Act 3 - The Descent

Captain 5 - A Space Sweeper

Captain creation

Describe the Captain and consider how they took command of your ship, and any notable crew or assets.

This will be our final captain for the playthrough. The game recommends 2 captains from each act, but this feels like a good place to finish. And it leaves scope to pick up this ship for use in a future campaign before I run it completely into the ground.

• Name: Nathan Gonzalez
• Spotted the ship rusting away and with his keen eye for salvage, saw through the rust.
• Traded his entire haul for the Endurance, but her cargo hold and magnetic clamps won him over.
• Older man, tired, but always hustling.

Describe the junk fields they salvage and their miserly patron.

• Main scavenging grounds is a graveyard of ships in orbit far from a red dwarf star a couple of systems over.
• He has a patron who is intereted in specific tech. Processing units. Hard to extract in one piece, different on every vessel. He’ll pay for those. Nathan doesn’t know what he needs them for. Everything else he can find gets sold to the junkyards for pittance.

Whose ire was provoked when they salvaged a priceless asset?

• Made enemies with one of the major factions when he pulled the processing unit from an old military vessel and the history turned out to have co-ordinates to a very secret installation still on the chip.
• Was accused of spying and had to lay low for a month until they accepted that the fault was theirs, not his.
• Learned to be a lot more careful visting locations from the old derelict computer systems after that.

Memorable events

Out of fuel and funds, your Captain was forced to land at the nearest space station.

• Was forced to land at an old outpost known for pirate activity after a fuel leak. Flew slowly through a gauntlet of old, rusty vessels brimming with crude weaponry, target lock klaxon going off constantly.
• Was made to retrieve an escape pod containing a bounty hunter which has been deployed into the orbit of a nearby gas giant.
• The orbit was decaying and it was dangerous to try and retrieve the pod, but the mag-clamp gave Nathan the edge.
• He couldn’t look at the man as he handed over the pod, knowing what his fate would be among these pirates.

Ship Question

Across the galaxy there are spaceports in every shape, size and standing.

• My favourite types of port are the research stations. Something about them feels like where I’m meant to be.
• They’re clean and utilitarian and have an air of people gradually peeling back the great mysteries, uninterested in petty things like riches or great material posessions.

How does the captain and ship’s time together end?

• Eventually the Endurance ends up back with the scrap dealer. The fuel leaks and other malfunctions become too frequent. There I sit, decades later, still hoping that one day someone will recognise the ship that discovered the first wormhole and take me back to a university to rest where I belong.

And so ends the tale of the Endurance. For now at least. This probably took about an hour and a half of play time all told, easily playable within an evening. I categorise this as a ‘story game’ because the ‘game’ elements are so light - it’s really prompted creative writing. But easy to sit down with, and it doesn’t require much more than a paper and pen.

This game was written by Jack Harrison at Mousehole Press, and PDF copies are available at the Mousehole Press store on itch.io along with all of Jack’s other games. Physical copies occasionally get refreshed in the store on the Mousehole Press website. Check them out! Jack’s style is very narrative-heavy, but you may well have heard of Koriko: A Magical Year which is regularly recommended on solo journalling blogs, podcasts and youtube channels (I have a copy, and it will likely feature on this blog at some point).