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DEAD AIR

· Amanda Girard · Games

A Wormwood Drift Adventure on Morkvald

Requires the Wormwood Drift core rules. Built for a crew of 3–5, roughly one to two sessions at the table.

Referee’s Briefing

Somewhere on Morkvald, the noise never stops. It isn’t music, not exactly — it’s the Neverend, a planet-wide riot that’s been running so long nobody alive remembers it starting. Sound systems built from mining drills. Reactor housings turned into speaker stacks the size of cathedrals. A hundred anarchist Krews holding territory not with borders but with volume, spectacle, and how far they’re willing to go.

Everyone who’s heard of Morkvald knows it as the place you go when you’ve already done everything else — where every excess has a bigger version waiting one Krew over, and the only rule anyone agrees on is that the sound doesn’t stop.

Here is the part nobody outside the First Voice’s inner circle knows, and the part your players should not learn too easily: the sound was never about celebration. It’s a ward.

Three centuries ago, Morkvald was a deep-core mining colony. Its drills broke through into something that had been sleeping in the crust since before the planet had a name worth remembering. Somewhere in the panic of the worst week that colony ever lived through, its engineers learned that the thing in the dark could only reach up into a silence — that vibration, noise, and motion kept the seams shut. “Keep every drill running” became “keep every reactor howling,” became a festival, became a religion, became simply how Morkvald is.

Nobody has been sober and silent on this planet for longer than an hour at a stretch in three hundred years. Until recently.

The hook: the crew is hired — by a nervous corporate guardian, a worried Contact, or their own patron, referee’s choice — to find someone who came to Morkvald chasing the ultimate experience and stopped sending word. Standard payment: 2,000cr on delivery, plus expenses. That someone has fallen in with a subculture called the Unplugged, who have decided that on a world where every possible noise and excess has already been tried, the one transgression nobody’s dared is silence. They are, without knowing it, picking at the one seam that was never meant to be tested again.

1. Morkvald

Population: Established · Government: None — the Anarchist Concord (see below) · Notable Feature: The Neverend

Morkvald has no government in any sense a corporate world would recognize. What it has instead is the Concord of Riot — an unwritten understanding, older than anyone’s living memory, that territory belongs to whichever Krew can hold it through sound, spectacle, and mutual respect for a handful of rules nobody wrote down but everybody knows. Chief among them: the noise does not stop. A Krew that goes quiet — through defeat, disaster, or choice — loses its ground within a day. Nobody has ever needed to explain why that rule matters more than the others. It simply does.

Getting to the surface isn’t hard. Getting a straight answer once you’re down there is another matter — everyone on Morkvald has an angle, most of them are chemically enhanced, and the ambient noise makes half of every conversation a guess.

Arrival

Ships making planetfall on Morkvald contend with decades of accumulated broadcast interference scrambling every approach vector. Call for a Pilot check (TN 10) to bring the ship down clean; failure doesn’t cause a crash, but it does mean the ship comes down somewhere the crew didn’t plan for, possibly in the middle of someone else’s territory dispute. Referees looking to open with tension can resolve this as a Sensor Ghost (core rules 7.4) — something in the static that resolves, on a successful Sensors check, into just another ship doing exactly what the crew is doing. Or it doesn’t resolve at all before they’re down.

2. The Noise Itself (New Rule)

Sound is not just flavor on Morkvald. It’s mechanical.

Every location has a Noise Level: Deafening, Loud, Quiet, or Silent.

  • In Deafening or Loud locations: characters gain a Boon on Resolve Checks made against the Unheard’s influence, but a Bane on Perception and Stealth checks — you can’t hear trouble coming, and nobody can hear you either.
  • In Quiet or Silent locations: the reverse applies — a Bane on Resolve Checks, a Boon on Perception and Stealth. The quieter it gets, the easier it is to hear — and to be heard by whatever’s listening back.

Most of Morkvald’s surface is Deafening. That is, until the crew finds the places that aren’t.

3. Key Locations

The Wreckspire

The crew’s most likely point of arrival: a landing district built into the fused superstructure of the original colony ship, now a market, a dock, and a war zone in slow motion, all at once. Noise Level: Deafening. Good ground for Legwork (core rules 8.1) — rumors, black-market gear, and a first lead on where the missing party was last seen all live here, for the price of a few rounds of asking and a Streetwise check or two.

The Choir Engine

The literal heart of the ward: a former drilling and reactor complex, now a cathedral of speaker stacks fused to the original mining rig, kilometers of cable running down into the dark the colony’s engineers found three centuries ago. This is the Riot Wardens’ seat, and the one place on Morkvald where the truth is actually spoken aloud, in whispers, by people who know exactly how much is riding on the volume never dropping. Noise Level: Deafening, verging on physically painful.

The Hush

Hidden, soundproofed, and technically impossible to build on a world with no permits, no government, and no reason to keep a secret — except this one. The Unplugged’s sanctuary. Getting in requires either a genuine invitation, a very good lie (Deceive, TN 12), or brute-force entry through walls built to keep sound out, which works both ways. Noise Level: Silent. The first Silent room most of these people have ever stood in. It shows.

The Static Bazaar

A rolling market that never sets up in the same place twice, run by whichever Krew currently controls the loudest ground. Good for gear, Contacts, rumors, and a chance for the crew to be seen — which, on Morkvald, is its own kind of currency.

4. Key NPCs

Skarn Ashwrit, First Voice of the Riot Wardens Might 2 / Agility 1 / Wits 2 / Presence 4. Command 3, Lore (Occult) 2. Stamina 13 / Lifeblood 7. Armor 1. Special: knows the truth and won’t say it plainly to outsiders without very good reason to trust them. Earn that trust, and Skarn becomes the single best source of help on the planet — including, if it comes to it, standing between the Unplugged and the seam they’re trying to open.

Hesk Mourn, called the Quiet Might 1 / Agility 2 / Wits 3 / Presence 3. Occultism 3, Willpower 3. Stamina 13 / Lifeblood 6. Armor 0. Special: has not spoken a word in four years. Communicates by written note and gesture, and when Hesk finally does speak — which the referee should hold for the moment it costs the most — treat it as an automatic Fear Rating 2 effect (core rules 4.4) on anyone in earshot. Hesk isn’t a monster. Hesk genuinely believes silence is the last honest thing left to feel on a world that’s tried everything else. That belief is the most dangerous thing in this adventure.

The Missing Party (name and reskin freely — “Iskra Venn” is a placeholder) Might 1 / Agility 2 / Wits 2 / Presence 2. Streetwise 1. Stamina 13 / Lifeblood 6. Armor 0. Special: came to Morkvald looking for the biggest feeling left to feel and found the Unplugged instead. Is not being held against their will. Whether that makes this rescue easier or harder is entirely up to the table.

Unplugged Acolyte (use for any of Hesk’s followers) Might 1 / Agility 1 / Wits 1 / Presence 2. Willpower 1. Stamina 8 / Lifeblood 6. Armor 0. Special: trained to endure Silent rooms without breaking. Immune to the Bane on Resolve Checks from low Noise Level, though nothing protects them from what they’re eventually trying to summon.

5. The Front: Static Fades

Track this as a 6-segment clock.

Fill a segment when:

  • The Unplugged complete a stage of their ritual undisturbed
  • The crew damages or disables part of the Choir Engine, even by accident
  • A full day passes without the crew making progress
  • Hesk speaks aloud in anger or triumph

At 3 segments, the ambient Noise Level across the nearest district quietly drops from Deafening to Loud — nobody notices consciously, but Resolve Checks made there start feeling harder than they should.

At 6 segments, the clock resolves: the Unheard reaches far enough up through the silence in the Hush to be felt planet-wide for one terrible, absolute minute of true quiet, everywhere, all at once — the first the Concord of Riot has broken in three hundred years. What that minute costs is the referee’s call, and it should cost something real. This is not a wipe. It’s a scar the whole planet carries afterward, and a clock that starts filling again the moment the crew leaves.

6. Possible Endings

Wormwood Drift doesn’t do clean wins. Pick the one that fits your table, or let the dice and the players decide between them.

  • Pull them out. The crew removes the missing party from the Hush before the clock resolves. They may not thank the crew for it, and Hesk’s people won’t forget who interfered.
  • Talk it down. Someone convinces Hesk — or the missing party directly — that the transgression they’re chasing has a body count attached that isn’t theirs to spend. Hardest ending to earn; the most lasting one if it lands.
  • Let it ring. The clock resolves. The Unheard gets its minute. Morkvald survives, changed, and now knows exactly what it’s been keeping out — which may be worse, for the Concord, than never knowing at all.
  • Tell everyone. The crew breaks the Riot Wardens’ three-century silence and makes the truth public. Treat what happens next as an open question, not a punishment or a reward — a world that knows why it screams might scream louder, or might finally, fatally, consider stopping.

7. Bestiary Entry: The Unheard

Fear Rating 5. Not a creature in any sense worth drawing. The Unheard is what fills a silence that’s held for too long — pressure, absence, the specific wrongness of a held breath that never gets let out. It has no stats because it is never meant to be fought. Treat any full manifestation as an environmental and narrative event, not a combat encounter: Resolve Checks, Countdown Clocks, and consequences, never a stat block across the table.

Referee’s Note: The scariest thing about the Unheard is that Morkvald’s answer to it actually worked, for three hundred years, at the cost of never being allowed to stop. Let your players sit with that a while before they decide whether “fixing” this world is the same thing as saving it.