Description
VIGIL: Cosmic horror on a colonial frontier
You crew a mortgaged salvage ship in a frontier region that was settled two centuries ago and is thriving. There is no faster than light travel, so voyages cost years and you sleep through them. Something is wrong out here, and it is going to take a long time to find out what.
BERTH NOTICE 14-B
Posted at Ashgate Waystation, Cassidan Reach. Renewed quarterly.
Independent hull seeks crew. Salvage and survey work, courier contracts, general haulage. Void-born preferred. No world, no dirt name, no family plot.
Applicants should expect long voyages. The Guild rates the outbound run at eleven years of station time. Those with people waiting are advised to write ahead.
Terms discussed at the berth office. Ask for the Berthmaster.
Filed under the authority of the Chantry, whose records are complete.
Because there is no faster than light travel, ships push toward relativistic speed and the crew sleeps through the journey in fugue, so a short hop costs months of outside time and a long run costs decades. You will come back to places you know and find them changed, and everyone you left behind will have aged while you have not. Between voyages you cut metal out of dead hulls, haul freight, take survey contracts, and occasionally move something for people who would rather you kept no records, because the mortgage does not care what else is happening.
You choose the work, but there is a clock running underneath it, and the setting moves fastest while you are asleep.
Your ship is a real part of the game rather than a set piece, with a custom shipyard and a browser sheet that handles the arithmetic. It is the only ground your characters will ever have, so expect to name it and argue about it.