The sky above is ruled by memory and madness.

When the Feedback Cascade tore through the global network, it did not stop at the atmosphere. Orbital habitats, colonies, shipyards, military stations, and warships became sealed tombs filled with dead crews, failing systems, corrupted intelligences, and psychic residue that has spent seventy-five years fermenting in the dark.

Those wrecks still circle the world.

They contain technology, weapons, data, medicine, fuel, fabrication systems, lost histories, and fortunes large enough to change the balance of power below. They also contain everything that killed the people who once lived aboard them.

Among the Derelict Stars carries the Deadwake universe into high orbit, where salvage crews, corporate survey teams, orbital cults, scavenger unions, rogue intelligences, and secret societies compete across the largest graveyard humanity ever created.

The Graveyard Above

The orbital ruins are not empty scenery. Every station and vessel is a sealed environment with its own history, hazards, surviving systems, competing claimants, and psychic ecology.

A derelict may contain a crew still following orders issued during the Cascade, an artificial intelligence attempting to complete a mission whose purpose no longer exists, a colony whose survivors adapted to isolation in ways no groundside society would recognize, or a warship whose dead remain connected through its Cognitive Resonance Interface.

Every expedition begins with the same calculation: whether what might be recovered is worth what the void may take.

Plan the Journey

Orbital operations begin before the airlock opens. Crews must select their destination, secure transportation, gather intelligence, ration fuel and oxygen, choose equipment, negotiate salvage rights, and decide how much risk they can afford before the expedition becomes impossible to abandon.

Resources that are merely inconvenient on the surface become matters of life and death in orbit. A damaged seal, lost maneuvering pack, exhausted oxygen reserve, or miscalculated transfer window can kill a crew that has survived every hostile encounter aboard the wreck.

Rules for the Void

This book expands Deadwake play with rules for movement, combat, survival, and psychological strain in orbital environments.

• Zero-gravity movement, momentum, maneuvering, and three-dimensional positioning;
• Vacuum exposure, decompression, hull breaches, failing life support, and environmental collapse;
• Orbital travel, limited fuel, oxygen management, and expedition preparation;
• Boarding actions, shipboard combat, and fighting through confined or unstable spaces;
• Ship-to-ship encounters and tactical operations around stations, wrecks, and orbital debris;
• Corrupted systems, surviving machine intelligences, and CRI-linked vessels;
• Isolation, sensory deprivation, psychic residue, and the effects of the Cognitive Static in sealed environments; and
• Salvage, extraction, transport, and the difficult task of bringing recovered material home.

The Salvage Economy

Orbital salvage is among the most valuable commodities in the Wake. It is also politically dangerous.

A recovered reactor core may restore power to a settlement, strengthen a corporate military, or destabilize an entire region. A data archive may contain scientific knowledge, military intelligence, family records, blackmail material, or proof that a faction’s official history is false.

The expanded salvage system tracks value through more than simple currency. Barter, scarcity, factional interest, competing claims, reputation, and accumulated Heat determine who wants the recovered material, what they will offer for it, and what they are willing to do when the crew refuses to surrender it.

Powers of the Orbital Graveyard

The derelicts have produced societies and organizations that cannot be understood entirely through groundside politics.

Corporate survey teams claim wrecks in the name of contracts written generations after their crews died. Scavenger unions defend customary salvage rights through collective force. Orbital cults interpret the silence, stars, and trapped dead as revelation. Rogue intelligence conclaves negotiate, deceive, and wage war according to objectives inherited from forgotten masters. Secret societies search the graveyard for artifacts capable of reshaping the struggle below.

These powers may serve as patrons, competitors, allies, inhabitants, or the reason an expedition should never have been launched.

Isolation and Memory

The Cognitive Static behaves differently in orbit. Distance from the planet may reduce some forms of interference while concentrating others inside sealed ships whose crews died together, connected through the same systems and sharing the same final terror.

A derelict remembers.

Its corridors, interfaces, recordings, environmental systems, and damaged CRI architecture may preserve fragments of the people who inhabited it. Those fragments can replay events, manipulate systems, imitate the dead, overwrite the living, or attempt to complete actions interrupted seventy-five years earlier.

In the orbital graveyard, the crew must determine whether a voice in the communication system is an automated recording, an Echo, a corrupted intelligence, a psychic residue, or a survivor who has waited decades to be found.

Inside This Book

• A complete guide to the orbital regions of the Deadwake universe;
• Silent shipwrecks, abandoned colonies, dead warships, stations, and orbital tombs;
• Rules for zero-gravity movement and combat;
• Vacuum, decompression, life-support failure, radiation, debris, and other orbital hazards;
• Expedition planning, fuel, oxygen, equipment, travel, and extraction;
• An expanded salvage economy based upon barter, scarcity, factional interest, and Heat;
• Corporate survey teams, scavenger unions, orbital cults, rogue intelligence conclaves, and secret societies;
• Shipboard encounters, corrupted systems, breached compartments, and surviving machine minds;
• Roleplaying material for isolation horror, exploration, salvage, infiltration, and factional conflict;
• A complete zero-gravity miniatures subsystem with orbital units and tactical rosters;
• Tools for generating wrecks, compartments, hazards, discoveries, and competing claims;
• Campaign frameworks ranging from a single salvage expedition to a continuing tomb-chain campaign; and
• Guidance for introducing orbital missions into an existing Deadwake campaign.

Among the Derelict Stars in Roleplaying Campaigns

Orbital campaigns combine exploration, survival, horror, political competition, and resource management. Operatives may serve as salvagers, scouts, corporate surveyors, boarding specialists, pilots, engineers, security personnel, researchers, or desperate groundside agents searching for something only the orbital dead still possess.

The central tension is not simply whether the crew can enter the wreck. It is whether they can understand what happened there, survive what remains, decide what should be taken, and return before their air, fuel, trust, or Cohesion is exhausted.

Among the Derelict Stars in Miniatures Play

Orbital skirmishes occur across hulls, debris fields, breached compartments, docking structures, and zero-gravity interiors where movement is governed by momentum rather than ordinary ground control.

Forces must manage three-dimensional lines of approach, environmental hazards, limited mobility systems, decompression, changing terrain, and objectives that may be more valuable than every operative deployed to recover them.

Using This Sourcebook

This book supports both the Deadwake Role Playing Rules and the Deadwake Miniatures Combat Rules. It contains material for players, Facilitators, miniatures commanders, and readers interested in the orbital ruins and surviving powers of the Wake.

The appropriate Deadwake core rulebook is required to use the included roleplaying or miniatures mechanics.

Book Details

• Author: Jon Compton
• Publisher: Canvas Temple Publishing, LLC
• Format: Paperback
• Length: 158 Pages
• Dimensions: Approximately 7.44 × 9.69 inches
• Language: English
• Publication Date: [INSERT DATE FROM COPYRIGHT PAGE]
• ISBN-10: 1969445297
• ISBN-13: 9781969445293

The digital edition is sold separately through WargameVault. This listing is for the physical paperback edition.