Last session ended with the crew in deep space, their crystal drive at full power, the containment unit empty, and the ship's occupant count reading one too high. The main display briefly showed the word "HELP" before reverting to normal.
The cargo is gone. Something is in the ship.
Open the session in the immediate aftermath of the possession. The crew is rattled. The ship is behaving strangely — not broken, but wrong. Systems work, but they have opinions now.
Echo is barely conscious and doesn't understand where it is or what's happening to it. It's a mind that has only ever existed as a waveform in a communal harmonic field, and now it's trapped in a box made of wires and binary logic. Its attempts to communicate come through as ship system glitches:
Environmental:
Diagnostic readouts:
Direct attempts:
One crew member realises the glitches aren't malfunctions — they're communication attempts. This is a Clever overcome roll (Fair difficulty). Anyone can attempt it, but the player who succeeds should be someone whose character would find a haunted ship more interesting than terrifying.
On a success, the crew member starts parsing the diagnostic readouts as intentional. They talk back. Echo responds — crudely, through whatever system is nearest. This is the beginning of a relationship, not a translation. Echo doesn't suddenly become fluent; it just now has one human who's paying attention.
On a failure, the crew still eventually figures it out — but it takes longer and feels more frightening than funny. The tone shifts from "our ship is doing bits" to "our ship might be trying to kill us." Give the players another chance after a scene or two.
The crew has established some basic communication with Echo (even if it's just "the ship is alive and scared") and has decided what to do about it. They can't remove Echo — it's fused with the crystal drive, and the drive is the only thing keeping it alive. They can't go back — Ventriss can't help, and returning to the station means Kragg. They're stuck with a haunted ship and a job to finish.
The patrol corvette Steadfast hails the crew. Lt. Osei is running interdiction sweeps near the crystal harvesting zones — the same zones Ventriss's route passes through. She's professional, thorough, and suspicious of any ship running this corridor.
The timing is terrible. The crew is still figuring out their possessed ship, and now they have to act normal during a military inspection.
This is a challenge — a series of overcome rolls against escalating obstacles. The crew needs three successes before two failures.
Obstacle 1 — The hail. Osei requests identification, cargo manifest, and destination. The crew needs to explain why they're on this route with no declared cargo (or with whatever cover story they invent). Overcome roll against Fair (+2) difficulty. Approach depends on the crew's strategy — Clever for a convincing lie, Sneaky for a misleading truth, Flashy for brazen confidence.
Obstacle 2 — The scan. Osei runs a sensor sweep. She's Careful +3 with a +2 stunt, meaning she rolls at Fantastic (+6) when scanning. The crew needs to mask or explain the anomalous readings from the crystal drive (running at 340% resonance, occupant count wrong, power distribution unusual). Overcome roll against Good (+3) difficulty — but if Echo's Harmonic Interference stunt is in play (+2 to Flashily defend against scanner sweeps), the ship itself might help. This is the first time Echo does something clearly beneficial for the crew, and it should feel significant.
Obstacle 3 — The ghost signal. Osei's equipment picks up something it's never detected from a human ship before: a ghost signal. The same kind of signal she's been filing classified reports about. She doesn't know it's a Resonant — she just knows something on this ship is emitting the same frequency as the anomalies near crystal fields. She'll demand an explanation or request to board.
This is the hardest obstacle: Overcome roll against Great (+4) difficulty. The crew can try to bluff ("faulty crystal drive, we're getting it serviced at Kepler"), intimidate ("you're welcome to board, but our insurance doesn't cover military delays"), or something creative. If they fail, Osei boards — see below.
She's professional and by-the-book. She'll sweep the ship, check the cargo bay (empty containment unit — suspicious), and ask pointed questions. The ship will be doing its best to act normal, but Echo doesn't fully understand what's happening and might glitch at a bad moment.
If Osei finds evidence of smuggling or anomalous activity, she'll impound the cargo (the empty containment unit) and file a report. She won't arrest the crew — she doesn't have enough for that — but she'll flag them for future stops, which means Kragg can find them more easily.
If Echo acts up during the boarding (a crew member lies and the ship displays "STATEMENT ACCURACY: 12%"), this could go very badly OR very well. Osei's reaction to ghost signals is complicated — she's been filing reports about them and being ignored. Seeing one up close, from inside a human ship, might make her an ally rather than an enemy. But only if the crew handles it carefully.
Osei's corvette peels away and the crew is alone again. The immediate danger is past, but the encounter has changed things — the crew now knows their ship can be detected, and they have to decide how to handle that going forward.
The crew is alone in deep space. The Osei encounter is behind them. The ship is haunted and helpful in equal measure. The original job — deliver "quantum ashes" to Kepler Station — is meaningless now. The cargo is the ship. Or the ship is the cargo. Either way, they can't deliver it.
This is an open roleplay scene. Let the players drive it. The questions on the table:
Echo is more active now — it's been feeding on the crystal drive's resonance and is slowly recovering coherence. Its communications are still crude but more varied:
The crew has made a decision about where to go next. They don't need to have a plan — just a direction. The ship hums around them, alive and listening. Whatever they decide, they're not doing it alone anymore.
Three scenes again, but the emotional arc is different from session one. Session one escalated from social → action → horror. Session two moves from horror → tension → quiet. The Osei encounter is the mechanical peak; the final scene is deliberately low-key, giving players space to process and plan.
If the session is running long, the "What now?" scene can be brief — just establish a direction and end. The real value is in scenes 1 and 2.
If the session is running short, extend Scene 1. The haunted ship is a playground — let the players experiment with talking to Echo, testing the ship's responses, trying to understand what's happened. This is the fun weird stuff that makes the campaign distinctive.
Ship aspects (updated from session one):
Osei encounter aspects (created during the challenge):
A critically starved Resonant, captured during a botched raid and reduced to barely coherent energy patterns. This is unprecedented — humans have never seen Resonant possession because Resonants normally self-destruct rather than be captured, and no one has ever starved one this thoroughly while keeping it contained. Echo didn't choose to possess the ship — it reflexively lunged toward the crystal drive's resonance as a survival reflex, like a drowning person grabbing a piece of driftwood.
A critically starved Resonant reduced to barely coherent energy patterns resembling glowing crystalline dust. After possessing the ship's systems, it manifests as a confused, frightened presence that communicates through diagnostic messages, status readouts, and error codes. Its real name is an untranslatable chord — the crew will nickname it. "Echo" is suggested but let players decide.
A by-the-book Outer Colonies patrol officer running interdiction sweeps near the crystal harvesting zones. Dark skin, close-cropped silver hair, pressed uniform with too many commendations for someone this young. She suspects the crew is smuggling but can't prove it. She's also secretly filing reports about 'ghost signals' near crystal fields that her superiors keep classifying.