© Myrrys 2026
MIT / CC-BY
The Vessel — FREE//FALL

The Vessel

The thing that holds the crew together is a small, fast boarding craft: a privateer of the space age. Five operators have run her together for the better part of a year — same five, same ship, no churn. That is rare; crews rotate constantly, people burn out, cash out, or don’t come back, because deaths happen even to professionals. This crew hasn’t lost anyone. They know the ship and each other the way a hand knows a glove, and that cohesion is their real asset, more than the titanium prow, more than the AI. It is also what the scenario spends the evening pulling apart.

Naming her

She carries only a hull code on the registry. Crews name their own ships, and this crew has earned the right. Offer the players one of these, or let them coin their own — the name tells you who they think they are:

  • Due Diligence — dry, corporate, faintly menacing. The name of a ship that reads your contract before it reads your rights.
  • Pay Day — blunt and cheerful about the only thing that matters. No pretense; they came for the money and they’ll say so.
  • Special Circumstances — the polite phrase on the incident report, for the jobs nobody admits to. A crew that names her this thinks they’re the deniable option, and rather likes it.
  • Warhog — unsubtle, ugly, and proud of it. A ship named for exactly what a titanium prow at ramming speed does to a hull.

Whatever they pick, write it into the scene: the assistant should address them by the ship’s name from the first line, and the ship should feel like the sixth member of the crew — right up until the scenario starts teaching them what a ship’s mind can actually be.

Statted below as an example FREE//FALL vessel — an aggressive privateer boarding craft. Ship types are countless; treat her as a working template as much as a scenario prop.

Stat block

title: "[Crew's Vessel]"
nickname: "Privateer boarding craft"
category: "vehicle"
size_category: "Huge"
frame: 32
systems: 24
vehicle_av: 3
binding:
  body: 2
pilot_binding:
  body: 2
  mind: 2
qualities:
  - "Movement System (Antimatter-catalyzed fusion torch — sustained 3 g brachistochrone)"
  - "Fuel Reserve (Oversized — one full-burn intercept, then a crawl home)"
  - "Ramming Prow (Reinforced titanium bow — breaches transport hull plating; front facing AV 6)"
  - "Crash Foam (Full-cabin impact suspension — boarding by ram)"
  - "Point Defense (1 Laser + 2 Micro-Rocket Cannons)"
  - "Carried Craft (Approach Shuttle — see Dart Courier Shuttle)"
  - "Ship's Equipment (Cutter Light EVA Frame — work exo in the bay, mission pool gear: anyone binds it when the job calls for hauling or cutting)"
  - "Sensor Suite (Passive array + active radar/lidar)"
  - "Integrated AI (Specialist shipboard assistant — flight, sensors, fire control, tactical modelling)"
  - "Occupancy (5 — powered exoskeleton acceleration berths)"
  - "Confinement (Crew bound to acceleration couches under thrust)"
  - "Environmental Sealing"
  - "Life Support (Extended — weeks)"
  - "Signature: Loud (fusion torch — no stealth under thrust)"
source: "northern-lights-demo"

Effect

A boarding craft, not a warship. Everything about her is bent toward one move: cross a gulf fast, arrive with the crew alive, and put them inside a hull that would rather stay closed. The oversized tanks buy the brachistochrone burn (Appendix A.02) — the drive is a fusion torch spiked with a metered trickle of antimatter to light it, and that antimatter is the ugliest line on the fuel invoice, logged by the platform to the milligram. The titanium prow turns the whole ship into a battering ram when the crew commits to it; the crash foam is what lets them survive doing so. Her point defense is for sweeping debris and swatting a curious drone — she loses any straight fight against something built to shoot back.

The specialist AI is the reason five people can crew her. It flies, it burns, it runs the sensors and the guns, and it models options faster than any of them can. It is narrow and incurious and exactly what it appears to be — hold that thought for later in the scenario.

Crew binding — Body 2. This is the part players feel. She is small: under thrust, every soul aboard is bound Body 2 whether they touch a control or not, strapped into a coffin-sized acceleration compartment, pinned by gravity, unable to walk, reach, or turn without the exoskeleton doing it for them. Play the confinement. The burn is not a loading screen — it is hours of being a body in a box, and the crew arrives at the Njord’s Whisper already spent before a single hatch opens.

Pilot binding — Body 2, Mind 2. On top of the crew cost: Body 2 for sustained high-G handling and ram geometry, Mind 2 for sensor fusion, fire control, and burn management — most of the Mind load shared with the assistant.