The Sable Wake

This is the GM document for The Sable Wake — a five-session horror adventure for a party of four at level 3 (scales 2–6). It runs a dead ship, a slow dread, and a hard choice about what to do with the thing that killed her crew. Everything here is GM-facing; the players get the spoiler-free landing on the Adventures hub. Read the Real Story and the Manifestation scaling table before session zero, then run the acts in order. General "how the party met" framings live on the hub; the three entry hooks below plug into any of them.

Synopsis

The survey tender Sable Wake went quiet on a travel lane weeks ago and now drifts, dark and cold, answering no hails. The party boards her — to claim the salvage, to answer a distress beacon, or on a broker's quiet contract, whichever hook you choose. Inside, the crew is dead and the ship is wrong: the lights breathe, the cold has weight, and a whisper moves through the dark that Force-sensitives feel like a hand on the back of the neck. The survey's last dig recovered a dark-side reliquary — a fist-sized idol of fused black stone and bone — and over eleven days it whispered the crew into suspicion, then murder, feeding on the killing until it turned the whole vessel into a Force-nexus that now replays the death. It has puppeted a handful of corpses, twisted the live specimens in the hold into something worse than they were, and it does not want anyone to leave. The party works deck by deck toward the reliquary's chamber, past the dead and the dread, and reaches a choice at the heart of the ship: destroy the idol, take it, seal it and walk away, or make a bargain with the thing that's been whispering their names.

The Real Story

What the players think they're doing (salvage, rescue, or a retrieval job) is not what's happening. Here is what actually happened aboard the Sable Wake, in order:

• The Sable Wake is a deep-space survey and salvage tender — a working ship that catalogues wrecks and old sites, sells artifacts to collectors, and runs a small live-specimen hold for the exotic-creature trade on the side.
• Her last job was a tomb-world dig (call it Veranthe; move it to fit your era and galaxy). The survey lead, Dr. Ysanne Corr, pulled a sealed reliquary out of the deepest chamber — a black idol of fused stone and bone that reads cold to the touch and colder to the Force. The same haul filled the specimen hold with a small pack of caged vornskrs — Myrkr predators that hunt by sensing the Force.
• Scanning the idol woke it. It is a dark-side nexus, and it feeds on death. It could not act on its own — so it whispered. Over eleven days (the logs degrade as it worked) it turned the crew's ordinary frictions into certainty: that someone was stealing, that someone had turned, that the only safe move was the first move. Suspicion became a knife in the dark, then several.
• The massacre fed it. Each death made it stronger, until it could reach past the crew — into the ship's systems, and into the caged vornskrs, warping them into savage, dark-drawn things straining at failing containment.
• Bex Talvor, the ship's engineer, was the last one standing and the only one who understood. He spaced the bodies he could reach, sealed the reliquary behind the engineering bulkhead, scrawled warnings on the walls, and set the beacon. Then the ship — or the idol — took him too. (Whether Bex is dead, or alive-but-hollowed and waiting, is a GM choice in Act II.)
• What's left is the haunt: cold, whispers, echoes of the crew's last days that replay for anyone who walks the decks, a handful of relic-puppeted corpses (the Hollowed), the twisted vornskrs loose below, and — at the center — the reliquary and the death-echo it has grown into: the Keening.

The Dread (how the haunt touches the party)

The Sable Wake is a dark-side nexus, so proximity and its echoes press on the living. This uses existing SWURPG rules — no new mechanics:

• The save. When the ship reaches for someone (entering a haunted space, touching a marked object, an echo naming them), call a Wisdom saving throw against the ship's dread DC, which escalates by act: DC 12 in Act I, DC 14 in Act II, DC 16 in Act III.
• On a failure, the target gains the Frightened condition until the end of their next turn (or the scene, GM's call) — or takes a GM-chosen compulsion in its place: drop a held item, refuse to enter a space, turn on the nearest ally with a harsh word. Keep it small and personal.
• Force-users feel it worst. A character using the Force (or with the Use the Force skill) rolls their Dread saves at disadvantage while the reliquary is active, and hears the whispers clearly — the idol wants them most. In return, Use the Force checks reveal far more of the Real Story (see the echoes throughout), and a Force-user who succeeds on a Dread save senses a true, useful thing about the space they're in. The gift and the danger are the same sense.
• The whispers are a roleplay tool, not damage. Hand each player a private, true-to-their-character temptation — the salvage is worth more if you cut the others out; the survivor knows something you could take; you were always the strongest one here. The whispers never lie outright; they aim true things at the worst target. There is no corruption score to track — this is theater. (An anti-TPK release valve, modeled on the "dramatic save" pattern, lives in Act III.)

How the Party Met

The Sable Wake is built to drop into any campaign, so the reason the party boards a dead ship is left to the GM. Pick one of the three hooks below at session zero — the haunt is identical once they're aboard, and each hook only changes who sent them and what they think they're walking into. Use whichever fits your table (and pair it with the general framings on the Adventures hub). The adventure assumes a party of level 3; the six pre-made bank characters are level 1, so run them leveled to 3 if you want ready-made PCs, or bring your own.

The Manifestation scaling table (read before session zero)

The Keening is the Act III boss — the reliquary's accreted death-echo, given form. Set its tier by party size before session 1 and hold that tier for the whole finale; don't shift mid-fight. All other combats scale by the per-encounter notes in each <Encounter>; the Keening gets its own table because it is the spine the climax is built on.

Constant across tiers: Speed 0 ft (it hangs in the air; it reaches rather than moves), it is incorporeal — resistant to Energy and Kinetic damage, immune to being grappled, shoved, or knocked prone. Attacks: Grave-cold Reach (melee, Force DC or the target takes 2d8 Cold + is Frightened) and Wail (all living creatures in the chamber, WIS save vs Force DC or Frightened for 1 round; recharge each time the party has NOT damaged the reliquary that round). It cannot leave the nexus chamber, and its HP is tied to the reliquary — see Act III for the "hit the idol, not the ghost" objective that makes the fight winnable at level 3.

Act I — Boarding the Silence

Estimated length: 1 session, roughly 3 to 4 hours. What it teaches: initiative and cover (the droid), ranged vs. mobile-melee tactics (the vornskrs), and the Dread save — the first Wisdom saves against DC 12, and the first whisper that uses a player's name.

The Sable Wake hangs dead in space: a mid-bulk survey tender, hull scarred with old salvage cuts, running lights dark, one docking ring lit by a single failing strip of emergency amber. She is not answering. Act I is the boarding and the first two decks — the party learns the ship is dead, then learns the ship is wrong, then meets the first two things aboard that will try to kill them: one mundane, one very much not.

Scene 1.1 — The Approach & the Hook

Open with the hook you chose (Salvage / Rescue / Contract). Whatever the framing, the party has to get aboard, and how they board sets the tone. The airlocks are unpowered; the ship has minimal drifting rotation.

Scene 1.2 — The Dead Decks

This is the establishing deck: the crew is dead, the job was abandoned mid-motion, and the first thing that still works aboard is hostile. Let the party investigate — the bodies (a Treat Injury or Perception look reads knife and blaster wounds, crew-on-crew, not an outside attacker — the first clue that the killer came from inside), the abandoned crates (party-tier salvage), a wall-mounted deck terminal. A Use Computer check (DC 13) pulls the first, cleanest log entry before the record degrades:

Day 3. Corr says the find's inert — just old stone. Captain wants it crated for the buyer. Morale's fine. Everyone's a little on edge since Veranthe but that's just deep-space nerves. — Talvor, Eng.

Then the droid finds them.

Scene 1.3 — The Specimen Hold

The survey's live specimens were a small pack of vornskrs — predators from Myrkr that hunt by sensing the Force. The reliquary warped them: they were dangerous before, and now they're savage, fast, and drawn to Force-users like iron to a lodestone. This is the Act I climax and the "living things are wrong here too" turn. The hold is a mobile fight — broken cells for cover, spilled feed as difficult terrain, and blast doors the party can try to seal to split the pack.

Act I ends with the party two decks in, bloodied, and no longer able to pretend the Sable Wake is just a dead ship. They've met the mundane threat (the droid) and the twisted-living threat (the vornskrs). They have not yet met the dead — that's Act II — and they have not yet heard the ship remember. Pause here.

Act II — The Ship Remembers

Estimated length: 2 sessions, roughly 6 to 8 hours total. What it teaches: Heroic Surge (the hazard crawl), Force use and Expertise (reading echoes, the survivor), and the group skill challenge (the sealed bulkhead). The Dread DC rises to 14, and this is where the ship stops being a place and starts being a memory — the echoes replay the eleven days, the first Hollowed rise, and the party meets the only other thing still moving with a will of its own.

The crew deck is where the Sable Wake died — quarters, medbay, the mess, the little rooms where eleven days of whispers turned people who trusted each other into people who didn't. It is also failing: hull breaches, a scrubber fire, grav-plating that can't decide which way is down. The party has to cross it to reach the engineering bulkhead and the sealed heart of the ship — and the ship does not want them to.

Scene 2.1 — The Crew Deck

This is a hazard crawl — the party has to work through three failing systems to cross the deck. Each is optional to engage directly (there are always slower ways around), but engaging teaches a mechanic and pulls a piece of the Real Story. Interleave the hazards with echoes: when the party enters a marked cabin, a Use the Force check (DC 13) or an Insight read of the room replays a fragment of the eleven days — a crewmember barricading a door, a whispered argument, the captain crating the idol against Corr's objection. Feed the paranoia arc in order.

Hazard A — The Breach

Crossing the breach section means timing the failing containment field. Athletics or Acrobatics (DC 14) to cross in one field-cycle; on a failure, the character is caught at the edge of a decompression pulse — a Strength save (DC 13) to brace and avoid being dragged toward the black (no fall damage, but a hard, frightening recovery, and a used nerve). A Mechanics check (DC 15) stabilizes the field for everyone, turning the hazard off — the clean solution. This is a good Heroic Surge moment: a player who spends it to make the impossible cross looks like a hero, which is exactly the fantasy horror keeps trying to take away.

Hazard B — The Scrubber Fire

The medbay holds party-tier medical loot (2× Medpac II) and a log, but the air is a hazard. Endurance or a Constitution save (DC 13) to work in the smoke without choking; Mechanics (DC 14) vents the compartment and kills the fire; a Force-user can smother it with an appropriate power. The scorched datapad (Use Computer DC 12) gives a middle-arc log:

Day 7. Kesh is dead. They're saying I did it. I found him — I FOUND him, I didn't — the vornskrs are screaming in the hold and nobody will go down there and Corr won't look at the idol and I can hear it now too, I can hear it when it's quiet — Talvor

Hazard C — The Turning Deck

Acrobatics (DC 13) to move cleanly through the shifting gravity; a failure isn't damage, it's a disorienting tumble that costs position and dignity. The body in the dead zone is a crewmember — and when the party gets close, it opens its eyes.

Scene 2.2 — The Other Presence

Not everything still moving aboard the Sable Wake is dead or twisted. There is one more will here — and who it is depends on the hook you chose. Run one of the two versions below. Both deliver the same beats: a living person the reliquary is working on, a choice about whether to trust them, and the last, worst pieces of the Real Story.

Version A — The Survivor (default; strongest with the Rescue hook)

Building trust with Bex is the roleplay heart of Act II. He gives up the Real Story in stages as the party earns it: Insight (DC 13) reads that he's telling the truth and that something's wrong with him; Persuasion (DC 14) or genuine roleplay opens him up; Treat Injury (DC 12) both heals him and buys enormous trust. What he reveals, in order: the idol whispers true temptations; it fed on the killing; it puppets the dead within its reach; it can't leave the nexus chamber but it reaches; and — the crucial tactical intel — the reliquary is the source of everything, and if it's destroyed, the Hollowed drop and the Keening unravels. He does not know about the Keening's full form; nobody who saw it lived.

Version B — The Rival Crew (default with the Salvage hook)

If the party came for salvage, they are not alone. Another crew — the Velloc outfit — beat them aboard or landed minutes behind, and eleven hours in the ship's dark has already started to work on them. Where Bex is one cracked-but-honest survivor, the Velloc crew is a live, armed, deteriorating problem: paranoid, greedy, and being turned in real time.

Scene 2.3 — The Sealed Bulkhead

Getting through the bulkhead is a group skill challenge — the ship is actively resisting, and the party has to work the problem together while the Dread presses and the dark closes in. Require 3 successes before 2 failures, each PC contributing an action against DC 14:

• Mechanics or Use Computer — cut Bex's welds / override the door's dark-fouled controls.
• Athletics — force the failing door on its track once the seals are cut.
• Use the Force — hold the pressure back, or read the lock's dark-side "wound" to find its weak seam (a Force-user's save is at disadvantage here, but success counts double toward the challenge — the gift and the danger again).
• Treat Injury / Persuasion — steady a cracking teammate (or Bex) so they can keep working; a success here also prevents the next failure.
• Perception / Insight — spot the pattern in the chorus, or the physical tell (a maintenance panel, a pressure valve) that opens the way.

On 3 successes, the seals give and the door grinds open onto the dark beyond. On 2 failures, the ship wins the round: the lights stay dead, a Hollowed rises in the black (run a quick TR 1 husk), and the party has to steady itself and try again — no permanent failure state, just cost and dread. Each PC should roll something; the challenge is designed so a party that cooperates clears it and a party that lets one hero solo it struggles.

Scene 2.4 — The Threshold (cliffhanger)

Hold this beat for the top of the final session. The bulkhead is open; the nexus chamber breathes cold beyond it; and as the party's lights find the reliquary on its plinth, the accreted dead of the Sable Wake — every death the idol has fed on — begin to rise from the dark of the chamber and gather into a single shape. The whispers stop. In the silence, the reliquary speaks once, clearly, in a voice the whole party hears, and it offers them — each of them — the one thing they most want, if they will only leave the door open. Then Act III begins.

Act III — What the Dark Keeps

Estimated length: 1 to 2 sessions, roughly 3 to 6 hours total. What it teaches: the branching choice, an objective-based climax (the "hit the idol, not the ghost" math), and leveling. The Dread DC is at its peak — 16 — and the party finally sees the whole shape of what killed the Sable Wake and has to decide what to do with it.

Scene 3.1 — The Nexus Chamber

This is the finale. The Keening is the reliquary's accreted death-echo (stats from the Manifestation scaling table). The crucial tactical truth — which Bex told them, or which a Use the Force check (DC 14) reveals in the moment — is that the Keening cannot be killed directly. It is incorporeal and reforms; while the reliquary is intact, damage to the Keening does nothing lasting. The reliquary is the source, and the reliquary is the target. Break the idol and the Keening comes apart and the dead lie down.

At the moment the Keening is fully manifest and the party understands the stakes, present the choice. It can be made before the fight (a party that decides fast) or during it (most tables) — the branches below fold into or replace the combat above.

Scene 3.2A — Destroy It

Run the Reliquary Encounter to its end. When the idol's HP hits 0:

The dead are laid to rest, the ship is salvageable (its hull and systems are worth real money; the idol is gone), and the party leaves having done the hard, right thing. If Bex survived to here and didn't spend himself on the dramatic save, he gets out with them — changed, quiet, but free of the whispers for the first time in eleven days. Go to Scene 3.3.

Scene 3.2B — Take It

The idol permits this — it wants off the ship, and a hand willing to carry it is a hand it can keep working. The Keening does not fight to the death; it subsides as the party lifts the reliquary from the plinth, the cold folding down into a patient, waiting quiet. The Hollowed drop. The party walks off the Sable Wake carrying the thing that killed her crew.

Go to Scene 3.3.

Scene 3.2C — Seal It and Leave

The party rewelds the bulkhead, restores the beacon to a warning instead of a call, and burns for open space. The Sable Wake keeps her idol and her dead. But the ship does not want to let warmth leave — the run back to the airlock is a fighting withdrawal: Dread saves at DC 16, Hollowed rising in the dark to bar the way (run 2–3 TR 1 husks as a moving obstacle, not a stand-and-fight), and the corridors themselves resisting (a quick reprise of the Act II hazards). It's a chase, not a boss fight — get out before the ship closes around them.

Go to Scene 3.3.

Scene 3.2D — Bargain (the dark path)

If a party — or a cracked Bex, or a turning Velloc — takes the idol's deal, the reliquary delivers, and the price is always the same currency: it feeds on death, so it asks for one. The specific bargain is a GM/player negotiation, but it is never free and never clean: the "one thing you most want" arrives twisted just enough to teach the lesson, and the idol takes its due (an ally, a piece of the bargainer's self, a door left open that lets it out into the wider galaxy). This is the darkest ending and the one most likely to fracture a party — run it only if the players reach for it, and make the consequences land in the campaign, not just in a paragraph. Go to Scene 3.3, adjusting the outcome to what was traded.

Scene 3.3 — The Return

However it ends, close on the airlock and the cold at their backs. The Sable Wake falls away behind them — destroyed-idol-quiet, or carrying-something-new, or still-drifting-and-still-hungry. Pay off the hook (the salvage claim, the survivors found or not, the broker's cred-stick and her too-knowing smile), settle the loot and the consequences, and let the party breathe.

Then advance them. Completing The Sable Wake takes the party from level 3 to level 4 by milestone — they've crossed a dead ship, protected their own from a thing that hunts the Force, and made a hard call at the heart of it. Have each player update to level 4 before the next session (see Conclusion + Leveling below). Whatever they chose, they carry it out with them — which is, in the end, what the Sable Wake was always about.

Cast of NPCs

Quick at-the-table reference. Voices, motivations, and stat lines for everyone who speaks — plus the dead the party only meets through logs and echoes.

Bex Talvor — Sole survivor, ship's engineer

Role: Guide / tragic figure · Location: Engineering sub-bay (Scene 2.2, Version A).

Voice: Exhausted, over-controlled, fast when frightened. Checks people's eyes before he trusts them. Talks about the ship like it's a person that's ill.

Motivation: Get off the ship; see the reliquary sealed or destroyed. But eleven days of whispers left a crack the idol still works — part of him wants the party to just take it and go so the whispers stop.

Dialogue snippets:

• (First contact) "You're breathing. You're actually breathing. Are you real, or is it doing you too?"
• (Explaining) "It tells you the true thing that hurts the most and it lets you decide to do something about it."
• (The crack) "…or you take it off my ship and it becomes someone else's problem and I sleep for the first time in a week. Sorry. That's the idol talking. Mostly."

Abilities: STR 11 (+0) · DEX 13 (+1) · CON 14 (+2) · INT 15 (+2) · WIS 12 (+1) · CHA 10 (+0).

Stats: TR 2 · AC 13 · HP 30 (currently 19 — worn down) · Mechanics +6 · Use Computer +5 · Endurance +4 · Hydrospanner +2 (1d6 kinetic). Relic-touched — under pressure his Dread saves fail loudly (see the "Bex's crack" GMNote in Scene 2.2). Candidate for the Act III dramatic save.

Tarn Velloc — Rival salvage boss

Role: Rival / warning-figure · Location: Crew deck (Scene 2.2, Version B).

Voice: Loud, jovial, a half-second behind his own smile. Calls the party "partners" and means "obstacles." Getting worse by the hour.

Motivation: Claim the Sable Wake and her cargo — hardening, under the idol, into certainty the party means to rob him. A voice has told him the black idol is the real prize.

Dialogue snippets:

• "Well — partners. Didn't expect company on a dead boat."
• "It'd be a shame if anybody got greedy. This far out. Where nobody's watching."
• "You didn't come for the little black one, did you? Because that one's spoken for."

Abilities: STR 14 (+2) · DEX 14 (+2) · CON 13 (+1) · INT 12 (+1) · WIS 11 (+0) · CHA 14 (+2).

Stats: TR 4 · AC 16 · HP 52 · Blaster Rifle +6 (2d6 energy, 80 ft) · Intimidation +5 · Persuasion +5 · Pilot +5.

Crew: Daccess (heavy — TR 2, HP 26, AC 15, vibro-axe +5 for 1d10+2 kinetic) and Nyle (slicer — TR 2, HP 18, AC 14, blaster pistol +4 for 1d10 energy, Use Computer +6, hands shaking). Both turning; either may break toward the party or toward violence first.

Sethra Iaan — Neutral broker (Contract hook)

Role: Patron · Location: Off-ship (hires the party in the framing scene).

Voice: Precise, unhurried, gives nothing away. Answers a question with the part of it that costs her nothing.

Motivation: Wants the reliquary and the survey's data cores. Will not say why, or how she knew where the ship was. Pays on delivery, no questions — which should worry a careful party.

Abilities: STR 8 (-1) · DEX 11 (+0) · CON 10 (+0) · INT 15 (+2) · WIS 15 (+2) · CHA 15 (+2).

Stats: TR 2 · AC 12 · HP 24 · Persuasion +6 · Deception +6 · Insight +6 · Knowledge: Galactic Lore +6. What she knows (GM): exactly what the idol is, and that it's dangerous. She's done this before. A strong sequel thread if the party takes the idol and sells it to her.

The dead crew (met only through logs + echoes)

• Captain Renn Ostara — ran the Sable Wake; overruled Dr. Corr and crated the idol for the buyer. The whispers turned his caution into control, then cruelty. First to draw a weapon on his own crew.
• Dr. Ysanne Corr — survey lead / xeno-archaeologist who pulled the reliquary from the dig. Insisted it was inert; was the last to admit otherwise. Her final log is the clearest statement of what the idol does.
• Kesh Maren — specimen handler who caged the vornskrs. First to die (Day 7) — accused, then killed, over a theft that never happened. His death is the hinge the massacre turned on.

The Keening — the reliquary's manifestation (Act III boss)

Role: Final threat · Location: Nexus chamber only (cannot leave it).

What it is: the accreted death-echo of everyone the idol has fed on, given a single grieving form. It cannot be killed directly — break the reliquary and it unravels. Full stats + the 2→6 scaling in the Manifestation scaling table (top of the doc). Incorporeal: resistant to Energy/Kinetic, immune to grapple/shove/prone; Grave-cold Reach and Wail (see the table); raises Hollowed each round the party doesn't damage the reliquary.

The reliquary — the object at the center

A fist-sized idol of fused black stone and bone; the coldest thing on the ship; the source of everything. AC 15, HP 40 (scales — see Scene 3.1). Dark-warded: resistant to Energy/Kinetic; full damage from Force powers, lightsabers, Ion, and explosives. Destroying it ends the haunt. Taking it intact makes it the party's problem. It is never named after any specific dark-side figure — reskin its origin to your era.

Encounter Reference

Difficulty budget (L3 → L4, 4 PCs = 7,200 XP target): droid 200 + vornskrs 700 + Hollowed 150 + Velloc crew 600 + climax ~950 ≈ 2,600 XP (~36% of budget). This is a deliberate horror underspend — the adventure advances by milestone, not XP, and the remaining session time is carried by dread, exploration, the hazard crawl, the survivor/rival roleplay, the skill challenge, and the four-branch finale. (For reference, Signal from Tellan-7 runs ~56%.) If your table wants more combat weight, bump the vornskr pack, add a second Hollowed rise, or run the Velloc crew and a turned survivor.

Conclusion + Leveling

Outcomes summary

Sequel hooks

• Sethra Iaan paid to have the idol delivered and never said why. If the party sold it or destroyed it, she has opinions — and a history with objects like it.
• The beacon. However it ends, the Sable Wake's distress signal is the same one that brought the party. Aim it at someone else and you have your next session.
• The carrier. If anyone took the reliquary, it is not done. It is patient. Use the slow-burn Dread saves (Scene 3.2B) to let it earn its place in the campaign.

Leveling: L3 → L4 (milestone)

Completing the adventure advances the party from level 3 to level 4 — no XP tally required. Each player: add their class's level-4 features and any subclass trait, recompute HP (add a hit die + CON), update proficiency bonus if it changes at 4, and take their ability score improvement or a Trait if their class grants one at this level. Do this between sessions so the next game starts at level 4.

GM Quick Reference Card

The Dread DC ladder: Act I DC 12 · Act II DC 14 · Act III DC 16. Wisdom save; failure = Frightened (or a small GM compulsion). Force-users roll at disadvantage and hear the whispers clearly. Hand out private, true, aimed temptations — this is theater, there is no score to track.

Heroic Surge prompts (one big moment per act):

• Act I — the vornskr fight: a player Surges to screen the Force-user, body-blocking the pack off their most vulnerable teammate.
• Act II — Hazard A (the breach): a player Surges to make the impossible field-timed crossing and haul a teammate across with them.
• Act III — the climax: a player Surges to break the reliquary a round early, or to soak a Wail that would have dropped the party.

Force Power suggestions per scene: Sense/foresight powers to read echoes (2.1) and the lock's "wound" (2.3); movement/telekinesis to control the vornskr pack (1.3) and the rising Hollowed (3.1); protective powers to hold the breach field (2.1) and screen the reliquary-breaker (3.1). Remember: the reliquary takes full damage from Force powers — the Force-user is both the idol's favorite prey and its surest undoing.

Pacing checkpoints (where each session should end):

• Session 1 — on the whisper that says a player's name, as the vornskr alpha dies (end of Act I).
• Session 2 — on meeting the survivor / the rival crew, mid-Act II.
• Session 3 — on the open bulkhead and the first sight of the nexus (Scene 2.4 cliffhanger).
• Session 4 — the finale: the choice and the climax.
• Session 5 — spillover / the return, if the finale runs long or the party lingers.

The one anti-TPK lever: the Act III dramatic save (Bex, or the idol overreaching). Use it once, make it cost something, and never gift the win — horror earns it.