Running This Sandbox — a GM's how-to for the Driftmarch

This file turns the principles of Chapters 32–34 into a weekly routine. A sandbox like The Frozen Crown is not run by knowing what happens next — no one does, including you — but by keeping a handful of moving parts honest: the clocks that advance whether or not the crew is looking, the web of leads that lets any thread reach the whole picture, and the one big clock that promises a reckoning over the ark. Hold those steady and the campaign runs itself; your job is to describe the world, decide what's uncertain, and let the consequences fall (Chapter 32).

If you have never run a Wanderstar campaign, read this once before session one and keep it by your screen for the first month. After that you won't need it.

Index§

• Before you start — Session Zero & the themes
• The weekly loop
• The faction turn at sector scale
• Running the metaclock
• The phases — a soft escalation
• Downtime and the jump week
• Keeping it honest — difficulty, danger, and the dice
• Running the web
• Running it solo or co-op

Before you start — Session Zero & the themes§

Spend a little time agreeing on the game you're all going to play (Chapter 32). The Frozen Crown deals in hard material on purpose: tens of thousands of frozen people whose lives are a slow clock, a setting whose history runs on enslavement and rebellion (the Companions were made as property and freed by force, Chapter 31), and a central question — who counts as a person, and what is owed them — that the campaign asks the table to answer in deeds, not speeches. Name the themes the group wants to explore and the ones to leave off the table, and treat safety as a standing tool: anyone, you included, can pause, fade, or wind down a scene at any time without owing a reason (Chapter 32). None of this blunts the danger. A consistent, lethal galaxy is more compelling when everyone has agreed on the kind of story they're telling.

Three things to settle in that first conversation, beyond the usual:

• What the crew wants with the ark. Salvagers cashing out, idealists waking a people, fixers leveraging a prize — the table's answer sets which pillar leads and which powers become friends. You don't need a fixed plan; you need to know what they're reaching for.
• Where they start (the three on-ramps in 00). Pick one, or let the crew's backstory pick it.
• How heavy to run the Companion and Sleeper material. It is the campaign's moral spine, and it can be played anywhere from a live political thriller to a quieter background ache. Calibrate it to the table.

The weekly loop§

The rhythm is the stop-and-jump pulse of any Wanderstar campaign (Chapter 33), and it does most of your pacing for you. Each cycle:

1. On a world (or aboard the ark), the action happens. The crew works a job, a deal, a fight, a salvage crawl, or a stretch of rebuilding. You describe, they choose, the dice settle the forks (Chapter 32). When the scene ends, hand them the leads the place carries — a rumor (Chapter 33), a Contact reaching out (Chapter 35), a job (Chapter 38), a clue (04).
2. They choose a lead and jump. The jump is a week sealed away (Chapter 27), and that week is two things at once: downtime (below) and the faction turn (below). No word outruns the ship, so whatever moved in the sector moved without them.
3. They arrive to a changed map. You reveal what the clocks did — the dock under new management, the rival a jump ahead, the fee doubled, the rumor that turned out true. The consequences are the next session's hooks, and the loop begins again.

The gift in this loop is the lag. Because the crew acts on stale maps and learns results only on arrival, you can spring what couldn't have been prevented and never have to fudge a thing — the sector simply kept turning while they were in the dark between stars.

The faction turn at sector scale§

The faction turn is the spine of the whole sandbox: it is what makes seven powers feel like they exist without the Wanderers (Chapter 34). Run it between sessions, or during a jump week, with the Appendix A4 checklist. Chapter 34 introduces the faction turn with a clock or two; the Driftmarch runs seven, so a few habits keep it from becoming a chore.

The checklist, per faction the crew didn't hold in check (Chapter 34, A4):

1. Did the crew help, serve, or ignore the agenda? → tick the clock forward one (two if they served it directly, or the fiction clearly calls for it).
2. Did the crew, or a rival power, hinder it? → tick it back, or stall it.
3. Touched by nothing? → it still creeps forward one — ambition doesn't sleep.
4. Clock filled? → resolve the agenda, change the sector to match, set the faction's next (usually larger) goal, and seed the result into a rumor the crew finds on arrival (Chapter 33).

Habits for running seven:

• You won't move all seven every turn. Move the two or three the crew touched this session, plus any one the fiction has been leaning on. Let the rest hold for a turn — a clock that sits for a session while its rivals move is realistic, not neglected. Over a month, all seven get their motion.
• Let the powers fight each other. Four of them (Lumen, GANYMEDE, Helios, NULL) want the Concord in incompatible ways. When the crew does nothing, advance the one with the most momentum and tick a rival back — the contest moves on its own, and the crew arrives to find the board rearranged by powers other than themselves.
• Standing is leverage (Chapter 34). Raise the crew's standing with one power and they can borrow its reach to push another's clock back. That traffic — befriend the Free Burrow to slow GANYMEDE, lean on Saltgate's neutrality to stall Helios — is how a crew that can't out-muscle anyone still moves a sector.
• Keep a one-line log per faction (the A4 tracker has a slot). "Turn 5: GANYMEDE +1, breaking-ship reached the second escort." That log is your campaign memory; it's also where the next job comes from.

A worked beat: the crew exposes GANYMEDE moving a breaking-ship onto a recoverable hull (Chapter 38) → GANYMEDE's clock ticks back one. But off-screen, Helios uses the scandal to position itself as the ark's "responsible steward" and ticks forward, and Lumen quietly advances a probate at Coldcradle. The crew jumps home to find GANYMEDE chastened, Helios suddenly courteous and everywhere, and a Sleeper they meant to wake reclassified on someone's ledger — three clocks moved, one by the crew and two by the crew's own success. That is the sandbox working.

Running the metaclock§

Above the seven sits Who Owns the Concord — an 8-segment campaign clock (Chapter 33) you keep on the sector sheet (00). It is not a faction's clock; it measures how close the question of the ark is to being settled, by anyone. Tick it on the faction turn:

• Forward when the crew leaves the question unattended for a stretch, or when a power lands a decisive move toward control (a filled faction clock almost always ticks the metaclock too).
• Back when the crew asserts control — establishes a foothold, wins a recognition of their claim, breaks a power's grip on the ark, wakes a cohort that strengthens their hold.

When it crests (fills), the question resolves. This is the reckoning the year has been building to — but who wins is decided by the crew's accumulated deeds, not by the clock. Read the standings: whose clocks are full, whom the crew has armed or crossed, what the Concord can now do for itself (03a), and who holds the codes and the cargo when the music stops. NULL is the clock's dark engine (Chapter 34) — if no one has uncovered and fought its lien, the crest is NULL's, and the ark vanishes into a company no one can find. If the crew has built the ark into something real and made the right friends, the crest is theirs — or the Concordat's, or a shared sovereignty they brokered. The clock guarantees that the matter gets settled; the campaign is the players earning which way.

Pace it so the crest lands near the end of the year (the phases, below, give rough ranges). If it's filling too fast, the powers are advancing unchecked and the crew needs wins that tick it back; if it's stalled, the powers have gone quiet and you should let one make a bold move.

The phases — a soft escalation§

The Driftmarch has a phase shape — where the campaign tends to go, not a track the crew must follow. Use it to judge how hard the world should be pushing back, and roughly where the metaclock should sit.

The phases are soft because the sessions are modular: a table can skip a node, take the arcs out of order, or spend a month on trade and salvage with the politics simmering. The phase only tells you the temperature. Keep individual sessions self-contained and let the clocks carry the through-line.

Downtime and the jump week§

Every jump is a week sealed away (Chapter 27), and that week has a shape (Chapter 33): repairs, healing a Maimed or Broken node toward clearing it (Chapter 10), training, scheming, the slow pressure of a crew shut in together — and, in this campaign, work on the ark.

Rebuilding the Concord is the campaign's base-building, and it has its own light subsystem in 03a (Restoring the Concord) — the one place this campaign adds a rule, kept on top of the existing clocks and downtime and explicitly optional. In the weekly loop, it slots in here: a jump week is when the crew spends time, credits, salvage, and the specialists they've recruited or woken to push a restoration track (power, the bridge, defenses, the woken, recognition, mobility). Resolve it with 03a if you're using the subsystem, or simply as a progress clock the crew fills through play if you're not (Chapter 33). Either way, downtime is where the ark grows, paced for free by the same jumps that cross the sector. A filled track changes what the ark — and the campaign — can do, and raises the crew's reach the way every advance in Wanderstar does (Chapter 34–35), never a power curve.

Keeping it honest — difficulty, danger, and the dice§

The sandbox lives or dies on running the core engine cleanly. The reminders that matter most over a long campaign:

• The target is always 8 (Chapter 32). Never raise it. Make things harder with Advantage/Disadvantage, with training gates, with the cost of failure, or — when a thing is hard because it's large — with a progress clock (the same tool the factions and the ark run on).
• Players roll; NPCs don't (Chapter 32, 40). When a power's enforcer, a hazard, or an automated defense acts against a Wanderer, frame the threat and let the player roll to meet it against 8; a deadly foe means they roll at Disadvantage, never against a higher number. Crewed ship actions work the same — your crew rolls, you roll only the enemy's damage (Chapter 25).
• Trauma is the limit, not a power curve (Chapter 33). There are no levels here. What stops the crew from simply taking the ark by force is that a fight can cost a limb or a mind, and a full board is one hit from death (Chapter 10). Let danger be genuine; a combat the crew could lose is worth more than one balanced to be won. And because trauma feeds Momentum (Chapter 7), a hard fight arms them even as it wounds them — keep the resource flowing by leaning on tough situations honestly (Chapter 32).
• Let people fail at interesting things (Chapter 32). The mark-and-XP system only advances a character who reaches past their reliable skills. Frame challenges that invite the reach.

Running the web§

The leads tie the sector together into a node web (04): locations, people, objects, and threads that point to one another, so the crew can pull any thread and still reach the whole picture (no single lead is the only way forward). You don't move through it on rails; you activate nodes reactively as the crew turns toward them.

• Every place hands out at least two leads. When the crew finishes somewhere, give them more than one thing to pull — a rumor and a Contact, a clue and a job. Two open threads is the minimum that keeps a sandbox from collapsing into a corridor.
• Improvise the unbuilt. If the crew jumps somewhere you haven't keyed, build it at the table on the Chapter 37 (worlds, stations, settlements) and 38 (jobs, salvage) tables — minutes of rolling gives you a place with a hook. Write the result onto an A4 record and it's canon for your Driftmarch.
• The catch is where the story is (Chapter 38). Every job has one; the best ones surface on arrival, where distance means the crew can't simply turn around. Plant it at the meeting, let it bloom a jump later.
• Pull NULL's thread slowly. NULL is the adaptive adversary (Chapter 34): it should read as coincidence, then pattern, then enemy over many sessions. Let the crew make the lever against it; there's no obvious one to find (its pressure point is built, not discovered).

Running it solo or co-op§

The whole Driftmarch plays with no GM. The deciding-what's-uncertain role passes to an oracle — the dice answering the questions a GM would (Chapters 42–45). Everything in this file still holds; a few handoffs:

• The faction turn runs identically with no GM (Appendix A4 solo/co-op sheet). Keep the seven clocks and the metaclock on the sheet and move them between scenes by the same checklist; the oracle decides the ambiguous calls (did the rival reach the wreck first? — ask, set the odds, roll).
• The web becomes your threads list (Chapter 44, A4 solo sheet). The locations/people/objects/leads a GM would hold in their head become the written thread, cast, and power lists you keep current — which is exactly what the web (04) already is, so solo play just means writing it down as you go.
• Lines and veils, set together, are the safety tool when no one holds the tone (Chapter 32, 42). Agree them up front; honor them instantly.
• The scenario waves (05–08) ship with the same callouts — expectation-test framing for the unknowns and a What Intrudes prompt for the jump weeks — so a solo or co-op crew runs them with no extra work.

Run it GM-led, co-op, or solo; the engine is the same, and the sector keeps turning either way.