Waking the Crew¶
The campaign's crew progression, in fiction. Most of humanity crossed the dark asleep; over the game you wake them — one at a time, and you choose who. Every waking is a person with a name, a skill the colony needs now, and a bed someone had to build for them.
Status: proposed — not yet canon
This mechanic is a design proposal held for review. The framing, the names (the Long Sleep, the Berths, the Manifest, Reveille), and every specifics below are open to change and are not binding canon yet. Follows the house convention for provisional material — see the Timeline's provisional markers.
[!quote] "There are nine thousand people asleep over my head, and today I can afford to wake exactly one of them. Tell me that isn't the whole job." — Administrator Idris Vale
The Long Sleep¶
The Odyssey crossed the Long Dark two ways at once. A small watch-crew lived, worked, and bred across the generations of the voyage — Idris Vale's people, born in transit, who never saw the Cradle. The rest of humanity rode down in cold sleep, tens of thousands of colonists held in the ship's Berths, meant to be woken on a green world by a crew that had kept the lights on.
The green world fought back. The watch-crew made the first landfall and the war swallowed the plan. The Sleepers are still up there — humanity's whole future, stacked in the cold, waiting on a colony that can barely feed the mouths already awake.
Why they stay asleep
A body in the Berths costs almost nothing — no food, no water, no air worth the name, no risk. A body awake costs all of those every day, and can be lost to a Mara raid or a hungry winter. The Long Sleep is the safest place a human can be on Nandana. It is also useless there. That tension — safe-and-inert versus useful-and-mortal — is the choice the mechanic is built on.
Reveille — one at a time¶
Waking a Sleeper is not a switch. A revival needs a place to put the person: crew quarters, a life-support share, a daily ration, and a stretch of scarce medbay time to run the thaw (the same medbay that patches downed operators — its hours are finite). So the colony can only wake someone when it has built the room to hold them.
That is the gate. To earn a waking — a Reveille — you expand capacity: raise crew quarters, extend life-support, stand up more hydroponics, all paid for out of the salvage economy and often unlocked by a story beat. Each new berth's-worth of capacity buys one Reveille. Hence the shape the player feels: we expanded the quarters to house one more member — so we may wake one more person.
| In fiction | On the board |
|---|---|
| Expand quarters / life-support / rations | Spend resources (and clear the story gate) to open a crew slot |
| A Reveille comes due | You may wake one Sleeper |
| The Manifest | The candidates eligible for the role you're filling |
| The thaw | A short delay / medbay cost before they're active |
The Manifest & the choice¶
When a slot opens it opens for a reason — the colony needs a capability — and the ship's Manifest offers several Sleepers who could answer it. You wake one. The others stay in the cold.
Crucially, you are choosing an order, not making an exclusion. You will, eventually, wake everyone the ship carried; the Berths empty over the campaign. What you decide each Reveille is who comes online now — which capability you gain this act, which personality sits at your table for the fights ahead, which story opens first.
[!note] Design note — agency without loss-aversion Because no candidate is lost forever, the choice is a positive one — "which good thing first" — not a punishing fork the player agonises over missing. It still matters: the pilot you wake in Act 1 shapes Act 1. The design goal is meaningful progression pacing with a human face, not a permanent-consequence gotcha. (If you want higher stakes, a variant is that some Sleepers can be lost while still asleep — a Berths breach, a Mara strike on the ship — which turns "eventually everyone" into "everyone you keep." Flagged as an option, not the default.)
What a woken colonist becomes¶
A Reveille fills a role. Roles come in two kinds, and both are progression:
| Kind | The person | What waking them unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Joins the operator cadre — deployable, snap-back-protected on missions | A new playable operator with a kit and a specialty |
| Home | A colony specialist who never (or rarely) deploys | A strategic capability — a new building, research line, or economy boost |
Example archetypes on the Manifest — kept as flavour and reason; the exact unlocks live in your combat/economy data, per the contributing rules:
| Role | Kind | Unlocks (illustrative) |
|---|---|---|
| Pilot | Field / Home | Lander and aerial operations; faster redeploys between regions |
| Engineer | Home | Better harvesters and base structures; cheaper capacity expansions |
| Xeno-surgeon | Home | Quicker thaws, better medbay — more Reveilles, steadier snap-backs |
| Agronomist | Home | Hydroponics / food — raises the population ceiling and slows attrition |
| Salvage-tech | Field | Reads Progenitor tech faster; boosts the salvage curve |
| Quartermaster | Home | Improves the Reserve and stretches rations |
| Marksman / Breacher / Sapper | Field | New operator combat specialties |
The story reason comes first
A waking is always motivated: we need someone who can fly, and we finally have a bunk to put them in. The need is the fiction; the choice is the mechanic; the new capability is the reward. Three things the player usually pays for separately, delivered as one beat with a name attached. Write each candidate's dossier so the pick feels like meeting a person, not buying an upgrade.
Sleepers, Viable Population, and the bet¶
The Sleepers connect straight into the campaign life-bar (see Viable Population & MVP).
- Asleep, they don't count. Viable Population is the awake, working, breeding number. Sleepers are a finite reserve outside it — humanity's insurance, held in reserve against the day the colony needs numbers it doesn't have.
- Waking grows the number — and exposes the person. A Reveille moves a Sleeper into the living population: useful at last, but now mortal, now a mouth to feed, now killable by the Mara. Every waking is a small bet that the colony can keep this person alive better than the cold could.
- The reserve only shrinks. You never gain new Sleepers; the Cradle is dead and there are no reinforcements from home (see The Colony). The true end-state creeps closer from two sides at once: the Berths emptying, and the awake population bleeding toward MVP. Extinction is when the reserve is spent and the living fall below the floor.
Design note — why this belongs to the campaign, not the mission
Waking the Crew is the strategic-layer answer to the tactical raid loop: the raids feed resources up; the resources buy capacity; capacity wakes people; people expand what you can do — and every one of them is now something you can lose. It keeps the game's core inversion intact — the individual operator cannot die, but the people can — while giving the player a steady, chosen, human-faced sense of the colony coming back to life, one bunk at a time.