Jobs, Cargo, and Consequences

Every session of Void Drifters needs a job. A job gives structure to the session: a goal, a route, a deadline, a contact. Everything else comes from friction along the way. The job is the frame that holds the story together while it develops.

This chapter gives you tools to generate jobs quickly, complicate them without scripting outcomes, and resolve them in ways that leave traces. A session's job should matter. Not just because it paid the fuel bill, but because taking it changed something: a relationship, a reputation, a situation in the Verge that did not exist before the crew showed up.

What a Job Is

A job has four components.

Goal. What the crew is being hired to accomplish. Deliver this cargo. Extract this person. Investigate this facility. Protect this convoy. The goal should be specific and measurable: the crew should know when they have succeeded.

Route. Where the job takes the crew. Not just a destination, but the path: which systems, which checkpoints, which corridors. The route is where complications live. A job that stays in Port Meridian's docking bay is not a session; a job that requires passing through Merrow Gate and then running dark past the Funtari escort ships is.

Deadline. When the job needs to be done. Deadlines create pressure without requiring the GM to manufacture urgency. A cargo that expires in transit, a client who leaves Port Meridian in two days, a window of patrol absence that only lasts six hours: all of these are deadlines that make the crew move.

Contact. Who hired the crew and who they deal with at the destination. The contact is the human face of the job. They have their own agenda, which may or may not align with what they told the crew. The contact is also the first person the crew will be angry at when things go wrong.

What a job is not: a scripted adventure. The job provides the frame. The players navigate the friction inside it. Do not plan outcomes. Plan complications.

The Job's Hidden Layer

Every job has something the employer did not tell the crew. This is not always malicious; sometimes the employer genuinely does not know. But there is always something:

• The cargo is more politically sensitive than the manifest says.
• The destination contact has a reason to not want this delivery to arrive.
• The route passes through a system where someone is waiting for exactly this cargo.
• The employer has a rival who also knows about the job.
• The deadline exists because of a situation the crew was not told about.

You are not obligated to deploy the hidden layer; it gives the session depth the crew can discover or miss. If they miss it entirely, the consequence of the hidden layer becomes the hook for the next job.

Job Sources

Different employers bring different complications, different payment structures, and different relationship costs.

Power Agents

Who they are: Diplomatic liaisons, naval officers, Border Administration staff, intelligence operatives, customs officials, and the various bureaucrats who serve as the public face of a major power in the Verge.

What they want: Patrol support, courier work, border errands, infrastructure observation, and deniable operations they cannot officially authorize.

What they hide: The job's political context, the identity of who actually ordered it, and the consequences if the crew is caught doing it.

Complications they bring: Crew members working for the Caliphate on a smuggling route might face a Directorate checkpoint that now has reason to be interested. Power agent jobs have political weight even when they look routine.

Payment: Usually credits plus expedited registry clearance, licensed permissions, or access to restricted areas. Occasionally favors that cash out later.

Corporate Logistics

Who they are: Logistics managers, freight brokers, supply chain officers, and the representatives of corporations like Gatewright Logistics, Meridian Passage, and their subsidiaries.

What they want: Cargo runs, escort contracts, route security, competitive intelligence, and occasionally operations that cannot go through official corporate channels.

What they hide: Which other corporation has a contract on the same cargo, why the freight is moving on an unusual route, and what the actual contents of the sealed crates are.

Complications they bring: Corporate jobs can generate faction consequences the crew did not expect. Moving cargo for Gatewright might put the crew in conflict with a Funtari clan that has its own claim on the route. Taking a competitor intelligence job might create an enemy that the crew has to deal with three sessions later.

Payment: Credits are standard. Better corporate clients offer bonuses, insurance bonds, and priority access to their repair facilities.

Independent Merchants

Who they are: Free traders, family-owned shipping operations, colony administrators, port merchants, and anyone operating commercially without a corporate umbrella.

What they want: Off-the-books shipping, avoided routes, cargo that cannot go through official channels for reasons that may or may not be criminal.

What they hide: Why official channels are unavailable. This ranges from inconvenient tariffs to genuinely illegal cargo to personal safety concerns.

Complications they bring: Independent merchants have less political cover than corporate or power clients. A job gone wrong with an independent merchant is the crew's problem entirely. But independent clients are also more likely to be grateful, personal, and useful as long-term contacts.

Payment: Credits, barter, trade goods, and the kind of local knowledge that does not appear on any official database.

Criminal Networks

Who they are: Smuggling rings, black market brokers, syndicate representatives, and the various people who operate in the spaces between official economies.

What they want: Contraband movement, extraction of people who need to disappear, enforcement of private arrangements, and logistics for operations that cannot involve any official entity.

What they hide: The full chain of ownership for whatever is being moved, who else has an interest in the cargo, and what happens to the crew if the job goes wrong.

Complications they bring: Criminal network jobs generate the most dangerous consequences. A crew working for a smuggling ring is now an asset in that ring's ledger. If a rival network or a power's intelligence service is watching the ring, the crew is visible.

Payment: Credits, usually above market rate. Access to restricted goods and services. Leverage that can be used later. Some criminal employers pay in obligations rather than currency.

Private Clients

Who they are: Individuals with money and a specific need: a merchant who wants a family member extracted from a political situation, a researcher who needs to reach a restricted site, a wealthy traveler who needs to arrive somewhere without leaving a record.

What they want: Personal retrieval, escort, investigation, and private transportation of things or people that cannot move through normal channels.

What they hide: Why they chose a small independent crew instead of a corporate service, what they have done that makes official channels unavailable, and who is looking for them.

Complications they bring: Private clients are unpredictable. They have strong opinions about how the job should be done, they rarely tell the crew everything relevant, and their personal situation tends to be more complicated than the hiring conversation suggested.

Payment: Credits are common. So are promises that pay out later in information, access, or unusual goods. Some private clients have nothing to pay with except the favor itself.

Organizations

Who they are: The Common Orbit Foundation, the Red Thread Society, Vessel of Saint Orra, the Quiet Table, and other humanitarian, religious, and advocacy groups operating in the Verge.

What they want: Supply runs to missions in dangerous systems, escort for personnel or sensitive individuals, recovery of lost property or missing people, and occasional whistleblowing or evidence transport that their official status cannot protect.

What they hide: The political context of their mission, who funds the operation the crew is supporting, and whether the people they are helping have made powerful enemies.

Complications they bring: Organization jobs can generate unexpected moral weight. The crew may arrive to deliver medical supplies and find a situation that is much more complicated than the mission brief suggested. Organizations also have internal factions, and the person who hired the crew may not represent the organization's actual policy.

Payment: Credits, when available. More often: hospitality at mission facilities, letters of introduction to other organizations, moral claims on future cooperation, and occasional access to information networks the crew cannot reach any other way.

Job Generator

Use these tables to create a job in under two minutes. Roll or choose. The tables are starting points, not scripts.

d8 Job Type

d10 Complication

Roll once. This is the thing the employer did not tell the crew.

d8 Secondary Interest

Roll once. This is who else has a stake in what the crew is doing, whether or not they make contact.

d6 Consequence

Roll once. This is what changes regardless of whether the crew succeeds.

Cargo

In Void Drifters, what a ship is carrying defines its political position at every checkpoint it passes through. A crew can be entirely honest about their cargo and still have a serious problem at a Caliphal inspection point because of what they are carrying.

Cargo has four attributes: weight (how much space it takes and how much it affects ship performance), legality (whether it can be declared openly), value (what the market pays), and political sensitivity (which factions care about it regardless of its legal status).

Cargo Types

Legal/Common: Food, fuel components, standard manufactured goods, building materials, civilian electronics, and ordinary trade goods. A ship carrying legal cargo has the simplest checkpoint experience. The risk is boredom, not trouble.

Restricted (Licensed): Cargo that is legal with the right paperwork: weapons, pharmaceutical compounds, advanced communications equipment, AI components, stack maintenance supplies, and certain engineering materials. Legal to carry with a valid license from the relevant power. Illegal to carry without one. The license specifies the permitted route and destination. A ship with restricted cargo on the wrong route has a problem even if the license itself is valid.

Contraband (Power-Specific): Cargo that is illegal in one or more jurisdictions but not universally banned. What is contraband in the Caliphate may be legal in the Confederacy. Common examples: certain media, banned pharmaceutical compounds, proscribed religious materials, specific biological samples, and unlicensed weapons in quantities above personal use. A ship carrying power-specific contraband needs to know its route before accepting the job.

Sensitive (Politically Dangerous): Cargo that is not illegal but creates serious political consequences for whoever is carrying it. Diplomatic communications, intelligence reports, financial records, evidence of treaty violations, testimonies, and certain technology prototypes. Sensitive cargo is dangerous precisely because its value to various factions is high. A checkpoint officer who scans it and identifies it has a decision to make.

Living (Passengers, Refugees, Prisoners): People have papers, or they don't. People have health certifications, or they don't. Refugees may not have any documentation at all. Prisoners require specific transport authorizations. Pilgrims on certain routes need Caliphal travel papers. Living cargo is the most unpredictable: each person aboard is a separate political question at every checkpoint.

Strategic (Military Components, Monopoly Tech): Cargo that specific powers have legal authority to restrict at a universal level: Irnan teleporter components, Funtari anti-gravity systems, Shoiyan continuity technology, Caliphal AI components, Antaean cloaking systems. A ship carrying strategic cargo without authorization from the relevant power is in violation of treaties that all five powers recognize. This is the most dangerous cargo category. Getting caught with it is not a fine; it is impoundment, interrogation, and possible crew detention.

At the Checkpoint

When the crew passes through a checkpoint, the inspection officer cares about one thing: does the cargo match the manifest, and is the manifest legal for this route?

A crew with good paperwork and legal cargo has a routine experience. A crew with falsified paperwork has a roll to make. A crew with contraband has a decision to make before they reach the scanner. A crew with strategic cargo that they cannot explain has a very short time to decide whether to run, talk, or surrender.

Give each checkpoint a personality. The Directorate checkpoint at Merrow Gate is thorough and impersonal: the officer has seen every trick and is not impressed. The Funtari-adjacent stop at Red Vale depends entirely on whether the clan running it knows the crew. The Caliphal inspection at Saint Orra's Rest asks about passengers before it asks about cargo.

Consequences

Jobs do not end cleanly. A crew that completes a job successfully still leaves traces: records at checkpoints, factions that noticed their ship, contacts who now know the crew can do this kind of work. A crew that fails a job leaves more visible traces.

The eight consequence categories below cover the ways a job's outcome extends beyond the session. Use them actively. A consequence that sits in your notes and never resurfaces is wasted. Each one should generate at least one future complication.

Lost Cargo

What it looks like: The cargo did not arrive. It was destroyed, seized, stolen, or jettisoned. The employer did not receive what they paid for, and someone else may now have what they needed.

How long it lasts: Until the cargo's situation is resolved: recovered, replaced, or abandoned and written off.

How the crew addresses it: Find and recover the cargo, replace it at personal expense, negotiate with the employer for a reduced settlement, or accept the reputation damage and move on.

As a future hook: Whoever ended up with the cargo has it now. If it was politically sensitive, it is going to cause a problem for someone. That someone might hire the crew again to solve the problem.

Impounded Ship

What it looks like: A checkpoint or fleet authority has taken the crew's ship into custody. The crew may be free, detained, or separated from each other.

How long it lasts: Until the legal situation is resolved. This could be hours if the papers just need verification, or weeks if the seizure involves a serious charge.

How the crew addresses it: Pay the bond, call in a favor, find a legal advocate, make a deal with the authority holding the ship, or find a way to take it back.

As a future hook: The authority that impounded the ship knows the crew. If they got the ship back through legitimate means, a reputation adjustment applies. If they got it back through other means, there is a warrant.

Fines, bonds, and impound. Price legal consequences against the same scale as jobs.

An unpaid fine becomes a warrant after thirty days. A warrant becomes a bounty at twice the fine; see The Bounty Market later in this chapter.

Damaged Reputation

What it looks like: A faction, employer, or local community has a worse opinion of the crew than before the job. This may be based on what the crew actually did, what someone said they did, or what a failed job looks like from the outside.

How long it lasts: Until the crew does something that changes the reputation, or until it costs them enough that it becomes the most important thing to fix.

How the crew addresses it: Complete a job for the affected faction that demonstrates competence, loyalty, or usefulness. Find out who damaged the reputation and address that directly. Accept the reputation and build a new one with a different faction.

As a future hook: A damaged reputation means some jobs are not available. A crew burned with the Directorate cannot take the next job that requires Irnan cooperation. That closed door becomes the question of how to reopen it.

Faction Debt

What it looks like: The crew owes a faction something. This might be explicit: the clan that helped them escape the Harrowspan patrol expects a favor returned. It might be implicit: the Quiet Table brokered a deal that saved the crew, and now someone expects something.

How long it lasts: Until the debt is paid or until the faction decides to collect.

How the crew addresses it: Complete the expected favor, negotiate for an alternative arrangement, or refuse and accept that the faction now has a reason to be unfriendly.

As a future hook: Faction debts get collected at inconvenient moments. The clan that helped the crew escape does not call in the favor when the crew has nothing else going on. They call it in when the crew is already committed to something else.

Border Warrants

What it looks like: One or more powers has issued a formal notice of interest or detention order against the crew or their ship. The warrant may be specific (detain for questioning regarding a specific incident) or general (flag for inspection on any crossing).

How long it lasts: Warrants are not automatically dismissed. They persist until a legal process removes them, a bribe closes the record, the issuing authority loses interest, or enough time and distance passes that the warrant falls out of active use. A warrant issued for an unpaid fine becomes a bounty at twice the fine, and a bounty follows the crew across borders; see The Bounty Market later in this chapter.

How the crew addresses it: Legal representation, bribery, finding the source and resolving the underlying incident, using a favor with the issuing faction, or avoiding the issuing power's space entirely.

As a future hook: A Directorate warrant means the crew cannot pass through Merrow Gate without risk. This shapes every future route. Eventually the crew either has to resolve the warrant or make a run that requires going through Directorate space anyway.

Stranded Travel

What it looks like: The crew or a person they are responsible for is stuck: a ship breakdown at a dead relay, a slipstream seam that closed before they could exit, a port that will not let them leave until a dispute is resolved, or a system where they have no fuel and no credit.

How long it lasts: Until they can move again.

How the crew addresses it: Get creative. Find a repair solution, negotiate passage on another ship, send a distress signal to a faction that might help, or find something of value in the location to trade for assistance.

As a future hook: Being stranded somewhere long enough to know it creates connections: the mechanic who patched the ship, the station administrator who extended credit, the other crew that provided fuel. Some of those connections are useful later. Some become complications.

Tech Seizure

What it looks like: A checkpoint authority, corporate security team, or power agent has confiscated a piece of the crew's technology. This might be a restricted component, an unlicensed AI system, a piece of strategic tech, or equipment with a suspicious modification history.

How long it lasts: Until the crew recovers the item, replaces it, or writes it off.

How the crew addresses it: Legal challenge through the relevant authority, bribery, theft, or finding a replacement. Some seized tech is gone permanently: a Directorate checkpoint that finds an unlicensed AI core is not returning it.

As a future hook: Whatever was seized is now in someone else's inventory. If it had information on it, that information belongs to whoever took it. If it was a unique component, finding a replacement becomes a job in itself.

Betrayal

What it looks like: Someone the crew trusted provided false information, sold them out, or actively worked against them during the job. The employer, the contact at the destination, a crew member's old acquaintance, or an NPC the crew relied on.

How long it lasts: Forever, in the crew's memory. The betrayer is now a known quantity with a known history.

How the crew addresses it: Confront the betrayer, find out why, decide whether to take revenge or write it off, and adjust their trust calibration for future jobs.

As a future hook: A betrayer is either a recurring antagonist or a future complication waiting to happen. They know things about the crew. They may have shared those things. The crew has unfinished business, and unfinished business always comes back.

Payment and Economy

Crews get paid in multiple currencies in Void Drifters. Credits are the most fungible, but not always the most valuable.

Payment Forms

Credits: Straightforward. The crew can spend credits anywhere credits are accepted. A high-credit payment from a sketchy source can itself be a complication: where did the money come from, and does the faction that lost it know?

Favors: A promise of future assistance from a faction, corporation, or individual. Favors are not credits. They do not transfer. But a favor from the right person in the right situation is worth more than any credit amount.

Information: Access to data that affects the crew's situation: a route that avoids a new patrol pattern, intelligence about a faction's plans, the identity of who ordered the job that went wrong. Information payment ties the crew to the universe.

Access: A license, a clearance, a contact introduction, or a standing authorization that the crew could not obtain commercially. Access payment opens doors. It also places the crew inside a relationship with whoever granted the access.

Components: Ship parts, medical supplies, specialized equipment, or fuel at below-market price. Component payment matters most to a crew that needs what is being offered. A KR-41 engine component from a Funtari clan contact is worth more to a crew with a Kharos ship than any equivalent credit value.

Passage: Safe transit through a controlled corridor, a berth at a restricted port, a relay priority code. Passage payment is temporary access: it solves one problem and creates a relationship.

Non-Credit Payment as Setting Texture

When a job pays in something other than credits, the crew becomes more embedded in the universe. A crew that has favors with the Directorate, an information debt with the Red Thread Society, a component agreement with a Nerezza clan, and a passage code from Vessel of Saint Orra is a crew that has a political position, whether they wanted one or not.

Use non-credit payment to tie the crew to the factions they interact with. Every favor owed creates a future obligation. Every information payment means someone trusted the crew with something they value. Every access grant means a faction has reason to know where the crew is going.

Pricing a Job

Jobs price along one of two spines. Work out which one you are looking at before reaching for a number.

Volume jobs pay for hold space and distance: freight contracts, bulk trade, relief shipments, passenger runs. A bigger ship earns more. Price these per Cargo Unit.

Consequence jobs pay for exposure: escort, blockade running, extraction, sabotage, strikes. Hold space is almost irrelevant. Price these per job, against who will be angry afterward.

Confusing the two produces broken numbers. A crew does not smuggle 120 tonnes of contraband; they smuggle eight. Paying illegal work by the tonne makes the biggest freighter the best smuggler, which is exactly backwards.

Volume Jobs: Contract Freight

The crew hauls someone else's cargo for a fee. Multiply the handling rate by Cargo Units carried, by the number of Slipstream jumps, by the exposure multiplier.

Handling rate, per Cargo Unit per jump:

Exposure multiplier:

Worked examples.

A Model 20 carrying 120 Cargo Units of ore across two jumps, fully documented: 120 × 40 × 2 × 1 = 9,600cr. This is the honest baseline. It covers a Scale 4 crew's monthly operating costs with a modest margin, about 1,750cr. See the Vehicles Manual, Chapter Twelve, for the operating cost breakdown.

The same ship carrying 8 Cargo Units of restricted pharmaceuticals across two jumps: 8 × 150 × 2 × 3 = 7,200cr, for cargo that fits in a smuggling compartment and leaves 112 units of hold free for legitimate freight on the same run. This is why crews carry mixed manifests.

Volume Jobs: Speculative Trade

When the crew buys the cargo themselves, they capture the whole spread instead of a fee, and they carry the price risk. Use the trade good prices in the Equipment Guide, Chapter Fourteen, and the location modifiers in Chapter Three of that book.

Buy below baseline at a source market. Sell above baseline at a market that lacks it. Remember that hold space is volume: iron is Dense, so a 120 Cargo Unit hold takes 240 tonnes of it. Bought at a manufacturing hub 20% below baseline and sold at a resource-poor station 40% above, that run clears roughly 28,800cr on 38,400cr of capital.

Capital is the gate, not hold space. The same hold filled with titanium clears roughly 115,200cr but needs 153,600cr to load out, which no starting crew has. A crew that cannot afford the good cargo hauls the cheap cargo, and that is the pressure that makes the mortgage matter.

Note what density does to the trade. Dense goods pack twice the tonnage into the same hold, so they are worth roughly twice as much per Cargo Unit as standard freight and four times as much as grain. Contract freight pays per Cargo Unit regardless, so a hauler earns the same fee either way. Speculation is where density pays, and experienced traders chase mass into a fixed volume. The limit is the hold's mass ceiling: twice its Cargo Unit rating in tonnes, which dense cargo reaches exactly as it fills the space.

Consequence Jobs

Price these per job for a competent crew of four to six, then apply the opposition multiplier.

Opposition multiplier:

A sabotage job against a megacorporate refinery guarded by a corporate security division pays 40,000 × 1.5 = 60,000cr. A strike on a Directorate installation pays 100,000 × 3 = 300,000cr, and the crew should understand that the fee is priced for the pursuit, not the work.

Corporations operating outside sovereign law pay well and prosecute privately. A corporate employer will not report the crew to any authority, because doing so would document the operation. They will handle it themselves, which is worse.

When the Job Does Not Pay in Credits

Relief runs, political favors, faith obligations, and jobs the crew takes because refusing would be worse should pay in the currencies described earlier in this chapter. Use these rough equivalences when you need to weigh an offer against a credit figure.

A crew that delivers medication to a quarantined world for nothing has still been paid, in a currency that will matter later. Make it matter later. A faction that owes the crew should show up with the debt in hand at a moment when credits would not have helped.

Checking Your Numbers

Before you set a fee, compare it against what the crew must clear to keep flying. A Scale 4 crew's monthly operating cost runs roughly 7,900cr including debt.

• A job paying under 5,000cr is a job the crew should be able to refuse.
• A job paying 8,000cr to 15,000cr is a month's survival with a small margin.
• A job paying 40,000cr or more changes what the crew can do next, and should carry consequences proportional to that.
• A job paying over 150,000cr is a campaign event. Price the fallout before you price the fee.

The Bounty Market

Bounties are how the Verge enforces anything across a border. A power cannot chase a ship into another power's space. A licensed hunter can go anywhere a ship can.

Boards. Every phased relay in power space carries a bounty board. Postings are public, authenticated by the poster's credentials, and propagate at relay speed: a ship flagged at Port Meridian is on every board in the Verge within a day and across a developed region within a week. Freeports carry unofficial boards that mirror the official ones and add postings no authority would accept.

Ship debt on the board. The most common way a player crew ends up posted is the ship's note. A payment is missed when it is thirty days late, and the lender's response escalates by count, not by amount.

Curing a default means paying the arrears, the late fees, and the posted bounty whether or not anyone has claimed it; the lender adds all of it to the balance, and the flag clears within a week in the lender's power and within a month elsewhere. A repossessed ship is auctioned at a quarter of its condition value and the crew still owes the difference. Loan terms and the outstanding-balance formula are in the Vehicles Manual, Chapter Twelve.

Who posts.

A lender's bounty is against the ship. A power's bounty is against the crew. A corporation's is usually against both.

Claiming. A bounty pays when the hunter delivers the ship, or the person, to a port licensed by the poster's power, with the ship's registry or the person's identity confirmed. Delivery of a ship means intact enough to auction. Delivery of a person means alive unless the posting says otherwise, and power postings never say otherwise in public. Hunters who deliver a wreck or a corpse get the salvage and nothing else. Claiming on an official board requires a Recovery License from the issuing power: 2,000cr, renewed annually, revoked on the first proven abuse. Freeport boards require nothing.

Player crews as hunters. A crew with a Recovery License and a hull built for pursuit can work the boards. Price the work as consequence jobs: a lender recovery on a small hull is an Escort-band job, a criminal warrant on an armed crew is a Blockade-band job or worse, and the opposition multiplier is the target. The bounty is the fee. The poster does not pay expenses.

Player crews as targets. Once posted, the crew's ship is a job on someone else's board. Hunters find it through the transponder flag at any port that reads it (running dark is illegal in port space; see the Vehicles Manual), through the registry lookup at docking, through the silhouette, last known port, and model the board carries, and through port records and fuel logs bought from anyone who sells them. A Model 20 in the Verge narrows nothing; a Model 20 with a Kharos engine and a patched port-side seal narrows a great deal. Every port the crew docks at while posted is a roll of who else is there: use the encounter tables in Chapter Eleven and add a hunter result to any zone where the board propagates.

The Downtime Frame

Between jobs, the crew is not inactive. Ships need maintenance, reputations need managing, faction clocks keep moving, and crew members have personal projects that do not fit inside a job's frame.

Downtime is a brief procedure, not a full session. Run it in ten to fifteen minutes at the start of a session or at the end of one.

Step One: Advance Faction Clocks

Look at each active clock. Apply the between-session advancement rules from Chapter Nine. Note any clocks that filled and what changed in the setting as a result. Note any new clocks that opened.

Step Two: Address Consequences

Any unresolved consequences from the previous session become downtime items. Is there a warrant to deal with? A damaged reputation to address? A faction debt that is overdue? Each consequence gives the crew a downtime action to spend, or a cost if they choose to ignore it.

Step Three: Ship Status

Ships accumulate wear. Between jobs, the crew addresses repairs, maintenance, and upgrades. The Vehicles Manual owns the mechanical details of ship maintenance; in the GM Guide, the relevant question is: does the ship have any problem that will matter in the next job? If yes, note it as a session complication.

Step Four: Personal Projects

Each crew member can pursue one personal project between sessions. Personal projects are open-ended: a character researching a faction's history, a pilot working on a reputation problem, an engineer modifying a system, a crew member following up on a personal lead from the previous job. Personal projects do not require rolls unless they generate complications. They are texture and investment.

Step Five: Next Job

Before the session begins, give the crew a hook: who is offering work, what the broad shape of it is, and why it is available now rather than at some other time. The hook is an invitation, not a contract yet. The crew can take it, refuse it, or negotiate for different terms.