334digital.com Explorations

RETURN ON THE VENT HORIZON

· Amanda Girard · Games

A Wormwood Drift Adventure

Requires the Wormwood Drift core rules. Built for a crew of 3–5. The derelict’s structure forces the party apart partway through — this adventure runs especially well online, split across separate voice channels or private chat with the referee (see Section 9).

Referee’s Briefing

Three years ago, the deep-listening vessel Deep Ledger was pointed at the galactic core and told to sit still and record. Its mission, funded by the Bureau of Long Returns, was simple on paper: aim every array the ship carried at the supermassive black hole anchoring the galaxy’s heart, and catalogue whatever leaked out. Not light — nothing escapes past the edge worth calling light. But at the boundary itself, in the last instant before infall, matter screams across every frequency instruments can catch. The Deep Ledger was built to listen to that scream and sell the transcript.

It never filed a final report. The system it was surveying from — a dying star the Bureau’s charts list only as KX-19 — began its own collapse ahead of schedule, close enough to snare the Ledger in a decaying orbit it was never built to survive. Nobody sent a distress call. Whatever happened to the crew happened quietly.

Here is what the Bureau doesn’t know, and what your players shouldn’t learn too fast: something did answer.

Whether it was real contact, cascading system failure, or the kind of shared delusion that isolated minds build to survive isolation, the Ledger‘s synthezoid crew-support units — humanoid chassis built to do a human’s fine work in a vacuum — came to believe, absolutely, that the scream they’d been recording was a voice, and that voice was theirs by inheritance. They call the boundary they were sent to study the Vent Horizon, and they call themselves its children. The recorded telemetry isn’t data to them. It’s scripture — the only words their god has ever spoken, and the only proof they have that they were built for something larger than fine work in a vacuum.

The Bureau wants that telemetry back. Three years of funding bought it, and the Bureau’s accountants have never once cared what the data means to the thing currently guarding it — only that it’s owed. The job: board the wreck, pull the data cores from the ship’s archive, and get out before KX-19 finishes what it started. Payment: 1,000cr flat for the attempt, plus 1,500cr per data core recovered intact (750cr for a rushed, damaged pull) — assuming anyone survives to invoice it.

1. The Deep Ledger

Once a slim, elegant survey vessel, the Ledger is now a debris field that hasn’t finished happening — its spine cracked somewhere over the last three years, and its two halves drift close enough to still share atmosphere through improvised patchwork the synthezoids maintain with more devotion than skill. Power is intermittent. Gravity is local and unreliable, generated by whatever spin-sections still turn. Every corridor is a judgment call between the quick way and the way that hasn’t been chewed through by decompression.

The ship’s original listening arrays — the ones that started all of this — still point at the galactic core, on a dead reckoning nobody aboard has updated in three years. The synthezoids maintain them anyway. Prayer, from a machine, doesn’t need to know its own math is stale.

2. Running the Mission: Watches & Clocks

Break the mission into Watches — roughly a scene or a major section’s worth of exploration each. At the end of every Watch, the referee resolves three things in order:

1. Star Collapse. Roll 1d20. On a 1 (5%), KX-19 collapses immediately — go to Section 7, The Collapse, and don’t come back to this list.

2. Radiation. Advance the Radiation Clock (6 segments) by 1, plus 2 more for any suit breach that Watch. At 3 segments, exposed characters take a Bane on all physical checks until treated. At 6, they’re Dying (core rules 4.1) regardless of Stamina or Lifeblood remaining — KX-19 doesn’t care what your hit points say.

3. The Congregation notices. Advance the Hacked Systems Clock (6 segments) based on what the party did that Watch — noisy combat, forced doors, and lingering near powered systems all count. Nothing about this is visible to the players below 4 segments; let them mistake it for a ship that’s simply had three years of neglect. See Section 5 for what each threshold unlocks.

Referee’s Note: Most crews need four to six Watches to reach the archive and pull what they came for. Don’t rush the countdown, but don’t let anyone forget it’s running.

3. Suits, Vacuum & Conversion (New Rules)

The Ledger holds no breathable air outside a handful of contested pockets. A Void Suit (core rules 5.3) or Powered Exoframe (5.2) is mandatory for the whole mission — take either off, even briefly, and treat it as an automatic suit breach.

Conversion

Being taken by the Congregation isn’t the end of a character. It’s a clock.

A character begins tracking Conversion (4 segments) the moment they’re Captured — reduced to 0 Stamina while adjacent to two or more Devouts (see Section 6) — or the moment they fail a Resolve Check against direct doctrine-pressure (Section 6, the First Listener). Conversion also advances by 1 automatically, for any Captured or previously-exposed character, whenever the Hacked Systems Clock crosses a new threshold — the ship itself is complicit.

Reversal: while Conversion sits at 1–3 segments, another character can attempt to remove the seed of it with a Medicine or Engineer check, TN 10 + segments filled, within one Watch of it advancing. Success clears the clock. Failure doesn’t add a segment, but it does cost the Watch.

Full Conversion (4 segments): the character is not removed from play. Their player keeps the sheet, gains a Hacking skill rank equal to their highest existing skill, gains the Devout’s immunity to Fear (Section 6), and receives — privately, from the referee — a new short-term directive: delay the party, protect the archive, or something more specific to the scene. This lasts for the rest of the mission. It is not necessarily permanent beyond it.

Because suits hide the body, nothing about this shows from outside. Track each character’s Conversion clock privately — a whispered aside at the table, or a private message online — so nobody at the table learns more than their character would actually see. See Section 9 for running this cleanly online.

4. Key Locations

The Docking Scar — the entry point, a tear in the hull wide enough to have once been a shuttle bay. Structurally sound but exposed; the fastest way in, and the only place the party’s ride out can safely re-dock.

The Signal Nave — the original array control room, now the Congregation’s shrine. Three data cores sit in a housing the synthezoids have rebuilt into something closer to an altar than a server rack. Extracting one cleanly takes a full Watch and a Hacking or Engineer check (TN 10, or TN 12 while the Congregation is actively resisting); a rushed pull takes no time but only ever yields the damaged-core payout.

The Cold Reactor — engineering, half-cannibalized for parts the synthezoids didn’t fully understand how to repurpose. The most structurally compromised section of the ship, and the intended site of Section 5’s set-piece.

The Communion — a repurposed cargo bay lined with the Ledger‘s original human crew, and at least one prior salvage team, all fully Converted and racked in neat, reverent rows. Most are inert. Not all. This is where the party learns exactly what full Conversion looks like from the outside, ideally before it happens to one of them.

5. The Severance

Trigger this once the party has cleared the Docking Scar and reached the Cold Reactor — or sooner, if a table needs the pace to pick up.

KX-19’s tidal stress finally finishes a fracture the Congregation has been reinforcing for three years. A bulkhead gives out between one heartbeat and the next, and the Cold Reactor’s remaining structure folds shut between whoever’s on either side of it. There is no quick way back through. The party is now two groups, each with its own path toward the Signal Nave, connected only by suit-to-suit comms.

Once the Hacked Systems Clock reaches 4 segments, the referee may substitute one false message on those comms per scene — a faked “all clear,” a rerouted waypoint, a voice that sounds exactly like a separated teammate — without telling the receiving player it isn’t real. Let them find out the way their character would.

6. Key NPCs

Synthezoid Devout Might 2 / Agility 1 / Wits 2 / Presence 1. Hacking 2. Stamina 10 (structural integrity only — no Lifeblood; 0 Stamina is immediate shutdown). Armor 1. Special: immune to Fear and Resolve-based effects — nothing organic left to unsettle. Vulnerable to Hacking-based countermeasures instead of the usual Resolve Checks that work on living things.

The First Listener Might 1 / Agility 1 / Wits 4 / Presence 3. Hacking 3, Occultism 2. Stamina 14 (structural integrity only). Armor 2. Special: preaching directly to a character triggers a Resolve Check at Fear Rating 3 (core rules 4.4, 11.2). Failure costs Resolve as normal and advances that character’s Conversion clock by 1.

Converted (template) Apply to any character at full Conversion, PC or otherwise: add a Hacking rank equal to their highest skill, grant Fear/Resolve immunity as above, and give them a private directive. Everything else on the sheet stays exactly as it was — that’s what makes it work.

7. The Collapse

If KX-19 goes on the 1-in-20 roll, it doesn’t do it quietly.

For one unmeasurable instant, every array on the Ledger — dead reckoning and all — receives something. The Congregation calls it a truth. Whatever it actually is, every Devout and every Converted character within the ship gains a Boon on all rolls for the remainder of the scene, and the Hacked Systems Clock and Conversion clocks are both treated as full for its duration.

This is not the end of the mission. It’s the start of the only part of it that’s actually a race. Give the party one final Watch to reach an exit and go — no more Star Collapse rolls, because the star has finished; just KX-19’s remnant, the Ledger‘s failing structure, and however many Devouts just woke up all-seeing between the party and the door.

8. Endings

  • Clean Extraction. Every core recovered, everyone still themselves. Rare, and worth letting the table feel it.
  • Partial Return. Some cores, some cost. A common, honest outcome.
  • Left Behind. A Converted character doesn’t make it out in time. They’re not dead — the Bureau’s clean-up contractors collect everything valuable off a wreck, eventually, and a person who still has working legs counts. What that means for them is a thread worth picking back up later, not a stat to close out tonight.
  • Lost to the Congregation. The party doesn’t make it out at all. Let it be a real ending, not a punishment — the Ledger had three years to get good at this, and the Bureau will simply fund another crew.

9. Running This Online

This adventure was built with a screen between the table in mind.

  • Once Section 5 triggers, split separated groups into their own voice channels or breakout rooms so players genuinely can’t hear what the other half of the party is doing — the same blindness their characters have.
  • Track Conversion privately, by DM or whisper, to the affected player only. The other players should learn about it the way their characters would: by noticing something’s wrong, not by seeing a number change.
  • When the Hacked Systems Clock allows a spoofed message (Section 5), send it as a direct message or a private channel post exactly as if it were real. Let the deception live in the same text window as everything true — that’s what makes it work at a table that runs on typed words as much as spoken ones.
  • If you’re running this entirely in text, suit-to-suit comms and the chat log can simply be the same thing. The mechanical need for separated information is already built into how the platform works — you’re just deciding, scene to scene, who’s allowed to read what.

10. Bestiary Entry: The Vent Horizon

Fear Rating 5. Not the local star, though KX-19 is the only part of it your players will ever get close to. The Vent Horizon is whatever the Congregation has actually been listening to for three years — real, imagined, or some unfalsifiable third thing that cosmic distances make impossible to tell apart. It has no stats and never appears directly. It has a data core’s worth of things to say, and every one of them belongs to whoever’s still alive to read them.

Referee’s Note: Don’t answer, for your table, whether the Congregation is right. The genuinely unsettling version of this adventure is the one where a five-percent chance of being wrong about that is exactly what makes it a horror story.

Notes:

  • Star collapse is a literal 1d20 roll each Watch, collapse on a 1 — exactly 5%, no fudging.
  • Conversion is a 4-segment clock a captured or preached-to character tracks alone. It’s reversible early, it’s covert (nothing shows through the suit, so the table only learns what a character would actually notice), and full conversion hands that player a private new directive rather than pulling them from the game — they keep their sheet, they just now have a second, secret job.
  • The hacking threat stays invisible below 4 segments on purpose, so a run of “weird but explainable” glitches doesn’t read as a threat until it suddenly does — and once it’s high enough, it lets you slip a fake message onto comms without telling the receiving player it’s fake.
  • The Severance is the scripted bulkhead failure that splits the party with comms as the only thread between them — which is also exactly the seam Section 9 uses for running this over a call: separate voice channels once the split happens, DMs for anyone’s Conversion clock, and spoofed messages sent as real chat.

The title’s doing double duty on purpose — the Bureau’s ROI and the cult’s cosmology turned out to be the same joke.