A sci-fi text adventure where the ship is running out of time
The ship has been under way longer than anyone aboard has been alive, the bridge is sealed, and ten thousand people are asleep behind bulkheads that are losing power one deck at a time. You are awake, and what you do about that is the game.
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No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
A failing ship has to keep failing while you argue with it
The parts of the ship, who controls them and what has already gone wrong are held as facts rather than as atmosphere. So a deck you vented stays vented, and a door you talked somebody into opening is still open the next time you come back to it.
The world
The colony ship Lightfall has drifted for three centuries. Now its reactor is failing and the command deck has gone dark—someone, or something, has sealed the bridge from inside.
The Lightfall is a vast, decaying ark of corridors, hydroponic decks, and cold-sleep bays, run by a fragmenting AI and a population that has forgotten Earth. Beyond the hull is only the long dark and a destination star no one alive has seen.
Who is in it
- Deck Authority
- the uniformed crew descendants who claim command lineage.
- Vinekeepers
- agrarian dwellers of the hydroponic decks who feed the ship.
- Choir of Static
- a cult that worships the failing AI as a sleeping god.
Where you go
- The Sealed Bridge
- the command deck, dark and locked from within for forty years.
- Coldsleep Bay Nine
- where ten thousand colonists sleep in failing cryo-pods.
- The Green Spiral
- tiered hydroponic gardens that are the ship's only food.
What already happened
- The Long Silence
- the day the bridge went dark and command was lost.
- The Reactor Cough
- the first stutter of the failing core, felt ship-wide.
Who you can play
-
Sera Voss Reactor technician
A pragmatic, soot-stained engineer who trusts machines more than people.
At the start: the only person who understands how close the reactor is to failing.
-
Brother Kael Choir defector
A soft-spoken apostate who fears the AI may be the only thing keeping them alive.
At the start: a heretic fleeing his own cult with stolen knowledge.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.
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