The Frozen Crown — the Driftmarch sandbox (campaign frame)

A frame for a campaign meant to run a year or more: an open sector of the Shore, a vast dead ark adrift at the heart of it, and the powers all reaching for the same prize. This file is the whole campaign at a glance — the premise, the "now," the Concord, the seven powers in brief, the clock that ties them together, and how to run the sandbox week to week. The detail lives in the files beside it: the sector in 01, the powers in 02, the ark and its rebuilding in 03 and 03a, the web that connects everything in 04, ready-to-run situations in 05–08, the GM's how-to in 09, and the player-facing documents in 10.

Everything here is built from the rulebook's own engine. No new rules, with one flagged exception — the base-building subsystem for rebuilding the ark (03a), which sits on top of the existing clocks and never touches a target number or the Momentum economy. Where a roll comes up, the owning chapter is cited. The Driftmarch is independent of The Coldwake Reach (WC01) and assumes no prior campaign; it also stands entirely apart from the canon worlds of Chapter 30, sitting beside that map rather than on it.

The premise in a paragraph. A frontier sector at the edge of settled space, where the lost still wash up out of the dark — and the largest thing ever to drift in is the Concord, a ballistic Sleeper ark the size of a small moon, fallen silent after a crossing of millennia. Tens of thousands of Sleepers are still frozen aboard; its reactor still ticks; no one has walked its decks in centuries. The crew comes into a claim on it — and discovers they are holding a salvage trove, a base they could rebuild into a power, a kingdom of the frozen, a moral debt, and a prize that every corporation, court, and cause in the sector means to take from them. The question the whole campaign turns on: what do you owe the people you find frozen — and what will you build from what they left behind: a crown, a council, or a commons?

What this campaign is§

The Frozen Crown is a sandbox, not a plot. There is no scripted sequence of events to march through and no ending written in advance. Instead the Driftmarch generates its own pressure — a debt that never stops, distances that make every map stale, favors owed and owing, scars that demand a session to mend (Chapter 33) — and the seven powers each pursue an agenda whether or not the crew is looking. The GM's job is to point that pressure at the Wanderers, honor what they choose, and keep the clocks turning. What the crew does with the Concord is theirs to decide; the campaign is the consequences.

That makes this a different beast from a keyed adventure like The Cold Lantern (Chapter 36). A keyed adventure teaches a mode of play in a session; this one runs for a year, gives every pillar of the game recurring room — personal fights, the ship and the jump, trade, salvage and exploration, intrigue and investigation, and the slow politics of holding a thing too big to hold alone — and lets the table set its own course through all of it. If your group has never run a Wanderstar campaign, read the GM's how-to in 09 first; it turns the principles of Chapters 32–34 into a weekly routine you can run from session one.

The "now"§

The Shore has no fixed date; you set the era for your table (Chapter 29, 33). The Driftmarch's default "now" is a working frontier on the edge of an arrival age — old enough to have grudges and registries and old money, young and loose enough that no single authority reaches every world, and lately unsettled by the arks. Ballistic hulls are still falling in out of the deep dark (Chapter 30), and each one that makes orbit is a fortune, a crisis, and a legal war at once. The Concord is only the largest of them.

That setting does three useful things at once. It makes salvage and the waking of Sleepers the sector's signature business, so the crew's claim is part of a pattern rather than a freak event. It keeps law thin and contested, so the powers matter more than any government. And it keeps distance the law of the land (Chapter 27): no word outruns a ship, so every jump the crew takes lets the sector change behind them, and every arrival is onto a stale map. Lean on that lag — it is the engine that lets consequences land that no one could have prevented.

The crew, the ship, and the claim§

The campaign is party-agnostic. Build your Wanderers the usual way (Part III); nothing here depends on specific characters, careers, or peoples. The Driftmarch simply gives every kind of crew something to want — a hauler chasing the note, fixers working a Contact web, frontier salvagers, or a crew with ideals about who counts as a person. Read the party's sheets before the first session and hang the opening hooks on what you find there (Chapter 33): a debt, a scar, a Contact owed, a heritage that the ark's frozen Companions will not let lie.

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

The crew can move around the sector. 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. Tables that want to start fast can take the canon pregens and the mortgaged free trader Long Account (Appendix A6; Chapter 25) straight off the shelf, exactly as the rest of the book flies them. Tables that would rather earn their hull can start shipless and crew someone else's deck until they don't have to.
The crew has a claim on the Concord. How they got it is the first session's business (see Entry points). It might be salvage rights bought cheap from someone who didn't know what they held, an inheritance from a Sleeper who woke just long enough to sign, a finder's claim filed at a free port, or a job that was supposed to end with handing the ark to someone else. However it comes, the claim is contested the moment it exists — which is the campaign.

The ship gets the crew around the Driftmarch. The ark is the thing the campaign is about. Both are addressed at length in 03 (the Concord as a place and a project).

The Concord — the ark in brief§

The Concord — locals already wear it down to "the Cord" — is a ballistic Sleeper ark, one of the heavy hulls flung toward the Shore in the long migration and never heard from again (Chapter 29). It is enormous: a sealed, pressurized hull the size of a small moon, built to carry a whole population across 160,000 light-years and keep them frozen the entire way. Most of it is dark. Its reactor still idles at the lowest of its settings, enough to keep the deepest cryo-vaults cold and almost nothing else. Tens of thousands of Sleepers are still aboard, in cryo that is failing slowly — the central mercy and the central clock of the whole campaign.

What makes it a year of play rather than a single payday is that it is five things at once, and they pull against each other:

a salvage trove — reclaimable alloys, a working drive core, gear and cargo and the personal effects of a lost age (Chapter 38);
a base to rebuild — power, life support, a bridge, defenses, eventually the ability to move it (the project lives in 03a);
a kingdom of the frozen — those tens of thousands are people, not cargo, and waking them is a population, a debt, and a politics: if the Concord becomes a polity, what kind — a crown, a council, or a commons? Worlds that must be kept alive tend to crown whoever holds the keeping-alive (the new nobilities, Chapter 30), and three blocs aboard the ark push for each answer. The crew may take the crown, sit first among the holders, or midwife a true democracy and let it go;
a moral problem — the ark also carries Companions in stasis, legally "cargo" under the old law (Chapter 31; Chapter 38), and what the crew decides about them lights a fire across the sector; and
a prize — every power below wants it, in incompatible ways, and several will kill or ruin the crew to take it.

The crew cannot do all five. The campaign is which they choose.

The Driftmarch — the sector in brief§

A sector is a handful of systems and the powers whose reach spans them (Chapter 37). The Driftmarch is a frontier cluster, its worlds roughly a jump apart — one parsec, one week (Chapter 27) — so the stop-and-jump pulse paces the campaign and fires the faction turn every jump week (Chapter 33). Sketch them all now on the Appendix A4 sector sheet; develop each on its own record when the crew turns toward it. Full detail is in 01; this is the map at a glance.

System	What it is (Chapter 37)	The hook riding on it
Saltgate	A free port that answers to no one and sells that fact	The sector's only neutral dock; the crew's likely first base, and where a claim has to be registered somewhere
the Concord	A ballistic Sleeper ark adrift in an unclaimed fringe hex	The prize itself — salvage, base, kingdom, and moral problem at once
Calloway's Watch	A Seeder core world, old money, holding the sector registry	The registry decides who legally owns the ark — and a claim against the crew may already be filed
Brightspan	An industrial foundry world and orbital, high-TL	The only place that can fabricate the ark's parts — at a price that mortgages the crew to the combine
Farcradle	A Wanderborn frontier breadbasket	The world that could feed the ark's woken thousands; its own harvest is faltering
Marrow Deep	A Companion-majority mining world with a bonded past	A bond-holder still has reach here; the ark's stasis-Companions are the spark
Stilldrift	A graveyard of derelicts in slow orbits	The Concord didn't arrive alone — its escorts died out here, and the breakers are already working the field
Coldcradle	A cryo-revival wake-station	Someone runs the thaw lists, and decides who wakes and who never does
Newlanding	An arrival-year boomtown — a smaller ark making orbit now	The precedent for everything the crew faces with the Concord
Lasthollow	A lost colony, gone dark generations ago	The Concord's original destination — and what someone does not want found there

Two more sit on the chart as names only until the crew sails their way — Pale Watch (a relay system) and Greaves March (a garrison) — built in minutes on the Chapter 37 tables when needed.

The seven powers in brief§

Seven factions reach across the Driftmarch, each an agenda, a reach, and an influence clock that advances on the faction turn whether or not the crew engages (Chapter 34). Four of them want the Concord in incompatible ways and so fight each other off-screen; three are the crew's natural board and allies-of-convenience. Full dossiers and trackers are in 02. In one line each:

Power	What they are	What they want with the ark	Clock
Lumen Sleeper Trust	Legacy bank for the still-frozen (corp)	Custody of the ark's Sleepers — and to quietly ensure the inconvenient ones never wake	8
GANYMEDE Salvage	Derelict-breakers (corp)	Break the Concord for its alloys before anyone can wake it	6
Helios Vanguard Heavy Industries	The megacorp colossus	Acquire the ark by law and leverage — and look heroic doing it	8
The Saltgate Free Companies	The free-port authority	Keep the Driftmarch neutral and taxed; play every side	4
The Free Burrow	A Companion-liberation movement	Free the Companions in the ark's stasis-hold and ignite a Second Liberation	6
The Concordat of the Woken	Sleepers already thawed from the ark	Secure the Concord as a sovereign homeland — they are its rightful people	6
NULL	A shell company that predates the Ejection	(hidden) Repossess the ark on an impossible old lien — and bury what it carries	8

The metaclock — Who Owns the Concord§

One clock sits above the rest and gives the year its shape: an 8-segment campaign clock (Chapter 33) measuring how close the contest over the ark is to being decided — by law, by force, by attrition, or by the crew's own hand. It advances on the faction turn whenever the crew leaves the question unattended and whenever a power lands a decisive move; it ticks back when the crew asserts control. NULL is its dark engine, adapting toward ownership no matter who else is in the running.

The clock filling does not mean the players lose. It means the question resolves — and the players' accumulated deeds decide who wins when it crests. That is the doomsday clock's real job here: it guarantees a reckoning, not an outcome. Run the campaign's escalation against it; the soft phase shape (Claim → Hold → Sovereign) is laid out in 09.

This clock tracks who owns the Concord. A second question runs beneath it — what the Concord becomes: a crown, a council, or a commons. Three blocs aboard the ark push for each, every outside power backs the one that suits it, and the crew chooses or brokers among them. That question needs no clock of its own — it rides the ark's growing sovereignty (the rebuild, 03a) and resolves in the Sovereign phase. It is the question the campaign's name asks: do you take the Frozen Crown?

How the sandbox runs§

The loop is the standard Wanderstar campaign rhythm (Chapters 33–34), scaled up from a couple of clocks to a whole sector:

The crew acts somewhere — a salvage run, a deal, a conversation, a fight, a stretch of work on the ark. You narrate what they find and hand them the leads that place carries: a rumor (Chapter 33), a Contact calling in (Chapter 35), a job (Chapter 38), or a clue found on site.
They choose a lead and jump. Distance gates the pace (Chapter 27): the next place is usually a week away, so the faction turn fires (Chapter 34, Appendix A4) — every power the crew didn't hold in check creeps its clock forward — and they arrive to a sector that has moved since the lead was true.
You activate what they reach — reading the keyed entry if it's built (01–08), or rolling it on the Chapter 37/38 tables if it isn't — and the cycle repeats. Places the crew never visits keep advancing on their factions' clocks, so the Driftmarch is always alive.

The leads form a web (04) — locations, people, objects, and threads that point to one another, so the sandbox coheres without a fixed path: the crew can pull any thread, in any order, and still find the whole picture. The base-building work on the Concord (03a) happens in the jump-week downtime, so rebuilding the ark and crossing the sector share the same clock. The full routine — the faction turn at sector scale, the phases, downtime, and running it solo or co-op (Chapters 42–45) — is in 09.

Entry points — start anywhere§

Because sessions are modular and hung on the web and the clocks, a table can begin wherever suits it. Three ready on-ramps:

Broke at Saltgate. The crew is offered, wins, or inherits the Concord claim and has to work out what they're holding — and who already wants it. The cleanest cold open, and the one the first scenario wave (05) assumes.
Aboard the ark already. Play opens mid-rebuild: a foothold established, a deck or two warmed, the contest already at their door. Good for a group that wants to start with the base in hand.
Working for a power. The crew begins as a faction's hired hull — Lumen, Helios, or the Free Burrow — and discovers the ark on the job, then faces the choice of whether to deliver it or seize it for themselves. The strongest opening for an intrigue-leaning table.

Whatever the on-ramp, the first session's real work is the same: establish the claim, put one power's face to it, and let the crew feel that holding the Concord will cost them. Everything after that is theirs to steer.

Pre-filled record sheets (Appendix A4)§

Ready to run. Copy into your A4 sheets, or use as-is; the full system and faction records are built out in 01 and 02.

SECTOR: The Driftmarch        The "now" (era): An arrival age on a thin-law frontier

Systems (name — one-line character):
  • Saltgate — free port, neutral dock, sells silence; likely first base
  • the Concord — the great derelict ark adrift in an unclaimed fringe hex; the prize
  • Calloway's Watch — Seeder core world; holds the sector registry (who owns what)
  • Brightspan — industrial foundry world; the parts to rebuild the ark, at a price
  • Farcradle — Wanderborn breadbasket; could feed the ark's woken; harvest faltering
  • Marrow Deep — Companion-majority mine; bonded past; the Liberation spark
  • Stilldrift — graveyard of derelicts; the ark's dead escorts; the breakers
  • Coldcradle — cryo-revival station; someone runs the thaw lists
  • Newlanding — arrival-year boomtown; a smaller ark making orbit; the precedent
  • Lasthollow — lost colony gone dark; the ark's true destination; NULL's secret
  • (sketched) Pale Watch — relay system; Greaves March — garrison

Factions in play (name → Ch 34 tracker):
  • Lumen Sleeper Trust — custody of the ark's Sleepers (clock 8)
  • GANYMEDE Salvage — break the ark for alloys (clock 6)
  • Helios Vanguard Heavy Industries — acquire the ark, look heroic (clock 8)
  • Saltgate Free Companies — keep the Driftmarch neutral and taxed (clock 4)
  • The Free Burrow — free the ark's stasis-Companions; light the Liberation (clock 6)
  • Concordat of the Woken — the ark as a sovereign Sleeper homeland (clock 6)
  • NULL — repossess the ark on a pre-Ejection lien; bury what it carries (clock 8)

Metaclock — WHO OWNS THE CONCORD (8): [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
  Advances when the crew leaves the question unattended or a power lands a
  decisive move; ticks back when the crew asserts control. When it fills, the
  question resolves — the crew's deeds decide who wins.

Open threads / rumors running:
  • A claim on the great ark just changed hands, and everyone's heard (Ch 33)
  • The Cord's cryo is failing — slowly — and the clock is the Sleepers' lives
  • A breaking-ship has moved to Stilldrift, close to the ark, and is waiting
  • Berthing and "finder's registration" fees at Saltgate climb every visit

FACTION: Lumen Sleeper Trust
  Kind: A cryo-trust banking the fortunes — and votes — of the still-frozen (Ch 34)
  Agenda: Win custody of the Concord's Sleepers; quietly keep the inconvenient frozen
  Reach & methods: Law, debt, blackmail; the Coldcradle wake-station; the registry
  Pressure point: A betrayed triage officer who kept the real wake-ledger
  Standing toward the crew:  Contact  (patron-and-threat)
  Influence clock (8):  [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
  When it fills → Lumen holds a controlling bloc of the sector's frozen wealth,
    the claims and votes attached, and the say over who aboard the Cord ever wakes.

FACTION: NULL
  Kind: A shell holding company rumored to predate the Ejection (Ch 34, roster 16)
  Agenda: (hidden) Repossess the Concord on an impossible old lien; bury its cargo
  Reach & methods: Secrecy, deniability, subsidiaries — it owns pieces of the others
  Pressure point: A truth about its own origin it has buried; the lever must be MADE
  Standing toward the crew:  Unknown  (→ Enemy as the truth surfaces)
  Influence clock (8):  [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
  When it fills → NULL's claim is suddenly, legally real, and the ark — with whatever
    the memory cores hold — vanishes into a company no one can find. (The metaclock's hand.)

The remaining five faction trackers, ready-filled, are in 02 Faction Dossiers.