The Concord — the ark, the base, the question

The campaign's centerpiece: a dead Sleeper ark the size of a small moon, drifting in an unclaimed fringe hex off Stilldrift, with tens of thousands of people still frozen aboard. It is the prize every power in the Driftmarch reaches for (file 02), the base the crew rebuilds into something of their own (the subsystem in 03a), and the place that asks the campaign's hardest question — what will you make of it, and of them?

This file keys the ark as a place. Treat it the way Chapter 38 treats any wreck and Chapter 37 treats any world: a set of zones, not a fixed map — develop each as the crew reaches it. The Concord is a megadungeon the crew returns to across the whole campaign, lit one deck at a time as power comes back; you will not run it in a session or even ten. Where a roll comes up — to cross a breach, force a door, read a core, brave a hazard — the owning chapter is cited (salvage, Chapter 38; hazards, Chapter 13; the rest as noted). Nothing here is a new rule; the one place this campaign adds rules is the restoration subsystem in 03a, kept separate on purpose.

Index§

• The ark at a glance
• How to run the Concord
• Zone 1 — The Approach and the breached ring
• Zone 2 — The command spine and the bridge
• Zone 3 — The core
• Zone 4 — Life support and the hull-farms
• Zone 5 — The cryo-decks
• Zone 6 — The stasis-hold
• Zone 7 — The memory cores
• Zone 8 — The dark decks
• The question of the crown — the internal blocs
• What restoring the ark unlocks
• A pre-filled ark record (Appendix A4)

The ark at a glance§

The Concord is a ballistic Sleeper ark — one of the heavy hulls flung toward the Shore in the long migration, built to cross under momentum alone and keep its passengers frozen the whole way (Chapter 29). It is a Sòrensen-frame hull (Chapter 34, roster 12), several kilometres of sealed, pressurized megastructure: a blunt cylinder of cargo-cradles, cryo-vaults, and a slow-idling reactor, never meant to land, never meant to be seen again. It left in the Ejection waves and fell through the dark for the better part of a thousand years; it is arriving now, into a Driftmarch that has no idea what to do with it.

Hold these facts; they shape everything:

• It is mostly dark. The reactor idles at the lowest setting that keeps the deepest cryo-vaults cold and nothing else. Most decks are unpowered, unpressurized, or both. Light, air, and warmth are things the crew brings or restores (03a).
• It is full of people. Roughly forty thousand Sleepers remain in cryo, plus a separate stasis-hold of Companions logged as cargo (Chapter 31; Chapter 38). They are not salvage. The cryo is failing slowly — the central clock of the campaign is measured in those lives.
• It cannot move. It is ballistic: no jump drive, barely any thrust. To take it anywhere needs a full FTL retrofit (the Mobility project, 03a; Chapters 26–27) — a campaign-capstone undertaking, not a quick fix. For now it drifts where it is, and everyone knows exactly where that is.
• It remembers. Its memory cores hold the ark's logs, its manifest, its destination — Lasthollow — and, perhaps, the Last Transmission Wanderstar may have sent before it left range. Someone (NULL, file 02) is paying to be sure none of that is ever read.

The crew arrives to a cold, enormous, silent thing that is worth a fortune in scrap, a kingdom in people, and a death sentence in attention. What they do first — wake it, strip it, defend it, or simply understand it — sets the campaign's course.

How to run the Concord§

Three habits keep the ark alive at the table:

Run it as a returning place, not a dungeon to clear. Each zone below is a standing location the crew comes back to as power, air, and access spread. Early on they crawl it in suits by handlight (Chapter 13); a year later they walk lit corridors past woken citizens. The same zone plays as a vacuum hazard, then a salvage site, then a neighborhood, then a seat of government. Let it change as they restore it (03a).

Roll the unbuilt on the toolkit. When the crew opens a compartment you haven't keyed, reach for the salvage generator (Chapter 38: what's here, what's worth taking, what's wrong) and the hazards (Chapter 13). The zones below give each area its character and its fixed threads; the generators fill in the rest, deck by deck, for as long as the campaign runs. The dark decks (Zone 8) exist precisely to never run out.

Keep the people in front of the loot. The ark's deepest pull is not its alloys; it is the forty thousand frozen lives and the question of who they become. Every zone is also a moral fact: the core that powers the ark is the core that keeps the Sleepers cold; the data worth a fortune is also a dead people's memory; the "cargo" in the stasis-hold is a person. Play the temptation straight, and let the crew's choices accrete into the answer the whole campaign is reaching for (the question of the crown, below).

The first trip aboard§

The crew's first visit sets the tone for the year, so frame it as an arrival, not a dungeon delve. They come up on a dead thing the size of a moon, dark against the stars, its breached ring turning slow — and the realization lands before any roll: this is too big to strip, too full of people to abandon, and too watched to keep quietly. A first session aboard usually runs:

1. The crossing in. A vacuum approach to the breached lock (Zone 1; Chapter 13) — the players' first taste that the ark fights back with cold and dark, not guns.
2. A foothold, contested. A GANYMEDE cutting-crew is already in the ring (file 02), and the breach won't hold itself. A firefight in vacuum, a tense standoff, or a deal — the crew learns at once that the ark is a claim to defend, not a prize to pocket.
3. One impossible discovery. Open one door onto the truth: a cryo-vault tier stretching away into the dark, thousands of faces behind frost (Zone 5); or the stasis-hold's manifest listing people as cargo (Zone 6). Let the scale and the weight land, and end the session on the question — what do we do with all of them?

Everything after that is the crew answering, deck by deck, across the campaign.

Zone 1 — The Approach and the breached ring§

The way in. The Concord's outer docking ring took damage on arrival — a cracked spar, a breached lock, a debris halo turning slowly in the dark — and that breach is, for now, the only way aboard. There is no power to open a hatch politely; the crew comes in through vacuum, in suits, with handlights, onto decks that have not held air or warmth in centuries.

• What it is. A kilometre of skeletal docking ring and the breached forward lock behind it; the first foothold, and the place every rival also has to come through. GANYMEDE's cutting crews work the ring's far side, stripping spars (file 02).
• The crawl (Chapter 13). Vacuum and drift, no footing, no light; a Sealed suit and a tether are the difference between salvage and a body. A structural-collapse pocket where the spar is failing — a clock, not a wall. Treat exactly as the salvage hazards of Chapter 13; the players roll to cross, the world rolls only the damage.
• What's here (Chapter 38). Reclaimable hull alloys and ship parts in quantity (aboard 13) — GANYMEDE's whole reason for coming. A wrecked tender still in its cradle, possibly flyable with work (aboard 35; Chapter 25).
• What restoring it unlocks. A working dock — the first and most important capability, because until the crew can bring a ship alongside and pressurize a lock, every visit is a vacuum crawl. Restoring the dock is the opening move of the Power & Life Support and Bridge projects (03a).
• Threads. Whoever holds the breach holds the ark; the crew's first real job is to take and keep it. A GANYMEDE breaking-crew is already inside the ring — the first contact may be a firefight in vacuum (Chapter 11–13), or a tense standoff over who has the claim.

Zone 2 — The command spine and the bridge§

Down the ark's central spine, past the cargo-cradles, lies the bridge — and the locked command order that ran the Concord when it was alive. Whoever holds the bridge holds the ark's hands: its reactor controls, its few thrusters, its logs, and, eventually, its drive. It is the single most contested room aboard, and not only by outsiders.

• What it is. The command deck and the spine that feeds it: sealed, dark, its consoles waiting on power. The command codes that wake it are split — some in the bridge safe, some in the memory cores (Zone 7), some carried by an officer who went into cryo with the secret (Zone 5).
• The obstacle. Not a hazard so much as a lock: the bridge will not answer without its codes, and an old automated command-protocol — a thin shipboard estate still executing its last orders (Chapter 34, the rogue AI / automated estate) — treats unauthorized hands as intruders until satisfied. Reason with it, fool it (Chapter 23 skills), or find the codes.
• What's here (Chapter 38). A working jump calculator and drive-control suite (aboard 26) — useless until there's a drive to control, but priceless to anyone building one. The ark's logs and manifest (aboard 23): who it carried, who commanded it, where it was bound.
• What restoring it unlocks. The Bridge & Command project (03a): with the bridge answering, the crew can power systems deliberately, hold the ark's attitude, seal and pressurize decks, and — once the Mobility project is done — fly it.
• The crown thread. The bridge is the seat the Bridge Court wants (below). The ark's original command line is not all dead; an officer or an heir may be thawed from Zone 5 with a legitimate claim to this chair. Who sits the bridge is the campaign's central political question made architectural.

Zone 3 — The core§

The ark's heart, and its cruelest knot. The reactor still idles, throwing just enough heat to keep the deep cryo-vaults cold — which means the single most valuable object aboard is also the one keeping forty thousand people alive. Take it, and you kill them. Leave it, and every power who wants the ark dead comes for it anyway.

• What it is. A radiothermal core and drive-reactor (Cinderhall Refractories liners, Chapter 34 roster 63; Umbral-style heat exchange) idling deep in the hull, behind shielding that has held for a thousand years and is tired.
• The hazard (Chapter 13). A radiation pocket where the shielding has thinned — Maimed-grade exposure, on a clock, exactly as a cracked core anywhere (Chapter 13). Working the core safely needs the right gear or a Sealed approach; working it carelessly costs a Physical track.
• What's here (Chapter 38). A working drive core (aboard 26) — a fortune, and the thing GANYMEDE wants most. The temptation is total and the cost is moral: pulling it for sale (or to fund the rebuild) lets the vaults warm and the Sleepers die. The cleanest money in the sector, and the cleanest way to damn the crew.
• What restoring it unlocks. The Power & Life Support project (03a): a stabilized, throttled-up core is the prerequisite for every other capability — warm decks, breathing air, a working dock, the strength to wake more Sleepers without losing the ones already cold.
• Threads. GANYMEDE's whole agenda points here (file 02). A reactor mishandled goes to a slow timer (Chapter 13). And the choice the core forces — people or payday — is the campaign's first real test of who the crew is going to be.

Zone 4 — Life support and the hull-farms§

For the ark to hold living people and not just frozen ones, it has to breathe and eat. The life-support decks and the long-dead hydroponic hull-farms are where the Concord stops being a tomb and starts being a home — or where a contamination sealed for a thousand years gets loose.

• What it is. Reclamation plant (Espinoza-style scrubbers, Chapter 34 roster 55), water stores, and tiers of dead grow-decks under failed Brightwell sun-arrays. Built to feed a population; capable of it again, with work.
• The hazard (Chapter 13). Failing life support and stale, thinning air on the powered decks; and in the farm tiers, a contamination — a blight, a toxin, or worse — sealed when the decks died and waiting for someone to open the wrong bulkhead (Chapter 13; the salvage "what's wrong," Chapter 38).
• What's here (Chapter 38). A seed-vault of Earth-line and engineered genestock (aboard 24) — living, rare, worth a fortune to Mwangi Seedbank or a starving frontier (Chapter 34). Working reclamation machinery (aboard 34) that a dozen worlds would buy.
• What restoring it unlocks. Feeds the Power & Life Support project and, crucially, gates The Woken (03a): you cannot thaw more people than the ark can breathe and feed, which is why the woken track leans on Farcradle's harvest (file 01). Restore the farms and the ark can hold a city; leave them dead and every waking is a countdown.
• Threads. The seed-vault is a fortune the crew may need to not sell if they mean to feed a population. A contamination loose in the hull-farms is a session of its own. And Farcradle's growers will deal — if the crew earns it (file 01).

Zone 5 — The cryo-decks§

The reason for everything. Tier on tier of cryo-cradles run the length of the hull, and in them sleep some forty thousand people: families, crews, whole towns that boarded a thousand years ago and never woke. This is not a salvage site. It is a population, a politics, and a debt, and it is dying by inches as the pods fail one at a time in the cold and the dark.

• What it is. The great cryo-vaults — the deepest, coldest, best-powered decks aboard, because the idling core was set to keep these alive above all. Tens of thousands of pods, a small and shrinking fraction failing every month (Chapter 38, "what's wrong" 36 — the dead didn't all die; the pods are failing one by one).
• The clock. This is the campaign's master clock made flesh: every month the ark goes un-restored, pods fail and people die who could have been saved. It is not a threat the crew can fight, only one they can outrun by restoring power, life support, and revival capacity (03a). Let the GM track it lightly and let it ache.
• Waking them (Chapter 30, 38). Thawing a Sleeper is a procedure, not a switch — it needs power, a working revival suite (built here or borrowed at Coldcradle, file 01), and someone to catch a person waking a thousand years out of date. Lumen offers to handle all of it (file 02), which is exactly the danger: the Trust's wake-ledger decides who opens their eyes.
• What restoring it unlocks. The Woken project (03a): each cohort safely thawed is population — allies, crew, specialists, citizens — and, with them, the politics of what the ark becomes (the question of the crown, below).
• Threads. Who do you wake first is a real choice with real costs — a needed engineer, a powerful claimant, a whole grateful town, or the people whose pods are failing tonight. A specific Sleeper here carries the bridge's missing codes (Zone 2); another carries a claim or a secret someone offworld will kill to keep frozen (file 02, Lumen). And the Concordat of the Woken (file 02) is built from the first crew to come out of these decks.

Zone 6 — The stasis-hold§

Apart from the cryo-vaults, behind a different kind of door, is the stasis-hold — and the campaign's sharpest moral edge. The Concord carried Companions, and the old manifest logs them not as passengers but as cargo: engineered people, in stasis, legally owned (Chapter 31; Chapter 38, aboard 46). What the crew decides here lights a fire that burns across the whole sector.

• What it is. A separate hold of stasis-cradles, colder and meaner than the cryo-decks, its manifest listing lineages and lot-numbers where the passenger vaults list names. Hounds, Ferals, Drays, Warrens — a community, boxed as freight.
• The knot (Chapter 31). They are people. The law that called them cargo is the law the Companions broke once already, by force, behind Sable Thresh-Ember (Chapter 31). A bond-holder — a combine that bought the old lien — may have a paper claim; the Free Burrow (file 02) means to void it; and the crew is holding the door.
• What's here. Not loot — a choice. Free them, and the crew has allies, the Free Burrow's loyalty, and a sector-wide Second Liberation catching light (Spine C). Sell or surrender them, and the crew has clean credits and a stain that will not wash. Hand the question to the woken Sleepers, and the ark's own politics decide.
• What restoring it unlocks. A freed stasis-hold is a community of skilled, motivated people — and the moral and political heart of the Commons bloc (below). It also makes the Free Burrow an Ally and Marrow Deep a friendly port (files 01, 02).
• Threads. Wren Sablekin-Feral (file 02) finds the crew the moment this hold is known. A bond-holder's agent arrives to collect. And the freed Companions have their own opinion about what the Concord should become — they will crown no one.

Zone 7 — The memory cores§

The ark's mind and memory: banks of archival cores holding everything the Concord knew. Its logs, its manifest, its charts — and the two secrets the campaign is built on. This is the most valuable compartment aboard to exactly the people the crew should fear, and the deepest the node web runs (file 04).

• What it is. A shielded archive deck, cores intact but dormant, waiting on power and a key (Zone 2's codes open them). What they hold is worth more than the hull (Chapter 38, aboard 23/43).
• The obstacle. Encryption, a guardian protocol (the same automated estate as the bridge, Chapter 34), and the simple fact that NULL has paid to be sure these cores are never read (file 02). Cracking them is a project of skill and patience (Chapter 23), and doing it loudly draws NULL's notice.
• What's here (Chapter 38). The ark's destination — Lasthollow — and the date it should have arrived, which is the date Lasthollow went dark (file 01). A buried lien: NULL's claim on the Concord, older than the Ejection, that should not exist. And, perhaps, the Last Transmission — a final FTL message from Wanderstar itself, caught and stored as the ark fell out of range (the deep prize; file 02).
• What restoring it unlocks. The cores are less a capability than the campaign's answers: read them and the crew learns who they're really fighting (NULL), where the road leads (Lasthollow), and what the ark truly carries. A restored archive also strengthens the Bridge and Sovereignty projects — a polity that knows its own history argues from strength (03a).
• Threads. Every NULL thread in the campaign terminates here. The Last Transmission is a prize worth a war (Chapter 38, aboard 66). And what the cores say about Lasthollow is the hook that eventually pulls the crew to the dark edge of the chart (file 01).

Zone 8 — The dark decks§

Beyond the keyed zones, most of the Concord is still black: cargo holds never opened, crew quarters never lit, sections sealed during the crossing for reasons the manifest doesn't give. The dark decks are the ark's inexhaustible frontier — the reason it can anchor a campaign for a year without running dry.

• What it is. Everything not above: kilometres of unpowered, unmapped hull. Each time the crew (or a restoration project) lights a new section, roll it fresh on the salvage generator (Chapter 38: what's here, what's worth taking, what's wrong) and the hazards (Chapter 13).
• What's down there. Whatever the campaign needs: a second seed-vault or weapons cache (Chapter 38); a sealed section still pressurized, with survivors or their bodies (aboard 44); a thing that "isn't as dead as it looks" (the wreck's classic last line, Chapter 38, 66); a stowaway, an animal, an old-world relic from Earth itself (aboard 55). The dark decks are where a GM plants the surprises the keyed zones can't hold.
• What restoring it unlocks. Space — literal room for the woken to live, for industry, for a dock, for defenses. Each cleared section is a neighborhood the ark didn't have, and a place the next surprise can hide.
• Threads. The dark decks are the standing answer to "what do we do this session?" when the crew wants to crawl. They also hide the things the powers are really after — a NULL cache, a Companion the manifest missed, the body of the captain whose chair everyone's fighting over.

Sample dark-deck finds. When the crew lights a new section and you want a spark, roll the salvage generator (Chapter 38) or take one of these — each a find and its catch:

Lesser compartments§

Between the great zones lie smaller rooms worth keying when the crew reaches them — each a short hook and, often, a capability:

• The med-bay. A revival-and-surgery suite, dark but intact. Restored (a Power + Woken side-project, 03a), it can clear a Maimed or Broken node (Chapter 10) without a trip to a surgeon — a standing reason to invest, and the safest place to wake a Sleeper who shouldn't be moved.
• The cargo-cradles. Holds of the ark's original freight — supplies, machinery, trade goods (Chapter 38) — and the obvious bones of a future trade hub (Chapter 28) once there's a working dock.
• The chapel-of-the-crossing. A quiet memorial space the original passengers kept; the woken gather here, and so the blocs first argue here. A room with no loot and all the politics.
• The garden tier. A small, stubborn pocket of the hull-farms (Zone 4) that never fully died — the first green the woken see, and a symbol every bloc wants to claim.

The question of the crown — the internal blocs§

The seven powers (file 02) contest who owns the Concord from outside. The moment the crew begins waking its people, a second politics opens inside: what the ark should become. This is the question the campaign is named for, and the one only the crew and the woken can answer. It is built on the new nobilities of the Shore (Chapter 30) — a thing that must be kept alive tends to crown whoever holds the keeping-alive — and the crew gets to decide whether the Concord obeys that gravity or escapes it.

Three blocs form among the woken (and the crew's own circle) as the Woken and Sovereignty projects advance (03a). Each is a light Chapter 34 faction — an agenda, a face, a pressure point, a small clock — but scoped to the ark, so they use the same engine as the seven powers without becoming an eighth, ninth, and tenth sector faction. They are not the crew's enemies; they are the crew's constituents. The crew can lead one, broker among them, install a rival, or be torn apart by the contest.

The Bridge Court — monarchy§

A sovereign on the bridge and a peerage beneath: the crew as captain-king and their dukes and duchesses, or a woken claimant's line restored. The fastest way to make the ark act as one body, and the Chapter 30 nobility made literal.

• Carried by: "Captain" Iola Sandry, a woken officer of the Concord's original command who holds a legitimate claim to the bridge — or the crew's own captain, if they reach for the chair.
• External patrons: Lumen and NULL (a crown can be advised or puppeted where a parliament can't); Helios prefers a single stable sovereign to deal with (file 02).
• Pressure point: legitimacy — a crown with no rightful claim is a usurper, and the Companions of Zone 6 distrust the whole idea on sight (a crown means masters again).
• If it wins: the Concord becomes a House — decisive, defensible, and one assassination or one bought claimant from catastrophe.

The Holders' Table — oligarchy§

Rule by those who keep the ark alive: a council of the crew's department-heads and the woken chief-engineers, quartermasters, and dock-bosses. Pragmatic, stable, and exactly the keeping-alive nobility of Chapter 30 in collective form.

• Carried by: Chief Bohdan Reyes, a woken systems-chief who frames it plainly — whoever runs the reactor runs the ark — and the crew's own specialists.
• External patrons: Helios (money buys council seats cleanly) and the Saltgate authority (an oligarchy is the most transactable partner, file 02).
• Pressure point: it answers to function, so whoever the corporations can buy gets a seat; an oligarchy is the easiest body to hollow out from inside.
• If it wins: the Concord becomes a stable, prosperous, quietly corruptible concern — and may wake one morning to find Helios holds three of its five seats.

The Commons — democracy§

One woken soul, one voice: the forty thousand as citizens, not subjects or assets. The most radical answer, the most fragile, and the most threatening to the whole external order — a sovereign democratic ark of awakened people voids Lumen's custody, the bond-holders' claims, and the frozen-as-property logic entire.

• Carried by: First-Woken Ada Sandoval and the Concordat (file 02), and the freed Companions of Zone 6, who will crown no one.
• External patrons: the Free Burrow; the Concordat splits toward it (file 02).
• Pressure point: fragility — it cannot defend itself young, cannot feed or wake its citizens fast enough, and a single crisis can hand it to a "temporary" crown or council that never gives the power back.
• If it wins: the Concord becomes something the Shore has not seen — and a target for everyone who profits from the old order.

Running the question§

The internal contest rides the Sovereignty & Recognition project (03a), not a clock of its own: as the crew advances the ark's sovereignty, they are forced to commit to — or keep brokering among — the three directions, and each external power courts the bloc that suits it, wiring the ark's inner politics straight into the faction turn (file 09). The democratic path leans hardest on the Woken and Life Support projects (you must wake, feed, and enfranchise a population before it can govern itself); the monarchic path is fastest but most easily infiltrated; the oligarchic path is most stable but most corruptible. The Concordat of the Woken (file 02) is the body these blocs grow from — it fractures along these lines as it succeeds.

And the crew's own choice — take the crown, sit first among the holders, or midwife a commons and let it go — is the campaign's culminating question, resolved in the Sovereign phase (file 09), and the one the title asks outright: do you take the Frozen Crown?

What restoring the ark unlocks§

The zones above are what the ark is; 03a is how the crew rebuilds it. In brief, restoration runs on six projects — progress clocks the crew advances through play and the jump-week downtime — each tied to the zones and each unlocking a capability:

The rules for advancing them — the ark-project action, what it costs, and how it stays inside Wanderstar's engine without touching the target number or Momentum — are in 03a, kept separate and optional on purpose.

A pre-filled ark record (Appendix A4)§

Keep the ark's state on one sheet beside the sector and faction trackers (files 00, 02). A starting state, with the crew newly aboard:

THE CONCORD — ark record (Ch 37/38; A4)

State: Dead and drifting; reactor idling; ~40,000 in cryo, a stasis-hold of Companions.
  Cryo failing slowly — the master clock is the Sleepers' lives.

Zones opened:   [X] 1 Approach (held)   [ ] 2 Bridge   [ ] 3 Core   [ ] 4 Life support
                [ ] 5 Cryo-decks   [ ] 6 Stasis-hold   [ ] 7 Memory cores   [ ] 8 Dark decks

Restoration projects (clocks — see 03a):
  Power & Life Support   [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  The Bridge & Command   [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  Defenses               [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  The Woken              [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  Sovereignty            [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  Mobility (FTL retrofit)[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Internal blocs (form as the Woken/Sovereignty projects advance):
  • The Bridge Court (monarchy) — "Captain" Iola Sandry / the crew's captain
  • The Holders' Table (oligarchy) — Chief Bohdan Reyes / the crew's specialists
  • The Commons (democracy) — First-Woken Ada Sandoval / the freed Companions

Powers circling (file 02): GANYMEDE (break it) • Lumen (custody) • Helios (acquire it)
  NULL (repossess & bury) • Saltgate (tax it) • Free Burrow (free the hold) • Concordat (claim it)

Open threads:
  • The core is the keeping-alive — taking it kills the Sleepers
  • The bridge codes are split (safe / cores / a Sleeper in Zone 5)
  • The memory cores hold Lasthollow, NULL's lien, maybe the Last Transmission