Deep space relay

A lonely beacon far from any star, passing messages between worlds for a skeleton crew who rarely speak to each other. It hears everything that crosses the dark, including signals nobody sent.

Light
Dim
Going
Easy

Hear it

Hazards

  • Vacuum. No air at all: an unprotected person stays conscious for about ten to fifteen seconds, the moisture on the tongue boils, and death follows within minutes. A suit, a helmet that seals and an air supply are the price of every step. D&D 5e: With no breath to hold, a creature without air gains 1 Exhaustion level at the end of each of its turns until it can breathe; it then loses all the Exhaustion it gained this way. Starfinder 2e: Vacuum (GM Core): no breathable air, so the creature suffocates, and it takes minor bludgeoning damage (1d6 to 2d6) every minute; with no propulsion it is untethered. Armour environmental protections cover vacuum for a number of days equal to the armour's item level (minimum 1). Archives of Nethys
  • Decompression. A hull breach or a door opened at the wrong time: the air rushes out with everything loose in it, bulkheads slam shut and whoever is on the wrong side has seconds to find a mask. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: each creature within 9 m (30 ft) of the breach makes a DC 13 Strength saving throw or is pulled 6 m (20 ft) toward it, taking 1d6 Bludgeoning damage for each 3 m (10 ft) if it hits a wall. A creature pulled through the breach is in vacuum. After 1 minute the section is airless. Starfinder 2e: Decompression (GM Core): a creature thrown from pressure into vacuum takes moderate bludgeoning damage (4d6 to 6d6) and starts suffocating at once, with no breath held. Archives of Nethys
  • Isolation. Months from anyone, with the same few faces. Small grudges grow, sleep goes wrong, and some start hearing things in the static. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: after each month of isolation, each creature makes a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw; on a failure it has Disadvantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks and Charisma checks with the crew until it gets a week of leave.

What may happen

  1. The relay logs a message addressed to the station itself, signed by a crew member who has not sent it yet.
  2. For six hours, nothing comes through on any channel, from anywhere.
  3. Two of the crew have stopped speaking; the third passes messages between them.
  4. A ship passes close without hailing, running dark.
  5. A message arrives decades late, from a colony that no longer exists.
  6. Frost has built up on the main dish’s feed horn, and the signal is fading. Someone has to go out and clear it.
  7. The message queue is three days behind. Somewhere a ship waits for orders and a family waits for a birthday call.
  8. One of the crew has built a whole model railway in the spare module. He shows it to the party for an hour, very proudly.
  9. From the viewport there is no near star at all, only a sky thick with distant ones, and no up or down.
  10. The supply ship is a month late. The crew has started counting coffee by the spoonful.
  11. The relay’s chief, a quiet woman named Ines, is writing a novel. She asks the party to read the first chapter and be honest.
  12. A game of chess with a player light-hours away has lasted two years. The next move arrives while the party is there.
  13. A faint distress call comes through from a ship far beyond any help. The crew can only pass it on and wait.
  14. A company auditor arrives with the supply ship and counts every spare part twice.
  15. The relief crew arrives. The old crew hands over without a word, packs in an hour and does not look back.
  16. On an unused band a voice reads out numbers, slowly, in a calm voice, every six hours exactly.
  17. The encryption keys must be changed by hand today, and the procedure needs three people. There are only two awake.
  18. The dish has drifted a fraction off its target. Realigning it takes hours of patient adjustment.
  19. A heater fails in the sleeping module. The crew moves into the control room and sleeps among the consoles.
  20. The air has the flat, stale smell of air that has been breathed too many times by too few people.
  21. Two of the crew admit over breakfast that they had the same dream. The third goes very quiet.
  22. A single potted tomato plant grows under a lamp in the galley. It has a name, and it has two tomatoes.
  23. The relay keeps a copy of everything it passes. In the archive, the party finds a message mentioning one of them by name.
  24. Something small pings off the hull, once, then again. The crew look at each other and say nothing.
  25. On the relay’s night shift the crew plays music down the line to the next relay, which plays some back.

Adventure hooks

  1. The relay has been sending a message nobody wrote, on a schedule, to a star with no known colony.
  2. The crew of three asks to be relieved; the company says it sent the relief ship months ago.
  3. A message intercepted at the relay would bring down a government, and both sides know it is there.
  4. Static on one channel sounds like someone breathing.

Who and what is met

Each is an SRD stat block under another name, as game masters reskin them.

Other places among the stars

Orbital station, Derelict ship, Colony outpost, Precursor ruin, Asteroid field, Gas giant orbit, Terraforming works, Prison hulk, Research lab, Crashed freighter, Nebula, Neon city, Junktown, Spaceport, War front, Alien hive, Living ship, Undersea base, Lava foundry

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

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