a string of small choices, not a corridor: cut fast and risk the collapse clock, or go slow and let GANYMEDE arrive; take the relay quietly, or get caught holding it by the rival breaker-boss. The rival can be outrun, out-talked, bought off, or fought (Chapter 11) — multiple keys, as every set-piece in this campaign has. If GANYMEDE's crew sees the relay, they want it for scrap value and become the first mouth that tells the buyer something surfaced out here (a Net tick later; the dossier, file 04). If the crew keeps it quiet, they buy themselves a head start they won't know they needed.

The take. Let them leave Greywell with the relay and whatever else the wreck gives up (Chapter 38) — clean salvage credits that make the find feel like a good day, before it stops being one. The freight or the salvage fee covers the note for a week; the relay is the thing that ends their quiet life.

The relay, and the first layer§

The relay decrypts by degrees, not all at once — run it as an extended effort across the campaign (Chapter 5), resolved with whatever the crew brings to bear (an engineer's craft, a sleeper's memory of old encodings, a bought specialist; the skills are on their sheets, Chapter 23). Act I yields only the first layer, and it should unsettle rather than explain:

• The core is older than its housing — refit more than once, carried a long way, kept alive on purpose.
• Under the first seal is a single source flag the decryption can't argue with: WANDERSTAR — final window. A signal from the rogue planet itself, from the last moment it could still send one (Chapter 29).
• And a partial header that means nothing yet: a routing tag, a destination that reads only as somewhere across the dark, and a fragment of a voice that cuts out before it says anything (file 05).

That is all they get for now. They are holding a dead world's last word, addressed to no one they can name, and they have no idea yet that anyone else knows it exists. Let them sit with that for a beat before the buyer arrives — the quiet is the setup for the squeeze.

Set-piece two — the buyer§

Back at the home port, or at the first dock they make, the crew is approached. A courteous stranger who gives the name "Mr. Ashford" and signs only "N." would like to buy the old message-core they pulled out of Greywell (Chapter 38, patron 64). He names a price that is too good — well above scrap, well above curiosity, the kind of money that should make a careful Wanderer's neck prickle. He asks no questions about what's on it. He'd rather it never be read.

This is NULL's first reach, though the crew has no way to know the name yet (hold the reveal; file 04). Ashford is the campaign's recurring face — never quite the same man twice, always one step into the crew's business. Run the scene as a contact, not a fight (Chapter 35): an offer, a read across the table, the slow understanding that the offer is also a warning.

The proof it's lethal. Whatever the crew says to Ashford, the act needs one cold fact to land before they leave: the last people who carried this are dead. Deliver it however suits the table —

• a previous courier the crew was meant to meet, found dead on the dock (the already holding it opening makes this the cold open);
• a fence or fixer who handled the relay's prior leg, now missing, his rooms turned over;
• a rumor at the bar that the crew can run down (Chapter 33), each thread ending at a grave.

Let them connect it themselves: the generous buyer and the dead handlers are the same story. The moment they do, the relay stops being salvage and becomes a problem with arms longer than theirs.

The forks, and the ways through. This is a genuine branch, and the campaign honors all of it (the choices section, below):

• Sell it to Ashford. The cleanest credits they'll ever regret. The relay is gone — but NULL does not believe they kept no copy, and dead handlers stay dead; the hunt continues for the witnesses, which is now them. (And a crew can be given the chance, later, to learn they sold the one thing that could have saved them — a Delta Green ache.)
• Refuse and run. The default spine. Ashford's courtesy curdles by degrees, and the Net begins to climb in earnest.
• Play him. Take his money and keep the relay (or a copy), stall, misdirect. The most Wanderer move, and the one that buys time at the cost of making NULL certain they're worth killing.

Whatever they choose, the door the scene opens is the same: the home sector is no longer safe, because the buyer has money and patience here, and the only place his reach thins is across the Throat.

Set-piece three — the break-out§

The crew decides to run — or is forced to, when NULL stops asking. The break-out is Act I's climax: getting out of settled space and into the corridor ahead of the closing net.

The squeeze at the Reach mouth. The last customs-and-relay post before the dark has taken a sudden interest in the crew's hull (Chapter 37). A hold has been placed on their manifest; a berth they paid for is suddenly unavailable; an inspector asks after a "recovered message-core" by description. This is NULL working through someone else's hands — a bought official, a planted lien, deniable to the last (file 04). It is an institutional net, not a gun: the way through is papers, nerve, and choices, not a firefight.

Give them ways out, more than one (the rails stay hidden):

• Talk or trick the hold loose — a Bureaucracy or Deceive contest against the inspector (Chapter 5), a forged clearance, a Contact at the port called in (Chapter 35).
• Slip the berth — leave without clearance, accepting that the post logs them as runners (a Net tick; file 04) and that the Reach mouth's traffic will report which way they jumped.
• Buy the lane — pay the corridor fixer for a quiet departure and the beacon-dark route (the fixer, file 04), which ticks the Net back but costs credits the note can ill spare (Chapter 28).

The run for the corridor. Once they break for the dark, NULL springs what it has staged here: a hired hull on an intercept, working the strand zone the way raiders always have (a corsair-class raider from the Chapter 25 fleet, run as the Chapter 27 ship fight — crew stations, the Hull/Systems track, players roll and the GM rolls only the raider's damage on a missed evade; scale bites if the crew's turret is outmatched, Chapter 12). Throttle it for the act: this is a break contact fight, not a duel — the win condition is reaching the jump, not killing the raider. A crew can evade, outrun, mislead, or cripple-and-flee; boarding or destroying it is possible but costly and slow, and slow is what NULL wants.

The commit. The act ends on the jump into the Throat. Plot it (Chapter 27); the charts thin past the Reach mouth, so this is the under pressure case — a real roll, the misjump on the table — and then the week sealed away in jumpspace, the first jump-week of the crossing. As the hull goes dark and quiet, two things are true: the home sector and everyone in it is behind them, and the Net has begun to climb on its own (Chapter 34). They are committed. There is no road back that NULL hasn't already watched.

The choices that matter§

Act I is fixed in its beats and open in everything that fills them. The decisions the crew makes here set the shape of the whole crossing (carry them forward on the A4 threads list, Appendix A4):

• Sell, hold, or play the buyer. The single largest fork. Selling doesn't end the hunt; holding is the spine; playing him buys time at the price of NULL's certainty. All three lead across the Throat, because the witnesses are the crew either way.
• Learn it, or run blind. How hard the crew pushes the decryption (Chapter 5) decides how much they understand when the stakes turn at the midpoint. A crew that runs blind is more easily panicked; a crew that decodes early carries the dread sooner.
• Loud or quiet. Every loud choice — a body left at Greywell, GANYMEDE told, the Reach mouth logged as runners, credits spent where NULL can see — ticks the Net forward (file 04). Quiet, careful play buys a better position for the reckoning that's coming regardless.
• Who they'll trust at the far end. If the crew asks where a thing like this could be read, the answer points across the corridor — a thawed old-world reader at the far port who remembers the Shore the signal was sent from (the Concordat reader, file 04). Naming that destination now gives the crossing a purpose beyond mere flight, and seeds the disposition of Act III.

Per-pregen hooks§

For a table using the canon five (Appendix A6), optional threads that make the find personal:

• Ace (Hound pilot) — the break-out is his to fly; a misjump offends never lost a parcel, and the corridor is the kind of run he was made for.
• Echo (Wanderborn engineer) — the relay is hers to crack; a message-core older than its housing is a mystery she can read a layer deeper than anyone.
• Edda (Sleeper medic) — she has seen a final-window flag before, in her own waking; the relay touches the lost world she came from, and she will not let it be sold.
• Bram (Seeder soldier) — the dead handlers are a debt to him; somebody killed people for this, and that makes the carrying a matter of honor as much as money.
• Jinx (Feral fixer) — she smells the angle first (who pays this much to bury a recording?); her Contact web is how the dead couriers get found, and her Maimed leg makes a zero-g salvage crawl a real cost (Chapter 10).

The Net in Act I§

The Net starts at 1 — Ashford has made his first offer (file 04). In Act I it moves on these:

• +1 when the crew commits to the jump into the Throat (the first jump-week; the floor tick, Chapter 27). The act ends with the Net at 2 at minimum.
• +1 more for any loud break: GANYMEDE told what surfaced, a body left, the Reach mouth logging them as runners, credits spent where NULL is watching.
• −1 for a clean, quiet exit: the fixer's beacon-dark route bought, the hold talked loose without a trace, no witnesses left behind.

A careful crew leaves Act I with the Net at 1–2 and a head start; a loud one leaves it at 3–4 with NULL already close. Either way the climb is now automatic, one tick a jump-week, until the threshold (file 04).

Running it solo or co-op§

Like the rest of the line, Act I runs GM-led, co-op, or solo (Chapters 42–45; the A4 solo sheet). The find is the Oracle's natural home — expectation-tests for the unknowns (is the wreck as dead as it looks? does GANYMEDE arrive now?), the What Intrudes table for the jumpspace week, and the buyer scene run as a framed contact with the Oracle answering Ashford's reads. The ship fight is already player-facing as written (your crew rolls; the raider's damage is the only die the world throws, Chapter 27), so the break-out needs no special handling solo.

Into Act II§

However Act I ends, the crew jumps into the Throat carrying the relay, hunted, and pointed at the corridor's first keyed stop. The leads that hand off to Act II (file 02):

• They need fuel, repairs, or a medic before the next jump — and the only stop for a jump in any direction is a cryo-revival way-station called Halflight, which they cannot route around.
• They need the decryption pushed — and the reader who can do it is at the far mouth, with one stop between here and there where something is said to be wrong with who the station wakes.
• NULL is a jump behind — and the corridor's dead air is the one place its net thins enough to lose, if the crew is willing to run dark.

The crossing proper begins at Halflight Station.