A little over a week ago, I sat outside at a patio table and played Moonsailors, by Annamyriah de Jong, with four of the friends I made through an online course about world building and game design. Moonsailors is a game about lone starfarers exploring an abandoned system and finding traces of one another. We started our game at dusk, and as night fell, we were left relying on a battery-powered camping lantern in the middle of the table.
This post is unusual. It’s a narrativized play report that tells a version of the stories we told at the table that evening. It’s entirely from memory and it’s edited down, so it misses some things and misremembers others. There are details I added or backfilled to help tie things together. I couldn't recall all the character names, so I left them out and gave the characters simple titles. I hope you find it interesting.
It’s lonely out in the stars, especially in the abandoned inner reaches of the system. Dwindling at its center is the system’s own sun, dying a death that’s too slow to perceive and too massive to ignore. Most of what remains of civilization in the Inner System are abandoned industrial sites and residential stations. There are folks living out here, but they’re far apart from one another.
1. The rogue surveyor scavenges parts from the wreckage of the Aurelion, sure that he can find something to fix his broken antenna. As he sifts through the drifting space debris, he thinks of a distant home where the weather gets colder with each passing year. Here in the warmer Inner System there are a scarce few places that are viable for rehabitation.
Normally, he would contact his superiors to get his ship repaired. They were stingy with requisition requests, but anyone could tell you that the ship needs a functioning antenna to perform normal operations. But they were no longer his superiors, and this ship was no longer theirs, as far as he was concerned. Eventually, they’d catch up to him and there would be consequences. But if he could find what he was looking for before then…
As he fits the Aurelion’s functioning antenna onto his own finicky ship, he gently wraps his old broken one in a spare adhesive strip. He nestles it into an old flower pot that floats amid the ships forgotten things. A reminder that we lived here once, and we could perhaps live here again.
2. Across the system, the Courier sits at Rozie’s Diner and picks at her waffles disappointedly. Her latest cargo sits in the hold of her ship, which is parked in clear view outside the window, just to be safe. Secretive cargo like this always makes her nervous, and she has a long way yet to go with it. She doesn’t much care for smuggling jobs, but good pay and veiled threats help grease the wheels when they cross her desk.
But even for a smuggling job, this one feels different. The air of secrecy is less fearful, more reverent. The clues about the cargo’s true purpose are less evident, even when she allows herself to search for them instead of pushing the thoughts out of her mind. The strange, cold canisters sit there, bundled tightly, and she feels almost as if she can still see them through her hauler’s hull as she gazes out the diner window.
3. The exiled priest looks up and shifts his sore knees slightly, emerging from somber reverie after a long and persistent prayer. He brushes frost out of his beard and shakily stands up, feeling the cold of Tyrian’s icy surface deep in his bones. Strange that a place like this could exist so close to the sun—supposedly still inhabited, no less—when it was already so frigid. Much like the Outer System, it’s been getting colder here on Tyrian.
The overcast skies have no answer for him today, so he sighs and returns to his ship to warm up. Endurance in harsh conditions, and even pain, are important to his faith. But self-destructiveness is not so holy.
His ship beeps cheerily at his return and he pauses to gaze again at its plush, high-tech interior. As if in final insult to his devotion, the religious community that cast him out sent him on his way in cloying luxury. He wondered, not for the first time, if this miserable ship was enough of an affront to plainness and piety that it was the thing holding him apart from his god.
4. The elder surveyor runs routine analysis as she orbits Carnelian, a planet-like ball of scrap that has developed an ecosystem of its own. Its still open for business; occasional passing vessels discharge bundles of refuse in low orbit before jetting away into the dark. Each year, she passes through and runs some tests on the odd species of lizard that inhabits the junkyard, its origins unclear.
Her fleet of spiderbots scuttle around the surface collecting samples as she watches their feeds from orbit. Someday, they might shut down this junk heap, stop raining new debris down on the heads of these creatures. But for now, nothing changes. No major population decline, no signs of greater intelligence that could shift priorities.
She sighs as one of the spiderbots gets caught in the settling refuse. It’s too dangerous to retrieve it manually, so she calls the others back, updates the task item in her work queue, and prepares to move on.
5. People find all sorts of things to fill the weeks of oppressive void, but more often than not it includes voices. Perhaps that’s why most of them listen to radio and podcasts; it feels just a little bit like community.
The oracle now waits patiently as fuel sloshes through a series of tubes that they’ve attached between the I.A.R. Pitch, a derelict station in tight orbit around the sun, and their own ship. They skip back and forth through a podcast episode to make sure they’ve followed all the right steps for the fuel siphoning technique that they’ve learned. It’s funny that something like “divination podcasts” could catch on as much as they had, even in a dying system, but it’s no surprise that they’d quickly devolve into various other tips, commentary, and personality content.
Still, fuel siphoning advice is the sort of thing that comes in handy regardless of where you hear it. There are few people out here in the Inner System and hardly anyone to enforce the laws prohibiting it; making use of these drifting ruins feels more meaningful than following the rules of a ghost town.
6. The rogue surveyor wanders the tunnels of Mining Base Celadon, a mined-out asteroid that basks in the warmth of a swift, close orbit. The rock is sturdy, at least in the places it hasn’t been damaged too thoroughly. There would be plenty of danger that came with building here, but plenty of potential space too. Maybe they could enclose enough of it to establish an artificial atmosphere…
He’s interrupted from his thoughts by the sounds of rocks shifting somewhere down the tunnel. He wonders how much time he has before they catch up with him. He wonders how much time his friends and family back home have before their world becomes uninhabitable. He wonders where they’ll go. How much longer can they wait to rebuild in the Inner System?
7. The courier exchanges a package with a recipient who has made their base on the derelict City Ship Sage. The brief interaction warms them, and they leave a family memento with their contact as a gift. It’s been a long time since she thought about her family as the people and experiences she grew up with, not the abstract symbols of them that she had brought with her to to the stars. She must have had some lingering emotion that drove her to hold on to these trinkets, but the impromptu gift was more an expression of magnanimity than a desire to be rid of the thing.
This dropoff was only a side gig, though, and the ominous cargo that she’s been carrying still waits in the hold, impatient for its destination. The courier has been having strange, grim dreams lately. A frigid place, spines and spires of jagged ice, empty, terrifying. She can’t help but think the cargo is calling to her somehow. She’s never broken a promise to leave clandestine cargo sealed, and she’s well aware of the dangers it could pose. Still, it’s harder than ever to resist…
8. The exiled priest drifts amid the stars, unsure of where to go next. The megachurch station where he made his life and career is far away now, and he thinks of the last time he glimpsed true divinity. It came, he recalled, in the unlikeliest of places. Some strange canisters of cargo that called to him once and even still haunted his dreams, inviting him to believe in a future not yet promised. With the sun dwindling and his congregation becoming nervous, he told them of his revelation.
The clergy understood this to be heresy, a deviation from their own notions of divinity. Though many of them fervently sought signs from their god—pursuing purity by way of fasting, long hours in prayer, and living in harsh simplicity—it was hard for them to believe that one of their fellows had achieved such contact. Ironically, they found his story to be lacking in grandeur, mundane and modern in a way that strained credulity. They gathered, deliberated. He was sent away with no chance to appeal.
He can’t explain why, but he knows in his heart that he’ll never encounter something like that again. Unable to go back, he drifts amid the stars, unsure of where to go next.
9. The elder surveyor frowns and clears the notifications from her terminal. Another memo about the rogue surveyor with the stolen ship, who is still at large, and the actions that employees are meant to take should they encounter him. Being suddenly asked to work as a bounty hunter troubled her. Touching down on the shattered planet Viridian, she chooses without quite knowing why to stroll along with her surveying robots in the planet’s mild atmosphere.
The thin sunlight warms her face, though the air here is crisp and cold. Breathing it in, she immediately feels a sense of relief that only dirt underfoot can give. Navigating around the cracks on the surface of Viridian, she listens to the latest voice message from her son. Fresh out of the university, he’s taken to the stars just like her, working as a courier. Can’t say she didn’t warn him about the long weeks in space. Lately, her pride in her work has given way to a nagging sense of doubt. She hopes, at least, that he’ll send her messages more often now.
She stumbles slightly, swearing under her breath as one of her earbuds slips loose from her ear and tumbles into a crevasse. Again, too dangerous to retrieve. She hopes, inexplicably, that someone else will find it.
10. The oracle touches down on Tyrian in search of its elusive inhabitants. Hours spent trudging around the frozen wastes yield no signs of life. Resigned, the oracle returns to their ship, and begins broadcasting on their radio.
The oracle believes in community; they believe enough to dedicate their years to visiting its most distant tendrils, providing guidance through divination. In the barely-populated Inner System the sun’s slow death looms even greater. They know that people out here are looking for direction and comfort, and that their gift can only truly be given face to face.
You could call the loose network of oracular podcasts and radio shows a “community” too, but this oracle doesn’t see it that way. They make their broadcasts without fussing over listenership or marketing; they don’t even know if anyone’s listening. For them, broadcasting into the darkness is an act of outreach and unselfish kindness. The listeners they address feel more imaginary than real, but they love them all the same. Out alone in the black, they speak for those who might hear; and when they meet clients to perform their divination duties, the first thing they do is listen.