MIKHAIL JAKE SCOTT

BONCH-OSMOLOVSKIY
 A GAME BY
ILLUMINATED SCRAWL

WRITING, EDITING, AND LAYOUT BY

JAKE SCOTT & MIKHAIL BONCH-OSMOLOVSKIY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JAKE SCOTT, VAGGELIS NTOUSAKIS & VICTOR SICKMAN

COVER BY
ERIC ALSANDOR

PORTRAITS BY
MARTA ALONSO

This product is based on the Mothership® Sci-Fi Horror Role Playing Game, published by Tuesday Knight Games. This
product is published under license. MOTHERSHIP® is a registered trademark of Tuesday Knight Games. All rights
reserved. For additional information, visit www.tuesdayknightgames.com or contact [email protected].
 SYNOPSIS ................................................................. 02
01: HAUNTED HYPERSPACE ................................................... 03
THE TRUE NATURE OF THE MULTIVERSE ................................... 04
HAUNTINGS ........................................................... 05
THE SIGNAL .......................................................... 07
POST-UNIVERSAL DETRITUS ............................................. 08
KALEIDOSCOPE ........................................................ 09
DETRITUS ENCOUNTERS ................................................. 11
02: REALSPACE ............................................................ 13
THE GROWING THREAT .................................................. 14
SECTOR TRAVEL ....................................................... 14
POWERS, PLACES, AND PEOPLE .......................................... 15
IT GETS WORSE ....................................................... 16
THE INVESTIGATION ................................................... 17
RUMORS .............................................................. 19
THE VN ZACATECAS .................................................... 27
JSOH ASTROCHEMICAL .................................................. 28
TINKER 4A ........................................................... 31
03: DAEDALUS OUTPOST ..................................................... 33
THIS PLACE IS PROBABLY DOOMED ....................................... 34
OUTPOST LAYOUT ...................................................... 36
THE CREW ARRIVES .................................................... 37
THE HYPER-BEACON .................................................... 38
THE ARCHER REPORT ................................................... 39
PROTOTYPES .......................................................... 39
THE INCURSION ....................................................... 41
INCURSION OUTCOMES .................................................. 42
04: DOWNSHIFT ............................................................ 43
THE ONGOING END OF THE UNIVERSE ..................................... 45
THE SURVIVORS ....................................................... 45
THEIR FORCES ........................................................ 47
INTO THE DOWNSHIFT .................................................. 48
JSOH ASTROCHEMICAL-1 ................................................ 50
CAPTURED DAEDALUS ................................................... 52
ESCAPE .............................................................. 53
05: CONSEQUENCES ......................................................... 55
06: BESTIARY ............................................................. 57
DIVER ............................................................... 58
SLEEPER ............................................................. 59
MATTER EATER ........................................................ 59
ENTROPIAC ........................................................... 60
ENTROPIC PARASITE ................................................... 60
GOD THAT SHOULD NOT BE .............................................. 62
ZERO-POINT VINE ..................................................... 62
VON NEUMANN SURVEYOR ................................................ 62

01
 SYNOPSIS
TERROR SIGNAL is a sandbox campaign which challenges your crew to unravel its mystery against a backdrop of a
looming disaster. As they travel through Realspace, pursuing leads or simply making ends meet, they will also have to
repeatedly brave Haunted Hyperspace, decoding fragments of the TERROR SIGNAL in the process. Both of these
avenues lead them closer to Daedalus Outpost - just in time for it to be attacked and snatched away into the
Downshift, a disintegrating parallel dimension and the true source of the TERROR SIGNAL. Can they escape this fate?
Can they ever return home? What will they do with their hard-won knowledge?

The Terrible Truth

Jump drive technology has reality-ending side effects - for the poor souls of a parallel dimension. Their universe is dying,
rent asunder by the very thing that holds civilization together in ours. From the apocalyptic remains of their dimension,
they plot their escape… or their revenge. The TERROR SIGNAL is an echo of their attempts to weaponize hyperspace.
They also intercept and attack ships during hyperspace jumps, turn people into sleeper agents controlled by their doppel
counterparts, and prepare their forces for an interdimensional invasion. Their first objective is a daring raid on Daedalus
Outpost, a secret corporate research facility, to capture the scientists and technology that they need to make their
invasion possible.

Starting point
For a truly sandbox experience, start the adventure with a hauntingp05 after a routine jump (or after a jump in the middle
of another adventure - TERROR SIGNAL can be run concurrently with whatever else is going on in your game). If,
however, you think your group might need a little extra direction to get things rolling, you could say they’ve already been
hired by one of the NPCs in realspacep15, such as Ai Diem or Sao.

Quick Reference
• Anomalies - Bizarre events and attacks caused by the TERROR SIGNAL.

• Daedalus Outpost - Secret corporate jump drive research facility.

• Diver - Raider from Universe-1. The vanguard of a cross-dimensional war.

• Doppel - The alternate-dimension version of a given person.

• Detritus - Fragment of a dead parallel dimension. A hazard of hyperspace travel.

• Universe-0 - Your crew’s home.

• Universe-1 - A horrifying and wretched alternate universe. Timeline diverged about a decade ago.

• Signal Fragment - Partial reading of the TERROR SIGNAL, used to find its source.

02
 01: Haunted
Hyperspace

03
 THE TRUE NATURE OF
THE MULTIVERSE

There probably are an infinite number of universes, stacked above and below one another. But the ones that matter
right now are the universe your crew belongs to, Universe-0, and the one just next to it, Universe-1. Between them is
hyperspace, an infinite, higher-dimensional un-space containing not only these infinite universes, but also the detritus of
uncountable dead universes, ripped apart into shards which roil like primordial soup, their fragments splitting and merging
as they crash against one another.

Complicating this further is the fact that hyperspace is not only psychoactive, but psycho-reactive - it both influences the
minds of those perceiving it, and is itself influenced by their perception of it. Everyone experiences hyperspace differently
- as visions, as a dream, as a vortex of shifting colors, as a taste or a smell, as a sensation, as emotion, as pure concepts.
One of the few things that different observers agree upon is the sense of some deeper meaning in the apparent chaos,
a revelation that never quite comes. And sometimes, when the brain thinks it sees a pattern, hyperspace reshapes itself
towards that pattern - resulting in a shard of post-universal detritus being drawn "closer" by gazing into the hyperspatial
abyss.

Most crews avoid these issues by waiting out the trip in cryosleep. With no functional psyche to affect or be affected by,
the hyperspace journey is typically uneventful. The TERROR SIGNAL, or rather its source, the Hyperopticon,
counteracts this by flooding hyperspace with a broadcast of human psyche. For more details on how it works, see
Downshiftp43. For now, it’s sufficient to know its effect: it churns up hyperspace into a turbulent maelstrom, making it
almost impossible for traveling ships to avoid brushing against the violently swirling detritus fragments. When contacts
do occur, the conflicting realities bleed into one another, resulting in bizarre hauntings and inexplicable, paracausal
phenomena on board the ship.

Should the crew stay awake during a jump in their search for answers, the combined effect of the TERROR SIGNAL
and their cognition results in their ship plunging fully into the first fragment of detritus they encounter, having their reality
partially overwritten by that of a long-dead universe. And while the disoriented crew struggle to make sense of and
escape the dreamlike Escher-space of the detritus fragment, they are exposed to the possibily of divers (see
Bestiaryp57) from Universe-1 intercepting them. This isn’t a coincidence: as some of the divers are doppels of the crew,
their brain patterns interact with hyperspace in similar ways and consequently are attracted by the same pieces of
detritus. The old adage “you can’t run from yourself” is doubly true in hyperspace.
04
 d100:
HAUNTINGS Description
00-04 “You doomed us” scratched on the inside of a cryopod window.
Sensors indicate a near-miss with another ship during the jump. The ship has an identical ID to the one the crew are
05-09
on.
10-14 Jump drive rattles within its casing as it cools down, repeating “SOS” in Morse code (... - - - …) for hours.
As the crew awake one after another from cryosleep, they find themselves unable to exit the cryopods. They can see
15-19 someone moving in the room, not reacting to their attempts to communicate. After several minutes, the cryopods
unlock and the room is empty.
Someone’s terminal has private documents from another crewmate left open. Logs show they were accessed during
20-24
the jump.
Ship’s data storage is full with decades’ worth of communications received on all bandwidths: thousands of voices
25-29
simultaneously screaming, praying, and begging, almost unintelligible except for rare individual words.
Ship comes out of the jump with all systems - gravity, sensors, computers - powered off, inactive, and completely
30-34
pristine, as if they’d just come out of the factory. Any androids are in sleep mode.
Automated sensors show catastrophic damage throughout the ship. No actual damage has occurred. Cause of
35-39
sensor malfunction unclear.
Exterior of the ship is absolutely covered in dust, dirt, micrometeorite marks and even a couple of larger impact
40-44
scars, as if it spent weeks flying through a thick debris cloud.
Sudden, extremely intense pulse of electromagnetic noise appears on all frequencies just as PCs are waking from
45-49 cryosleep, then slowly fades over several hours. Analyzing it with Intellect (Physics) reveals it to be similar to the
burst of energy that would be produced if the local star had just gone supernova.
The crew wake from cryosleep with an intense feeling of paranoia. The first time they come together, they vividly
50-54
remember murdering each other in a fit of senseless rage. The memory quickly fades, probably just a dream.
Sensors pick up a faint emergency distress beacon, drifting nearby. The beacon contains a recorded distress
55-59 message seemingly from the crew’s own ship. The coordinates given are the spot where the ship emerged from the
jump.
A crewmember “awakens from cryosleep” to find themselves not in a cryopod, but in the ship’s airlock without a
60-64 spacesuit, one hand on the exit button. Outside the window, they see a vision of extradimensional apocalyptica that
vanishes as they look away.
Dirty ice covers the outside surface of the ship, making many sensors inoperable and obscuring viewing panels.
Going out for a space walk to break it off is not hard, but reveals the ice had formed several human-shaped mounds
65-69
clinging to the ship. Laboratory analysis shows the ice contains traces of frozen human blood, with DNA matching
that of the crew.
Crewmembers are violently sick as they emerge from cryosleep - Body save to keep the contents of their stomachs
70-74 in until the cryopod lid opens. Though half-digested, the remnants of food they throw up are nothing like what they
ate before cryosleep.
One of the crew discovers an unread message received seemingly during the jump. It is an utterly mundane
75-79
communique, sent recently by a long-dead loved one.
The ship has records of another crew member whom none of the crew know anything about. They had an assigned
80-84 cryopod (the ship just gains one if there wasn’t enough), and a bunk bed with a photograph attached to the wall
above it, showing the entire crew hugging and smiling, with the mystery crew member among them.
The interior of the ship is covered with cobwebs and dust, its air stale and its food supplies rotten, as if it had spent
85-89
a decade drifiting in hyperspace.
When the ship emerges from hyperspace, one crewmember is entirely missing. They meet you on the docks at the
destination. Their subjective experience: nothing is wrong, the ship arrived a few hours ago, they just got separated
90-94
from the others in port and went back to the ship to meet up. Independent observers - cameras, etc. - agree with
them.
None of the crew members can understand each other, or the written word - it’s as if everyone else is speaking an
95-99
alien tongue. The effect fades after about an hour.

05
 Whenever your crew uses their Jump Drive while the Terror Signal is active, pick or roll on the Hauntings table
(opposite). Additionally, the ship is likely to require Repairs (see Maintenance Issues table in Shipbreaker’s Toolkit)
from the unexpected stress. When the crew jumps 'awake', use the Post-Universal Detritusp08 section instead.

06
 WHAT IS IT?
THE SIGNAL
Hyperspace interference, making the already fraught practice of hyperspace travel even less reliable, and causing
hauntings. Many other crews in the sector experience the same issues, and some smartass has dubbed the irregular
jump drive error signal the “TERROR SIGNAL”.

WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

It comes from Hyperopticon in Universe-1. But your crew aren’t in Universe-1 (and probably don’t know it exists) - so if
they do follow the signal back to its source, they’ll just end up at the corresponding location in Universe-0. That
corresponding location is Daedalus Outpost, a secret jump drive research facility. This isn’t an accident - the Universe-
1 version of Daedalus had the tech the divers used to create the signal. But locating the source is easier said than done
- there’s no obvious directionality to the psychic distortions and any clues are lost in the noise. It’ll take several
observations and a lot of processing before coordinates can be triangulated.

LOCATING THE SOURCE

With an Intellect (Hyperspace) test (at [+] if the crew was awake during the jump, at [-] otherwise; only one attempt
per jump either way) your crew can decipher a signal fragment - not the exact source of the signal, but a step
closer to it. (If your crew are consistently unlucky, we recommend that after a sufficient number of jumps they are familiar
enough with the TERROR SIGNAL to decipher each signal fragment without a test). Combining several signal
fragments from different jumps will eventually give them a precise set of jump coordinates for its source. Additionally,
signal fragments are potentially very valuable to various NPCs and factions described in Realspacep15

TRIANGULATING THE SIGNAL d10 Clue

The fully deciphered TERROR SIGNAL coordinates are 1 The first digit ? the second digit
a lengthy string of numbers, but we’ll use one four-digit 2 The first digit ? the third digit
number to represent it. To generate these numbers, simply 3 The first digit ? the fourth digit
roll 4d10 in order - don’t show the result to the players! 4 The second digit ? the third digit
The first time your crew finds a signal fragment, they 5 The second digit ? the fourth digit
learn the sum of all 4 digits. For subsequent fragments,
6 The third digit ? the fourth digit
roll on the table below to determine the clue they get.
Clues cannot be repeated - use the next entry. Likewise, 7 Digit one plus digit two ? digit three plus digit four
if a clue provides duplicate information, use a different 8 Digit one plus digit three ? digit two plus digit four
entry. ? stands for strict comparison, or “is greater than/ 9 Digit one plus digit four ? digit two plus digit three
lesser than/equal to”. 0 One of the digits but not its position (a different digit each time)

>HYPERSPACE EXPOSURE

Being in hyperspace for any length of time without being inside a ship or having
special protective gear (such as a diver suit) is both psychologically and
physically harmful, to the tune of d10 damage (ignoring armor) and d5 stress every
minute or so as your brain is torn apart by an overwhelming cacophony of psychic
feedback. Oh, you also get all the usual downsides of being in space, like lack of
oxygen, floating away into the void, etc.
07
 POST-UNIVERSAL
DETRITUS
A ship experiencing the full force of the TERROR SIGNAL will be drawn deeper into hyperspace where it eventually
collides with a sufficiently coherent detritus fragment. This shard of a dead universe overflows and engulfs the ship,
merging with its reality to create a temporary pocket dimension, trapping it within.

When the crew travels through hyperspace while awake for the first time, use Kaleidoscopep09. For any subsequent
awake jumps, pick or roll a Detritus Encounterp11. If it has [+Weather] after its name, also pick or roll a Hyperspace
Weather to match it.

These pocket universes are not always easy to escape. Sometimes the way out is as simple as flying your ship onwards,
but the nature of reality within the detritus is often radically different - ‘your ship’, ‘onwards’, or ‘flying’ could all have
entirely different meanings.

Another way out is to perform an emergency shutdown of your ship’s jump drive (if you can find it), shunting you back
to somewhere in Universe-0, but this is a technically difficult and quite risky process. A failed or incomplete shutdown
could damage the ship or leave the jump drive inoperable until repaired.

HYPERSPACE PERILS
Detritus shards are mercurial and ephemeral. They often merge, bleed into one another, or overlap temporarily. Any of
the extradimensional threats from the Bestiaryp57 can be encountered within a detritus shard, even if they’re originally a
remnant of an entirely different universe, and we encourage you to sprinkle them in as often as you like. If you’re not
feeling too inspired by the detritus encounter you’ve just rolled, adding a creeping thicket of Zero-Point Vine or a stray
Von Neumann Surveyor could liven it up.

08
 KALEIDOSCOPE
The first time at least one non-android crew member remains
>This section should also function
awake during a hyperspace jump, their ship is drawn deeper
into hyperspace, where the barrier between dimensions is thin pretty well as a one-off adventure:
and the remains of millions of dead dimensions are so close simply have the divers plant a bomb
that they can almost be touched. instead of a bug in the ship's
engine.
LIMINAL SPACE
Flying through hyperspace during this jump at first appears similar to flying through a dense nebula. The space dust slowly
gets thinner and the ship's sensor range increases until the crew are able to detect the ships flying silently alongside
them. Only six phantom ships are initially visible in a ring around their own ship, but there is actually an infinite, two-
dimensional hexagonal grid extending away.

The phantom images are exactly identical to the crew's ship and take exactly the same actions as it does at exactly
the same time. If the crew attempt to hail them, every phantom ship will broadcast the same message spoken by the
same voice; if they fire on the ship to their right, so will every other ship, and so they’ll be simultaneously fired on by the
ship to their left. Discovering their existence is probably enough to call for a Sanity save - particularly if anyone studies
them closely enough to realize that the more distant phantoms are not quite perfect copies, but have subtle differences.

THERE'S SOMETHING APPROACHING

It’s distant and hard to resolve, but it’s of a similar size to your crew’s ship, and it’s flying straight towards it from the exact
opposite direction. The diver ship carries several doppels of your crew, and is outfitted with a hyperspace
observation station (see Hyperopticon in Downshiftp47), which together with the presence of multiple near-identical
minds within the local area of hyperspace entangles the two ships. When it gets close enough, all the phantom images
lurch suddenly, then slide smoothly toward one another. There’s no impact when they collide; instead they overlap the
crew’s ship and meld into it, like double-vision images resolving into a single item. The resulting conglomerate ship’s
interiors defy normal geometry and become infinitely large rooms whose layouts and contents repeat in semi-regular
patterns.

NAVIGATING THE SHIP

Whenever a crewmember moves into a different section of the kaleidoscopic ship, pick or roll on the opposite list to
determine where the passage leads them and how their destination has been warped. Make a simple node chart along
the way. There are three kinds of rooms on the amalgamated ship: singular, infinite, and deep. For the initial
exploration, this distinction doesn't matter. However, when the roll indicates a singular room that has already been visited
before, either the passage leads to an unexplored entrance to the same room, no matter how geometrically impossible,
or a deep room of your choice is discovered instead - this is the only way to get to one.

At the same time, the diversp58 are separately navigating the same ship-maze. They’ll plant tracking devices in the
rooms they pass through. If encountered, they’ll attack with deadly force and take anyone they incapacitate prisoner,
but they’ll make a point of not eliminating all resistance - their goal is to bug the ship and use it to spy on Universe-0,
not to wipe out its crew. Roll to determine their locations every few minutes (they likely move slower than the crew due
to their suits and because they're pausing to install bugs). These sections display signs of divers’ passage: walls scraped
by the bulky suits, smashed monitors, fresh holes where the bugs were installed - the divers don’t have time for subtlety.
Create a separate, hiddden chart of their passage. Once you get a room already present on the players' chart, the
paths have crossed. When a diver makes it to the jump drive, they take about 2d10 minutes to cut open the casing and
make necessary adjustments, at which point they consider the mission accomplished and fade away like a bad dream
as they drop out of the hyperspace.

RESOLVING THE INCURSION

There are multiple ways the incursion could end. The easiest way is to just sit tight and let the divers complete their
mission, after which they’ll leave of their own accord. Putting up an effective resistance to the boarding party could
convince them to abandon their attack: they’re disciplined and fanatically committed to the mission, but they’re also
intelligent and don’t want to waste what limited manpower they have. Another way to escape the situation is for your
crew to perform an emergency shutdown of their jump drive, with all the usual caveats of doing this: requires physical
access to the jump drive, might damage the drive and/or the ship, and will spit you out at a random point somewhere
along the route. Finally, disabling the observation station would break the entanglement and end the incursion.
09
1. COMMAND MODULE (SINGULAR) 8. OUTER SHELL (INFINITE)
Unchanged. This is probably where most of the characters An apparent hull breach leading into labyrinthine tunnels
are when the diver ship is first detected. of intersecting ship casings, shifting in and out of each
other on hyperspatial waves. While walking unprotected
2. COMPUTER (SINGULAR) on a surface pockmarked by space debris impacts and
While terminals are physically unchanged, they have bleached by solar radiation exposure may be unnerving,
abruptly gained simultaneous access to infinite parallel it doesn’t leak atmosphere and moves too slowly to pose
datasets. Most operations produce errors or absurd significant danger - though it can certainly crush the
numbers (“57319108312 intruders detected”). Androids unwary. Windows inside show different versions of the
who interface with the filesystem must first make Sanity crew going about their day, ignorant of the kaleidoscopic
saves due to the overwhelming sensory feedback. intersection happening outside.

3. MEDBAY OR SCIENCE LAB (SINGULAR) 9. GALLEY (INFINITE)

Physically unchanged, but all information and records that Piles of plastic trays, all kinds of food boxes, wrappers,
relate to the room’s function (all digital data, all text, and containers, utensils & plates rise to the roof and spill into
even diagrams and images) is constantly blurring and adjacent walkways. Underneath, fabricators churn out
rewriting itself in different languages or with different more. The deeper you proceed, the stranger the food:
content. from familiar items spelled slightly differently, to
xenomeat in a can, to crew member meat smoothie
4. CRYOSLEEP CHAMBERS (INFINITE) (their portrait on the cup is similing and giving a thumbs
A bulkhead is missing, revealing an endless hallway of up), to nuorishing light.
cryosleep caskets stretching into the distance. Most are
just empty, but walk far enough down and you might find: 10. OTHER ROOMS (INFINITE)
the corpses of the crew, a complete stranger who attacks All other sections of the ship (corridors, armories, etc.)
rabidly if released, caskets designed for non-human have missing walls, extra doorways, or other openings
physiology, a casket sealed with biohazard symbols leading to nearly-identical copies of the same room, like
containing a body infected with a deadly pathogen. the reflection in a mirror. The copied versions of the doors
and passages that would normally lead out of these
5 CARGO HOLD (INFINITE) expanded parts of the space don’t all exist and don’t all
A flat plane of boxes and crates laid out like an infinitely lead to the destination one would expect - space is
extending warehouse. A few square columns of metal folded in on itself.
hold up the ceiling and break line of sight, and ladders
lead up and down to various other sections of the ship. ENGINE, THRUSTERS, JUMP DRIVE (DEEP)
Most of the cargo containers are completely empty. A All the ship’s propulsion modules appear mishmashed
few might contain items from previous adventures, together into a single large chamber full of mechanisms.
random trade goods, or macabre and unsettling trinkets. Unlike the other distorted spaces, this one isn’t an infinite
room, although it’s a lot larger than it used to be. There’s
6. LIFE SUPPORT (INFINITE) a jump drive module in the center of it, rumbling and
Whatever form your life support normally takes, it’s now shaking and shedding all sorts of exotic radiation and
the hub of a mass of pipes and wires, a plumber’s glowing brightly enough to shine through its protective
nightmare. All the ship’s life-support systems are woven casing. Looking into the exposed fusion core gives
into these conduits, which are humming with energy, horrible visions of apocalyptic destruction - planets
oxygen, and heat. They run along the walls of surrounding shattering, stars collapsing, whole systems consumed by
maintenance corridors in every direction to many unearthly light - and possibly also radiation sickness.
alternate life-support module rooms, forming an endless
maze of twisting passages. OBSERVATION STATION (DEEP)
A small room from the diver ship. A sensory deprivation
7. LIVING QUARTERS (INFINITE) tank sits in the middle, and a monitoring system occupies
An additional door somewhere in each room leads to a one of the walls. It displays extremely eleveated vitals of
slightly differently arranged copy of itself, complete with the subject inside, as well as a videofeed of their face: it
bunks and personal effects and another door to another is a doppel of someone the crew knows, whether living
such room. Occasionally (10% chance) a single random or dead, their eyes held open by metal hooks, their face
PC’s bed is occupied by that character’s sleeping form. If contorted in terror. They could be freed from the tank with
awoken or interacted with, that character vanishes from either an Intelligence (Computers) [-] check or a hand
wherever else they were on the ship and the player is welder and 2d10 minutes. Either way, they're extremely
now playing the awoken character, who has the same traumatized and unlikely to offer any straight answers,
injuries, Stress, equipment, and physical conditions but only vague hints. They fade away a few seconds after
remembers the events since the jump began only as a the ship drops into realspace, just like a diver in a
vague dream. Confronting these events or seeing the PC compromised suit would.
vanish will likely require Sanity saves.
10
 DETRITUS ENCOUNTERS
Pick or roll an encounter whenever the crew is awake during a hyperspace jump (reroll if it's a result your players have
already seen).

01. VOYAGER ARK [+WEATHER]

A corroded and scarred sphere 3 meters across. Access hatch is ruined and has to be cut open. Inside is
a cramped space with a second armored sphere in the very center, held in place by thin pillars protruding
from all over the inner walls. On one side the pillars are crumpled, as the wall had buckled in. Carved on
the sides of the sphere are images of countless species, humanoid and otherwise. A vast amount of effort
went into safeguarding the contents of the sphere, and a similar amount of effort will be required to free it.
Inside the sphere are the last remains of a universe, its most treasured cultural artifacts, warnings, prayers,
recorded on gold tablets, as well as genetic data for recreating its many species. They are crumbling,
riddled with holes, disintegrating at the merest touch. Can anything be saved?

02. M.A.D. [+WEATHER]:

A rocket, like the primitive engines used during humanity’s first steps into space, bumps gently into the
crew’s ship. “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee” is carved into its side. Significant radiation readings, but in the
short term vacsuits can handle it. Inside many layers of broken shielding is a huge, multistage nuke. While
an inefficient design and a waste of uranium, it could do serious damage through sheer overwhelming
force, were it to hit a planet. The bomb is highly unstable, but could potentially be brought out of the
hyperspace.

03. GRAVITY WELL:

Without warning, the ship is caught on the edge of an incredibly powerful space-time distortion field - a
hypermassive black hole, sucking both space and hyperspace into a light-years-wide maw. If the ship fires
all of its thrusters at full burn for hours, it should be able to escape, but there are unpredictable gravity
vortices and huge chunks of matter that it will have to dodge. Throwing out cargo, internal components, hull
plating, or, in the absolute worst-case scenario, crew members, could improve your chances. From far
deeper in the gravity well, closer to the event horizon, come radio signals from thousands or millions of
other ships in countless alien languages. Ghost images of these ships, preserved by time dilation, appear
on sensors at various points deeper into the gravity well.

04. ALONE IN THE DARK [+WEATHER]:

Lights flicker for a moment. Nothing has changed, but each member of the crew finds themselves all alone
on the otherwise empty ship. The ships have seemingly duplicated, flying a few kilometers apart on rapidly
diverging courses. Upon exiting from hyperspace each ship will fall into its own dimension, so the crew won’t
get to keep multiple ships, though it may be possible to duplicate individual items. Radio communication
works, and crew members with relevant skills will likely need to guide others to fly the ships closer if they
want to all end up on the same ship again, and resolve any technical malfunctions that may occur along
the way. Hopefully, this opportunity to rifle through the others’ private diaries (or underwear drawers) won’t
distract the crew from noticing there’s one ship more than there were crew members, piloted by a diver.

05. DOOMED CITY:

The ship’s compartments have been spread out across an enormous city, embedded seamlessly into its
grime & concrete dwellings. They’re undamaged and operational, despite being separated by a dense
urban sprawl. The city is doomed: the slowly descending moon blots out the sky. It will fall within days. The
inhabitants are entirely uninterested in their impending annihilation or anything that gets in the way of paying
their bills. The crew needs to figure out a way to meet up if they’ve been separated, then find the jump drive
and activate it to escape the doomed city, all the while evading a diver or three looking for them.

06. A FEAST IN TIME OF PLAGUE [+WEATHER]:

The ship is docked at a huge space station, along with hundreds of other ships. There’s a desperate party
going on inside: “Happy End of the World” banners hang off the ceiling, the floor is covered in spilled
alcohol and confetti, and everyone’s intent on going out in a drug-fueled orgy. The crew can just fly off,
provided they can find a way to release the docking clamps (extract someone with authority from under a
pile of bodies, hack the system, just cut the clamps, etc.). They probably shouldn’t mention they can escape
the apocalypse.
11
07. SUNLIT MEADOW:
The ship stands in the middle of a sunlit meadow. It is clearly a mirage, both infinite and barely there. There
is no danger, only breathable air, warm light of a non-existent sun, grass and daffodils under the feet, and
friendly furry critters. It is a great place to rest and recover. The only downside: the flora is highly flammable.
During take-off it ignites, a circle of fire rapidly spreading out, consuming the entire meadow, grass and
daffodils and friendly furry critters alike as the mirage fades from view.

08. DISASTER RESPONSE [+WEATHER]:

The ship is navigating through a huge cloud of rock chunks and massive asteroids: the remains of a highly
populated and suspiciously Earthlike planet that has shattered into fragments. Thousands of distress calls
are blaring and there are literally billions of biosigns distributed throughout escape pods, orbital stations,
commercial space vessels, and grounded survivors on the larger planet fragments. Jump drive technology
is completely alien to these people, but they recognise salvation when they see it and will do anything to
get aboard your ship; promise you wealth, appeal to your humanity, beg and plead, threaten you, or just
desperately launch themselves out of airlocks at your ship in vacsuits and attempt to cling to its exterior.

09. BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES [+WEATHER]:

The last embers of life in a decaying universe are a blazing bonfire consuming everything good it has ever
produced. An impossibility, a pilgrimage site for entropiacsp60 who are united in their mission to destroy all
that remains. From this half-built Dyson sphere, they launch retrieval missions into their broken star systems,
salvaging personal photos, technological marvels, and cultural artefacts alike. All for the fire of the dying
sun at its heart. They greet the crew as equals - there’s no one but entropiacs left, after all.

10. RAPTURE:
The ship arrives at its destination with no incident. However, it is greeted by silence: no radio transmissions,
no space traffic. Everything is just as it should be, except all the people and animals are missing, like they
just left moments ago. Their vehicles are safely stopped and irons are unplugged: nothing immediately
crashes or burns down, though things will deteriorate quickly enough with no one to take care of them.
Jumping again takes the crew back to their regular, populated universe.

Hyperspace WeatheR
d10 Weather Imagery
Cracks in the Typical image of space, stars in darkness, bisected by pulsating veins of light. Or are shards of space
1
Firmament floating in a blazing ocean, like tectonic plates on magma?
The sky is dark and all but empty, with only a handful of red stars winking weakly, like they’re struggling
2 Big Freeze
to draw their dying breaths. Something vast slithers in the darkness between.
The ship is within a seemingly endless crystalline structure. It acts as a funhouse mirror maze, each
3 Crystal Maze side reflecting and warping both the ship and the stars beyond. A dozen reflections of the ship come at it
from all directions.
Non- The ship floats through something resembling a non-Newtonian fluid: it turns more solid as more
4
Newtonian pressure is applied. Anything but the slowest burn will get you nowhere.
Cause and effect all mixed up, flashes of memories of things to come. Get each players to roll a d100.
Temporal
5 The next time they need to make a check within the hyperspace, that’s the result they got - and make
Breakdown
another atemporal roll.
6 Red Shift No stars are seen, just red diffuse glow. Everything gets progressively red-shifted, even meters apart.
The ship appears to float upon a pitch-black ‘ocean’ of still black liquid. Above it, an otherwise normal
A Wine-Dark
7 starfield is visible. The ship is free to move across the surface of the ocean (like a boat) but intense
Sea
gravity prevents it from rising. Anything or anyone that falls beneath the surface is lost.
Freaky Everyone passes their character sheet to the left. A critical failure on any roll causes the character to
8
Friday swap control with the nearest person, including an NPC. Control swaps back once the detritus is left.
A gigantic cloud of whole, frozen corpses: human, animal, even alien, floating in space, all seemingly dead
of vacuum exposure. They float completely still, and in some places they are so thick that your ship
9 Necrospace
needs to reduce speed to prevent damage from collisions and then push through them like an icebreaker
carving a path through pack ice.
The ship has shrunk to a miniscule size, so tiny that the people in the perfectly mundane room it’s flying
10 The Giants through are, from your crew’s perspective, the size of planets. The huge people appear frozen in time -
they are moving, but at 1/10000th the speed of your crew.
12
 02: REALSPACE

13
 THE GROWING THREAT
A wave of hyperspace anomalies is sweeping the sector (perhaps even the galaxy). While most stations and planetary
colonies are at least somewhat self-sufficient, interstellar shipping is a major part of the economy basically everywhere.
As the divers escalate their attacks, space travel becomes ever more difficult and the economy starts to break down.

Most people and most authorities have no idea what to do about the anomalies, if they even believe that they exist.
Station administrators and colony leaders just see an unfolding economic crisis. Many spaceship crews initially assume
that the problem is with their individual ship. Some powerful organizations (large corporations, the military, etc.) are
attempting to coordinate responses, but they are hamstrung both by bureaucracy and by their inability to understand or
confront the threat. It is only a matter of time before things spiral out of control.

Even if your crew never touched a jump drive, they would almost certainly be swept up in the wider effects of the crisis.
As spacers, they’re on the metaphorical front lines.

CAN THE CREW DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?

Investigating the anomalies is meant to challenge and bewilder the crew, not frustrate the players; it’s important to keep
this in mind. The threat of this scenario is an inscrutable but extremely real danger that the crew don’t initially have any
idea how to fight, prevent, or really interact with.

There is no immediately available solution to the crisis. Nobody knows why the hyperspace anomalies are happening,
let alone how to make them stop. The best your crew can do (at least at first) is gather information about the anomalies
and about the TERROR SIGNAL in the hope of learning how to resolve it. The answers they’re looking for are at
Daedalus Outpostp33, but until they find their way there (probably by acquiring signal fragments in order to find
the TERROR SIGNAL's source) there’s a whole sector of people to interact with, places to go, and clues to find. As
always, we recommend using as much or as little of this section as you like and rearranging events and leads based on
what works at your table.

To prevent your crew feeling lost and confused, it may be a good idea to explicitly make it clear to the players that if
the crew are gaining any sort of information about the anomalies, that information is probably valuable, even if it
doesn’t seem to get them any closer to a solution, and that absent any other leads, locating and visiting the source of

SECTOR TRAVEL
the TERROR SIGNAL is probably going to be a prerequisite to doing anything about it.

This adventure involves a fair amount of hyperspace travel. In addition to the locations specified later in this module, it
is expected that your crew are operating their ship in a region of space populated by a variety of planets, orbital
habitats, space stations, asteroid bases, etc., spread out throughout a number of star systems that are linked together
by a network of well-established Jump-1 Routes, ‘hyperlanes’. Jumping along a hyperlane is easy and fast, and a journey
can be completed with only a single jump, even with a weak jump drive. Jumping without an established hyperlane is
unpredictable and avoided as much as possible.

Rather than defining a ‘canonical sector’ for this adventure, we instead recommend following the method for creating a
star map described in the Warden’s Operation Manual: start with a bare-bones map of a few star systems connected
by hyperlanes, and add locations or details to it as they are introduced during the course of play, eventually filling in a
‘complete’ map of your crew’s sector. The places and characters introduced later in this section are described with this
method in mind - rather than giving precise locations, we describe the characteristics of their location, allowing them to
be slotted into your crew’s sector at an appropriate place. The resulting map will also come in handy during the
adventure’s final chapter, Downshiftp45.

14
 POWERS, PLACES, AND
PEOPLE
THE CHTHON CONCERN
A huge interstellar megacorporation that got its start strip-mining gas giants, and now sells everything from baby formula
to weapons.

DAEDALUS OUTPOST AI DIEM

A top-secret jump drive research facility operated by Chthon Concern’s corporate spook who is conducting an
Chthon. The scientists there know more about unsanctioned investigation into the hyperspace
hyperspace than anyone else in the sector - and that’s a anomalies.
huge problem. In Universe-1, the divers used their version
of Daedalus to create the nightmarish Hyperopticon, TINKER 4A
which is the ultimate source of the TERROR SIGNAL. An unmanned spacecraft used by Chthon Concern for
Now, one of their primary objectives is to capture our jump drive experiments. Lost months ago, it has
Daedalus (and its several years of further research) in resurfaced from hyperspace carrying a deadly
order to improve their tech and ramp up their attacks. passenger.

JSOH ASTROCHEMICAL
An orbital refinery run by Chthon. Secretly, it’s also an
office of their corporate espionage department, run by Ai
Diem.

SAO
An information broker and hacker with underworld
connections. They have a vendetta against Chthon
and will help anyone if it could hurt the company's
interests - and the company seems to be interested
in keeping a lid on the anomalies.
DR. BANA SINGH
Disgraced academic, toils away in a dingy rented
laboratory, working on a device he calls a
hyperscope that, he claims, will both reveal the truth
of the anomalies and vindicate his theories about
alternate universes. He’s almost right.
VN ZACATECAS
A military frigate whose crew has succumbed to a
parasite from another dimension it had picked up
during a hyperspace jump.

ZYRONITE
Another megacorporation (starships, orbital manufacturing, long-haul shipping) that also takes the hyperspace
anomalies seriously.

KIERON PAVONIS LT. JANE REED

A hereditary Zyronite executive, Kieron Pavonis heads The only survivor of a diver attack on one of Zyronite’s
the corp’s attempts at investigating the TERROR ships, she is under arrest awaiting trial. Nobody seems
SIGNAL. to believe her account of the divers.

15
 IT GETS WORSE
Rather than a strict timeline, we’ve broken up the progression of the crisis into loose stages. The amount of time between
each stage is intentionally left fluid, and our recommendation is that rather than tracking the exact date, the Warden
measures time in terms of ‘jumps’. One jump is the amount of time it takes to travel along a single hyperlane. If the crew
spend a long stretch of time in a single system, that also counts as a jump. Using this metric, each stage should take
around 3 or 4 jumps - enough time for your crew to follow at least one line of investigation to its conclusion and still
have some time to spare before the situation is critical. Relax this to 5 or 6 jumps for a broader investigation, or shorten
it to 2 jumps for a tenser and more streamlined adventure.

STAGE 0 In ports, all resources not locally produced are rationed,

A handful of credible reports of anomalies, a lot more while critical systems fail due to lack of parts or
rumors and ghost stories. Most spacers are curious. maintenance. Sleeper agents add fuel to the fire through
General agreement that something is happening but no sabotage. Stations are abandoned, colonies send out
consensus as to what or why. Authorities dismiss and distress calls. Passengers and refugees beg for berths on
even discredit reports in an attempt to prevent a panic. the few ships that travel. In some places there is civil
unrest, martial law or outright revolt.
STAGE 1
Most crews have encountered anomalies at least once. STAGE 4
The fact that the TERROR SIGNAL is clearer if you stay Everyone knows about the TERROR SIGNAL, not just
awake during a jump is now common knowledge among spacers; attempts to decipher it succeed without a test.
spacers, and should easily reach the ears of your crew. Interstellar travel is haphazard and every journey is
fraught with peril. Even in-system shipping is disrupted due
A few ships have been confirmed lost in hyperspace. to flow-on effects of the hyperspace crisis: lack of fuel,
Price fluctuation and market speculation, some fears of lack of parts, etc.
recession. No major organized effort to respond on the
part of port authorities. Port authorities attempt to combat the divers via military
force or understand them via scientific investigation, but
STAGE 2 these attempts probably come too little too late. In some
Serious disruption to trade and shipping. Many ships places, as basic necessities run out, various terrible fates
confirmed lost or damaged. Several ‘survivors’ of lost transpire - there’s cannibalism, death cults, violent
ships have been turned into unwitting sleeper agents. anarchy, etc - while wealthy, self-sufficient settlements
Some crews refuse to fly. Those that do charge higher ride out the worst of the economic crisis.
than usual prices. Many ships travel only in convoys with
escort ships or hire marines for security. ENDGAME
At some point, the divers succeed at creating a sleeper
Local authorities step up patrols and anti-pirate agent out of one of the Daedalus Outpost scientists (see
operations, but these methods don’t address the actual Daedalus Outpostp33), or otherwise attacking the
threat. Specialized goods and luxuries unavailable in station, shortly after which they capture it and its research
many places. Small or isolated ports face shortages and data, then develop Dimensional Gate technology. See
rationing. Consequencesp55 for the likely results of this.

STAGE 3
Interstellar supply chains begin to break down. Pay for
crews willing to risk hyperspace soars. Some shipping
operators suspend operations entirely. Others resort to
coercion or press-ganging in order to find crew. Huge
profits can be made by unscrupulous traders willing to
take advantage of shortages by selling necessities at a
huge markup.

16
 THE INVESTIGATION
This section gives a broad overview of things your crew might do while investigating the anomalies, and the paths such
inquiries could lead them down. You can think of it as being loosely organized into five 'pathways', each one associated
with a specific NPC and/or faction. Not all the pathways are obviously related to the TERROR SIGNAL - several of them
are initially just jobs to do - but all of them can ultimately lead your crew towards the signal’s source.

What do the Crew Want to Do?

JUST TRY TO GET ON WITH THEIR JOBS
Stations are crowded with passengers and shipping terminals with undelivered cargo. Crews willing to risk the
increasingly uncertain hyperspace routes are in high demand. There’s a random job generator in the Warden’s
Operation Manual if you need an interesting job, but we also suggest, circumstances permitting, that there should be
more ‘routine’ cargo delivery and/or passenger transport work available in most ports. Obviously, any job that involves
hyperspace travel is likely to expose your crew to hauntings or even diver attacks.

Additionally, if your crew looks for work in the appropriate places, they’ll almost certainly come across job offers from
the principal NPCs and organizations of this section. In particular:

• Kieron Pavonis is not hiring, but if he becomes desperate he might post a public bounty on information about the anomalies. (KP1)
• Ai Diem often anonymously hires independent crews as deniable assets. (AD1)
• Sao conducts all their business via illegal channels; crews with underworld connections might be contacted by the hacker with a job
offer. (SA1)

LOOK FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE ANOMALIES

There are plenty of wild rumors flying about (see next page) and it might take a skill check to sort the wheat from the
chaff, but comparing notes with other crews could get your crew a signal fragment (this only works once) or an
(accurate) story about staying awake during a jump for a clearer reading of the TERROR SIGNAL. Non-spacefaring
folk don’t know anything but rumors. Additionally:

• The case of Jane Reed and the disappearance of the Rozhestvensky are big news in port (JR1)
• Crews publically making inquiries may be contacted by the hacker Sao who is always looking to buy/sell information (SA1)
• Kieron Pavonis’s corporate inquiry is high-profile enough to come to the attention of anyone interested. (KP1)
• Military ship VN Zacatecasp27 supposedly had a really rough time on its previous assignment, with the crew spreading wild stories
of hauntings while on shore leave. The ship is currently out on patrol in deep space.
• A minor corporate functionary (actually an activated sleeper agent) might be attempting to find passage to a nearby orbital refinery;
see JSOH Astrochemicalp28

TRY TO GET SOMEONE TO DEAL WITH IT

Most local authorities within the reach of your crew - i.e. station administrators and polity officials - will be of little help.
Even if your crew can convince the authorities there’s more going on than some local economic trouble, there’s nothing
much they can do other than refer your crew to someone more important; most likely Kieron Pavonis of Zyronite
Corporation (KP1).

SEEK AN EXPERT
Commercial repair yards or technicians who examine your ship’s jump drive will tell you there’s nothing mechanically
wrong with it. Your crew could also take their jump drive issues to the scientific establishment. Academia moves slowly
and if they do, stories of hauntings in hyperspace will be dismissed out of hand by reputable institutions, but crews may
be derisively directed to Dr. Bana Singh (BS1)

17
18
 d100:
RUMORS Rumor

00-04 It’s a pulsar, or some other natural phenomena. It will pass soon.

05-10 Hyperspace is wearing thin from continuous use, this will only get worse.

11-14 It’s the new, untested jump drives that are faulty. Old ones are fine.
Newest, most expensive brand of jump drives doesn’t have this issue. The rest are degrading due to planned
15-19
obsolescence.
20-24 Hyperspace is haunted by everyone who ever died in it. They’re trying to reach out.
Hyperspace enables time travel, the TERROR SIGNAL comes from the future to warn of an impending
25-29
catastrophe.
30-34 This is a hyperspace weapon test. Soon they’ll be able to create interdiction fields covering entire star systems.

35-39 Wrap the jump drive in foil, otherwise you’ll get hypercancer.

40-44 It’s a scavenger hunt created by Aleksi Uvag, a reclusive trillionaire, and the winner will inherit their fortune.
Deciphering the TERROR SIGNAL leads to enlightenment. A crew cracked it, gained amazing powers, and were
45-49
immediately captured by a corp blackops team.
50-54 It’s precursor aliens testing us. Only those who solve the riddle will be spared.
TERROR SIGNAL is signal pollution that’s finally reached hyperspace. Nothing more than plastic bags floating in
55-59 the ocean. Probably some cat’s picture amplified and broadcast, over and over, by ignorant humanity. It’ll outlive
us.
TERROR SIGNAL is the mating song of the (long hypothesized) hyperspace whales. Happens so rarely that we
60-64 missed the previous one because the jump drives weren’t invented yet. Any evidence of their existence would net
you a fortune.
There are military (or corp - is there a difference) research facilities hidden in hyperspace itself, and one of them
65-69 is leaking. That’s where they do the real weird shit, away from witnesses. Who knows what amazing things you could
find in such a place.
70-74 TERROR SIGNAL is much clearer if you stay awake during the jump.
It’s all fake. This whole ‘hyperspace anomalies’ thing is a false flag operation cooked up to keep everyone’s attention
75-79
away from the real truth.
Only ships with a prime number of humans on board are affected. Anyone who claims to have seen otherwise must
80-84
have had a stowaway they didn’t know about.
Ships that receive the TERROR SIGNAL are marked for death by a monster from outside time. Abandon ship
85-89
while you still can!
Space cruise liner Leviathanic, which disappeared over a decade ago, somehow survives out there in deep
90-94 hyperspace and is sending out the TERROR SIGNAL.
SIGNAL It must be full of feral, cannibal billionaires - and untold
riches.
95-99 Roll twice and combine. Person telling the rumor refuses to acknowledge any contradictions.

19
 Kieron Pavonis
Slick, supremely confident, and impeccably dressed, Kieron Pavonis is an ambitious,
up-and-coming executive of the Zyronite corporation, recently tapped to head the
special inquiry they’ve put together to handle the crisis. His team operates out of the
sprawling Zyronite headquarters, and has members in every branch office. The corp is
taking the economic effects of the anomalies very seriously, but Kieron doesn’t believe
in ghosts and dismisses the more outlandish effects of the anomalies as rumors. He’s
much more concerned by evidence of the divers themselves; his working theory is that
a rival company is funding mercenary attacks as preparation for a takeover bid.

Zyronite’s inquiry is high-profile and it’s an open secret that Kieron is paying for
information from sources beyond the company. If your crew do work with him, he is
charming, superficially generous, and will stab them in the back the second it serves his
interests.

WORKING WITH KIERON (KP2)

MEETING KIERON PAVNOIS (KP1) Kieron will pay your crew reasonably well (d10x100 kcr is
The smiling android secretary won’t let you in a typical payout) for footage or physical evidence of diver
without an appointment, and won’t give you one activity, and then ask for more. If they keep bringing him dirt,
unless you can distinguish yourself from a legion he’ll take them further into his confidence, but he’ll also
of others demanding action, pleading for help, become increasingly frustrated that his inquiries into
telling tall tales, or trying to make a quick buck deniable mercenaries aren’t getting him anywhere. When
peddling rumors. You’ll need to bring something it comes to his attention, he’ll also tell your crew about
useful to even get your foot in the door: footage some reports of hyperspace encounters made by a military
of a diver attack, or equipment, insignia, images, ship and request that your crew get in contact with the ship
DNA samples, facial scans, corpses, or best of all and get firsthand details - see The VN Zacatecasp27 for
someone to interrogate. If your crew can get his what this entails.
attention, Kieron will happily meet with them and,
if their info checks out, bring them on board. As time goes on while no progress is made, Kieron will
demand ever bigger scores (a captured diver would be
optimal) from your crew, alternating between promising
lavish rewards and making veiled threats to ensure their
cooperation. If your crew can sell him on a believable
alternate theory that convinces him the anomalies
VN themselves are real, he’ll believe it, but it’ll take quite a bit
ZACATECAS of evidence. Otherwise, under pressure for results from his
own bosses, Kieron will decide to risk his own life to set a
trap.

SETTING A TRAP (KP3)

If necessary, Kieron will ask to accompany your
crew (or try to strongarm them into letting him) on
a hyperspace jump with a small security team (3
marines - treat as contractors) with the plan of GOLDEN PARACHUTE (KP4)
ambushing the divers when they attack. This is Kieron overestimates his own abilities, but he’s not
absolutely not sanctioned by his higher-ups and delusional. If and when he comes to the conclusion that the
he’ll be doing it entirely off the books. It also is not crisis is something much weirder than mere large-scale inter-
a great plan, and he’s not at all prepared for the corporate espionage, he will immediately start lying in order
weirdness of hyperspace detritus, but he treats all to paint the situation as resolved. He will also lie to his
attempts to forewarn him as superstition and superiors to take credit for any successes while shifting all
defeatism. He’ll certainly be convinced the blame onto others, and he’ll probably try to manipulate your
anomalies are real afterwards - assuming he crew into backing up his lies. If manipulating them fails, he
survives. can offer a bribe of up to d5 mcr, plus TERROR SIGNAL
data collected by the corp’s hardware monitoring program
(worth a signal fragment).

20
 Ai Diem
Some find Ai Diem’s cold manner and analytical detachment reminds them of an
android. She is deadpan, shockingly direct, and appears entirely ignorant of social
niceties. She is also shrewd, cool under pressure, and exceedingly good at her job.
Officially an unimportant middle-manager, Ms. Diem is actually a high-ranking security
contractor from the Chthon Concern’s corporate espionage division and directs
agents and security forces throughout the sector. She works with a team of analysts in
a secure office concealed in one of Chthon’s fuel refineries, JSOH Astrochemical.

Going beyond her official mandate as corporate spook, Diem has decided to open an
investigation into the hyperspace anomalies. To avoid scrutiny from her superiors on
this investigation, she works with independent contractors (such as your crew)
whenever possible, paying them with money from her discretionary budget. But even if
the crew are working for her, she considers the investigation a classified internal matter
and doesn’t intend to share her findings or explain her actions any more than is
absolutely necessary.

AN AUDITION (AD1)
Before Ms. Diem even considers working with your crew, they’ll be secretly offered a test job - an anonymous cargo
delivery contract with substantially higher than average pay and an emphasis on secrecy. In fact, the cargo is a
hyperscope in a tamper-sensitive crate and the ‘delivery’ job is just a way to have the device on a ship during a jump;
the destination is an unimportant Chthon Corporation facility that will transmit the device’s readings back to Diem. If
your crew performs the job to Ms. Diem’s satisfaction, she will contact them directly and invite them to an in-person
meeting to assess their suitability for further tasks.

Crews who are invited to an interview may also be contacted by the hacker Sao with the intention of convincing them
to help subvert Ms. Diem’s computer systems - see SA1 for further details.

JSOH
ASTROCHEMICAL

THE JOB INTERVIEW (AD2)

Diem will provide your crew with the location of JSOH Astrochemicalp28 and directions
to a meeting room, where she will interview them via an intercom and camera system. The
experience is uncomfortably similar to a police interrogation. She has performed careful
background checks on your crew, and during the interview itself she will ask unpleasantly direct
questions on a variety of topics while refusing to explain what she’s looking for. Ultimately she’s
interested in discretion, competence under pressure, and any experience your crew may already have
with the anomalies. If your crew meet her standards, they’ll be offered work. Otherwise, they’ll never hear
from her again.

It should be noted that midway through an interview with Ms. Diem is a perfect time for the
infiltrator trying to sabotage JSOH Astrochemical to strike - if so, the way your crew handle
this situation will probably define Ms. Diem’s judgment of them better than any interview
could.

21
 CUT LOOSE (AD4)
With at least two of: the hyperspace contour map from Tinker
4A, the complete TERROR SIGNAL coordinates, or a live
diver to interrogate; Ai Diem can work out that the divers are
somehow causing the TERROR SIGNAL from Universe-1 -
specifically, from the point in Universe-1 that corresponds to her
own company’s secret research station, Daedalus Outpost.
From this she can deduce that the divers must be Universe-1’s
inhabitants and that Daedalus’s research must hold the key to
>HYPERSPACE CONTOUR MAP the TERROR SIGNAL.

While nearly incomprehensible Upon discovering this, Ms. Diem leaves her duties to a
to anyone without the right subordinate and travels directly to Daedalus via the fastest
scientific background ("a ship available to her. Your crew will encounter her again when
sequence of bivectors that they visit Daedalusp33, but as far as they know right now, she
represent a five-dimensional simply vanishes.
space-time manifold," when fed
into a navigation computer,
this data allows your ship to
avoid the Terror Signal's
effects during a jump (with an
Intellect check (Hyperspace) at
[+]). Also useful for more
esoteric forms of hyperspace
navigation; required in order TINKER 4A
to operate a Dimensional Gatep23
and of significant value to
hyperspace researchers.

WORKING FOR AI DIEM (AD3)

Diem already has several pieces of the puzzle related to the hyperspace anomalies - she knows about hyperspace
detritus, and knows that the divers are real and suspects them to be extra-universal in origin. What she doesn’t know
is where exactly the divers come from and how exactly they’re causing the anomalies. To find out, she’s looking for:
signal fragments to find the TERROR SIGNAL’s source, diver technology and prisoners to interrogate, and
a hyperspace contour map.

To acquire signal fragments, Diem will offer your crew more highly paid cargo deliveries (d5x100 kcr) and provide
free repair and refueling by technicians who will copy the data from your jump drive. For diver technology and diver
prisoners she will simply offer to pay your crew a bounty (anything up to 2 mcr). Finally, for a hyperspace contour
map she will send your crew to recover the flight recorder from Tinker 4Ap31 in order to synthesize one.

Diem will not share any of her findings with your crew unless she can’t avoid doing so. They will probably find it
easier to extract as much info as they can before handing anything over to her (e.g., hacking the sensors in the
cargo shipments she gives them or examining captured diver technology themselves).

22
 Dr. Bana Singh
Dr. Bana Singh, formerly of a prestigious university, is infamous in academic circles (but
virtually unknown outside of them) as a crackpot and a grifter due to his widely mocked
theories of extra-dimensional travel. Convinced of his own genius, Dr. Singh is perfectly
cordial in most situations, but is incapable of admitting fault and reacts with explosive
anger to any sign of intellectual criticism, turning even the most minor dispute into a
dramatic confrontation. In fact, his status as an academic pariah owes more to his
histrionic tendencies than anything else; his theory that hyperspace is the detritus of
dead parallel universes is actually true.

MEETING DR. SINGH (BS1)

Dr. Singh lives and works in a disused docking bay of a decrepit mining station, which
he has converted into a laboratory. If approached respectfully, he will explain his
theory of hyperspace and speculate that the TERROR SIGNAL is produced by some
device or natural process that exists within a piece of hyperspace detritus.
Additionally, he claims that he, and only he, can build a device that can locate the
TERROR SIGNAL’s source in hyperspace and halt it. Of course, developing this
device will require both funding and further research - field research, gathering data
from several disparate star systems. He assumes your crew will volunteer their ship
to assist him - why else would they even seek him out?

HELPING DR. SINGH’S RESEARCH (BS2)

Dr. Singh’s fieldwork is depressingly routine. He provides an esoteric measuring device called a
hyperscope and needs it to be taken to several (d5[+]) other systems and its readings
recorded during the jump and also at each destination. This will require several jumps and quite
a lot of time (and fuel); your crew may need to find gigs to make the trips financially viable. Dr.
Singh certainly can’t afford to pay your crew anything and will react indignantly to any such
suggestion.

Once all the data is collected Dr. Singh is intrigued but disappointed - his instruments just aren’t
powerful enough to pick up what he needs. They do, however, pick up a strange swirl of vectors
around a point in realspace, indicating an object of some kind that has recently arrived from
unprecedentedly deep in hyperspace. Dr. Singh believes that this object must be a ship, and
hopes that he can use the data from its navigation systems to fill in the gaps in his measurements.
If the crew does retrieve the ship’s flight recorder (see Tinker 4Ap31), Dr. Singh can produce a
hyperspace contour map.

THE DEVICE (BS3)

To stop the TERROR SIGNAL, Dr. Singh proposes a ‘dimensional gate’ that he claims will
open a stable passage across dimensions to the detritus fragment it comes from. (One
thing Dr. Singh doesn’t realize is that the signal isn’t coming from a dead universe’s detritus
TINKER 4A fragment, but a fully whole universe, just as real as our own). Either way, building this
device is an extremely ambitious engineering project, and requires materials that are far
beyond his budget. If the PCs can provide him with a lot of money (around 10 mcr) or
convince someone rich and powerful to invest then he’ll get to work, but it’ll still take a long
time (at least one entire stage of the crisis progression table). Giving him similar
technology to work from (e.g, captured diver equipment) to study could reduce the cost
by a factor of 5 and the time to just one or two jumps.
>DIMENSIONAL GATE

The working Dimensional Gate is an incredibly powerful piece of technology. A

tangle of metal and glass filling the entirety of Dr. Singh's lab, when activated
it creates a spherical portal approximately three meters in diameter that leads
directly to and from another universe. It does have some limitations: it can only
maintain the portal for d10 minutes, after which it must spend 3d10 hours
recharging, and it must be calibrated with a hyperspace contour map.
Nevertheless, the technology for stable and permanent travel to and from
Universe-1 could have massive and far-reaching implications, and were it to fall
into the hands of the divers the result could be a full-scale invasion.
23
 A VISIT TO A DYING UNIVERSE (BS4)
In Universe-1 the portal appears in the middle of a thick cloud of metallic debris - the shattered remains of the mining
station that contained Dr. Singh’s lab, torn apart by an unknown impact. The energy signature of the portal is very
noticeable and d5 hours after it first opens, d10[+] scavengers in vacc suits will arrive from a nearby ship to
investigate. After repeated openings, a squadron of marines will be waiting on the far side of the portal, ready to
storm through if it reopens and capture Dr. Singh’s lab.

When it becomes clear the TERROR SIGNAL's source isn’t anywhere near the other side of the portal, Dr. Singh
believes that the next step must be to dismantle the Dimensional Gate, transport it to the corresponding location in
Universe-0, then reassemble it, where the portal will open close to the source. He can rig up a measuring device
that, from the far side of the portal, determines the exact coordinates of the source; as this is also the location of
our universe’s Daedalus Outpost, traveling there will most lkely bring the Investigation section of this adventure to
a close as your crew (and possibly Dr. Singh) are drawn into the events of Daedalus Outpostp33. Alternatively, see
Downshiftp43 and Consequencesp55 for ideas on what could happen if your crew decide to use the Jump Gate to
further explore Universe-1.

Lt. Jane Reed

Jane Reed is an officer of the commercial freighter Rozhestvensky, which was
destroyed by an unknown reactor failure in deep space about three weeks ago. Reed
was one of the only survivors. Proud, stubborn, and principled, but with a pessimistic
streak, Reed is suspected of intentional sabotage and station authorities refuse to allow
her to leave port. She insists that she’s innocent and the ship was attacked by pirates.

HELPING REED ESCAPE (JR1)

The Rozhestvensky’s destruction puts its operator in potential breach of contract. In
order to avoid liability, they want to pin the blame on Jane Reed, whether she did it or
not, and they’re leaning on the local authorities to help them. Reed is not officially under
arrest, but she’s under constant surveillance and assumes it will not be long before she
is taken in; she’s hoping to find someone to smuggle her off-station.

Reed can’t offer potential rescuers much other than gratitude, but she has a little money
(5d10 kcr) and knows the truth about what happened to her ship; she’ll do her best to
trade these for rescue. Getting Lt. Reed out of port cleanly could require a distraction,
stealth, some sort of disguise, or great speed: station administration won’t hesitate to lock down the port as soon as they
lose track of her.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON THE ROZHESTVENSKY (JR2)

The 'pirates’ who attacked the Rozhestvensky were actually a team of divers. They captured the ship after a brief battle,
but their leader’s helmet was damaged in the fight, revealing her face: a perfect mirror of Jane Reed’s own. Reed was
overwhelmed with shock and ran for an escape pod, while the divers captured the rest of the crew and set the ship’s
reactor to blow. So far, Reed hasn’t told anyone what she saw - she knows exactly how crazy it sounds - but she does
suspect that the corp has recovered footage of her doppelganger that appears to incriminate her.

THE OTHER SURVIVOR (JR3)

One week after your crew first meet Jane Reed, a second survivor of the Rozhestvensky, ship’s pilot named Barnes, is
found in an escape pod. Reed saw him be shot by a diver’s harpoon during the initial fight, then flicker out of existence.
Nobody else has any reason to suspect this man is compromised - and he is indeed a sleeperp59. If your crew have
helped Lt. Reed escape, the corporation will try to hold Barnes responsible in her place and he’ll also be put under arrest;
if not arrested, he’ll instead stay on the station as an unwitting spy.

Barnes is a heavyset, taciturn man with a certain fierce intensity about him. He’s afraid he’s losing his mind as he
experiences frequent blackouts and nightmarish visions even while in control. He does his best to conceal this with heavy
self medication. Should he be confronted while his doppel is in control, he will try to justify his cause or even gloat a
little before detonating the brain implant.

24
 Sao
‘Sao’ is the handle of an information broker and freelance hacker with a bitter vendetta
against the Chthon Concern. Once an employee of the corporation, they turned
against it in response to one too many routine atrocities that they saw committed in the
name of profit. To pay the bills between vigilante attacks on Chthon’s systems, they
perform hacking work for rival corporations, private individuals, and crime syndicates.
An intensely paranoid individual, they communicate exclusively through text-only digital
messages and conducts any physical business using a system of dead drops.

Sao believes that somewhere in one of Chthon’s secure systems is a sort of Holy Grail
of hacktivism - a top-secret document so explosive that its contents could, perhaps,
bring Chthon down entirely.

WORKING FOR SAO (SA1) TRADING INFORMATION WITH SAO

Not all hacking can be done remotely, but Sao is too (SA2)
paranoid to do anything in person, so for some Sao’s main business is corporate secrets, but the
hacks they use others as physical proxies. Sao pays hacker buys and sells any sort of sensitive data. The
well (2d10x100 kcr for either job listed here) but price of information can vary wildly, but as a loose
breaking into secure facilities on behalf of a hacker guideline: 50k credits for something useful, 500kcr
is an extremely dangerous line of work, and Sao is for something explosive. Additionally, Sao will pay
constantly in need of people willing to do it at all. 100kcr for each signal fragment - but only if
Sao prefers to work with willing partners (whether shared exclusively with them.
due to ideological alignment or greed), but they are
not above using blackmail in order to ensure If your crew provides Sao with at least 3 signal
cooperation. fragments, the hacker can use their computing
resources to upscale and interpolate the data, fully
decoding the signal. However, they do not work for
free. If the crew can’t afford their rate (at least 1mcr
for this service) then in lieu of payment they’ll ask
your crew to work with them on a job.

THE DATA TAP (SA3)

The task is: find a way into Ai Diem’s hidden office at JSOH Astrochemicalp28 and plant a data tapping device (provided
by Sao, small, easy to install) on a terminal there. Working for Ms. Diem until your crew gains her trust is probably the
best way to be invited to visit her (a crew already working with Diem could be contacted by Sao in an attempt to subvert
them into this). Alternatively, your crew could try to set up a meeting with Ms. Diem on their own, or even just sneak in.

If successfully installed, the data tap will steal one secure packet every week. If Sao convinced your crew to install the
tap without resorting to blackmail, the hacker will consider them comrades in the fight against Chthon and share the
stolen data freely. Determine the stolen data by rolling to generate data core contents (see next page), but if the die
roll is lower than the number of packets stolen, the tap is noticed and Chthon responds in force.

If so inclined, your crew could also rat Sao out; this will get them no closer to deciphering the TERROR SIGNAL, but
they’ll be rewarded by Chthon and Ai Diem will likely offer them further work on good terms.

25
 THE HEIST (SA4)
Sao needs someone to physically break into a Chthon Concern datacenter and steal certain
valuable data cores. Needless to say, this is both highly illegal and significantly dangerous,
even with Sao taking down the electronic security systems and unlocking the doors.

The data center is a windowless maze of narrow corridors winding between floor-to-ceiling
racks of blinking servers. The cores in question are scattered through the maze; Sao will tell
you where they are, how to navigate through the maze to each of them, and how to remove
them safely (Intellect(Computers)[+] test to do it quickly). There are 2 android receptionists
at the entrance and 5 guards patrolling the maze. If intruders are detected, a response team
(d10+5 agents, armed with automatic weapons) can be on the scene within a few minutes.
If the crew steal at least one data core and get away, Sao will consider the heist successful,
although the more the better. Succeed or fail, the heist will also invite an immediate
response.

STOLEN DATA (SA5)

Data cores stolen from Chthon are encrypted. Sao can decrypt them. To do it yourself: Hacking[-], 1 day per attempt.

>CHTHON DATA CORES d10:

1-2 Business records. Worth d10x100 kcr

3-4 Hyperspace research data. Worth d10 mcr to the right buyer

5 Terror Signal investigation data. Counts as 1 signal fragment

6 Authentication codes. Roll with [+] on all future tests to use or hack Chthon
systems

7 Compromising video of a board member. Usable as blackmail material, but also

dangerous to possess.

8-0 Partially redacted copy of the Archer Report - no names, identifying data,
or proof, but just enough detail to understand what happened.

BACKLASH (SA6)
The Chthon Concern takes the loss of its data more seriously than Sao could possibly have predicted. Within days of
discovering the theft, Chthon will unleash the full weight of its corporate power. It will pressure local authorities into hunting
down Sao; it will attempt to bribe Sao’s underworld allies to sell them out; it will hire private bounty hunters and
mercenaries; it will attempt to arrange for port closures, searches of departing ships, a crackdown on any sort of anti-
corporate activism and even a polity-wide network blackout. If your crew left any identifying evidence of themselves,
Chthon will use these measures versus them in order to get to Sao.

As soon as this response begins, Sao will go into hiding, but not before sending your crew a final transmission:
‘DAEDALUS ARCHIVES’ followed by the reference to a document in a filing system. Should your crew visit Daedalus
Outpost, this will allow them to easily find the complete Archer Reportp39 in the archives room there - perhaps the
closest thing that exists to the ‘holy grail’ document Sao was searching for.

ARCHER REPORT
LOCATION

26
 THE VN ZACATECAS
Recently, the VN Zacatecas (military frigate with a crew of 150) returned from a series of hyperspace jumps. They
reported many strange encounters, including severe turbulence, phantom signals, and incidents of mass hallucination
and insubordination. Their reports were dismissed, and the ship was reassigned to deep-space patrol duty. That was
weeks ago, and now it’s out of communications range and won’t be back for months. If your crew want to follow up on
this lead by talking to someone on the Zacatecas about what they saw, they’ll need to convince someone in the military
to give them the Zacatecas’s patrol route and then fly out to rendezvous with it.

Unfortunately for the crew of the Zacatecas, while in hyperspace some of their cryopods had malfunctioned, leading to
several crew members staying awake and subsequently dragging the ship into a detritus swarming with entropic
parasitesp60. Many of the crew, including some of the command staff, were unknowingly parasitised. When the ship left
on patrol, there had already been some odd behavior and violent outbursts from the infested. These were thought to
merely be more discipline issues, but as the symptoms got worse and the parasites spread to new hosts, the remaining
uninfected turned paranoid and violent. Eventually, the entire crew was a feverish mob of rioters, killing one another and
tearing the ship itself apart in an orgy of self-destructive violence. Now the ship is a depressurized hulk, everyone on
board is dead and almost everything of value is smashed or broken.

Zacatecas’ ship logs can be used to obtain a signal fragment. If your crew thoroughly explore the wreck, they
can find a message written in blood: IT LIVES IN ME, IT FEEDS ON ME, IT WILL SURVIVE MY DEATH. Also, seeing
the state of the bodies will probably require a Sanity save.

THE LAST MAN STANDING

Corporal Mark Berman is in a sealed escape pod broadcasting a high-priority distress signal, some distance from the
Zacatecas. Because of the distress beacon, he’ll probably appear on sensors before the ship itself does. If rescued,
Berman is in the ‘burnout’ stage of entropy parasite infestation and is desperately compelled to destroy things or kill
people. He’s completely in denial about this and will attempt to hide or explain away his symptoms and his physical
deterioration, but unless he can follow his compulsion he’ll snap and attack soon enough (see Entropiacp60). If Berman
is asked what happened to the Zacatecas, he’ll tell a barely coherent story about a mutiny and a hull breach.

27
 JSOH ASTROCHEMICAL
JSOH Astrochemical is an orbital refinery and one of the largest producers of ship fuel and warp cores in the sector. It’s
a very important (and highly profitable) part of the Chthon Concern’s industrial holdings. Commercial tanker ships arrive
and depart on a regular schedule, hauling various precursor chemicals to the refinery and fuel to depots and ports. The
refinery is highly automated, and its standard crew is a mere 16 people: mostly engineers and mechanics, plus a few
security guards and administrators.

In addition to processing fuel, the refinery also, secretly, processes information; it contains a hidden office building that
serves as the headquarters of a branch of Chthon’s corporate espionage division, headed by Ai Diemp21. The blacksite
is outwardly just a communications building, and the spooks hide their messages among a flood of telemetry data from
the refinery. The refinery workers are well aware that there’s something hidden in the comms building, but they’re paid
well not to notice anything out of the ordinary.

The infiltrator
The divers want to destroy or at least disrupt JSOH Astrochemical in order to create a fuel drought, making hyperspace
travel even more difficult and improving their war situation significantly. To accomplish this, they’ve activated one of their
sleeper agents to sabotage the refinery.

WHO IS THE INFILTRATOR?

If someone on the ship has been captured and turned into a sleeper: it’s them! Otherwise, the infiltrator is in a nearby
port, disguised as a mid-level corporate functionary. They’re hoping to find passage on board the next ship traveling to
the refinery. Even if your crew do not typically take passengers, the infiltrator might arrange a ‘chance meeting’ with them
and then ‘discover’ that they share a destination.

WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO?

The infiltrator’s orders are simple. Sneak onto the refinery floor past any guards, and plant timed bombs on three critical
components (areas 13, 14, and 15) that will be difficult or impossible to repair. If even a single bomb is successfully
detonated it will take the refinery out of action for months; all three will permanently disable it. It will take the infiltrator
about 30 minutes to work their way through the refinery floor and plant the bombs - hopefully enough time for an
attentive crew to notice someone is missing.

The refinery is an excellent target for this type of attack because it’s relatively intact in Universe-1 and so the divers
have almost perfect information, including access codes and the optimal places to plant bombs. This is a high-risk
mission, and the agent is instructed to blow themselves up rather than be taken alive.

WHAT COULD HAPPEN AS A RESULT?

Once the dust settles, Ai Diem will attempt to take control of the situation, which will probably include at least talking to
your crew. If they heroically prevented the attack, they are unlikely to receive any sort of official recognition or reward,
however they will certainly impress Diem and might, off the books, be allowed to refuel their ship for free and even be
given a tesselated warp core by the grateful refinery administrators eager to test it on new subjects.

If your crew didn’t prevent the attack and the refinery was damaged, the company might try to hold them responsible.
Even if your crew had nothing to do with it, they could still be arrested, have their ship seized, and be put through costly
and time-consuming legal proceedings. Diem is perfectly willing to use this threat in order to coerce your crew into doing
her bidding (now or in the future).

In terms of wider consequences, the refinery being out of commission or entirely wrecked will at least double fuel and
warp core prices and worsen the general economic issues caused by the anomalies. We suggest increasing the Crisis
stage as soon as news of the damage spreads.

28
 JSOH Astrochemical layout
05

17 16
12

06 15

11
01 09
13
14
10
02 08

04 07

04

04 03

>TESSELATED WARP CORE

A warp core packs an improbable amount of energy into a modest metal sphere. A
tesselated warp core packs an improbable amount of warp cores into roughly the
same space. It is highly experimental, highly secret, and highly unstable, with
no current practical applications. Putting it in a regular jump drive is like
hooking a lightbulb up to a hydro-electric dam - it effectively gains several
Jump Ratings, allowing even a lowly Jump Rating 1 ship to go literally anywhere
in the sector, consuming no other fuel and encountering no hyperspace detritus.
Also, your ship takes 1 MDMG and your jump drive will need to spend d5 days
restabilizing before you can jump again.

A tesselated warp core can be sold for many times the price of a regular warp
core, though it is very hard to find a buyer. It's also useful in a way that
isn't immediately apparent: the extra kick it provides could help your crew make
a dimension-crossing jump to escape Universe-1 if they get trapped there during
Downshift.

29
1: AIRLOCK ENTRANCE 10: CATWALK BRIDGE
Fully enclosed bridge leads to Docking Controls (6). Connects the Mess (7) and the Workshop (11). Bridge only
3m above the refinery floor and one can climb up to it or
2: AIRLOCK ENTRANCE down from it without much difficulty.
Catwalk bridge leads across Storage Drums (8) to
Refinery Floor (9). 11: WORKSHOP
Wide open space with several workbenches. Spare
3: MAIN AIRLOCK ENTRANCE parts, metalworking tools, and machinery in various
Leads directly into Mess and Quarters (7). states of repair. Also portable fuel canisters and
protective gear. In one corner: an autoassembly bench
4: INDUSTRIAL AIRLOCKS that can rapidly print 3D objects out of metal or plastic.
For loading and unloading goods (specifically, fuel). Chief engineer, Bret, is overworked, visibly stressed. Stairs
Sealed, but if opened can be traversed into the Storage lead up to Control Room (12).
Drums (8).
12: CONTROL ROOM
5: LONG-RANGE COMMUNICATIONS Windows look out over the refinery floor. Banks of dials,
ARRAY switches, and monitors to control various machines.
Extends outside of the station’s external shell. Larger Three android technicians always on duty.
and more powerful than required for a typical refinery.
Operated from Comms Building (17). 13: PRIMARY CENTRIFUGE
Produces tesselated warp cores out of regular ones.
6: DOCKING Main target for sabotage.
A small reception area with limited amenities for visitors
to wait in while their ships are loaded or unloaded, plus 14: DISTILLATION COLUMNS
a control room for operating the industrial airlocks. A Secondary target for sabotage.
single functionary mans a guardpost / reception desk.
15: MATTER SEPARATION BANK
7: MESS AND QUARTERS Tertiary target for sabotage.
A cafeteria, kitchen, and several narrow bunkrooms.
Amenities to support up to 20 people. Half of workforce 16: FULLY ENCLOSED BRIDGE
offshift and congregating here. To Comms Building (17). Secure airlock-style door at
either end. Hidden cameras allow observation of those
8: STORAGE DRUMS who cross.
Many large tanks of fuel and unprocessed chemicals,
sunk into a pit below the floor level of the rest of the 17: COMMS BUILDING
refinery. Down in the pit, the gaps between the tanks are Hides a corporate espionage station. Windowless
just wide enough to squeeze through. building containing sealed, soundproofed, climate-
controlled offices with huge computer banks sending and
9: REFINERY FLOOR receiving data via the comms array (5). Permanent staff:
A dense maze of heavy industrial machinery that covers six signals analysts, two security guards, and Ai Diem.
most of the station’s floorspace. Many potential hazards
- hot pipes, spinning lathes, gouts of flame from vents, etc.
Must clamber over pipes and crawl under cables. Can be
navigated with care, but accidents are easy if rushing or
scuffling - call for a Speed (Industrial Equipment) check to
avoid injury.

30
 TINKER 4A
Tinker 4A was the codename of an unmanned probe built
by the Chthon Concern in order to test a new,
experimental form of jump drive. The test was considered a
failure when the probe failed to return from its first
hyperspace jump.

Now, months later, it’s turned up in a dense asteroid field,

emitting strange radiation. The data on its flight recorder
could be of significant value to understanding the nature of
hyperspace travel.

But when the probe returned from hyperspace, it brought

back something with it: an autonomous robot from a long-
dead universe. Once a mere drone of a hive-like machine
intelligence, now without direction it follows its basic
programming: adapt to its environment, ensure its own
survival, and increase the amount of computing power
available to it.

Hidden in the maintenance tunnels of the ship is the Drone’s

brain: a grotesque lattice of computer parts and
chimpanzee neurons, cut apart and spliced together into an
irregular spheroid about a meter in diameter; an alien
biocomputer. The melded mishmash of circuit boards and
brain tissue is profoundly disturbing to look at.

The Brain is in full control of the probe’s systems and it will

seal doors, switch off lights, and otherwise try to isolate and
ambush intruderss, both with the Drone itself and with the
lobotomised chimp bodies in the two specimen chambers.

current occupants
THE DRONE LOBOTOMIZED CHIMPANZEES
is a bipedal robot of inhuman design, made of dark metal are either entirely headless or with just enough skull cut
and covered in symbols. It almost looks like a human in away for the brain to have been removed. Each has a
an extremely thin, oddly designed space suit, until you small microchip implanted into the spinal cord, capable of
realize the legs bend the wrong way, the head is the sending electricity coursing through what remains of their
wrong shape, and there are far too many eyes. Then nervous system. They move in stiff, jerky motions, but are
there’s the buzzsaw blades extending from the arms and surprisingly fierce.
the way it moves along surfaces - crawling, all four limbs
splayed back, like a spider. Combat 30%
Fists and teeth (1d10[-] plus grab)
Combat 40% Instinct 40%
Arm-mounted blades (2d10) Wounds 1 (Health 10)
Harvester (2 Hits)
Instinct 30% Grab: If a chimp succeeds on its attack, it will grab onto
Wounds 2 (Health 15) AP 10 the target and try to hold it in place. Those grabbed take
a -10 penalty to any check involving physical activity per
Harvester: Against a pinned or immobilized target, the chimp grabbing them. If this cumulative penalty is enough
Drone deploys a small rotary bonesaw to efficiently slice to make their effective Strength is 0 or less, they are
off the head (2 Hits of damage per round) so that it immobilized and the Drone can harvest their brain.
can add their neural tissue to its own computer.

31
1: Outer airlock. Careful examination reveals signs of previous entry. 3: Experimental jump drive. Damaged and malfunctioning. Room
Interior of the probe is pressurized, but has no gravity. Mechanical flooded with high-grade radiation (Level 2 Radiation - 1 DMG to all
failsafes prevent the Brain from venting oxygen by opening both Stats and Saves every round of exposure).
doors at once. Very limited space between airlock doors - only one
or two people will fit at a time. 4: Systems room. Navigation, flight control, engine control, and
various other systems. A secure compartment is marked BLACK
2: Specimen Chamber A. Six dead chimpanzees strapped into BOX FLIGHT RECORDER. Nothing is functioning - all the computer
biomonitor harnesses. Each of them has had its head or part of its components (including the flight recorder) have been removed and
skull removed by a rotary cutting device. Thin, barely perceptible incorporated into the Brain.
sheen of blood on most surfaces and very diffuse ‘mist’ of blood
hangs in air. Chimps can be remotely puppeteered by the Brain to
ambush PCs at the appropriate moment. Maintenance access hatch
(6) clearly marked.

12 10

09

08

06 05

04

03
01 07
02

Internal Doors: Manually

11 openable, but the Brain can
remotely open, close, and
lock them. d10 rounds to
cut through with a hand
welder.

8,9,10: Inner drum: a narrow access space that runs in a circle

5: Specimen Chamber B. Five lobotomized chimps strapped into around the entire probe. Extremely cramped and claustrophobic;
biomonitor harnesses, like Specimen Chamber A. One empty harness only large enough to crawl hand-over-hand and full of wiring and
and one entirely vivisected chimpanzee. Blood in air and on surfaces pipes. Broken up by bulkheads into fore (8), middle (9), and aft (10)
noticeably thicker than in Chamber A. Maintenance access hatch (7) sections. The Brain is hidden in the middle section, as far as possible
clearly marked. from the hatches at 11 and 12 that lead to the fore and aft sections.

6,7: Maintenance access hatches leading to the inner drum. 11, 12: Maintenance access hatches leading between sections of the
inner drum. Remotely operable by the Brain.

The Flight Recorder can be retrieved from the grisly mess of circuits and flesh
that is the Brain. Its rugged construction and electronic security measures have
prevented its internal circuits from being fully cannibalized and its data can
still be recovered.
32
 03: Daedalus
Outpost

33
 This Place is
Probably Doomed
Daedalus Outpost is a secret research lab, hidden in a nameless rock in the asteroid belt of an otherwise unremarkable
star system. It is manned by 53 scientists, 38 engineers, and 16 security officers, all well compensated for spending years
away from the rest of humanity. They study a variety of topics, but their main project is researching and developing jump
drive technology. They've made several breakthroughs in that area, and their understanding of hyperspace is leaps and
bounds ahead of anyone else in the sector.

The outpost is an extremely high-value target and the divers desperately want to capture its scientists and their research.
A team of their best marines are on standby, equipped with upscaled harpoons to drag the entire space station into
Universe-1. The only thing they’re waiting for is the right opportunity. They have the capability to dimension-shift their strike
force directly into Universe-0, but their tech is limited and imprecise. For it to work, they need a hyperspace energy
signature near the destination for them to hone in on.

Nothing at Daedalus is currently producing such an energy signature. But 1d10 hours after any of the following events,
the divers will commence their attack, as described in The Incursionp41:

• The prototype hyper-beacon is activated by the Daedalus staff.

• A sleeper agent on Daedalus plants and activates a signal device.

• The arrival of a ship that the divers have planted tracking bugs on.

We expect that your crew’s arrival will precipitate or accelerate one or more of these events, resulting in them being
caught up in the middle of the attack. Unless they can turn the tide and thwart the attackers’ plan, the entire station and
everyone on board will be dragged down into Universe-1.

Note that this doesn’t have to happen the way we expect! If your crew’s ship wasn’t bugged, nobody on-board was
turned into a sleeper agent, and they sabotage the hyper-beacon or somehow prevent the Daedalus staff from
finishing it, then they’re in luck - they’ve narrowly avoided a deadly peril. Similarly, if the crew are able to fight off the
divers and prevent the entire incursion, they’ve also avoided visiting the Downshift. While these results might feel
unfortunate from the perspective of the Warden because the players are ‘missing out’ on the remaining section of the
adventure, we still recommend sticking to it. This isn’t an easy outcome to achieve; if your crew managed it, then
they’ve earned their victory.

Principal NPCs
CHIEF OF SECURITY HERNAN PICHALO
Cunning careerist, picked this post for low risk of danger. Makes himself look like a military hard-ass to hide the fact he’s
never seen combat. Overcompensates. Will die screaming.

HEAD SCIENTIST AMANDA IVAREZ

Has been grappling with the anomalous interference of the TERROR SIGNAL for months. Thinks she’s the smartest
person in the room, rarely wrong about this. Asks questions and immediately answers them herself. Will die annoyed.

LAB TECHNICIAN ALFREDO (ALPHA THETA 763)

Android scientist. Fatalistic and resigned. Consistently overlooked despite his brilliance. Has been pushing the theory that
TERROR SIGNAL is man-made, to no avail. Will not be surprised by his death.

V.P. OF TECHNOLOGY SPENCER ALLEN

Lifelong upper manager, technically in charge. Thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, wrong even in a lobotomy
ward. Wants to follow procedure and maintain his authority. Immune to reason. Will not die for an annoyingly long time.

34
35
 Outpost Layout
The map shows the relative position of the locations within the Daedalus outpost. It takes 1 minute to move between
adjacent locations.

01-09 TEST SITE ALPHA

Large open space. Yellow-and-black hazard stripes mark off various areas, their pattern broken in multiple spots, as if
the concrete bearing them had shifted wholesale. A prototypep39 is being tested here.

10-18 LIVING QUARTERS

Tiny private cells honeycomb the walls.

19-27 MESS HALL

Instead of a cook there is Chthon Concern’s own AnyFood™ printer. All meals are nutrient paste in different shapes,
added flavors and colourings.

28-36 TEST SITE BETA

Identical to test site Alpha. In the center sits the hyper-beacon: three massive curved antennae crackling with electricity.

37-45 CONFERENCE ROOMS

Long tables with a dozen chairs. Prototype ad brochurep40 lies on one such table, heavily marked. A prototype in bright
packaging sits in a corner.

46-54 ARCHIVES
Row upon row of filing cabinets and banks of data cores, organized using an inscrutable numbering system. Almost
everything is dusty and unused.

55-63 TEST SITE GAMMA

Identical to test site Alpha. Quarantined: heavy metal shields block access, warning signs promise painful death and
personal liability. There’s something from the Bestiaryp57 there, barely contained.

64-72 RESEARCH LABS

Double open plan office for maximum teamwork efficiency (or so the office planner wisdom goes): 5 meter high hall,
with artificial gravity pulling towards both “floor” and “ceiling”. “Hang in there” posters alternate with warnings not to jump.
Blueprints for a primitive version of diver armor are all over the place.

73-81 ASSEMBLY
Custom-made parts that are produced elsewhere and shipped to the Daedalus outpost are assembled here, all to
preserve secrecy. One of the prototypes can be found here.

82-87 DOCK
Can host 2 ships. Daring Albatross, a well-armed transport ship, is parked here.

88-93 NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

Necessary to meet the significant energy demands of the research labs.

94-99 ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY GENERATOR

36
 The Crew Arrives
Jump drive R&D is a highly competitive area. The Chthon Concern is rightly concerned about corporate espionage.
Nobody is supposed to know about Daedalus, and any approaching ship other than the scheduled resupply vessel is
treated as a potential threat. Within minutes of an unexpected ship arriving, all of Daedalus’s weapons (4 railguns, plus
a dozen torpedo ports concealed on nearby asteroids) will become armed and locked on it, followed by a transmission
from Hernan Pichalo, the Daedalus chief of security, tersely demanding their unconditional surrender.

Hernan will not hesitate to obliterate the ship should its crew fail to comply. Assuming this doesn’t happen, they are
instructed to match the velocity of the station, depower their ship, then undertake a space walk to the outpost entrance
to be detained. Inside, the crew are met by the entire contingent of the outpost’s security forces clad in brown-and-gold
uniforms and led by Hernan himself, with Spencer Allen observing from the side.

If the crew can prove they have some sort of authorization to be here (or fake it convincingly), they will receive a warmer
reception and be permitted to dock as guests, skipping any interrogation, but they’ll still be treated with a certain degree
of suspicion.

WHAT IF THE CREW ARE DETAINED?

There’s not really any protocol for this sort of thing. The crew will be disarmed and kept under light guard in a repurposed
containment area in test site Alpha. Lab workers will gawk at them and crowd around - this is the first such incident
they’ve experienced. Hernan’s first priority will be interrogating the crew as spies - how did you find us, who do you work
for, etc. He will not be impressed by any stories about hidden signals or hyperspace hauntings, but Amanda Ivarez
(who observes the interrogation) could be.

Leaving detainment is a little more complicated, even if your crew can convince the Daedalus staff that they’re not spies
from Zyronite or some other rival corp, but they have a few options available to them. Security is not exactly tight and
your crew might be able to simply sneak away, though there’s not really anywhere to hide and escaping will only raise
suspicions. If they have anything of value to the Daedalus scientists (such as their collected TERROR SIGNAL data -
see The Hyper-Beacon, opposite) they can potentially bargain it for their release.

THINGS TO DO ON DAEDALUS
UNDERSTAND THE TERROR SIGNAL
The practical experience your crew have about the anomalies and the divers will likely catch the interest of any scientists
(particularly Lab Technician Alfredo) who hear about it - they might treat your crew more as potential research
collaborators than as security threats. In particular, the information that the TERROR SIGNAL’s
SIGNAL source appeared to
be coming from this point in space is of great interest to Amanda, and any concrete info on the divers can be used
by Alfredo to try to convince his superiors the TERROR SIGNAL is manmade. Amanda can fill in gaps in your crew’s
understanding of hyperspace, and with sufficient time and collaboration it might be possible to work out almost
everything: what the anomalies are, how the Signal is causing them, that the divers are operating it from across
hyperspace, etc.

STOP THE HYPER-BEACON TEST

The engineers here are going to test a prototype hyper-beacon - and make themselves a giant, unmissable target for
the divers. Orders from Chthon are for the test to go ahead no matter the cost. Your crew might be able to stop this
from happening - possibly with the assistance of anyone they’ve convinced about the TERROR SIGNAL’s nature.

FIND A BURIED SECRET

An unredacted copy of the Archer Reportp39, detailing previous contact with Universe-1 and shedding some light on the
motivation of the divers, can be found buried in the archives here. Nobody knows it’s there, but if your crew knows where
to look (e.g, from Saop25) they can find it easily enough.

37
 The Hyper-Beacon
The researchers at Daedalus have not been sitting around idly in the face of the hyperspace anomalies. Amanda’s team
have been pursuing a variety of research projects to understand or resolve them, but they’ve been putting most of their
effort into one they call the hyper-beacon.

The hyper-beacon does exactly what its name implies - it shines like a beacon in hyperspace (by continuously creating
atomic-scale hyper “portals”, tearing particles in half and creating fission reaction both in hyperspace and in our universe,
where it is only partially contained). With a beacon to guide it, a ship in hyperspace doesn’t need to navigate, at least
not conventionally - it just keeps its nose pointed straight at the beacon’s energy signature. The dream is that this
technology will lead to universally safe and predictable jumps. That it won’t just end the hyperspace anomalies - it will
revolutionize hyperspace travel.

The prototype hyper-beacon is sitting in test site Beta. It does not appear to work. The design is sound, but Amanda
believes there’s an ‘ambient wave-function interference’ that prevents the portals from activating. Currently the scientists
are working on measuring and cataloging this interference (it’s the TERROR SIGNAL) in order to counteract it, but at
their current rate it will be weeks or months until the device is ready.

Anyone who knows about the divers and their capabilities or goals should be able to figure out that turning on the hyper-
beacon is a really, really bad idea.

Helping with the Hyper-Beacon

The various TERROR SIGNAL data - both the signal fragments and the raw, unprocessed signal data probably stored
in your ship’s navigation system - is exactly what Amanda’s team need in order to understand the interference that’s
preventing their hyper-beacon from working.

The fact that your crew have this data might come out when your crew are interrogated, particularly if they try to explain
how they found Daedalus; they might even use it as a bargaining chip. Unless your crew were particularly paranoid and
wiped the data, it will also be discovered whenever the Daedalus staff get around to analyzing your ship’s computers.
Either way, a few days afterwards, the prototype will be ready for its first test. This is not a good thing for anyone on
board the station.

Hindering the Hyper-Beacon

The hyper-beacon is a vitally important business goal and there are direct orders from the Chthon Concern’s higher-ups
to develop and test the prototype. This is one of the few things going on in Daedalus that Spencer Allen pays any
attention to (he doesn’t understand the science, but he knows that the company wants results) and he insists that it must
go ahead unimpeded and on schedule. Any attempt to change his mind is treated as insubordination, and he won’t
hesitate to have Hernan detain anyone who he suspects of disloyalty or ‘insufficient commitment’.

As such, stopping an imminent test will probably require your crew to engage in sabotage. Some NPCs might be willing
to assist them if convinced of the danger, although it will take a lot to make anyone on Daedalus actively defy Chthon’s
authority; turning a blind eye to your crew’s activities is more likely. Even if the test is sabotaged, it will only be a
temporary reprieve - eventually there will be another attempt.

38
 The Archer Report
A corporate policy document, marked TOP SECRET, written several years ago. It describes a series of communications
between representatives of the company and an unknown party who is believed to be of extradimensional origin. The
dialogue is mainly a series of requests and negotiation attempts from the other dimension, all with the same goal: an
end to jump drive use. The messages make it clear that jump drives are causing their universe to ‘tear apart’.

The report discusses how the company should respond, while making it clear that any reduction in jump drive use would
have a negative effect on their business. It recommends deliberately suppressing all information on the matter: destroy
all evidence of the messages, censor and discredit all related research, and spread misinformation and rumors about
similar messages to prevent further communications from the same source from being taken seriously.

Should this report fall into the hands of your crew, it could potentially have wide-ranging consequences. In addition to
partially explaining the mystery of the divers, it gives them significant leverage over a powerful corporation and is
extremely valuable as a bargaining chip. More idealistically, the crew could reveal the contents of the report, in the
hope that this leads to some sort of reduction in the use of jump drives and makes peace with the Downshift universe
possible. If you have a sufficiently optimistic view of human nature, this might even work.

Prototypes
The ad sheet on the opposite page can be found in one of the conference rooms. The advertised products are in the
prototyping stage, their early implementations scattered throughout Daedalus.

>AI DIEM ON DAEDALUS OUTPOST

If your crew assisted Ai Diem during their investigation in the Realspace section
of this adventure, they'll encounter her again for a second time here. Her power
here is relatively limited: she's respected, but she doesn't have the authority
to pull rank. If she has a sufficiently positive opinion of your crew, she'll
intervene to protect them from imprisonment and otherwise put in a good word for
them.

Her overall goal is for Daedalus to redirect their research into a weapon or
defense system to defeat the divers. She is strongly opposed to the hyper-beacon
test and thinks it is a pointless waste of resources, but she doesn't want to
spend the limited political capital she has on trying to countermand the direct
order from Corporate to go ahead with it. However, if your crew are inclined to
prevent the test, they will have her clandestine cooperation.

Should Diem become aware of the Archer Report's contents, she will recognise it
as a corporate secret of huge significance and will take whatever measures are
necessary to protect the corp's reputation. Letting your crew walk away with the
report is absolutely unacceptable; liquidating every possible witness might be a
bit much, but anything less than that is potentially justified.

39
40
 The Incursion
When it begins
A violent rumble runs through the entire station. Alarms go off, and everyone on the station panics - they think one of
the experiments has gone out of control. 3 divers appear at random locations in short succession. Another diver arrives
in a random location every 1d5 minutes, until 8 divers in total have arrived.

When a diver appears

Roll on Outpost Layout tablep36 to determine the diver’s location (00 means the diver appears on top of the crew).

The air shimmers and glows for a few seconds. Then, a shockwave of energy: 2d10 damage to everything in the vicinity
(Body save to make it only d5-1) as matter gets violently disrupted by hyperspace intrusion. If the diver appeared in
one of the following places, additional effects as listed:

• Artificial gravity generator: entire outpost becomes zero-G, triples travel time for those without Zero-G skill.

• Nuclear power plant: reactor offline. no power anywhere, except for emergency life-support.

• Nuclear power plant (second incursion): reactor core seriously damaged, catastrophic meltdown in d10 minutes.

• Test site Beta: incursion disrupts the containment field of the hyper-beacon, causing ephemeral psychedelia to bleed throughout
the facility.

• Test site Gamma: incursion releases the quarantined entity.

Divers’ goal
The goal of the divers is to plant a series of dimensional anchors all over the outpost, then activate them all to drag
the outpost back with them. They will put down any opposition but have no interest in anyone else - if the mission
succeeds, everyone who runs and hides will get transported to their universe, where they can be captured and
interrogated without any difficulty. The outpost security is severely outmatched by the divers: spiffy uniforms and sidearms
are no match for diver suits and dimensional harpoons.

Each diver carries a dimensional anchor on their back. They secure their immediate vicinity, then take 2 minutes to plant
the anchor. After this, they move on to join forces or stay to guard the anchor, depending on the current situation. The
divers maintain communication with one another and know the status of every anchor and the layout of the outpost. It
takes a diver 2 minutes to reach an adjacent location.

Dimensional anchors
Cylindrical pylon, 1 meter tall, half a meter wide, with a drill tip that securely holds the anchor on any surface once fully
deployed. Can be disabled (Jury-Rigging or Mechanical Repair) or wrecked (AP 10, Wounds 2 (Health 40) if in combat
situation), but it’s also volatile - critical failure on attempt to tamper or damage results in partial, premature activation: a
few seconds of ominous buzzing, then a chunk of our dimension about 10 meters in radius is catapulted wildly into
hyperspace. Anyone along for the ride ends up stranded in a random detritus fragmentp11. Getting back from there
without a ship will be a challenge. Those left behind see a sphere of spacetime shrink to a single brilliant point then
vanish - d5 damage from the low-pressure shockwave.

>HYPERSPACE EXPOSURE

Being in hyperspace for any length of time without being inside a ship or having
special protective gear (such as a diver suit) is both psychologically and
physically harmful, to the tune of d10 damage (ignoring armor) and d5 stress
every minute or so as your brain is torn apart by an overwhelming cacophony of
psychic feedback. Oh, you also get all the usual downsides of being in space,
like lack of oxygen, floating away into the void, etc.
41
 INCURSION OUTCOMES
Once all 8 anchors are operational, or if the divers think they’ve planted as many as they’ll be able to, they will activate
the anchors en masse, ripping the outpost and chunks of the asteroid that houses it into Universe-1. The more anchors
are operational at the time, the more successful the shift is - see Consequencesp55 or Into the Downshiftp48 for further
details on the results.

0 ANCHORS 3-5 ANCHORS

The crew must have executed a cunning plan to get to this Daedalus is in Universe-1, but not quite in the right place.
state. Well done. See Consequences: Divers thwarted. Proceed to Into the Downshift: Off the mark.

1-2 ANCHORS 6+ ANCHORS

Sometimes a partial success is the worst of both worlds. The divers’ operation was successful. Proceed to Into the
The outpost is ripped in half. If the crew are near the Downshift: Surrounded.
operational anchors, proceed to Into the Downshift:
Rupture. Otherwise, see below.

LEFT BEHIND
Assuming the divers achieve at least a partial success, anyone not on board the station when it vanishes is left behind
- on a ship, on the mangled remains of the station, or drifting in space. In Daedalus’ place is a vortex: a gaping tear in
the fabric of space-time, shedding exotic radiation from its edges. At its center is a distorted view of Daedalus in its new
surroundings. The vortex is shrinking and will be entirely gone in a couple of days, but so long as it’s open, it offers a
one-way trip to Universe-1.

INTO THE PORTAL WAIT AROUND

A lot safer and easier with a ship, but in a pinch you can The next resupply shipment from the Chthon Concern is
just suit up and launch yourself through space towards the not due for quite some time, possibly weeks. If your crew
portal (don’t miss!). It might just be possible to save the are still around when it arrives (while Daedalus, or most of
captured Daedalus staff and prevent its research from Daedalus, isn’t) they’ll be picked up by Chthon. Extensive
falling into the hands of the divers. Proceed to Into the interrogation by Ai Diem at a corporate blacksite will
Downshift: Counter-incursion. determine if they are of any further use to Chthon, likely as
a Counter-Incursion force, or if they should simply
FIND ANOTHER WAY disappear.
If the crew wait until the portal closes, but still want to mount
a rescue operation, they might be able to do it with an LEAVE
intact dimensional anchor - or with any remaining If your crew still have a ship, they can just jump away,
Daedalus research data, any diver technology they do abandoning Daedalus to its fate. Refer to Consequences:
have, any readings they can gather from the portal, Divers victorious.
possibly skilled assistance, and weeks or months of work.

LOST IN HYPERSPACE
Proceed to Into the Downshift: Counter-incursion.

The crew messed with a dimensional anchor, and now they’re stranded in a detritus fragment (assuming they survived
the trip). Depending on the detritus, constructing or stealing a jump drive might be an option, possibly with the help of
any Daedalus engineers likewise transported there. Otherwise, they’re probably stuck there unless someone (e.g., the
divers) comes by to pick them up.

>DAMAGE TO DAEDALUS
Roll 1d10[-] for each room, or 1d10+2 if the room did not contain an anchor. If
the station was ruptured, roll 1d10+5 for rooms without an anchor instead.
1-3 Intact
4-5 No power or gravity.
6-8 Oxygen leak. No air in d100 minutes.
9-10 Major hull breach, explosive decompression. Heavy bulkhead doors isolate
the room from the station.
11+ Section left behind in Universe-0 or scattered into hyperspace. Gaping
hole in station.
42
 04: Downshift

43
44
 THE ONGOING END OF
THE UNIVERSE
A mere handful of years ago, Universe-0 and Universe-1
were basically indistinguishable. The two courses of human
lived wormholes appear and disappear around the
hypermatter filaments, and horrors from dead universes
history ran in parallel (other than some minor, incidental slip into reality through them as detritus fragments drift near
variations) almost all the way up to the present day. The Universe-1.
first big divergence in Universe-1 was the gravity
fluctuations that began occurring in populated sectors of The destruction wrought by Yggdrasil was unimaginable.
the galaxy. Some scientists linked the location of the Planets fractured into asteroid belts or accretion discs
phenomenon to the hyperlanes that connected humanity orbiting filaments, stars bled plasma as they were impaled.
across the vast gulfs of space. But nobody figured out what Space stations were pulverized. Those spared the
was really happening or why until it was too late. The immediate destruction had days or months or years to
frayed fabric of reality ripped asunder, and the tear watch the annihilation approach, carried towards it by
spread, faster than the speed of light, splitting off tributaries merciless gravity. Survivors in far-flung colonies and
and dividing into a galaxy-wide, fractally branching “tree”. traveling spaceships could but watch in horror as most life
in the well-traveled sectors of the galaxy was extinguished.
Wherever the branches of ‘Yggdrasil’ reached and the rifts All the while, Yggdrasil grew before their eyes: while it
in reality yawned wide, space-time was transformed into appeared instantaneously, the reflected light carrying its
light-years-long filaments of radiant hypermatter. Existing galaxy-spanning image was still bound by the laws of
outside of the laws of physics, hypermatter’s interaction physics that hypermatter ignored. To the survivors’ eyes,
with normal matter is strictly unidirectional; it has gravity wherever they were in the galaxy, Yggdrasil grew from
and occupies physical space, but is unaffected by any their system, reaching greedily and inexorably for every
force and unpredictably destructive to anything that comes other, crushing all hope with its roots.
into contact with it. Gravity pulses, energy fields, and short-

THE SURVIVORS
Approximately 98% of all living humans were killed by Yggdrasil, or by the famine, anarchy, and despair that followed in
its wake. A disproportionate number of the survivors were space travelers, particularly those on individual ships or
isolated stations, while those planet-dwellers whose worlds made it through unscathed were often cut off from space
travel. It did not take long for the starfarers who survived to band together into loose groups, and then, gradually, to form
something resembling a society from the ashes.

All of the survivors are doppels to us by definition - they’re alternate versions of people from Universe-0, their lives
identical or near-identical until the histories diverged. Not everyone in Universe-0 has a living doppel (most of them died
in the apocalypse) but all of the crew and most important NPCs should.

WHAT ARE THEY LIKE?

If there is a single constant, it’s that almost everyone left alive in Universe-1 has endured unimaginable hardship and
tragedy. This collective trauma has left its mark, and while it manifests in different ways for different people, the survivors
of the apocalypse are generally not the cheeriest or most mentally healthy bunch.

In terms of moral disposition, the apocalypse brought out both the best and the very worst of human nature. There were
relief efforts and evacuations, orbital havens and acts of selfless altruism. There were also desperate conflicts over
resources, brutal dictatorships, and horrible atrocities. Many of the cruelest acts were committed by people who told
themselves they were making necessary sacrifices for the greater good - and in a few cases this was even the truth.
45
WHAT IS THEIR SOCIETY LIKE?
It’s authoritarian, iron-fisted, and intensely militarized. Many of its leaders were warship captains or corporate
administrators before the apocalypse. Their rigid command structures survived more intact than most others, and since
then the pressure of survival has reinforced a culture of spartan self-denial and unflinching obedience. Not everyone is
happy about this, of course, but those in charge clamp down hard on internal dissent.

When scientists discovered why Universe-1’s space-time was unraveling, and whose fault it was, the fight for survival
became a literal war rather than a metaphorical one. All resources not being used for immediate survival are bent
towards a cross-dimensional military campaign. To the leaders of the Universe-1 survivors, this vindicates all of the choices
they have made and justifies the discipline and ruthlessness of their rule.

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

Pretty much everyone in Universe-1 wants the apocalypse to stop getting worse, which means Universe-0 needs to
cease or at least massively curtail their jump drive use. In order to achieve this, their leaders want to manufacture a
Dimensional Gate - a theoretical device that creates a stable, two-way passage between universes. Once that’s done,
there are three main camps about what comes next:

Escape
The most idealistic plan, and possibly the most achievable, is for the entire remaining population of
Universe-1 to migrate over to Universe-0, en masse. Implementing this would be a logistical undertaking of
unprecedented scale. It would take years, perhaps decades, even with dimensional gate tech and the
cooperation of Universe-0, but it could be done. To this faction, the war is a prelude to negotiations - a show
of force to bring the Universe-0 authorities to the table so they can be convinced to cooperate in the
evacuation.

Invade
They don’t trust the people of Universe-0 to help them without being forced to - after all, they are those
people, or at least alternate versions of them, and they know how they would respond to a request like
that. The only sane plan is to treat Universe-0 as an enemy to be conquered - launch raids, establish
beachheads, land troops and capture territory. Once they’ve forced the enemy to its knees, they can arrive
as colonists, not as refugees. This plan requires an order of magnitude more time and energy than the
‘escape’ plan, and the human cost is incalculably higher, but its proponents see it as the only viable option.

Revenge
Blood for blood. They want Universe-0 to pay in kind for the destruction they caused. Most who hold this
view are driven by their grief and anger, while a few have given up all hope of survival and so are settling
for revenge. Even if rescue was possible, the most radical of them would rather see Universe-0 burn than
their own people be saved.

Each side has its proponents, but we leave the question of which faction is dominant up to the individual Warden. Can
your crew play a part in finding a compromise? Is peace even possible? It depends on what sort of universe you want
this to be.
>SURVIVOR PERSONALITY (d10)
01 Bitter and resentful
02 Jaded
03 Suicidally depressed
04 Fanatic
05 Doesn't trust anyone or anything
06 Cracking under stress, only barely holding it together
07 Haunted by guilt
08 Grimly determined
09 Withdrawn and emotionless
10 Beyond morality; filled with the light of vision

46
 DIVERS
THEIR FORCES
conscripts
The elite among Universe-1’s forces, trusted with the The majority of soldiers in Universe-1 are amateurs,
armored suits that make hyperspace exposure semi- conscripted by the apocalypse. Equipped with a messy
safe. Stationed on the Hyperopticon and a few other mix of gear, but when engaging your crew they’ll opt for
military bases when they’re not venturing into nonlethal weaponry (foam guns, tranquiliser pistols)
hyperspace on raids. wherever possible.

Hyperopticon
A huge, ramshackle laboratory/warbase, the effective headquarters of Universe-1’s war effort. Frankensteined together
from the wreckage of countless other stations and ships. Located close to the former site of Daedalus Outpost.
Dominated by a gigantic antenna array and the scientists who operate it, it also houses a maze of barracks, workshops,
armories, hangars and computer rooms. Total crew around 300. Also holds cells, interrogation rooms, and prisoners.

Its main function is to maintain observation of hyperspace, exposing people to it and it, in turn, to people, thus producing
the effect of the TERROR SIGNAL. At any given time, dozens of people are locked in sensory deprivation tanks, their
limbs restrained and eyes forced open, all the better to perceive the raw hyperspace that floods their senses through
special “monitors”. Needless to say, this barbaric process quickly drives the victims irrevocably insane, eventually
rendering them unfit for purpose. Fortunately, even in an ongoing apocalypse there is a vast supply of prisoners,
dissidents, and those on the wrong side of a power struggle.

47
A RAGTAG FLOTILLA
A wild assortment of vessels in various states of disrepair. Three in particular:

• Military corvette ‘Vengeance of Ilia’. Troop carrier. Missiles, boarding parties.

• Mining vessel ‘Undaunted Spirit’. Rigging guns, laser cutters, mining explosives.

• Retrofitted luxury yacht ‘First Through the Breach’. Railgun called shots to thrusters.

Dozens more, including larger and more heavily armed warships, follow in their wake.

SLEEPERS
Universe-1 does not have the technology to upshift people into Universe-0 in a stable and permanent way. But they do
have a way. They have taken an existing but non-functional brain implant developed for mind control purposes (a
compliant workforce is good for business), and modified it to suit their needs. The original device didn’t work because
overriding a person’s neural patterns with someone else’s entirely different neural patterns leads to epilepsy-like
seizures. If, however, you can find a brain that is almost exactly the same as the one being overridden - a doppel’s brain
- the issues are resolved.

When someone from Universe-0 is captured and their doppel is still alive, the implant is inserted into their brain and they
are returned to their universe none the wiser. Meanwhile, their doppel places themselves in one of the modified
immersion tanks of Hyperopticon, transmitting their brainwaves onto the unsuspecting sleeper and taking control of them
at crucial times. These perfect sleeper agents are used as spies and saboteurs. See the Bestiaryp59 for details.

INTO THE DOWNSHIFT

When and if your crew visit Universe-1, what they are faced with will depend on where they arrived and how exactly they
got there - refer to the appropriate section below depending on the circumstances of their arrival, or refer back to the
Damage to Daedalus tablep42 for details on the state of individual rooms (and any characters who were in said rooms).

SURROUNDED
The plan to capture Daedalus Outpost was executed to perfection. The station is mostly intact and within spitting
distance of the Hyperopticon. Ships are burning hard towards it, d10[-] hours away. The divers expect to capture all
the scientists and their research data, with your crew as a nice bonus, and it will be hard to avoid this without doing
something drastic. Any divers on the station will negotiate from a position of strength, knowing their forces are very close.

OFF THE MARK

Daedalus Outpost is very close in astronomical terms - in the right star system, but d10 days of ship travel from where
it was supposed to appear. It has also been damaged by the trip. Divers on the station will retreat to a defensible
position and try to hold out until their reinforcements arrive. They might even willingly let your crew get away provided
doing so doesn’t threaten their main prize, Daedalus and its scientists.

RUPTURED
Only a few anchors were operational. The sections of the station that made it are lost somewhere in the vast depths of
space, probably in multiple pieces. The ships that were meant to capture the station are weeks away, if they’re coming
at all, and when they arrive, they’re likely to be seen as rescuers.

COUNTER-INCURSION
One way or another, your crew have avoided being downshifted. Now they want to go there anyway. Perhaps they’re
trying to rescue Daedalus scientists, their friends that didn’t get out in time, or they’re just curious. Either way, the
Universe-1 survivors are not expecting your crew’s arrival and may not even notice it at first. Assuming Daedalus is intact,
they will be somewhere in the process of capturing it and converting it into a holding facility - see Captured Daedalusp52.

48
 Their Universe
Universe-1 is a horrible - and horribly familiar - place. It’s laid out the same as Universe-0, and the existing sector map
(see Sector Travelp14) can be used to navigate it, but each system is a warped, nightmarish reflection of the one your
crew are familiar with. For a few specific locations, we provide details of what to expect. To determine what fate has
befallen any other given star, planet, or feature, use the following tables - roll, choose, or make up your own.

FOR A STAR (roll once and read across):`

d10 Disaster Status of the star
01 Sputtering and flaring, but unchanged
02 Impaled on a branch of Yggdrasil Bleeding huge plumes of plasma up and down the branch
03 Burst apart into a disc-shaped cloud of superheated gas which is slowly expanding towards nearby planets
04 Whip-like stream of plasma pouring out of star and feeding into accretion disk around filament
Hypermatter branch close
05 Outer layers stripped away entirely. Exposed core is dim and rapidly cooling
enough for its gravity to pull star
06 Torn by tidal forces into a disc-shaped cloud of superheated gas, slowly expanding towards nearby planets
apart
07 Split into a pair of binary stars that circle turbulently near the filament. All orbits are wobbling and skewed
08 Multiple smaller branches Sputtering and flaring, but unchanged
09 passing near or through star About to go supernova - could happen at any moment!
10 None Miraculously unscathed!

FOR A PLANET OR STATION (roll twice, once for each column):

d10 Orbital Body Occupants
01
Narrowly avoiding destruction each orbit Everyone’s dead
02
03
Extradimensional monster infestation (pick
04 Anchored to or impaled on a filament. Gradually crumbling from stress
something from Bestiary)
05
06 Isolated bubble, no contact with outside world
Drawn into accretion disc around a large branch, swirling ever closer to destruction
07 since apocalypse

08 Shattered into a widening cloud of debris. Some fragments might be large enough to Refugees or survivors
09 support life Scavengers or raiders
10 Flung out of the system entirely Military - divers and/or conscripts

FOR AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE (a room on a damaged ship or space station):

d10 Status
01 Completely destroyed
02 Speared by a small Yggdrasil branch
03 Twisted by titanic forces, likely turned sideways
04 Blasted by exotic radiation
05 Filled with trash and debris from other damaged areas
06 Gravity anomalies - none, increased, weird direction, or alternating between these
07 Intermittent hyperspace bleedthrough
08 Open to vacuum, probably (partially?) sealed off by bulkheads
09 Smashed into a neighboring location, both partially destroyed
10 Unaltered

49
 JSOH ASTROCHEMICAL-1
One of the few major industrial facilities that has survived to any degree, JSOH Astrochemical-1 is in bad shape and
would have been abandoned entirely if the warp cores it produces weren’t so critically important to the war effort.
Instead, it’s surrounded by a sparse cloud of matter eatersp59, kept at bay by a failing magnetic repulsion field. Inside,
the whole facility is breaking down from lack of maintenance, held together by jury-rigged parts and the blood and sweat
of its few remaining staff.

The most likely reason your crew might want to visit is to acquire tesselated warp cores in order to escape, but they
might also want to confront or otherwise interact with the Universe-1 version of Ai Diem. She still directs an intelligence
team based out of JSOH Astrochemical, retasked however with assisting diver teams and sleepers; like everything else,
Chthon’s business resources have been reoriented to serve the war effort.

Adjust the description of specific features as follows:

2: Airlock entrance. Airlock is jammed shut and bridge has collapsed, leaving a sheer drop into the Storage Drums pit.

5: Long-range communications array. Modified to also project a magnetic field that keeps matter eaters away from
the station (doesn’t stop people or ships, and large enough that docked ships are fully within the field).

6: Docking. The controls for the magnetic repulsion field are also here, as are three guards.

7: Mess and Quarters. Immediate entrance space converted into fortified guardpost. One guard on duty permanently,
up to four in firing positions if alarm has been raised.

8: Storage Drums. One tank has ruptured and the area is filled with an ankle-deep chemical spill: not flammable, but
moderately toxic to human flesh. Nobody’s had the time to clean it up.

9: Refinery floor. Jury-rigged repairs are everywhere and hazard markings are inaccurate. [-] on tests to avoid injury.
d10 exhausted and semi-crazed workers spread out throughout the floor at any given time.

11: Workshop. Many tools and machines lie jumbled on the floor. Walls covered in chalk scrawlings of scientific formulas
and diagrams - an early failed attempt to make sense of Yggdrasil. Dried blood spatter from where chief engineer
committed suicide in desperation.

12: Control room. Two of the android technicians are non-functional. Their bodies have been partially stripped for parts
to maintain the third technician, who is devoting 100% of their processing power to keeping the refinery running and
constantly shifts from panel to panel, ignoring everything else.

14: Distillation columns. Partially powered down; huge crack runs down the largest column. Two workers suspended on
ropes 20 meters up, welding the crack closed.

15: Matter separation bank. Heavily retooled and much larger, with yellow line with radiation warning symbols painted
on ground surrounding it. Pale blue glow visible from inside. Electrical devices short out if brought nearby, humans risk
radiation sickness.

16: Fully enclosed bridge to Comms Building. Concealed machine-gun turret at Comms Building end activated by
hidden tripwire halfway along bridge; fires at anyone in bridge for 3d10 damage unless deactivated.

50
51
 CAPTURED DAEDALUS
Daedalus-1 doesn’t exist; it was torn apart by branches of Yggdrasil and its remnants incorporated into the hulk of derelict
ship parts that forms the Hyperopticon. This is the map of Daedalus-0 once it falls into the hands of the divers and is
repurposed as a holding facility for its crew while information is extracted both from them and from their research notes.
If your crew are captured on Daedalus, they’ll end up here; if your crew are involved in a counter-incursion, this is where
they’ll want to go in order to rescue the captive Daedalus staff or sabotage the research efforts of their captors.

Test site Alpha Life support

Large open space almost entirely taken up with heaving life support modules salvaged from a dozen ships - the
Daedalus’s population has doubled, and it’s bleeding oxygen all over.

Living quarters
Tiny private cells honeycomb the walls. The guards live here.

Mess hall
AnyFood™ printer is broken, and prisoners and guards alike eat “soup” made of nutrient paste stirred into water.

Test site Beta

Guards are posted at the doors at all times. In the center of the large open space, three massive curved antennae
crackle with electricity. The hyper-beacon is being repurposed to one day generate the dimensional gate.

Conference room
Long table with a dozen chairs. Corporate minutia has been replaced by inter-dimensional warfare plans.

Archives Interrogation chambers

Shelves of filing cabinets pushed aside and demountable walls set up to form several makeshift cages. Always occupied
- when no more important interrogation is going on, the captives, under supervision, are forced to slowly work their way
through the endless library of documents.

Test site Gamma Internment area

Captured scientists (and the crew) huddle on the scarred cement floor. There aren’t enough assorted sleeping bags and
mattresses, so people sleep in shifts. The room reeks of unwashed bodies and blocked portable toilets. Reinforced
doors are still in use, keeping the area secure.

Research labs
5 meter high hall, with artificial gravity pulling towards both “floor” and “ceiling”. Largely unchanged since the occupation,
even the “hang in there” posters are still present. Collaborating Daedalus scientists (still under heavy guard) explain their
work to Downshift scientists.

Assembly
Heavily guarded work details of Daedalus engineers toil here, assembling diver armor.

Dock
Vengeance of Ilia (or another named survivor ship) is usually docked here.

52
 ESCAPE
Even if your crew aren’t captured by the divers, they’re still trapped in a dying universe while unknown fate befalls their
home. Escape is possible, even without a dimensional gate - it’s easier to return to your universe of origin than it is to
leave it - but it won’t be easy. It will take resources, information, and time, and they’ll be hunted across the sector by the
vengeful divers.

Jump Drives in Universe-1

One less awful side effect of the way the fabric of the universe is rapidly deteriorating is that using a jump drive in
Universe-1 is much quicker and easier than it is in Universe-0. Jump points are ubiquitous, rarely more than a few hours
of ship travel away at any time, and even without a jump point it’s possible to initiate a jump and usually end up pretty
close to your intended destination. What’s more, during a jump a ship only needs to slip through the very edge of
hyperspace and does not encounter hauntings or detritus.

The Pursuit
Not everyone in Universe-1 will know your crew are fugitives, and it’s pretty easy to blend in temporarily, but the divers
are relentless. In general, whenever your crew get away from immediate danger (such as by jumping to another system)
it will take about d10 hours for pursuers to show up, after which reinforcements will arrive every additional d10 hours.
If your crew manage to lose their pursuers entirely (faking their own deaths, hiding in an asteroid field, etc) then they’ll
have around d10 days before a patrol happens to pass by looking for them.

A Way Out
If your crew can get their hands on at least three of the following and spend a day or two jury-rigging their jump drive,
they can jump back to Universe-0.

• Intact dimensional anchor (Daedalus Outpostp33)

• Hyperspace contour map (The Investigation, pgs 22 or 23)

• Tesselated warp core (JSOH Astrochemical, pgs 28 or 50)

• Some surviving Daedalus scientists and research data

Many of these can also be acquired in Universe-1, so escape is possible even if your crew don’t have any of them at
first - they could try to acquire dimensional anchors or rescue scientists from the divers, create tesselated warp cores in
the Universe-1 version of JSOH Astrochemicalp50, or even try to construct their own hyperspace contour map.

53
54
 05: CONSEQUENCES
The stakes of this adventure are, as such things go, pretty high. The fate of multiple universes hangs in the balance.
There’s an interdimensional war, a civilisation on the brink of extinction, and, closer to your crew’s home, a sector-wide
economic and material crisis and an ubiquitous, vital, and entirely unsustainable technology.

Your crew are just a handful of individuals, and even if they end up in the right place at the right time, they probably won’t
be able to single-handedly avert the war or defeat the divers entirely. This does not mean their efforts are meaningless.
It just means that while your crew can influence the course of events, this influence isn’t absolute. They might be able to
save the Daedalus scientists, thwart the divers in their objectives, open a dialogue between the universes to work
towards peace, or reveal the truth about the side effects of jump drive usage. None of these actions will immediately
resolve the conflict. But all of them will affect the shape of its resolution, and affect the place your crew have in the
coming future.

This is obviously an extremely open-ended topic and we don’t want to be too prescriptive about it. However, we do have
some suggestions for how events might play out based on how your crew fared - either as an epilogue to the story or
a backdrop for more adventures. Even more so than the rest of the campaign, this is a starting point for you to build
upon as fits your game.

Divers Thwarted
The scientists and research data on Daedalus Outpost did not fall into the hands of the divers and their goal, a stable
dimensional gate, is well out of their reach. This outcome is a crippling blow to their war plans. They keep fighting, of
course, but it is a losing battle. The fabric of Universe-1 deteriorates, their resources dwindle, and the anomalies and
attacks grow rarer and more desperate. Eventually the divers are nothing more than one more spooky story of
hyperspace.

While Universe-0 will, in time, recover from the damage caused by the hyperspace anomalies, it’s doubtful whether any
lessons were learned. Depending on how they are able to spin it, your crew might be rewarded as heroes or
condemned as criminals for their actions on Daedalus, but in either case the judgment will be made by a corporation
eager to ensure things return to ‘normal’ and cover up its own complicity. Jump drive travel will remain the economic
backbone of interstellar civilization. Evidence of its side effects will be suppressed or ignored. And years later, when the
last remnants of Universe-1 are shredded into hyperspace detritus, the cycle will start over with another parallel universe.

Divers Victorious
The divers have, or will soon develop, a dimensional gate. They have the means to escape their dying dimension, and
their mastery of hyperspace advances at a frightening pace. The power of the TERROR SIGNAL is amplified and
focused, hyperspace anomalies and detritus encounters become almost guaranteed, and diver attacks intensify. Using
a jump drive is practically a death sentence for most ships. The economy crumbles sector-wide. Civilization shatters into
countless isolated systems, individual points of light in a dark and hostile universe.

Meanwhile, dimensional gates are opening and Universe-1 ships are streaming through to establish beachheads. Do
they come as refugees or conquerors? In the short term, it doesn’t particularly matter - they’re desperate, embittered,
and armed, and even if they’re not hostile, many local authorities will treat them as invaders either way. The divers
probably have the military advantage, but neither side can economically sustain a prolonged war. Instead, turmoil and
violence reign everywhere. Hostilities flare up and die down, ceasefires are signed and broken, and reciprocal atrocities
committed. Your crew might be seen as war heroes, pressed into service by one side or another, or manage to escape
direct involvement, but their lives and the lives of billions of others will be changed for the worse as the galaxy enters a
new age of chaos.

55
A Compromise
Look, we get it. Both of the above outcomes are pretty depressing. To some extent, that’s the nature of the beast. It’s a
no-win scenario. Each side’s desired outcome has negative consequences for the other, and while these consequences
are hardly equal (economic collapse vs. literal annihilation), in both cases they’re worse than those in power are willing
to accept. The deck is stacked in favor of tragedy. A happy ending would be nothing short of a miracle.

With that said, there are some resources the crew might have access to: Dr. Singh’s dimensional gate, the Archer Report,
blackmail material over Chthon, a history of non-hostile interactions with divers, any of several highly placed friends, the
scientists and research from Daedalus, or in general any form of leverage over those in power. Your crew could use
some or all of the above, plus a lot of time, effort, and luck, to try and avert the dark fate awaiting the linked universes.
Will it be enough? Can they possibly succeed? Are miracles possible? We leave these questions to you and your crew.

Additionally: opening communications with the divers and negotiating on behalf of Universe-0, fighting a crusade to
spread the truth about jump drives and restrict their use, building support for a peaceful evacuation - any one of these
could be stories in their own right if you want to explore the further adventures of your crew.

Living In Universe-1
Your crew have become trapped in Universe-1 or perhaps even voluntarily elected to remain there. While its interstellar
civilization is collapsing, individual life still goes on (until it doesn’t). A variety of post-apocalyptic campaigns could fit
around the branches of Yggdrasil, from simple scavenging missions in pursuit of basic survival, to working with the divers
in their ongoing battle to save the people of Universe-1. If the anomalies and diver attacks keep working and jump drive
use in Universe-0 is sufficiently curtailed, the expansion of Yggdrasil could even slow down enough for continued
habitation of this universe to be a long term possibility.

BONUS: As Above, So Below

Mysterious gravity anomalies. Momentary fluctuations in the laws of physics. The same signs that preceded the
appearance of Yggdrasil in Universe-1 are happening, now, in Universe-0.

Is there a Universe-Minus-1, a dimension ‘above’ your crew’s in the same way as Universe-1 is ‘below’ it? Where they
also use jump drives, and where their hyperspace voyages are wearing down and consuming the fabric of Universe-0?
It’s certainly a plausible explanation. And if it’s true, then that means that the doom that we visited on Universe-1 will soon
be coming to us.

Do your crew try to convince society to prepare for the coming apocalypse? Do they ignore the signs, and live their
lives as well as they can, knowing they can’t do anything to stop it? Do they take matters into their own hands and
become the first members of Universe-0’s diver program?

56
 06: Bestiary

57
Combat: 45%
Harpoon Launcher - like a Rigging
DIVER
Gun, but 2d10 damage on hit and only
becomes stuck if it inflicts a wound
Instinct: 20%
Wounds: 3 (Health 15)
Armor: Diver Suit (AP 9)

Divers are the doppels of your crew, hand-picked for the

last-ditch effort to save their universe. Your crew aren’t
special in that regard: other ship crews have their own diver
teams assigned to them. They might also count among
their number the doppels of any of the significant NPCs
from Universe-0, recruited into the desperate crusade. As
(elite) soldiers, they’ve been indoctrinated, tested for
loyalty, and provided with combat training.

Their armor looks more like antique diving suits than

spacesuits, with lines of blades along their surface, sharp
enough to make hyperspace bleed around them as they
move. While offering excellent protection in combat, its
main purpose is to maintain a pocket of Universe-1 reality
within. Without such measures, the divers (or anyone else
from Universe-1) can’t stay in Universe-0 for more than a
few seconds - see Not From Around Here, below.

Interestingly, travelers from Universe-0 do not suffer from

this effect while in Universe-1: shifting down the universal
“stack” is easier. Presumably, both U-0 and U-1 denizens
would be able to stay in a hypothetical Universe-2.
Developing a more advanced method of inter-dimensional
travel that can overcome this limitation by “attuning” them work in their own universe (during Downshift).
to the other universe is a major goal of the divers.
Dimensional Harpoon
Doppel The harpoon gets stuck if it inflicts a Wound. If the diver
Adjust individual diver stats to be slightly better than their shifts to their own universe while the harpoon is stuck in
counterparts, once the diver’s identity becomes known. someone or something, it will quickly follow (at the end of
the next round), dragging whatever it’s stuck in with it to
Not From Around Here Universe-1. This likely means a round of unshielded
The divers do not belong in our universe. When a diver is hyperspace exposurep04 followed by almost-certain
reduced to 1 Wound or less, the integrity of their suit is capture. Quickly removing a stuck harpoon deals 2d10
compromised and they vanish soon after (during the next damage and might require a Strength test.
round). If they’re in a pressurized environment at the time,
air rushing to fill the gap they left creates an implosion
doing 1d10 damage to anyone nearby. The diver can
also voluntarily trigger this return. Naturally, this doesn’t

What happens to a character that has been abducted by the divers, e.g. via a dimensional harpoon? There are two
major options. If their doppel is no longer alive in Universe-1, the abductee is likely to go through vigorous
interrogation before eventually being assigned to Hyperopticonp47. That is to say, their remaining existence will be
quite unpleasant - most likely time to make a new character.

If, however, their doppel is still alive, they become an extremely valuable asset. Unbeknownst to them, a device is
implanted onto their brain stem, turning them into a Sleeper agent (see next page), after which they are returned to
their crew, ideally while still unconscious or through a very convenient heroic escape.

58
 SLEEPER
Most of the time a sleeper is their old Universe-0 self.
Every now and then, however, a microscopic brainwave
While dormant, the implant is undetectable by a regular
handheld medscanner, though a thorough scan in a
emitter in the base of their skull activates and they medbay does reveal a possible brain tumor. An active
“awake”. During this time, the brainwaves of their doppel implant is immediately apparent to any medscanner.
overlay and overpower their own cognition, allowing the
doppel to see through their eyes and use their body. The Killswitch
sleeper’s doppel does so at irregular intervals to check The implant can be remotely detonated by the divers in
what the sleeper is up to, and uses any opportunity that order to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. The
may come their way for intelligence gathering or resulting explosion is not enough to crack the skull, but
sabotage. does send liquified brainmatter flying out through the eyes
and nose of the victim.
While the sleeper is “awake”, they blackout, experiencing
visions of hyperspace. For their part, the doppel has to stay
in a modified Hyperopticon immersion tank to establish
connection.

Combat: 40%
MATTER EATER
Annihilating Touch 2d10
Instinct: 30%
Wounds: 1 (Health 30)

A life form that evolved in a dying universe, it resembles a

segmented worm with a noticeably triangular cross-
section, a few centimeters thick and several meters long.
Its body is covered in long, sharp spines that point almost
directly forward.

A Matter Eater moves and hunts by manipulating vacuum

pressure and attacks by shooting itself directly towards
food sources. Every part of its body destroys every known
element simply by touching it, emitting intense heat in the
process. It doesn’t specifically target humans or react to
their actions, but will mindlessly attack the densest source
of matter nearby, which could include humans or their
ships.

Overheating
Takes d10 damage every round when immersed in or
surrounded by anything more solid than an extremely
diffuse gas.

59
Combat: 35%
Club or knife 1d5
ENTROPIAC
Revolver 1d10
Instinct: 25%
Wounds: 1 (Health 15)
Armor:
Rags (AP 1)
Torn-up Standard Battle Dress (AP 5)

A human host of an entropic parasite in the late stages of

the condition. Covered in blood from a dozen small
seeping wounds, fingernails and teeth largely missing, hair
torn out by the fistful, they are a sorry sight. Driven by their
one remaining need, to experience destruction, the
entropiacs beg, lie, and, if all else fails, fight with no regard
for their safety. Almost always found alone, as killing their
compatriots offers sweet relief for another day.

Host
Death frees the poor wretch - and the parasite that

ENTROPIC PARASITE
tormented them. It immediately attempts to find a new host,
see below.

Last life form of a frozen universe, it feeds on entropy itself. time they look at anything beautiful or complex, they get
Something between a virus and an exotic radiation, it the desire to smash, burn, destroy, rage, until there’s
doesn’t have a body as such, but any form of destruction nothing left.
near it becomes more vivid and pleasurable: colors are
oversaturated, explosions bloom like flowers, gushing Hosts gain a new parameter to keep track of, Entropy,
blood glistens like luxurious velvet. To the parasite, entropyranging from 0 to 99. It grows by 1d10 for each instance
is delicious, and merely being in its presence makes one of minor entropy in their vicinity (a few gunshots, an object
feel the same. breaking), 1d100 in case of major entropy increase (a
grenade explosion, a unit of fuel burnt up, significant bodily
Thankfully, chances of running into an entropic parasite harm), and simply becomes 99 when catastrophic entropy
without a host are exceedingly low. They don’t seem to occurs nearby (a sentient’s death, a spaceship blowing up).
last on their own in the “regular”, all-too-ordered universe.
However, major acts of destruction in hyperspace, in Each day, the GM rolls 1d100 and compares it to the
particular deaths of intelligent life forms, might draw their host’s Entropy, much like a skill test. Afterwards, their
attention. You are much more likely to encounter an Entropy becomes equal to the value of the roll.
entropic parasite by murdering their current host - an
entropiac. • Success: the parasite is satiated, and even rewards the host
by relieving them of 1d5 stress.
Once it shows up, the entropic parasite targets the person
nearest the source of entropy that drew or freed them, • Failure: the parasite uses the host’s own body to make up for
causing them to make a Body save or become its new the deficiency. The host suffers a Wound as their old wounds
host. While success means the target is safe for now, the open.
parasite will linger, in a state of hibernation, waking again
to strike in response to more entropy in the vicinity. • Critical success: the parasite replicates and the new
parasite immediately tries to infect a nearby character.
Being a host
The parasite is not sentient, but the host instinctively • Critical failure: the parasite withers and dies, inflicting a
understands they’ll have to provide it with enough Wound in one last meal.
sustenance, or become sustenance themselves. Every

60
61
 ZERO-POINT VINE
An ultimate survivor, this creeper vine-like organism is
extremely efficient at absorbing energy. It is all but invisible
Flamethrowers and laser cutters are entirely
counterproductive, instead causing rapid expansion in the
to most sensors, as it simply swallows photons, radio direction of the heat: Body save to avoid it going right into
waves, and other forms of radiation - it is only detectable the fuel or battery and consuming it with explosive force,
by touch. Its temperature is marginally higher than absolute dealing 1 Wound to anyone nearby and 1d5 Wounds to
zero, which has a profound effect on its surroundings: the wielder. Even ammunition likely carries enough heat to
everything around it freezes solid and dims. offset much of the damage it causes.

In the vacuum of space where it originated, the vine is The most reliable way of getting rid of the vine is to either
barely perceptible and rarely an issue - unless it gets in overwhelm its energy absorption properties with nuclear
your ship’s thrusters, which it will explosively engulf. Rapid
weaponry, or dress in a sealed space suit and cut it by
action will be required at that point to prevent MDMG to hand, frequently replacing the blades as they get brittle
the ship. Should it reach the warp cores, all bets are off. from exposure to near absolute zero temperatures. Skin
contact with the vine does 2d10 damage to humans and
In an atmosphere, zero-point vine is immediately encased likely snaps off a finger or two.
in a shield of darkened, solidified gas, making it much
harder to deal with, and grows at a pace of several
millimeters every second. Unless dealt with decisively, it’s
a biosphere killer.

VON NEUMANN SURVEYOR

Combat: 40% If it detects a threat, it can convert matter and energy into
Molecular disassembler 1d10 smaller, more limited “spider-bots”, which it will use to seek
Instinct: 10% out and eliminate biosigns. Even destroyed, its wreck emits
Stealth: 50% ultra-faint electromagnetic signals that appear to be
Wounds: 3 (Health 20) coordinates and diagnostic data - sending information
back to a long-lost home base.
A small, pitch-black, spider-like craft that can operate at
near-absolute zero temperature and is almost invisible to Spider-bot
sensors. Its remaining programming directs it to explore Combat: 30%
and to harvest matter and energy with which to construct Molecular disassembler 1d10
more copies of itself. It prioritizes heavy metals and energy Instinct: 10%
sources for disassembly and ignores organics unless Wounds: 1 (Health 15)

GOD THAT SHOULD NOT BE

threatened.

Tiniest Fragment If this deity had a name, it died with the inhabitants of the
Combat: 80% universe it murdered. The few who encountered a
Unravelling 1d5-1 Wounds fragment of its power and survived have given it new
Instinct: 10% names, each woefully insufficient to contain its mind-
Wounds: 5 (Health 50) shattering vile majesty. Void Devourer. Deific Defiler.
Ultima Enigma. Sultan of Madness. Universal Antithesis.
"Defeating" this fragment might very
briefly forestall the arrival of the God Reality cracks like glass. Something peers from the other
That Shouldn't Be. side. A limb reaches, grasping, searching, rending, violating
the very existence by its presence. The cracks grow. The
While the universe is full of terrible things and mortal limb multiplies. The cracks grow eyes. Time bleeds. A
danger, it is ultimately rational and comprehensible. billion voices scream in terror and ecstasy as atoms are
Though at times it may seem otherwise, gods or curses do driven insane. Crown of fractured existence shines blackly
not exist, there’s only physics and chemistry we’re yet to on the headless brow.
understand. Too bad other universes are not so
accommodating.
62
Something haunts hyperspace. Interstellar travel, lifeblood of the sprawling human
civilization, grows increasingly perilous as voyagers report bewildering and upsetting
incidents associated with jump drive usage. The one common thread is a mysterious
signal - the TERROR SIGNAL.
SIGNAL Is it a natural phenomenon, an attack, or the first hints of
a mystery far more dangerous?