Handouts and Maps

This chapter contains all player-facing handout text and written map descriptions for Dead Drop at Harrowspan.

Handouts are documents the players receive in play, either read aloud by the GM or printed and handed across the table. Each handout entry includes the in-world text and a GM note explaining when to distribute it and what it reveals.

Map Descriptions are written spatial references the GM uses to describe locations consistently. They are not a substitute for drawn maps; those are handled in the production pipeline. They provide every piece of spatial information the GM needs to run scenes in each location: what is where, how things connect, and what the space feels like.

Print this chapter separately if you plan to hand physical props to your players.

Handouts

Handout 1: The Job Offer

When to distribute: At the start of Scene 1, when the crew commits to taking the job. Vorn Ithaca has handed this over as written terms. The players receive the document before they board the Ember Drift.

What it reveals: The official shape of the job. Container registration, pickup details, delivery contact, payment terms. Everything here is accurate as of when Vorn wrote it. The document does not reveal that Vorn knew the container's real contents, or that Maren has since sent a warning message. It reads as a legitimate freight job.

How to present it: Read it aloud or print and hand it to the players. Either works. If you print it, use a plain font in a slightly smaller size; it should look like a business document, not a dramatic revelation.

[FUNTARI COMMERCIAL TRANSIT DOCUMENT — STANDARD FREIGHT TERMS]

Issued by: Vorn Ithaca, Independent Trade Broker, Funtari Confederacy Commercial Registry #VCI-4471-K

Issued to: Crew of the independent vessel Ember Drift (Antaean League commercial registration)

Date of Issue: [current date per session]

Cargo Description

One (1) sealed freight container, standard Funtari intermodal specification, Class B sealed and bonded. External dimensions: 2.4m × 2.4m × 6.1m standard. Container registration number: FC-0992-BRV-14. Manifest on file with the Harrowspan Cooperative Authority lists contents as: navigational reference materials, archival survey data, associated shipping documentation.

Container is currently located in Bay 3 cargo processing, Harrowspan Station, Meridian Verge. Pickup authority is confirmed for the crew of the Ember Drift upon presentation of this document and valid crew identification.

Delivery Instructions

Deliver container FC-0992-BRV-14 to: Dr. Ellana Caern, Saint Orra's Rest Medical Mission Station. Deliver to Dr. Caern personally or to a credentialed representative in her name. Obtain signed receipt on standard Funtari commercial form.

Saint Orra's Rest is located at Meridian Verge relay marker MV-117, approximately two and a half days transit from Harrowspan including the in-system approach.

Do not open the container. This is a bonded delivery; the seal must be intact on arrival. Any evidence of tampering will void payment and may result in legal liability under Funtari commercial code.

Payment Terms

Total payment: 1,600 credits. 800 credits on acceptance of these terms, 800 credits upon confirmed delivery and receipt.

Delivery balance disbursed by Vorn Ithaca via Funtari secure commercial transfer within 24 hours of receipt confirmation from Dr. Caern.

Advance transfers on acceptance. No further payment on pickup. Balance on confirmed delivery.

Additional Terms

Expedited delivery is encouraged. This consignment has time sensitivity not reflected in the manifest. Vorn Ithaca requests transit be completed without unnecessary delay at intermediate stops.

Questions regarding this consignment should be directed to Vorn Ithaca via commercial relay at the contact code below.

VCI-4471-K contact relay: Harrowspan transit node, standard commercial band.

This document is valid for 14 standard days from date of issue.

Handout 2: Maren's Relay Message

When to distribute: When the crew successfully retrieves Maren's queued message from the relay terminal. This requires accessing the terminal and either finding the message through Maren's credentials or recovering it from the queue. The message was composed and queued but not yet transmitted; Maren was interrupted before it sent.

What it reveals: That the container is not what the manifest says. That someone else wants it. That Maren believed the situation was urgent enough to warn the crew at significant personal risk. The message does not name Sev or the Pale Table; Maren either did not know or did not have time to write it. The instruction to not open the container is consistent with Vorn's terms but carries a different weight here.

How to present it: Read as a relay terminal printout. If you print it, use a monospace font. It should feel like a message transmitted on equipment that was never meant for sensitive communication.

[HARROWSPAN RELAY TERMINAL — QUEUED OUTGOING MESSAGE — UNSENT]

Terminal ID: HRW-RT-07

Queue status: PENDING TRANSMISSION

Addressed to: Ember Drift, crew general comm

Composed: [time stamp, 6 hours before crew arrival]

Crew of the Ember Drift —

The container. FC-0992-BRV-14. It is not what you were told.

I cannot explain here. Do not open it at Harrowspan. There are people on this station who are here specifically for it and they did not come through proper channels.

You need to leave. Take the container and leave now. Do not go to Vorn. Do not wait for clearance from the Cooperative.

GET OUT.

Deliver to Caern. She knows what it is. She will explain more than I can here.

I am sorry. I did not know this job was going to be what it is.

— Maren

[TRANSMISSION QUEUED — AWAITING NETWORK WINDOW — ESTIMATED SEND: 4 HOURS FROM QUEUE TIME]

GM Note: The message never transmitted because Maren's access was revoked before the network window opened. The crew finds it in the queue, unsent. This is significant: it means no one outside the station received a warning. It also means the crew now has information that Sev does not know they have, which is a genuine advantage if they use it quickly.

Handout 3: Partial Decryption of Vorn's Advance Message

When to distribute: When the crew searches Maren's office thoroughly and finds the partial decryption file on her secondary terminal. This requires either accessing the terminal through Maren's credentials, bypassing its security, or finding a printed copy Maren left in the office. The file is a partial automated decryption of an encrypted message Vorn sent to the contact at Harrowspan ahead of the crew's arrival.

What it reveals: Fragments. The crew cannot reconstruct the full message, but the pieces visible are enough to confirm that the container does not hold navigational reference materials. The phrase "Compact filing" is significant: it suggests the data may have legal or factional implications. The scrubbed sections are genuinely absent; this is not a dramatic withholding, it is the actual state of a partial decryption.

How to present it: Print in a fragmentary format if possible, or read it with pauses and "static" indications. The crew should feel like they are getting pieces, not a complete picture.

[PARTIAL AUTOMATED DECRYPTION — CONFIDENCE LEVEL: 34%]

Source message: encrypted commercial relay, Funtari band, 48 hours prior

Decryption engine: Harrowspan relay node, non-commercial grade

Warning: significant data loss. Fragments only.

[...] navigational survey data, primary and backup [...]

[...] corridor endpoint coordinates for [...] three unmapped seams, confirmed [...]

[...] do not disclose to [...] Compact filing [...] if the Directorate [...]

[...] medical supplies manifest is the cover document [...] open channel inspection should [...]

[...] Caern will know what to do with [...] cannot be copied once [...]

[...] if you cannot get it out [...] destroy rather than [...]

[...] the Pale Table [...]

[DECRYPTION ENDS — INSUFFICIENT KEY DATA FOR FURTHER RECONSTRUCTION]

GM Note: The crew now knows several things: the container holds real navigational survey data, including coordinates for unmapped slipstream corridor endpoints. "Compact filing" suggests that whoever commissioned the survey was keeping it outside the five powers' formal databases, likely for reasons that at least one power would object to. The phrase "destroy rather than" cuts off before completion but its direction is clear. The Pale Table is named. The crew does not yet know whether Vorn commissioned the survey, received it from someone else, or was paid to move it. These questions are deliberate hooks for the GM to develop if this adventure leads into a campaign.

The critical mechanical point: the container holds slipstream survey data for at least three unmapped corridor endpoints. That is an extraordinarily valuable and politically sensitive cargo. It explains why the Pale Table sent a capable operative rather than a standard courier intercept.

Handout 4: Sev's Offer

When to distribute: Sev may deliver this in person during a face-to-face encounter, or slide it under the crew's berthing door at Harrowspan, or have Rinn deliver it if direct contact seems inadvisable. Distribute when Sev makes their opening move on the crew, before any direct confrontation.

What it reveals: That someone knows what the container contains and wants to buy it. That the buyer is professional, not reckless. That 3,000 credits is the offered price, nearly twice what the whole job pays. The symbol at the bottom means something to anyone with Streetwise 2+ or Lore 2+ who knows the Pale Table: it is their mark. To everyone else it is an unidentifiable symbol.

How to present it: If in person: Sev hands it over, watches them read it, and waits for a response. If slid under a door: the crew finds it on a plain card stock with no envelope. Print it small and plain if possible.

I know what you're carrying.

I can make this easy.

3,000 credits. No questions. No complications. The container transfers to me at your docking collar. You file your manifest with Cooperative authority showing goods not recovered from pickup. You collect your partial fee from Ithaca for the failed pickup.

Nobody needs to know anything beyond that.

Comm me at this frequency before you leave Harrowspan.

Frequency: [seven-digit relay code, handwritten]

[A small symbol at the bottom of the card: a circle bisected by a single vertical line.]

GM Note: The Pale Table mark is a circle and a vertical line. It is not dramatic if the players do not recognize it. If someone rolls Streetwise or Lore and achieves at least one Success, they know what it is: the mark of the Pale Table, an information and acquisition network that operates across the Meridian Verge outside any power's jurisdiction. That identification tells the crew that whoever wrote this card is professional, well-resourced, and not working alone.

The offer is deliberately generous against the job's 1,600 credits and deliberately small against what the charts are worth. This is intentional: Sev knows the crew took a job with a clean manifest, which means they may not know the container's value. Sev is testing how much the crew knows before offering a number that reflects real value.

Map Descriptions

The map descriptions below give the GM everything needed to run scenes consistently. They describe spatial relationships, key locations, and what characters experience when moving through each space. Drawn maps and cartography are handled separately in the production pipeline; these descriptions are the canonical text reference.

Harrowspan Station

Harrowspan is a Funtari Cooperative transit station: functional, densely used, and built for throughput rather than comfort. It is not a city. It is a place people pass through on their way somewhere else.

Overall Structure

Harrowspan Station is built around a central spine with a docking ring at each end. Think of it as a long bone: two rounded joint-ends connected by a narrower shaft. The shaft is the main corridor spine, roughly 500 meters from docking ring to market quarter. The joint-ends are the docking rings, where ships berth.

The entire station is pressurized and climate-controlled to human-standard defaults. Lighting is functional rather than comfortable: bright in working corridors, dimmer in the market quarter, and genuinely poor in the cargo hold corridors below.

Docking Ring (Port Side)

The port-side docking ring has twelve bays arranged in a circle around the station's axis. Bay 3 is where the Ember Drift berths. Bay 7 is the IRNS Sentinel. Bay 9 is the Pale Table Courier registered as a salvage skiff.

The docking ring is loud with the sounds of atmospheric equalization, cargo loaders, and comm traffic. The corridor floor is reinforced metal grating over a meter of structural void. Ceiling height is four meters, adequate for most cargo-handling equipment.

Docking bay doors are controlled by the Cooperative Authority office at the spine entrance. Normal departure procedure requires clearance from the authority desk. Emergency lockdown seals all bay doors simultaneously and requires senior authority override to unseal.

Main Corridor Spine

The spine is 500 meters of transit corridor, wider than most ship corridors but not wide enough to feel open. It runs straight from the docking ring through to the market quarter at the far end. The floor is worn metal with guide markings. The walls are covered in permit notices, cargo listings, route tables, and the kind of unofficial information that accumulates wherever freight moves.

Key locations along the spine, in order from the docking ring:

• Cooperative Authority Office: 80 meters from the docking ring, on the left side of the corridor (port side). This is where Inspector Oll's desk is, where docking clearances are issued, and where security calls originate. A thick-windowed room with a transaction desk and a waiting area of three uncomfortable chairs.

• Security Post: 100 meters from the docking ring, opposite the Cooperative Authority office. A monitoring station with corridor camera feeds, a locker of security equipment, and a comm panel on the security frequency. Usually staffed by one officer during normal hours.

• Relay Terminal: 150 meters from the docking ring, in a recessed alcove on the right (starboard) side. Three public terminals for outgoing and incoming messages. Maren's queued message is on Terminal 07. Standard interface, no privacy screening.

• Maren's Office: 180 meters from the docking ring, behind a narrow door marked "Cooperative Freight Coordination." This is a working office with two desks (Maren used both), a secondary terminal, filing by physical document and datapad, and a shelf of reference materials that suggests Maren did her job carefully. The secondary terminal holds the partial decryption file in a folder labeled "incoming correspondence — archive."

• Cargo Hold Corridor Access: 200 meters from the docking ring, a grated stairwell descends to the hold corridors below the spine. This is where cargo is staged between ship and spine.

• Market Quarter: 380 to 500 meters from the docking ring, the corridor opens into a wider section with fixed vendor stalls, a food service counter, a small medical station, and the station's only reasonably comfortable seating. This is where most of Harrowspan's transient population spends its time.

Cargo Hold Corridors

Below the main spine, accessed from the stairwell at the 200-meter mark, the cargo hold corridors are a grid of lower-ceilinged (2.5 meter) passageways lined with lockable cargo alcoves. Lighting is inadequate. The floor is bare concrete over the station's structural layer. Noise from the docking ring above filters down as vibration rather than sound.

Container FC-0992-BRV-14 is staged in Alcove 14-B, which is 40 meters from the stairwell access and 20 meters from the docking ring lower access. The lower access connects directly to the docking collar area for Bay 3.

This is significant tactically: the cargo hold corridors allow movement between the docking ring and the spine stairwell without going through the main corridor. Anyone who knows about the lower access can move cargo, or themselves, without being visible from the Cooperative Authority office.

Rhi's Thermal Sense is particularly useful in the cargo hold corridors: the holds are cold, and any warm-blooded presence is clearly distinguishable from the ambient environment.

The IRNS Sentinel at Bay 7

Bay 7 is visible from the docking ring corridor. The Sentinel's running lights are on. Its docking collar is extended to the station. Its transponder is active and clearly labeled. If the crew looks at Bay 7, they can see the ship without any check; it makes no effort to conceal its presence.

Sev's Salvage Skiff at Bay 9

Bay 9's vessel is registered as "Kerath Salvage Independent" and carries a Funtari independent registration. It looks like a courier ship that someone has deliberately made unremarkable. A Perception check at Average difficulty notices that it is sitting too clean for a salvage operation. An Electronics check at Average difficulty against the transponder data notes a lag pattern consistent with a spoofed secondary registration.

Saint Orra's Rest Station

Saint Orra's Rest is a medical mission station operating under the nominal protection of the Antaean League, though its practical independence is more complete than most League affiliates. It was established forty years ago by a Jaziri-tradition medical order and has since become something quieter and harder to categorize: a place that treats whoever arrives, asks few questions about how they were injured, and maintains records that do not go anywhere.

Overall Structure

The station is small: two docking bays, a pressure lock corridor connecting them, and a main structure that is more organized than it looks from outside. The exterior is an old commercial hull with medical markings in four languages. The interior is immaculately maintained.

Docking Bays

Two standard bays, one on each side of the pressure lock. Both can receive vessels up to Scale 4. Bay 1 is typically reserved for emergency arrivals; Bay 2 is for planned visits. The Ember Drift will be directed to Bay 2 unless circumstances dictate otherwise.

The docking bay area is clean, well-lit, and has a marked triage space immediately inside the pressure lock. Medical supplies are staged here for rapid response.

Medical Ward

The main structure's largest space: a ward with twelve beds, species-adapted wherever possible (two beds have been reconfigured for Ssarathi accommodation; one is Dhoran-rated). The medical equipment is better than the station's age would suggest. Someone has spent money on this place, and it has not come from League funding.

The ward connects to a smaller surgical space with proper operating conditions and two recovery beds with monitoring equipment.

Chapel

A quiet room at the station's center that serves no single tradition. The aesthetic is restrained: a few objects from several different cultural practices, arranged without hierarchy. Anyone who wants it quiet will find it quiet here.

Dr. Caern's Office

At the far end of the main structure from the docking bays, Dr. Ellana Caern's office is a working space with a large desk, a comm station with better encryption than a medical mission usually requires, and a shelf of actual physical books in at least three languages. The office has a secondary door to an adjacent storage room that is always locked.

Dr. Caern herself is a Ssarathi physician of late middle age, unhurried, and very difficult to mislead. She has been expecting the crew, or someone carrying what the crew is carrying, for some time. She knows what the container holds. She knows why it matters. She will explain what the crew needs to know, and she will not explain more than that.

The Ember Drift

The Ember Drift is a KR-41 freighter, modified over its service life into something only a committed ship historian would still call a KR-41. It has been repaired with Openframe components, has a Viridian navigation suite that cost more than the ship's official value, and carries a non-factory cargo lock system that Davan installed after the previous one failed at an inconvenient moment. No two components are quite matched.

This is the crew's home. It should feel like one.

Cockpit

The forward station with two seats: the Helm (Senna's territory) and Astrogation (the secondary seat, used by whoever is plotting the course or operating sensors). The cockpit has a clear forward viewport and a secondary camera feed covering the aft docking collar. The directive AI's primary interface is a panel between the two seats.

Controls are not labeled consistently because Davan has replaced enough of them that the labeling scheme no longer makes sense. Senna knows where everything is.

Engineering Bay

Mid-ship, accessible through a hatch from the main corridor. This is Davan's space: densely organized in a way that would be chaotic to anyone else and is in fact extremely precise. Two primary work surfaces, tool storage, a direct access port to the reactor monitoring systems, and a folding bunk that Davan has never slept in but keeps available for very long repair shifts. The smell is machine oil and heat dissipant.

Cargo Hold

Aft of the engineering bay, the cargo hold is the Ember Drift's working heart. It holds approximately 60 Cargo Units in its current modified configuration. Container FC-0992-BRV-14, once loaded, sits in the center of the hold on the locking clamps, taking up a significant portion of the floor space. The hold has internal lighting, a cargo loader arm in poor repair, and a pressure seal that Davan checks before every transit.

The sealed container is locked. The seal is a standard Funtari commercial bond seal: opening it without authorization voids the bond and triggers a notification to the issuing authority. The crew can open it, but they will know they have opened it, and so will Vorn Ithaca.

Crew Quarters

Six bunks in two groups of three: one group forward, one group aft. Four of the six are in regular use. The other two are empty but clean. Personal storage is minimal but everyone has a locker. The crew quarters are narrow enough that two people passing requires one to flatten against the wall.

Common Area

Between the engineering bay and the crew quarters: a table that seats four comfortably and six with intention, a basic food preparation station, a small display surface that usually shows either a navigation chart or something Senna is watching with the sound off. This is where the crew eats, argues, plans, and occasionally admits things to each other.

Medical Alcove

A recessed bay off the common area: Rhi's territory. A medical bench that converts to a treatment surface, supply storage calibrated to Rhi's organization system (do not move things), a diagnostic display, and one of the station's adapted fixtures for Ssarathi use, installed by Davan over a weekend without being asked. The alcove is the cleanest space on the ship.