Call of Cthulhu: Firefly (Tales of the Starry Knight)

About the adventure

This is more of a 6-part mini-series than a true campaign. I am building Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed rules for the Firefly Universe. Vagabond anti-heroes with their own ship are cruising the Verse to score the next gig. Ru guo ni xiang chi fan, ni jiu de gan huo—if you want to eat, you gotta work. The Smuggler's Code: OUT HERE: NO LAW, NO LIGHT, NO MERCY "The job is simple. The money is good. The risk is high." The central planets offer a dream of "Earth-That-Was"—lush gardens, clean air, and the absolute safety of the Alliance’s watchful eye. But you don't live there. You live in the "Black," the space between the stars where the light of the White Sun barely reaches and the air in your lungs is recycled for the tenth time today. You are the crew of a Firefly-class transport, the Starry Knight, a ship held together by little more than prayer, duct tape, and a Pilot who knows how to listen to the engines. You have a mountain of debt, a hold full of nothing, and a ship’s gravity stabilizer that groans every time you hit the atmosphere. Mei you ban fa... there is no other way. In the Verse, you have two choices: find work or find a graveyard. THE OFFER Winston Wei is a man of significant means and very little patience. He doesn't deal in legalities; he deals in results. He has approached your crew with a contract that sounds almost too good to be true. A derelict freighter, the S.S. Gwydion, has been located drifting on the edge of the Rim. It’s a ghost ship—silent, dark, and a hull full of "high-value cargo" that needs to be retrieved before the Alliance's long-range scanners pick up the signal. The pay? Enough to clear your debt twice over. The catch? You don't ask what's in the crates. You don't look at the manifests. You just burn hard, burn fast, and get the job done. Dong ma? Do you understand? THE HORROR OF THE BLACK This is not a story about heroes. It is a story about survivors. As you drift further from the civilized Core, you’ll find that space is much emptier than the Alliance textbooks suggest. There is a coldness out there that the ship's heaters can’t touch—a huai dan (rotten) kind of silence that stays with you. When you’re millions of miles from the nearest breathable atmosphere, you begin to realize that some things were meant to stay lost. On the Starry Knight, sanity is just as precious as fuel, and both are running low.