Vestige Ruins & Boons

Voidcrew has no roundstart antagonists. Nobody is handed a traitor uplink or a changeling sting at the start of a shift. Instead, the abilities themselves are content you go and get: vestige ruins are the remnants of dead antagonists, each one holding a patron who will trade you a real, working antagonist power in exchange for doing a piece of work. Armblades, shadow walks, blood crawls, dragonfire. All of it is out there, and all of it has to be earned.

Finding one

Vestige ruins never seed naturally at roundstart. They arrive one at a time as the shift ages: the first about twenty minutes in, another every fifteen minutes after that, each theme appearing at most once. Every arrival is announced to the galaxy, and the site shows up on sensors as a dread signal marked in red, distinct from the gold of a rare ruin, named for the patron aboard from the moment it surfaces, so you always know who you're looking at before you dock.

Unlike ordinary ruins, a dread signal never moves and never cycles into something else. The interior unloads when everyone leaves, but the signal stays exactly where it is for the rest of the round, so once you have found your patron, you can always go back to it.

There are fourteen themes: the Chrysalis, the Scarlet Sepulcher, the Gloaming, the Athenaeum, the Reliquary, the Wake, the Silent Dojo, the Aperture, the Roost, the Menagerie, the Facsimile, the Comb, the Shambles and the Loom.

The patron

Inside is a vestige: something that used to be someone. The Vestige of Hive Wren in the Chrysalis, Sister Havel in the Scarlet Sepulcher, the Stranger in the Gloaming, the Magister's Echo in the Athenaeum, the Scrivener in the Reliquary, the Mourner in the Wake, the Hollow Master in the Silent Dojo, the Watcher Behind Glass in the Aperture, the Unfed in the Roost, the Curator in the Menagerie, the Understudy in the Facsimile, the Dowager in the Comb, the Stain in the Shambles, and the Weaver in the Loom.

They cannot be killed and cannot be moved. Touching one opens a small menu:

• Speak: they say something. Flavour, no mechanics.
• Pact: the business.
• Ascend, only appears once you have finished everything that patron has to ask (see below).

You do not browse a list of trials. The patron assigns your character one trial, rolled from whatever it has left, and that assignment sticks. Declining it does not reroll it. Renouncing it and coming back does not reroll it either. That is your trial until you finish it.

You can hold one pact at a time, across all patrons. Walk into a second vestige mid-pact and it tells you to finish what you started.

Trials

A trial is a specific piece of work, usually with a kit handed to you when you accept, and it is tracked on a button in your action bar. Hover it for live progress, click it to reprint the terms. The button appears with the pact and vanishes with it.

They are bespoke, and none of them are "go kill ten of something". The Rite of Offering hands you a satchel of chalk, candles and a knife: go somewhere well away from the Sepulcher, draw the rune, ring it with three lit candles and lay a body on it that once had a soul. The Trial of Birth gives you a chrysalis egg that needs incubating. The Trial of the Snuffed Flame wants a great many lights put out. The Trial of the Thrown Star wants hits on live targets with a training star. The Rite of Rust wants tiles corroded with the chrism you are given. Protocol: Field Study wants a telemetric probe deployed and read.

Fulfilling one pays out wherever you are, immediately. There is no trip back to the ruin to collect, which matters because its interior may well have unloaded behind you.

Boons

Completing a trial leaves you holding a claim button. Clicking it opens a radial of up to three boons rolled from that patron's pool; picking one shows its pitch behind a confirm, so a stray click cannot spend your choice. The debt sits there until you take something, and no patron will strike a new pact with you while you are owed one.

Boons are real antagonist abilities, rebuilt to work on an ordinary crewmember with no antag status attached. They chain: an upgrade only becomes available once you own the boon it grows from, and taking the upgrade replaces the original rather than stacking a second copy.

A sample of what is out there:

Others include Rusted Grasp and Ashen Passage from the Scrivener, Veiling Smoke and Soundless Step from the Hollow Master, Borrowed Shape and the Gullet from the Understudy, Rending Claws and Scent of Blood from the Stain, and physical items like the alien instrument and the recall anchor from the Curator. Every patron's pool is its own, no two vestiges offer the same power, so which ruins you find shapes what your character can do.

Dying

Your abilities die with your body; the ledger does not. Every trial you finished, every boon you took and any unclaimed payment are recorded against you, not the character. Walk a new body into any vestige (not necessarily the one that owed you) hit Pact, and it hands everything back and reopens any claim you died holding. The same ledger stops you farming: dying cannot reroll an assignment or reopen a trial you already fulfilled.

Ascension

Three patrons host a capstone. Ninety minutes into a shift, once you have fulfilled every trial that patron has, the Ascend option becomes usable.

Accepting opens a way into a private arena and sends you through. The confirm dialog states the stakes plainly before you commit:

You go alone. Nobody follows. Nothing docks. There is no door for a friend to come through, and the arena cannot be teleported into or out of.

The body is one-way. Die in there and the corpse is deleted outright, no body, no cloning, nothing to drag home, and everything you were carrying goes with it. Your ghost is freed with no way back in and the arena unloads behind you. A respawned character who still meets the gate may ask again, and the ledger keeps your boons, so a failed run costs you the body and the gear and nothing else.

One capstone per player, ever. The moment one is granted, all three patrons refuse you for the rest of the round. Choosing which to chase is the point.

The bosses are tuned as hard single-player fights, not raid bosses with the health divided down. You have thirty minutes.

Win and the ability is granted on the spot. There is no choice, it was named up front. Then the arena is yours for six minutes before the gate closes: strip the place, take what you can carry, and walk back out through the way home that opens beside you.

The capstones are round-warping by design. Voice of the Word shouts an order and everything alive within nine tiles that can see you obeys (through deafness, ear protection and magic resistance alike) from a list of about forty orders, once every three minutes. Greater Telekinesis lifts objects, furniture, machines and people out to nine tiles and drags them to you, and can tear up anything bolted down if you hold your grip long enough. Machine Communion makes machines treat you as the station AI, so ID locks stop applying, and adds a quickhack list plus a button that turns an entire room's machinery against whoever is standing in it.