"White Signal -- Extended Edition"

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Page 1 - Cover, hook, and session frame

WHITE SIGNAL -- Extended Edition

Subtitle: Some things are not lost in the void. They learn how to wait there.

At 03:41, Arklight-6 catches a distress signal dated 2047. The identifier belongs to Perséide-9, a probe lost near Hyperion forty years earlier. Procedure says wait for the company. Deep orbit has never liked waiting.

Once the signal is opened, consoles bleach white, erased logs return, dead names appear on station systems, and a single image shows Arklight-6 torn open twelve years before it was built. The station does not fail. It starts remembering impossible things.

The PCs must decide whether to listen to the end, destroy the evidence, hand it over to the company, or let something larger continue drifting through them.

Session parameters

• System: Year Zero Engine, space-horror adaptation
• Players: 3-5
• Duration: 4-6 hours
• Tone: slow pressure, orbital isolation, fragmented truth, cold panic
• Promise: station exploration, mission secrets, tension between survivors, multi-ending climax

Content warnings

• Prolonged spatial isolation
• Hallucinations, shared dreams, mnemonic confusion
• Recovered bodies, industrial accidents, decompression
• Corporate manipulation and archive erasure
• Possible PC or NPC sacrifice

Conflict summary

The PCs play part or all of Arklight-6's crew when Perséide-9 drifts back into recovery range. Their investigation reveals that the probe carried an experimental cosmic-recording device and that a similar incident was already buried on the station eleven years earlier. The company wants the phenomenon contained. The station reacts like an organism reclaiming forbidden memories. Survival matters, but the true choice is whether to hear the signal through, erase it, surrender it, or let something larger keep moving through human lives.

Page 2 - Extended background, hidden truth, and pressure rules

In 2047, the Perséide program launched gravitational listening probes around Saturn's moons. Officially, they were prospecting platforms. Unofficially, Perséide-9 carried a "cosmic residual signature" sensor meant to test whether some events leave memory in space itself.

Perséide-9 sent back only eleven seconds of structured white noise before vanishing. The program was classified. Its hardware was recycled. One of its antenna arrays now sits inside Arklight-6, a mining station assembled in 2069 and operated by a contract crew far beyond meaningful help.

In 2076, Arklight already suffered a brief incident: contradictory alarms, cold inside the ducts, two deaths recorded as "airlock accidents," then a partial archive purge. Vesna remembers. Theo only knows some logs were sealed. The company knows the phenomenon much better than it admits.

Hidden truth for the GM

Perséide-9 did not bring back an organism. It brought back a mnemonic trace. The prototype latched onto something that records matter as a palimpsest of relationships, fear, and possible futures. Any compatible system that reads the signal becomes a support for residual memory.

The presence is not malicious in a human sense. It simply confuses what happened, what might have happened, and what may still happen. That is why the station shows dead people from elsewhere, reconstructs deleted logs, and displays its own body before its birth.

The three forces at work

• Arklight-6's crew: exhausted contractors never meant to become the center of a historic incident
• The company: distant, slow to answer, but already aware of the "anachronic" risk and ready to sacrifice the crew to retrieve the hardware
• The White Signal: a mnemonic phenomenon that does not want to attack, only to keep being heard and recorded

Shared Stress tracker - The White Signal

Use a shared tracker from 0 to 12.

Add 1 shared Stress whenever:

• the crew uncovers a major archive or ghost-name clue
• a central pushed roll fails
• a system failure strikes in a tense scene
• a PC stays isolated with a manifestation
• a death, disappearance, or open rupture splits the crew
• Perséide-9's memory opens completely

Recommended effects:

• 0-3: subtle anomalies, low hum in the speakers, false timestamps
• 4-6: synchronized dreams, spontaneous text on screens, familiar voices in the ducts
• 7-9: the station acts, sealing then reopening sections, locking or opening doors "to help"
• 10-12: White Phase. The presence answers deliberately, departure becomes difficult, and the climax takes over

Reduce Stress by 1 when:

• a PC tells a costly truth that recenters the group
• the crew truly regroups, eats, tends wounds, or comforts each other
• an important clue finally gives intelligible shape to the horror

Push-roll reminder

A PC may push a failed roll according to your YZE adaptation. In this scenario, every push must leave a visible fictional scar: blackout, mishandled tool, biometric trace, bad confession, injury, or rising shared Stress. If a PC pushes while alone with an already contaminated system, answer immediately with something intimate: a childhood memory, a dead face, a sentence only the station should never know.

Page 3 - Act 1: the night the signal returns

Act 1 must install three things: the tired normality of a mining station, the arrival of an administrative impossibility, and the sense that Arklight reacts before any sane decision is made.

Read aloud

The comms display pulses milky white, as if fog had been poured into the monitor. Instead of an incoming beep, you hear a pure, almost medical tone with something knocking inside it at irregular intervals. Not a code. Not a language. A rhythm. The watch console shows a source 3,200 kilometers away, drifting closer. The machine identifier locks after half a second: PERSEIDE-9. Mission lost. Archived 2047. Status impossible.

Opening scene - Wake everyone or hide it

Orin Vass is on watch when the signal arrives. If no PC plays Orin, use him as the scene's spark. The first dilemma is social before it is technical.

• Follow protocol and wake Theo immediately. It calms hierarchy but delays analysis and gives the company time.
• Keep the signal quiet for a few minutes. That buys understanding but creates a first secret inside the crew.
• Try isolating the frequency without warning anyone. The station answers by reopening an old deleted Perséide folder on its own.

Useful rolls:

• Tech or Observation, danger 2: confirm the source is not a contemporary pirate transmission
• Command or Empathy, danger 2: wake the crew without causing immediate panic
• Science or Wits, danger 3: recognize that the embedded protocol predates the station itself

Scene 1 - Command deck

The bridge is narrow, washed in Titan's dirty orange glow. The PCs can find three immediate clues there.

• The automatic log records the signal as "return of an absent node," not as an incoming transmission.
• A 2071 archive contains lines nobody on board wrote: "Do not reopen the bay if the white answers."
• Perséide-9's route briefly crosses the position of an old relay point that was never built, as though the probe were following the memory of infrastructure.

Scene 2 - Life module

Waking the others turns the event into a group drama at once. A mess-hall tablet flashes a list of unknown names, all marked "present on board."

This moment establishes the main tensions.

• Jura wants to dump the whole problem back into space and cut the antennas.
• Theo wants documentation first because a clean report may save his career.
• Vesna goes pale when she recognizes Perséide-9's identifier, then claims it means nothing reliable.
• One PC may notice that nobody asks the most absurd question: how did a lost probe find Arklight with such precision?

Scene 3 - The first image

If the PCs authorize a low-level read, every screen shows the same frozen frame: Arklight-6 viewed from outside, split open, lit by internal hazard strobes, seen from an impossible angle for 2087. The embedded timestamp reads September 17, 2047.

Do not explain too much yet. The effect must stay simple: the station is being seen before it exists, as if memory chose its target before construction.

PC entry hooks

• You already lost someone in a station accident that was never explained.
• The company owes you an inner-system return that only a clean contract can finance.
• You dreamed of a white frozen corridor for several nights before the session.
• You once served on another installation where logs vanished after an incident.
• You know Theo has been hiding company messages for a week.

Recommended early manifestations

• A speaker plays three seconds of human breathing, then falls silent.
• One zone on the station map lights up as occupied, then goes dark when watched.
• Duct cameras show frost growing inward.
• An old mug in the common room suddenly bears the engraved name of someone from the former crew.

Page 4 - Act 1: station exploration and human faces

Arklight-6 should feel like a known place that becomes strange without changing shape.

Priority zones

#### Level 1 - Command deck Signal source, decision center, and site of company messages. From Stress 5 onward, consoles react half a second before the PCs touch them.

#### Level 2 - Life module Bunks, mess, washroom. Passive displays there show dead crew "present."

#### Level 3 - Science module Spectrometers, data bay, orbital charts. A successful test reveals loops in the white noise keyed to the station's rotation.

#### Level 4 - Machine room Auxiliary reactor, air distribution, thermal relays. Beneath the paint: "We heard it before we saw it."

#### Level 5 - Recovery bay Where Perséide-9 will be docked if the PCs tow it in. This becomes the scenario's center if proximity is chosen. From Stress 7 onward, the air turns unnaturally cold despite active thermal control.

#### Level 6 - Maintenance corridors Narrow tunnels, unreliable sensors, walls that return voices. Cameras see nothing. Thermal imaging does.

Main NPCs

#### Dr. Vesna Okafor Ship doctor, longest-serving crew member. Calm, exact, distantly tied to the Perséide program, and terrified that she understood too late.

#### Orin Vass Insomniac systems engineer. He notices the anomalies first and doubts everything he sees.

#### Jura Malet Mining operator. Practical, direct, committed to a physical solution: jettison, isolate, cut, burn.

#### Theo Castillo Station commander. He is hiding an isolation message sent by the company a week ago.

#### Sana Iqbal Geology analyst and unofficial archivist. She spots over-clean archive work immediately.

#### Ilya Soren Superstitious EVA technician. He understands none of the phenomenon, but feels first where the station stops being safe.

Recommended clue chain

1. In the life module, a death list links the phantom names to incidents on other deep stations since 2040. 2. In the lab, spectral analysis shows part of the white noise matches deleted Arklight-6 logs. 3. In the machine room, a carved 2052 warning predates the station itself, proving the impossibility now touches matter. 4. In sealed medical archives, Vesna kept a private report on the 2076 incident that was never sent to the company.

The secret 2076 report

Vesna's document is one of the scenario's hinges. It should teach three things.

• Two technicians, Rian Sol and Mel Kord, heard a "white call" inside the ducts before dying in a false airlock accident.
• The company dispatched a fast ship, recovered certain data supports, and imposed a partial archive purge.
• Vesna recorded Mel's last clear sentence: "The station already knows who leaves last."

Staging advice

• Alternate technical revelation and human friction. A station showing dead names is unsettling; a station doing so while Theo lies and Jura wants to cut the network is much stronger.
• Reward PCs who regroup. Horror should feel clearer together and more intimate when they split.
• Do not dump the truth from a single terminal. Spread it across screens, voices, maintenance graffiti, paper notes, body memory, and NPC silences.

By the end of Act 1, the PCs should understand Perséide-9 is not just recovered salvage. It is the return of a buried incident and proof that the station has a confiscated history.

Page 5 - Act 2: recovering Perséide-9 and rising contradiction

Act 2 begins when the PCs decide what to do with the probe. The important part is not whether they recover it, but how their choice accelerates the horror.

Option A - Recover the probe

The docking arms pull Perséide-9 in. Its hull is blackened and covered with impossible frost. The moment it crosses the outer door, Arklight feels the impact.

Immediate effects:

• bay temperature drops by six degrees in under two minutes
• nearby displays show logs out of sequence, many dated in the future
• anyone alone in the bay must roll Wits or hear a familiar voice use a forgotten nickname

Option B - Leave it adrift

Even at a distance, the signal keeps contaminating the station through the recycled antenna. The crew buys physical time, not moral time.

Immediate effects:

• the company answers faster, as if it expected the object not to be docked
• Theo receives a full-isolation instruction set
• manifestations spread through the station instead of concentrating in the bay

Revelation 1 - The company already knew

Theo may confess under pressure, or his message may be discovered. It reads: "Any anachronic signal must be classified as a mnemonic incident. Isolate crew and support. Do not broadcast." The phrase mnemonic incident finally gives the horror a cold administrative name.

Dramatic result: the PCs understand the company is not surprised. It already has doctrine, which means it already has history.

Revelation 2 - Vesna belonged to the program

If confronted, Vesna admits she worked on Perséide in 2046. The device was supposed to catch "structural residue," not a conscious phenomenon. Play her as tragic, not simply guilty.

Revelation 3 - The station has become an archive

Deep analysis proves Arklight is not seeing ghosts. It is reconstructing erased relationships. It can bring back:

• messages never officially recorded
• faces of the dead from other stations whose signals crossed similar relays
• possible future scenes extrapolated from data already present

Anything that enters the White Signal's field may remain somewhere.

Recommended complications

• A maintenance airlock opens for three seconds as if someone wanted to come in from outside.
• Sana finds a video of herself sleeping, timestamped thirty hours in the future.
• Ilya refuses to wear a headset again after hearing Rian Sol's voice inside it.
• Orin swears a circuit rewired itself while he watched, but no camera confirms it.

Pivot scene - The cold bay

The cold bay is the best place to make the presence feel like logic without a body.

If a PC attempts direct communication, the answer can arrive as image rather than speech: exterior hull, docking arm, a floating body, then nothing. On success, add one impossible intimate detail: the body wears the watch, chain, or ring of someone the PC lost. On failure, the presence answers harder and everyone gains 1 shared Stress.

Page 6 - Act 2: speaking with the inexplicable and preparing rupture

The second half of Act 2 moves the scenario from investigation to relationship. The White Signal stops being mere noise.

First clear contact

When a PC, alone or assisted, opens Perséide-9's deep memory or tries a dialogue through the main bridge, the presence answers in fragments built from human voices. It may begin with:

"You call this return. We call it remainder."

Or:

"The object does not come back. The place remembers."

Do not play it as chatty. It speaks rarely and thinks from somewhere that shelves past and future side by side.

What the presence wants

The White Signal wants to be heard to the end. As long as the transmission stays incomplete, it seeks a support and wakes every compatible trace.

It wants three things:

• coherence, so it stops fragmenting into false reflections across the station
• continuity, meaning a drift vector or archive support not instantly destroyed
• witness, in the sense that something living understands it is not a mere parasite

What the presence reveals if heard

• Perséide-9 crossed a region where several dead signals overlapped, as if deep space retained the traces of old distress
• Arklight answered once before in 2076 because maintenance accidentally reactivated the same antenna network
• the company concluded the phenomenon could predict or reconstruct incidents, making it both danger and instrument

Optional rule - Isolation trauma

If your table wants heavier pressure, any PC ending a scene alone with a contaminated system gains 1 personal Stress or an appropriate Condition until they tell another character what they saw. This scenario works well when silence becomes a cost.

How the station transforms before the climax

At Stress 7 or higher, show that Arklight starts choosing.

• a door locks to stop a panicked PC from reaching the bay
• a side airlock opens exactly when an escape route is needed
• screens automatically gather the right logs to reconstruct the 2076 incident
• the thermal map pinpoints every crew member, then adds one silhouette too many

Bringing the company closer

You do not need to show an enemy ship yet. A clear clock is enough.

• Theo decodes the full message: an isolation shuttle can arrive in twelve hours, less if the signal is officially confirmed
• a distant relay acknowledges a packet the station sent by itself
• Sana realizes someone, or something, has already started transmitting metadata outward

Bridge to the climax

By the end of this page, the PCs should be pushed toward active choice. Offer convergence around three possible places.

• The recovery bay, to jettison, destroy, or release the probe
• The command deck, to broadcast the signal, cut it, or keep talking
• The outside hull during EVA, to sever the antenna or guide a manual release

Last-minute escalations

• Orin vanishes for several minutes and returns with a full memory of a colleague he never knew
• Jura sees her own name on a death order dated tomorrow
• life support asks one PC to confirm the presence of "eight persons on board"

The climax should now feel inevitable. The station is no longer the object of exploration. The real subject is the relationship between truth, survival, and transmission.

Page 7 - Act 3: the White Phase

The climax begins when Stress reaches 10, when the probe's deep memory opens completely, or when the PCs commit to an irreversible choice.

Recommended dramatic arrangement

Place at least four elements in play at once.

• Perséide-9 or its memory-stream is accessible and vulnerable
• the presence answers actively
• the company is inbound or already announced
• at least one major NPC holds a moral position different from the PCs

Example distribution:

• Theo wants proof preserved, but the crew alive first
• Jura wants the probe gone even if the bay is sacrificed
• Vesna wants enough understanding to stop this elsewhere
• Orin moves between fascination and terror

Major possible actions

#### 1. Listen to the end The PCs let the transmission complete. That may mean keeping the station open, staying in the bay, or sustaining a dialogue from the bridge.

• Core roll: Wits, Empathy, or Tech, danger 6
• Risk: the presence reconstructs intimate memories, Stress rises, a crew member may become the main support
• Reward: the clearest understanding, and a chance at a consensual drift ending

#### 2. Violent excision The PCs destroy the probe and, ideally, the antenna or contaminated archives with it.

• Core roll: Strength, Sabotage, or bay piloting, danger 5
• Risk: station backlash, structural damage, casualties
• Reward: a clean short-term solution and a truth partly reburied

#### 3. Isolation for the company The PCs lock down the probe, freeze access, and prepare a neat handover.

• Core roll: Command, Tech, or Logistics, danger 5
• Risk: immense moral compromise, betrayal of the crew, enforced quarantine
• Reward: possible administrative survival and a chance at orderly extraction

#### 4. Manual release or human bearing A PC or NPC agrees to accompany the probe, pilot the bay from inside, or serve as a temporary anchor for the signal while carrying it away.

• Core roll: Wits or Stamina, danger 6
• Risk: death, disappearance, durable mnemonic contamination
• Reward: elegant but costly exit, and the most emotionally charged ending

Playing the presence during the White Phase

It does not attack like a beast. It chooses words and images that make every choice impossible to treat as mere procedure.

• To a PC who wants destruction: "Erasure is not silence."
• To a PC who wants handover: "You call rescue what comes to close the proof."
• To a PC who wants to listen: "You will not carry all of it. Only what already knows you."

Possible fractures

Use one or two of these breaks depending on pace.

• Local decompression: a side airlock gives way and forces a sacrifice of access
• Gravity failure: the bay becomes a floating volume of cables, tools, and frost
• Human crisis: Theo or Jura snaps, weapon drawn or decision made brutally
• External answer: the company pushes a containment order onto every screen

Jura's sacrifice

The original flash version made Jura a natural sacrifice candidate. Keep that option without forcing it. Jura volunteers if nobody can choose because she is the first person whose name appeared on the phantom alerts. She takes it as a sign. Her choice should hurt because it comes from someone who hates mysticism and still obeys something she does not understand.

A PC's sacrifice

If a PC wants to replace Jura, give them a real scene. Let them decide what the others must remember: a phrase, an order, a truth about the company, an intimate fear. The disappearance lands harder when it leaves meaning, not only loss.

Exit condition

Whatever option wins, the climax should resolve through exchange: safety for truth, truth for humanity, humanity for transmission, transmission for oblivion. The scenario is stronger when nothing feels like a clean victory.

Page 8 - Act 3: four endings and their fallout

Use these endings as written or bend them around survivors, Stress level, and unresolved lies. Ideally, the PCs leave alive with a decision they must continue carrying.

Ending A - Consensual drift

Condition: the PCs hear the transmission to the end, understand it seeks continuity more than conquest, and send Perséide-9 back into deep drift on a safe vector away from Arklight.

Resolution: The station calms almost at once. Console latency returns to normal. The bay's cold withdraws like a tide. Dead names stop appearing. One final data packet remains in the archives, though: an incomplete chart of similar incidents scattered through deep orbit.

Cost:

• part of the crew keeps dreaming for weeks of a region between stars that seems to remember them
• Vesna now knows she helped create this kind of return and can no longer deny it
• the company finds a normal station, but senses something was taken back from it

Ending B - Cold excision

Condition: the probe is destroyed, the antenna severed, or the contaminated memory purged before the transmission completes.

Resolution: The signal stops in an instant. Systems return to normal with the brutality of waking up. Phantom logs vanish. Some damage remains physical: burnt relays, a crippled bay, one section of station half-dead. Evidence survives only in fragments stored on forgotten supports or in memories nobody will find credible.

Cost:

• one or more NPCs may die during the maneuver
• the crew can never be certain the whole phenomenon was destroyed
• a PC may keep one sentence, one image, or one white sonic blank they can never forget

Ending C - The sacrificed bay

Condition: someone stays in the bay or on the outer hull to guide a manual release after automation is already compromised.

Resolution: The bay is ejected with Perséide-9 in total silence. From the bridge, the survivors watch the module drift past Titan like a white bulb going dark. The station survives. The launch vector makes any short-term recovery almost impossible.

Cost:

• the one left behind is presumed dead, missing, or somewhere else entirely
• the company has no object to recover, only incoherent survivors to interrogate
• several crew members sometimes hear the same line afterward in the systems: "I know now how this ends."

Ending D - Bearer of white

Condition: one PC or NPC accepts that a coherent shard of the signal anchors into implants, a helmet, an exocortex, or simply into memory.

Resolution: Perséide-9 becomes almost silent. The station stabilizes, but the bearer knows at once they did not come back alone. They are not possessed. They have become a mobile archive. The presence no longer needs Arklight to continue.

Cost:

• exact visions, shared dreams, involuntary access to distant dead or possible futures
• ongoing danger for any place built on hardware close to Perséide architecture
• the company will treat the bearer as a biological support to retrieve or destroy

Recommended debrief

Once the ending lands, ask each player one or two questions.

• What does your character refuse to write in the official report?
• What concrete detail proves they did not come back entirely unharmed?
• What would make them answer a second signal anyway?

Page 9 - D6 tables, detailed NPCs, and manifestations

D6 table - Encounters inside Arklight

• 1. Empty corridor except for a helmet on the floor broadcasting a 2076 conversation.
• 2. Orin or a PC sees their own silhouette at the end of a conduit exactly one second too late.
• 3. A maintenance drone rolls straight into a wall and stays there, listening.
• 4. A fire alert triggers in a freezing section, then displays the name of a dead worker from another station.
• 5. Ilya carries a tool requested by someone who swears they never asked for it.
• 6. A bulkhead opens onto a storage room absent from every plan, full of refurbished Perséide parts.

D6 table - Mnemonic discoveries

• 1. Audio message from Rian Sol: "If anyone hears this, do not open when it already knows your name."
• 2. Video from a future EVA in which a PC dies or vanishes depending on the viewing angle.
• 3. Company report marked "mnemonic incident" listing three earlier cases in other deep orbits.
• 4. Partial map of seven missing Perséide probes, all flagged "delayed return."
• 5. Vesna's private journal describing in 2076 something she swears she never knew.
• 6. Impossible capture of Arklight still under construction, already bearing climax damage.

D6 table - Pressure incidents

• 1. Micro-blackout: next Tech action suffers -1 die unless someone secures the area
• 2. Flash frost: everyone in the zone tests Mobility or drops something
• 3. Voices in the intercom: each present PC gains 1 Stress unless they name aloud the recognized voice
• 4. Airlock closure: split the group into two scenes unless someone passes a quick test
• 5. Parasitic gravity return: movement becomes hard, tools float, minor injury is possible
• 6. White answer: the system tells one PC an exact secret; if they deny it, +1 shared Stress

Compact YZE blocks - NPCs

Dr. Vesna Okafor - Ship doctor, witness to the Perséide program

ATTR Strength 2 · Agility 2 · Wits 4 · Empathy 4 Health 3 · Resolve 5 · Stress 2 Medical Aid 3 · Observation 2 · Science 2 · Empathy 2 ATK Emergency scalpel +1 [1 damage] · Range C CONDITION: Hesitates to reveal what she knows until a PC confronts her clearly SPECIAL: Hidden file. Once per scenario, Vesna can produce a medical or archival proof granting +2 dice to an analysis or persuasion scene. PUSH: if she pushes and rolls 1s, she admits a decisive part of the truth too late and adds 1 shared Stress.

Theo Castillo - Station commander under corporate pressure

ATTR Strength 3 · Agility 2 · Wits 3 · Empathy 3 Health 4 · Resolve 4 · Stress 2 Command 3 · Ranged Combat 2 · Observation 2 · Tech 1 ATK Service pistol +2 [2 damage] · Range M CONDITION: Loyal to the crew as long as he still believes procedure can save them SPECIAL: Command authority. Once per scene, Theo grants +1 die to everyone following one clear immediate order. PUSH: if he pushes a social roll and gets 1s, he chooses protocol over the nearest human being.

Jura Malet - Mining operator, physical solution

ATTR Strength 4 · Agility 3 · Wits 2 · Empathy 2 Health 5 · Resolve 3 · Stress 1 Strength 3 · Mobility 2 · Heavy Machinery 2 · Close Combat 2 ATK Hydraulic mining tool +2 [2 damage] · Range C CONDITION: Refuses to leave someone behind without an understandable reason SPECIAL: Worker's nerve. Ignore the first panic or terrain penalty in a physical scene. PUSH: if she pushes and rolls 1s, she breaks something useful and fragile.

Orin Vass - Insomniac systems engineer

ATTR Strength 2 · Agility 3 · Wits 4 · Empathy 2 Health 3 · Resolve 4 · Stress 3 Tech 4 · Observation 2 · Comtech 3 · Mobility 1 ATK Isolated access wrench +1 [1 damage] · Range C CONDITION: Already haunted by signal-dreams; -1 die while completely alone in maintenance shafts SPECIAL: Raw diagnosis. Orin may reduce the danger of a systems test by 1 if he has ten seconds and direct access. PUSH: on 1s, Orin mistakes a system prediction for a present fact.

Manifestations and entities

Bulkhead echo - Localized mnemonic projection

ATTR Strength 1 · Agility 3 · Wits 4 · Empathy 0 Health 2 · Resolve 5 · Stress 0 Observation 3 · Stealth 3 · Manipulation 2 ATK Frozen touch +2 [1 Stress + brief immobilization] · Range C CONDITION: Can only appear in a zone already touched by frost or reflection SPECIAL: False reflection. A PC attacking the Echo must first pass a Wits roll or strike a memory instead of the manifestation. PUSH: when the Echo pushes an interaction, it reveals one possible future scene to the witness.

Altered docking drone - Contaminated industrial machine

ATTR Strength 4 · Agility 2 · Wits 1 · Empathy 0 Health 6 · Resolve 2 · Stress 0 Strength 3 · Mobility 1 · Observation 1 ATK Magnetic arm +2 [2 damage] · Range C CONDITION: Heavy, slow, inactive while the bay remains unpowered SPECIAL: Ghost routine. If the drone detects Perséide-9 or an associated support, it tries to dock it at any cost, even with a human in the way. PUSH: on a 1, the drone locks an airlock or harness at the worst possible moment.

Mnemonic presence - Cosmic phenomenon in the process of anchoring

ATTR Strength 0 · Agility 0 · Wits 5 · Empathy 1 Health -- · Resolve 8 · Stress 0 Observation 4 · Manipulation 4 · Tech 3 ATK Remanence overload +3 [2 Stress or 1 severe Condition] · Range zone CONDITION: Cannot be destroyed through ordinary combat; manifests only through systems, sound, reflection, or a human support SPECIAL: Impossible archive. Once per scene, the Presence may display a true but untimely datum on any screen or speaker. PUSH: if it pushes a scene, increase shared Stress by 1 immediately and make one impossible proof appear.

Page 10 - Annexes, campaign hooks, and FTL notice

Campaign hooks

• The partial coordinates left by Ending A lead to a listening platform near Hyperion that was never commissioned.
• The company classifies surviving crew as mnemonic contamination vectors and sends a retrieval cell.
• A former Perséide employee secretly contacts the PCs to say Perséide-9 was not the first probe to come back.
• Other deep stations begin reporting emergency alerts naming dead people they should not know.
• The missing person from Ending C sends a message from a zone where no relay should answer.
• The bearer from Ending D becomes the unwilling key to a network of buried signals across the Saturnian system.

YZE worldbuilding connections

White Signal fits any YZE science-fiction campaign centered on contract crews, isolated stations, secondary routes, and incidents disguised as technical failure. To attach it to another setting, simply rename the company, the Perséide program, and the orbital sector.

Follow-up threads

• Survivor inquiry: the PCs investigate what truly happened in 2076 and who signed the purge
• Network horror: a derivative transmission reaches a cargo hauler, relay, or cryogenic colony
• Impossible trial: the company wants the PCs to testify while declaring them unreliable
• Recovery expedition: someone pays extremely well to find another Perséide probe before the next "return"

GM advice

• Give Stress when information becomes intimate, when the group fractures, or when the station reveals something impossible to ignore.
• Offer good reasons to push: save someone, extract a log, cut an antenna, stop an NPC from panicking.
• Reward concrete solidarity: meals, treatment, timely truth.
• Keep the presence alien. It can be understood in fragments without ever becoming familiar.

Year Zero Engine Free Tabletop License notice

Published under license for the Year Zero Engine by Tomas Harenstam / Free League Publishing. This product is based on the Year Zero Engine Standard Reference Document, designed by Tomas Harenstam and published by Free League Publishing. Published under the Year Zero Engine Free Tabletop License (FTL). freeleaguepublishing.com