Routes, Travel, and Communication

A ship in Void Drifters is not a teleport booth. Getting from one place to another takes time, fuel, decisions, and sometimes luck. Getting a message there takes time too, and the message may not say what you want it to say by the time it arrives.

This chapter gives you the tools to make travel matter: corridor classes, in-system travel, exploration, travel complications, communication lag, and the political machinery of route control. Everything here serves one purpose: helping you turn the simple act of going somewhere into something the crew has to navigate, negotiate, and sometimes survive.

Slipstream Corridors

Slipstream corridors are naturally occurring channels in folded space, anchored at each end by distant black holes. Ships do not travel from one black hole to the other. They enter and exit where the corridor passes close enough to a star system for local gravity to thin the boundary between normal space and Slipspace. Those entry and exit points are called seams.

Understand this as a GM: you are not running a setting with jump gates. You are running a setting with rivers. The powers did not build these routes. They discovered them, charted them, built relay stations near them, and then organized their entire economies and militaries around controlling access to them.

The GM's Eye View of Corridors

The key truths every GM needs to hold:

Corridors are geography, not infrastructure. A power that loses a war does not lose the route. It loses the relay stations, patrol bases, and nav beacons. The corridor still exists. Someone else controls access to it now.

Seams move. A seam is not a fixed gate. It shifts as the corridor drifts, as planets orbit, as stellar conditions change. An established seam on a well-traveled route barely drifts in a generation. A frontier seam on a new route might shift faster than a navigator can update their charts. This means route knowledge has real value, and outdated charts can get a crew killed.

Repeated use reinforces seams. Heavy commercial traffic gradually makes a seam more predictable and easier to locate. A route nobody uses starts to fade. A cut-off colony may lose access to its corridor not because anything broke, but because traffic has been thin and the seam has quietly wandered beyond safe reach.

Patrols cannot seal a seam. The arc of a usable seam is too large, too variable, and too diffuse to blockade the way a chokepoint on a road can be blockaded. A power controls a seam through patrol presence, relay monitoring, nav beacon credentials, and traffic compliance. A ship willing to use bad charts, skip the beacon, burn extra fuel, and accept the risk of an offset exit can often get through. This is why smugglers exist.

Corridor Classes

Corridor Stability

Travel Times

Fast military couriers or elite runners can beat average times by 25 to 40 percent. A battered civilian hauler hitting fuel and repair stops may take considerably longer. Build travel time into your scenario prep: a ship on a 10-day transit has 10 days of life aboard between beats.

Offset Exits

A standard exit from a corridor places the ship at the expected seam arc, where authorities are likely monitoring traffic. An offset exit places the ship somewhere else, at a cost.

Offset exit complications include: system damage, Slipstream drive damage, inaccurate emergence coordinates, emergence far from the intended system, sensor loss, power failures, crew injury, cargo damage, and detectable phase bloom.

Offset exits are not secret. Customs officers know the bloom pattern of an off-seam emergence. Using one implies the crew had a reason to avoid the standard arc.

Forced Entry

A ship already inside a corridor can push outward through a weak boundary section. A ship in normal space cannot safely enter Slipspace where no seam exists without catastrophic risk.

Forcing entry outside a seam requires confirmed coordinates, a skilled navigator, and a functioning Slipstream drive. Even then, this is a one-way gamble. Reserve it for desperation, experimental scenarios, or military recklessness. A forced entry may succeed and still leave the ship with no reliable way back.

Corridor Saturation

Heavy traffic creates phase interference. A corridor has no simple passenger cap, but it has a saturation threshold.

Saturation matters for fleets. A capital fleet cannot necessarily arrive in one synchronized wave. Vanguard ships appear first. Heavy vessels follow later. A defender who understands corridor saturation knows to hit the vanguard before the rest emerge.

Corridor Condition Table

When a corridor's current state matters, roll d10 or choose.

In-System Travel

Once a ship exits Slipspace, it is in normal space. The seam arc where it emerges is in the outer system, and getting from the seam to the port, station, or objective takes hours to days, not weeks. Do not compute distances. Read three things: the ship's Travel Band, its Cruise rating, and the system's Approach value. The Vehicles Manual owns the full rules; this section gives you what you need to run an approach, a pursuit, and a deadline.

Why In-System Distance Matters

Treat in-system travel as an active part of the scenario.

You cannot shortcut orbital mechanics. A ship has to go where things are, and where things are changes constantly as planets and stations orbit. A destination that was conveniently positioned when the ship entered the system may have moved around the star in the hours or days since.

In-system distance creates pursuit dynamics. A crew that exits through an offset seam adds Intervals to its outermost leg and picks its own emergence direction. The patrol at the standard exit arc has to turn and close, and whether it can depends on whose Cruise rating is higher. A crew with the faster drive can outrun a heavier ship to the planet.

In-system distance is a deadline generator. An NPC's ship is already a band ahead. A medic needs to reach the station before a patient dies. The message the crew sent ahead will arrive and be read before the ship does. Use distance as a clock.

Travel Bands

In-system distance uses the five Range Bands from ship combat, measured from the ship's destination: the port, station, planet, wreck, or rendezvous the crew is heading for. A ship is always in exactly one Travel Band relative to its destination. When the destination changes, restate the band.

Travel Bands share their names with combat Range Bands because they are the same abstraction on a different clock. When two ships in the same Travel Band begin an encounter, switch to the ship combat rules and open at Long combat range unless the situation dictates otherwise.

Legs and Intervals

Moving from one Travel Band to the next is a leg. A leg costs a number of Intervals: two for the outer legs, one for the inner legs.

A full run from a Standard seam arc to dock is 6 Intervals. Departure uses the same legs in reverse, plus the drive charge at the seam. How long an Interval lasts is set by the ship's Cruise rating.

Cruise

Every hull carries two speed ratings. Speed is tactical: Range Band movement per Maneuver in ship combat and chases. Cruise, rated 1 to 5, is strategic: the length of one Interval. The two are independent. A courier can be Speed 5 and Cruise 3; a bulk freighter can be Speed 2 and Cruise 1. Cruise belongs to the Sublight Engine, so swapping the engine changes it and engine damage reduces it. Every hull's Cruise rating is in the Vehicles Manual; most starting crews fly Cruise 2 or 3.

Cruise 4 and 5 require an antimatter engine, which is Restricted or Military, tracked, and expensive to fuel. A civilian hull running Cruise 4 or higher is corporate, ex-military, or illegal.

Approach

Approach is a system stat. It states which Travel Band a ship occupies when it emerges from the standard exit arc and how long the outermost leg takes. Every system record in the Sector Atlas carries an Approach value; when a record has none, use Standard. When you build a system yourself, Step 1 of the procedure in Chapter Six sets Approach from the star type.

Approach belongs to the seam arc, not the ship. A Cruise 1 hauler and a Cruise 5 interceptor emerge in the same band and arrive at dock five and a half days apart.

Offset exits add Intervals. An offset exit places the ship off the standard track and adds Intervals to the Extreme leg: +2 for a Near offset, +4 for a Distant offset, +6 for an Extreme offset. An emergency punch-out puts the ship wherever you place it, usually +6 Intervals or more, in a band of your choosing. The ship also chooses its own emergence direction, so a patrol sitting on the standard arc is not in its path. A wrong-exit-point result on the offset-exit failure table in the Vehicles Manual adds 1d6 Intervals to the Extreme leg.

Hard Burn. The pilot may declare Hard Burn at the start of a leg. Treat Cruise as one higher for that leg only; a Cruise 5 ship cannot Hard Burn. The leg costs 1 additional Supply Unit, and at its end the engineer makes an Average Craft Trial; on failure the Sublight Engine takes 1 System Damage. Each consecutive leg under Hard Burn raises the difficulty by one step. A ship under Hard Burn is detectable at Extreme by any sensor grade for the whole leg, and signature management does not offset this. Hard Burn is not the combat Overburn action, which is a per-round action with its own Heat cost.

Detection on the Approach

Travel Bands line up with the sensor detection bands in the Vehicles Manual. A watcher detects an approaching ship when it enters the outermost band the watcher's sensor grade reaches.

Two exceptions apply at any range. A ship broadcasting a transponder is known to traffic control from emergence wherever relay or beacon coverage exists. A ship on Hard Burn, or any ship running an antimatter engine at Cruise 4 or higher, is detectable at Extreme by any sensor grade.

A crew that wants to arrive unannounced runs a fusion drive, no Hard Burn, transponder dark, and accepts the offset exit that keeps it off the monitored track. Running dark is illegal in port space; see the Vehicles Manual.

Pursuit on the Approach

When two ships travel the same track, track each ship's Travel Band and elapsed time. Do not roll for position. Compare clocks.

1. Note each ship's Cruise and current band.
2. Advance both ships leg by leg. A ship completes a leg when its Interval count for that leg has elapsed.
3. When both ships occupy the same Travel Band at the same time, the pursuer has caught up. Switch to ship combat at Long combat range, or to the chase rules if the target keeps running.
4. If the target reaches Engaged before the pursuer enters the same band, the target has arrived. What happens at the dock is a new scene.

A ship that starts at Engaged and moves outward to intercept an arriving ship meets it in whichever band the two clocks cross. State the band.

Worked example. The crew punches out through a Near offset at a Standard system, so their Extreme leg is 4 Intervals instead of 2. The ship is Cruise 2, an 8-hour Interval: 32 hours to reach Long, 16 more to Medium, 8 to Short, 8 to dock, 64 hours in all. An Irnan patrol cutter is sitting on the standard arc. It is Cruise 4, a 2-hour Interval, and its Military sensors pick up the crew's drive signature at Extreme the moment they emerge. The cutter turns outward toward the emergence point. Both ships are in Extreme, and the cutter's clock crosses the crew's long before the crew finishes their 32-hour leg. Open ship combat at Long combat range with the crew 30 hours from anywhere useful.

Change one fact and the scene changes. If the crew had run dark and the cutter carried only Standard sensors, the cutter would not have seen them until Medium, roughly 48 hours in, and would have had 16 hours of closing to do.

Fuel and Supply as Pressure

Fuel cost should appear in play when the crew is running lean, running long, or running a drive that burns expensive fuel. Sublight cruise costs 1 Supply Unit per day of travel, rounded up, and Hard Burn costs 1 more per leg. The Vehicles Manual owns the fuel tables.

• A Cruise 2 ship burns 2 Supply Units on a Standard approach. The same ship on a Far approach through a Distant offset is looking at 14 Intervals, four and a half days, and 5 Supply Units before it reaches dock. If the tank was not topped off at the last port, that math matters.
• Antimatter fuel is expensive, regulated, and tracked. A ship running an antimatter engine at Cruise 4 or 5 leaves a financial and administrative trail.
• A seam exit that lands the crew six or eight Intervals farther out than planned means days of extra burn before they reach the objective. The GM does not need to track every gram of fuel, but a crew that has been running hard on a lean tank should feel the math close in.

Antimatter as a Signal

A ship running an antimatter engine at Cruise 4 or higher is visible at Extreme to every sensor in the system. A crew trying to move quietly cannot do so on an antimatter drive. A crew that wants to signal urgency or authority, however, will find nothing else communicates it as clearly.

The GM Uses of In-System Distance

Express distance as bands and hours rather than raw numbers.

Arrival windows: “You are at Long. At Cruise 2 that is thirty-two hours to dock. The liner ahead of you is Cruise 1 and left Long thirty hours ago. You catch it at Medium, well before the station.” Let the crew do the math and decide whether to Hard Burn.

Pursuit: “You burned offset and ran dark. You are in Extreme, four Intervals from Long: thirty-two hours at Cruise 2. The patrol on the standard arc has Standard sensors and will not see you until Medium. You have about two days of quiet. What do you do with it?”

Communication timing: News sent by relay arrives before the ship does. If the crew committed a notable act at the last port, the message about it is already in transit ahead of them. What the crew does during transit may matter more than what happens on arrival.

Resource depletion: A long in-system run without resupply is a countdown. Play it when it becomes relevant, not as a background tax on every session.

Exploration and Survey

Finding a new route is an expedition, not a gamble. A crew plans it, equips for it, and can fail it without losing the ship. Forced Entry stays what it is: exploration finds a real seam first. The product is information. A route record, a system record, and a body survey are cargo with buyers, and the crew's problems begin when other people learn what they carry.

The procedure has six steps. Run one step per session beat or compress several into a single roll; both are correct. This section is the GM-facing summary. The Astrogation Trial difficulties, the New seam and offset-exit failure tables, and the survey hardware (Seam Survey Package, Astrogation Lab, Survey Module, Probe Bay, Sample Containment Module, Deep Archive) are in the Vehicles Manual. The record formats, habitability classes, and accuracy tiers are in the Sector Atlas. The Exploration License and information prices are in the Equipment Guide. A ship with no survey hardware can still explore: it runs Step 1 only from a terminal seam or a Rumored atlas entry, at Severe, and its Body Surveys stop at Failure.

The Six Steps

Step 1: Corridor Trace. Navigator, extended Astrogation check, threshold 4 net Successes, time unit 1 day, run from the Extreme band of the starting system or from inside a corridor at its last mapped point. Difficulty is Average from a known corridor that continues past its terminal seam, Hard from a Rumored atlas entry or a Faded, Collapsed, or Lost seam, and Severe from open space with no prior data (Seam Survey Package required). Success confirms the corridor's class and one Route Trait; a Calamity is a false trace that you note privately and let Step 2 fail after its full attempt limit.

Step 2: Candidate Seam. Navigator, extended Astrogation check at Severe, threshold 3 net Successes, time unit 1 day, attempt limit 6 days plus 1 per Boon Die of equipment. Success locates a Candidate Seam at New stability; 2 Banes send the ship into a hazard, so roll on the Expedition Complications table; a Calamity means no safe seam exists at this system. Reaching the attempt limit leaves Forced Entry as the only way through, and nothing here softens it.

Step 3: First Transit. Navigator makes the Entry Trial at Severe, the Transit Trial at Hard (treat the corridor as Turbulent), and the Exit Trial at Severe, with the pilot handling turbulence; failures use the New seam entry, corridor navigation, and offset-exit failure tables in the Vehicles Manual. Transit time is unknown before the first crossing: roll d6 for 1, a short hop of 12 hours to 2 days; 2 to 3, a regional run of 3 to 10 days; 4, a long run of 1 to 3 weeks; 5, a long frontier run of 3 to 6 weeks; 6, branching, so roll twice and the navigator chooses a branch mid-corridor with a Hard Astrogation Trial, failure taking the other branch. Then roll on the First Transit Exit table below.

Step 4: Arrival Survey. Sensor operator, extended Electronics check at Average, threshold 3, time unit 6 hours, run from Medium with Standard sensors, Long with Extended, or Extreme with Military; a Probe Bay moves the position one band out. The crew emerges at Extreme on a New seam and adds 4 Intervals to the Extreme leg on top of the system's Approach until the seam is reinforced. Build the system with the Empty-System Generator in Chapter Six before the first roll and reveal it as Successes accumulate: star and Approach at 1, bodies and belt at 2, hazards at 3, and What Is Here only when the crew reaches the relevant band or spends 2 Boons.

Step 5: Body Survey and First Landing. Sensor operator, single Electronics Trial from Short at Average, or Hard for Class D and E bodies; a Survey Module is required for any result above Failure, and each Success past the first adds hazards, resources, a safe landing site, and finally a full record with a value estimate. The pilot then makes the landing Trial at Average for Class A and B, Hard for C and D, Severe for E, with 1 Bane Die if the survey stopped at Failure, and the first hour on the ground is a Survival Trial at the same difficulty. Samples come aboard through a Sample Containment Module or not at all.

Step 6: Survey Record and Claim. No roll. The record files at Rumored (one transit, Arrival Survey below threshold), Charted (one transit, full Arrival Survey), or Surveyed (two transits in both directions, full Arrival Survey, one Body Survey at 2 Successes, stored in a Deep Archive and filed with a registry). Filing needs an Exploration License from the authority where the expedition began; it tells that power the route exists, it conflicts with any prior claim found under What Is Here, a cut-off colony on the route keeps its own standing claim, and the record leaks within a month. Selling positions the route inside the Equipment Guide's 2,000 to 20,000cr range: a dead end at the bottom, a Class A or B body in the upper third, a corridor that continues adds a third, and a bypass into known space around a controlled seam at the top. A crew that files nothing and sells nothing owns a Thread that nobody patrols, taxes, or reinforces.

First Transit Exit d10

Expedition Complications d12

Roll d12 when a step produces 2 Banes, when an expedition has run long without a beat, or when you need a specific problem.

The Phased Relay Network

The Phased Relay Network is the interstellar communication infrastructure of known space, commonly shortened to “the Relay.” It is the reason news travels faster than ships.

A phased relay is a large fixed installation near an established seam. It does not broadcast radio faster than light. It opens a narrow, temporary phase channel through the same corridor geometry ships use, and sends tightly encoded data packets through that channel. Think of it as a telegraph line running alongside the road, except the road is a slipstream corridor and the telegraph can hop the message to the next station in hours rather than days.

How the Relay Works

Each relay communicates only with other relays that share an established phase lock: a synchronized calibration relationship built through careful technical preparation. Messages travel hop by hop along the relay chain.

A message sent from Port Meridian to Aurelis does not jump there directly. It moves through a chain of relays, each one authenticating, logging, and forwarding the packet to the next station. The delay comes from queueing, authentication, censorship review, damaged nodes, political routing restrictions, and relay availability more than from raw transmission physics.

News Speed Reference:

Who Controls the Relays

Relay stations are infrastructure, and infrastructure is power.

Irnan Directorate: Government-operated relay authority. Strict logging, authenticated traffic, systematic prioritization of official channels. Civilian traffic is not routinely inspected in content, but the capability exists and has been exercised during security crises.

Funtari Confederacy: Patchwork relay ownership. Some nodes are clan-operated. Some are corporate concessions. Some have been out of maintenance contract for years. A message crossing several clan boundaries may be delayed at each node while routing agreements are confirmed.

Shoiyan Concord: Technically sophisticated relay infrastructure with heavy encryption. Concord relay nodes are excellent for speed and fidelity. They are also extremely capable at forensic traffic analysis after the fact, which is a different kind of threat.

Jaziri Caliphate: Government and religious authority share relay operation, sometimes at the same node. The Caliphate uses relay credentials as tools of political and religious compliance: a ship with the correct sponsor records gets priority routing. A ship flagged for irregularities may find its messages delayed, reviewed, or stripped of content.

Antaean League: Corporate relay consortiums, private relay operators, competing routing services. Message routing in League space is a market. Priority routing can be purchased. A message sent on the cheapest tier may bounce through several competing relay companies and arrive slower than expected. The League does not censor content the way the Caliphate does; it charges for the privilege of fast delivery instead.

Meridian Verge: Relay infrastructure is sparse, patchy, and disputed. Vanta Relay is the most significant node in the Verge, and it is damaged. Messages through the Verge may be delayed, rerouted through longer chains that cross into power space, or forced onto physical courier traffic entirely.

Relay Failure and What It Means

A relay failure in a strategic system is a campaign event: someone is about to be very surprised by something everyone else knew days ago.

Communication Lag as a GM Tool

The gap between when something happens and when relevant parties hear about it is one of your most powerful tools. Use it deliberately.

The Crew Acts on Old Intelligence

The crew received a message three days ago: the station administrator is ready to deal and the rival crew has not arrived yet. The crew has been in transit for five days. What they know is five days old. The situation has had five days to change. And it has.

Frame it before the crew commits: “Your information is five days old. Do you trust it, or do you scan for updated relay traffic before you act?”

The Destination Already Knows

Information travels faster than ships. If the crew did something notable at the last port, a relay message describing that action is already in transit ahead of them, or has already arrived. The crew arrives at the new system and discovers that the person they need to meet has heard a version of events that is accurate in ways the crew would prefer it were not.

Messages Sent Ahead Do Not Always Arrive

A crew sends a message through a frontier relay chain to warn someone at their destination. The message has to pass through four nodes, two of which are in marginal condition. The message arrives two days late. The person the crew was warning did not know to prepare. The crew arrives to a situation their warning should have prevented.

Selective Silence

A power censoring a relay node creates information asymmetry: the people on the far side of the censored node do not know what they do not know. A crew carrying physical data across a censored border may be the only source of accurate information for a community that has been living on sanitized relay traffic for months. That makes the crew extremely valuable, and puts them in danger accordingly.

Communication Failure Table

Roll d12 or choose when relay communication creates a complication.

Route Control as Leverage

A power that controls a corridor controls everything that moves through it. This is the political core of Slipstream geography. Every ship, every cargo, every relay message, every courier, and every piece of salvage that uses a corridor is subject to the authority of whoever holds the seam.

What Route Control Looks Like in Practice

Patrol presence at the standard exit arc means every ship that transits on normal routing is seen. The patrol does not need to catch everyone. It needs to catch enough people, and create enough uncertainty, that most operators comply with the tariff regime.

Nav beacon credentials determine what route data a ship receives. A ship whose credentials are flagged gets degraded navigation data, outdated seam positions, or nothing at all. The ship can still attempt the route on old charts, but old charts introduce risk.

Relay node control means the authority decides what information flows through its infrastructure. It can delay competing commercial traffic, inspect messages before forwarding, suppress communications, or strip sensitive content. A commercial enterprise trying to coordinate across a route controlled by a hostile power faces information delays their competitors in the controlling power do not.

Transit permits are the bureaucratic face of route control. A ship without the correct permit for a given corridor faces delays at the exit arc, inspection holds, cargo seizure, or denial of relay access. The permit regime is also a revenue mechanism: fees, tariffs, and surcharges extracted from every ship that passes.

Interdiction systems, where deployed, prevent safe phase entry or exit within a localized area. They are expensive, so powers use them defensively around high-value systems rather than along every corridor. A mobile interdiction platform at a chokepoint effectively closes a corridor to ordinary traffic until the platform is removed or destroyed.

Using Route Control at the Table

Route control works as leverage when the crew needs something that crosses a controlled corridor.

The political weapon: A power tightens transit permit requirements after a diplomatic incident. Every independent ship crossing that corridor now needs paperwork that takes two weeks to process. The Confederacy clan that depends on the route to export ore is suddenly unable to move cargo. The crew may be hired to move something that cannot wait two weeks, through a route that does not cross the inspection zone, through a Thread corridor the permit regime does not officially acknowledge.

The information blockade: A power censors the relay node on a frontier route. The colonies beyond it have been receiving filtered news for three months. The crew is carrying physical data that contradicts everything those colonists have been told about a recent political event. Multiple parties have strong reasons to stop the delivery.

The monopoly break: A corporate consortium controls the only Thread corridor to an isolated colony and has been extracting above-market prices for every cargo. Someone has found evidence of a secondary seam that bypasses the consortium's route entirely. The crew is hired to survey it. The consortium has strong reasons to prevent that survey from completing.

The military chokepoint: A power moves warships to the exit arc of a Spine corridor and begins requiring inspections of all commercial traffic. Convoys are backed up. Perishable cargo is spoiling. The political pressure mounts. The crew needs to transit, but the inspection will expose something they cannot explain away.

Travel Complication Tables

Use these tables when travel needs texture, when the crew has been in transit long enough that something should happen, or when a Bane needs to become a specific complication.

Slipstream Travel Complications d12

In-System Travel Complications d12

Summary: Travel as a GM Tool

Time is the primary resource. Every day in transit is a day something is developing without the crew's involvement. A faction is moving pieces. A patient is getting sicker. A rival crew is getting closer to the objective. Make time feel spent.

Route choice is a real decision. The faster route is more expensive, more monitored, or in worse condition. The quiet route adds a week and takes the ship through space where a previous job left complications. Give the crew real tradeoffs when routes are available.

Communication lag is asymmetric information, not punishment. The crew acts on what they know. What they know is old. Play the gap: have NPCs respond to events the crew caused but does not know were witnessed. Have the destination ready to receive a crew with a reputation that arrived ahead of them.

Corridors are political. A route the crew relies on can become complicated if the power controlling the relay node has a reason to notice them. A route that was safe last month may have a new patrol presence this month. The geography of known space does not change, but who controls it does.