Sci-Fi197K plays

Cold Wake

Five strangers. One drifting ship. A planet no one remembers heading to.

Open-Ended
4 heroes

About this adventure

Somewhere between the stars, a ship called the Erewhon drifts on a course no one remembers setting. Five crew members claw their way out of cryo-pods caked in frost and silence, their minds wiped clean by a catastrophic malfunction in the cryogenic suspension system. No names. No mission briefing. No memory of why they are here or where they are going. Only the hum of a ship running on emergency power and a distant planet growing larger on the viewscreen. The Erewhon is damaged but alive. Its AI — a fractured, partially corrupted system called VENN — speaks in riddles and half-sentences, offering clues but never the full picture. The ship's logs are encrypted, the crew manifest is corrupted, and someone — or something — has physically destroyed key sections of the vessel. Whoever the crew were before they went under, someone did not want them to wake up with their memories intact. As the unknown planet looms closer and ship systems continue to degrade, the crew must piece together who they are, why they were sent here, and what catastrophic secret the Erewhon is carrying in its cargo hold. Factions may be hunting them. The planet below may hold answers — or extinction. And trust among the crew will be tested when it becomes clear that not everyone on board has forgotten everything.

Prologue

You wake up gasping. The pod around you is cold — bone-deep, lung-aching cold — and the air tastes like recycled metal and something faintly chemical. Emergency lights pulse amber across the ceiling. The ship groans, a low structural moan that you feel more in your chest than hear with your ears. Something is wrong. Something has been wrong for a long time. You don't know your name. You don't know this ship. You don't know the faces of the other people stumbling out of their pods nearby, shivering and wide-eyed. But through the cracked viewport at the end of the cryo-bay, a planet hangs in the dark — vast, pale, and waiting. Whoever you were before you went to sleep, that person is gone. What you do now is all that matters.