Derelict ship

A hull drifting dark between the stars, its crew gone and its log ending mid-sentence. Some systems still wake when you board, the air may or may not hold, and whatever emptied the ship might still be aboard.

Light
Dark
Going
Slow

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
  • Weightlessness. Nothing falls. A person drifts in the direction they last pushed, tools float away if not tied down, and a fight is a matter of handholds. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: a creature without a Fly Speed moves only by pushing off a surface, at its Speed in a straight line, until it meets another. Each attack it makes without a handhold has Disadvantage unless it has trained for weightlessness. Starfinder 2e: Zero gravity (GM Core): creatures are clumsy 1, off-guard and untethered; they move by Push Off from something their size or larger, or with propulsion. They lift and carry ten times as much, and thrown ranges are multiplied by 10. Archives of Nethys
  • Deep cold. Cold far below anything on Earth: steel turns brittle, rubber cracks and an unheated suit fails within hours. Heating and power are life. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: a creature without heated protection makes a DC 15 Constitution saving throw at the end of each minute, taking 2d6 Cold damage and gaining 1 Exhaustion level on a failure. Cold resistance halves the damage but not the Exhaustion; Cold immunity passes automatically. Starfinder 2e: Incredible cold (GM Core, −62 °C / −80 °F or colder): fatigued after 2 hours of travel and moderate cold damage (4d6 to 6d6) every minute. A superior thermal capacitor protects against it. Archives of Nethys

What may happen

  1. The last log entry reads only “all well”, and the timestamp is three years old.
  2. The lights flicker on along one corridor, as if something had been waiting for visitors.
  3. A crew member floats in a corridor, frozen, still holding a tool and a look of surprise.
  4. A hatch sealed from the inside, with scratches on the outside.
  5. The ship's drift changes by a fraction: something aboard has fired a thruster.
  6. The outer airlock answers no code. Behind its panel, an override lever waits under a layer of frost.
  7. Inside, every surface wears a thin fur of frost that glitters in the helmet lamps and smudges at a touch.
  8. A photograph drifts past the party in the dark corridor: a family on a beach, smiling, on a world nobody recognises.
  9. The forward hold is a seed bank, thousands of sealed tubes still cold. Some colony never got its forests.
  10. The gravity plates in one deck stutter on and off, and loose tools slam to the floor and rise again.
  11. Emergency lights pulse red along the deck, slow as a sleeping heartbeat.
  12. A ship’s computer wakes and greets the party in an old protocol, asking for a captain’s code that nobody has.
  13. In the mess, the table is laid for dinner. The food is frozen on the plates, and one chair is pushed back.
  14. A bulkhead is buckled outward, as if something pushed from the other side, very hard.
  15. In the escape bay, every pod sits in its cradle but one. Its launch log shows a date and no name.
  16. A long tear in the hull shows the stars, sharp and still, a hand’s width from the deck plating.
  17. Every bed in the medical bay carries a quarantine tag, and every bed is empty.
  18. A recorder in a cabin, its battery nearly gone, plays a child singing the same verse over and over.
  19. The reactor is cold, but a bank of batteries still holds a charge, enough to wake one system. The party must pick which.
  20. One suit is missing from the locker, and its helmet hook is bent.
  21. With a helmet pressed to the bulkhead, the party hears a faint tapping carried through the metal from somewhere aft.
  22. Salvage tags from another crew are stuck on the best equipment. They are dated last month.
  23. A cloud of frozen water droplets hangs in a corridor, glittering, the remains of a burst pipe.
  24. The captain’s private log is encrypted, and the key is hinted at in a note taped beside the console.
  25. The ship’s nameplate has been ground off the hull, carefully, by someone with time and a good tool.

Adventure hooks

  1. Salvage rights go to whoever reaches the bridge first, and another crew docked an hour ago.
  2. The ship's registry says it was decommissioned twenty years before it left port.
  3. A cryopod still has power and an occupant, and its manifest entry has been erased.
  4. The derelict is on a slow course for an inhabited world; someone must turn it or break it.

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, Colony outpost, Precursor ruin, Asteroid field, Gas giant orbit, Deep space relay, 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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