Drifter's Wake

01 · The rim

Too far out for anyone to send help.

The rim colonies were outposts, built to wait for a fleet carrying everything they needed: fabricators, reactor cores, medicine, seed, and tens of thousands of colonists asleep in cryo. The fleet never arrived.

For forty years the rim has been eating itself. Stations are stripped to the frame. Settlements have gone quiet. The people still out here keep worn-out machines running and take what they need from whoever has it. A working air filter can be worth more than a gun, and people will kill for either.

The ships are coming back wrong.

Now and then one of the fleet's ships drifts home, dark and silent. A single reactor core can keep a settlement alive for another year, so everyone comes running, and they come armed.

Most of them are only wrecks. Some are not. Nobody on the rim agrees on where the fleet went. They agree that crews who board the wrong ship do not come back the same, if they come back at all.

02 · How it plays

You're a salvager with a ship to keep alive.

Answer a distress call, take a job, or chase a rumor of a wreck nobody has stripped yet. You never know what you've docked with until you're inside, or who else had the same idea. What you bring back gets built into your ship. More cargo space, a better workshop, backup life support: each one lets you travel farther out and survive what you find there.