A grimy station bar on a mining colony orbital. The crew is between jobs, low on funds, and looking for work. Ventriss finds them — or they find him through a job board posting that's trying too hard to sound casual.
"Call me Fructus — my parents had ambitions for me to bear fruit from my studies. Well, here it is. Forty years of war and I'm the first to recover workable Resonant material. These particles were recovered from a null zone boundary. First physical evidence that Resonants leave anything behind when they die."
He needs them to smuggle "quantum ashes" to his colleague Dr. Sarah Chen on Kepler Station. The journey at 0.9c will take several months ship-time (years in real-time). He's offering well above market rate for a simple courier job.
Partway through negotiations, Kragg Dulton approaches the table. He's polite, well-informed (he knows Ventriss's name, the crew's ship, probably their outstanding debts), and makes a competing offer. He doesn't threaten — he presents a "reasonable business alternative."
How to play Kragg: He's not here to fight. He's here to buy. If the crew hasn't committed yet, he'll try to outbid Ventriss. If they have committed, he'll express polite disappointment and leave — but his Helix operatives are already at the docks (see Scene 2). If the crew asks why Helix wants the cargo, Kragg genuinely doesn't know: "My employer identified this as a priority acquisition. I don't set the priorities, I execute them. Would you like to hear the offer?"
Possible compels:
The crew commits to Ventriss's job. If they take Kragg's offer instead, the campaign goes in a very different direction — Ventriss will try to steal the cargo back, and the possession still happens, but now the crew is working for the bad guys when it does. That's a viable path, so don't force it.
The crew heads to the docking bay to load Ventriss's cargo onto their ship. The containment unit is a heavy, humming metal cylinder about the size of a coffin, covered in monitoring equipment and trailing power cables. It's warm to the touch and vibrates faintly.
Before or during loading, the dock rats make their move. They've overheard Ventriss talking too loudly and figure anyone paying that much for a courier job has cargo worth stealing. They're not subtle — they block the corridor, crack their knuckles, and make demands.
This is a straight-up fight and should be fast. The dock rats are mooks (1 stress box each, two groups of three). They fold as soon as anyone fights back with real conviction. The point of this scene is to let the PCs feel competent and establish their combat approaches before things get complicated.
Possible twists:
If Kragg didn't get what he wanted in Scene 1, his Helix security team is here. They won't fight openly — corporate liability, bad for the brand, incident reports to file. Instead, they run interference:
This is a contest — the crew is trying to load the cargo and launch; the Helix team is trying to delay, distract, or acquire the containment unit. Run it as a three-exchange contest:
If the Helix team wins the contest, they don't get the cargo — but they get detailed scans and a tracking tag, which means Kragg can follow the crew. If the crew wins cleanly, Kragg has to pursue blind.
The cargo is loaded, the crew is aboard, and they're ready to launch. Ventriss stays behind — he's too well-known to travel without attracting attention. His last words should include a reminder about the containment's power requirements: "You'll want to patch it into ship power once you're under way. The portable cells are good for... a while. But ship power is better. Steadier."
The crew launches and clears the station. Open space. The crystal drive spools up for the journey to Kepler Station. Ventriss mentioned plugging the containment unit into ship power — now's the time.
Give the players a few minutes of quiet. Let them settle into the ship, talk about the job, discuss whether they trust Ventriss, count their advance payment. This is the last moment of normal. Use it to establish the crew's dynamic and the feel of their ship.
If anyone examines the containment unit more closely now that they're aboard:
When the crystal drive reaches full power, read or paraphrase:
The containment unit screams. Not an alarm — the metal itself resonates, a harmonic that climbs in pitch until it's beyond hearing. Every display on the ship flickers. The monitoring equipment flatlines. Then the containment unit goes dark — power draw drops to zero. It's just a metal box now.
But the ship isn't right. The lights are wrong — they pulse, slowly, like breathing. The navigation display shows your position, then shows a position three light-years away, then shows both at once. The engine diagnostic reports crystal resonance at 340% of maximum. The cargo bay camera shows the containment unit sitting open and empty. Nothing came out. Nothing is on the camera. But the ship's internal atmosphere sensor is reading an occupant count one higher than your crew.
There is no roll for this. The crew can't stop it and trying to fight it is pointless. This is a GM-narrated event. The point is horror, confusion, and the gut-drop realisation that the cargo is gone, the ship is wrong, and they're in deep space with nowhere to go.
End the session on one final beat. The ship's main display — the one the crew uses for navigation — clears itself of all the glitching and static, and for one moment displays a single line of text in the standard diagnostic font:
HELP
Then it goes back to normal navigation. Except the occupant count still reads one too high.
End session.
Three scenes, escalating from social to action to horror. Scene 1 (the bar) should take the longest — it's where the players learn what the job is, interact with two major NPCs, and make their first big decision. Scene 2 (the docks) is a quick action beat. Scene 3 (departure and possession) is short but intense.
If the session is running long, the Helix contest in Scene 2 can be cut — just run the dock rats fight and move on. The dock rats are enough to establish that other people know about the cargo.
If the session is running short, extend Scene 1: let Kragg and Ventriss have a polite argument in front of the crew, let the crew explore the station, let them ask around about Ventriss's reputation (anyone in the science community has heard of him — "brilliant but unhinged" is the consensus).
Station aspects (available for anyone to invoke or compel):
Ship aspects (once aboard):
Chen doesn't appear in this session but is referenced by Ventriss as the delivery destination. Key details for the GM:
A twitchy, brilliant xenobiologist who smells faintly of ozone and regret. Forty years of obsession have left him gaunt, wild-eyed, and prone to muttering equations mid-conversation. His lab coat has more patches than original fabric. He knows the cargo is energetically active and staggeringly valuable — he's lying to the crew about it being inert because if they knew the truth, they'd refuse the job, steal it, or triple the price. He has no idea it's conscious.
A 'freelance acquisitions specialist' (corporate mercenary) working for Helix Dynamics, a weapons manufacturer that profits from the war. Shaved head, cybernetic left eye that glows faintly amber, wears an expensive tactical suit under a cheap station poncho. Polite in a way that makes your skin crawl. He's been told to acquire Ventriss's cargo. He doesn't know why and doesn't particularly care — that's above his pay grade and several light-years away.
A brilliant theoretical physicist at Kepler Station and Ventriss's former colleague at the Inner Systems University. She's been publishing increasingly radical papers about crystal harmonic theory that suggest Resonants might be conscious — papers that have made her unpopular with the military establishment. Ventriss has been sending her encrypted messages for months about his discovery; she thinks he's lost his mind (again) and has been ignoring them. Tired eyes, perpetual coffee stain on her lab coat, speaks in metaphors that accidentally become prophetic.
Corporate security contractors in matching black tactical gear with the Helix Dynamics double-helix logo on their shoulders. They move in crisp formation, communicate via subvocal comms, and file incident reports IN REAL TIME during combat.
The usual assortment of station lowlifes who hang around the docking bays looking for easy marks. Mismatched gear, terrible dental work, and a surprising talent for being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. They've heard Ventriss has valuable cargo and want a cut.