Don't answer the hail
The Sable Wake stopped answering hails weeks ago. She drifts on a travel lane now, dark and cold, one failing light blinking on her flank at an interval a half-second too slow to be a heartbeat.
The Sable Wake is our third adventure and the first one built for horror. It's five sessions for a party of four at level 3, and it scales cleanly from two players to six.
Three ways in
The reason your party boards a dead ship is yours to pick. The GM chooses one hook at session zero, and the haunt is identical once they're aboard — only who sent them changes, and what they think they're walking into:
- Salvage — she pinged an open registry as an unclaimed derelict. You're the salvagers, and you're not the only crew who saw the ping.
- Rescue — a weak, looping beacon carries a partial crew manifest and one live word: "—still here—". Someone may still be alive aboard, and finding out whether they're still themselves is the whole job.
- Contract — a broker pays well to retrieve the ship's "recovered find," and won't say why it matters or how she knew where the ship was.
Dread, not firefights
Most adventures are paced by their fights. This one isn't. The Sable Wake trades firefights for a slow crawl through a haunted derelict, and the combat is deliberately sparse and lethal — punctuation, not the sentence.
When the fights do come, each one is a different problem. A malfunctioning loader droid the haunt can't touch, because droids can't be reached that way — the mundane fake-out before things stop being mundane. A pack of Force-hunting predators the crew never should have caged, loose in a breached hold, and they will flow straight past your front line to get at whoever touches the Force. Your Jedi is their marked prey, and screening them is a puzzle you solve with bodies and blast doors. Then the ship's own dead, wearing faces you've read about in the logs.
The horror runs on a Wisdom save — nothing invented, just the Frightened condition and a DC that climbs act by act. Force-users roll it at disadvantage. They hear the whispers clearest, because the whispers want them most. The gift and the danger are the same sense.
Best of all, the whispers don't lie. They take a true thing about your character and aim it at the worst possible moment. There's no corruption score to track. It's theatre, and it works because the party turns on itself long before anything else does.
Four maps at LEGO scale
Every major fight ships with a printable tactical map at the usual scale — 1 inch = 5 feet, sized to a LEGO minifigure's footprint. The cargo deck, the specimen hold, the crew deck with its hull breach and its failing gravity, and the chamber at the ship's cold heart.
The printed tiles are clean, so you can lay them on the table without handing your players the answers.
The GM download, rebuilt
This one ships as three PDFs instead of one, and that change came straight out of playing it at the table.
The problem was obvious the moment a fight started: you're reading a scene on page 9, the stat block is on page 24, and the mood you spent an hour building dies while you scroll. So the adventure is split by what you're actually doing with it:
- The adventure — the story you run. Read-aloud text, scene guidance, the choices. Nothing to look up.
- The Stat Reference — every stat block with tactics, scaling, and loot, grouped by scene.
- The Tactical Maps — every map with its key and your enemy placements, also grouped by scene.
Open the reference beside the story and stop flipping. Each stat block also carries the full ability line plus every skill the creature is proficient in — so when a player tries the thing you didn't plan for, and they will, you can roll it instead of guessing.
A choice with no clean answer
Deck by deck, the ship gives up what killed her. By the time you reach the cold heart of her, you'll know exactly what you're standing in front of, and you'll have to decide what to do with it: destroy it, take it, seal it and walk away, or take the deal it offers you.
Whatever you choose, you carry it out with you.
There are no faction names here — no Empire, no Order, no era-specific politics. The threat is old and personal, the patrons are independent, and the horror is the same in any century. Drop it into the Old Republic, the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, or your own corner of the galaxy; only the set dressing changes.
Read the adventure and grab the GM download →
A Force-user isn't required — the adventure flexes without one. But if you have a Jedi at the table, this ship was built to test them.