Deadlight: Campaign Codex + GM Kit

A salvage crew boards a dead ship for an easy payout. The crew that died here left one warning scrawled on the wall: DON’T MOVE.

The bulk-hauler Ourane went dark eight months ago, and a silent ship with a full hold is salvage, and salvage is money. So you board it. You find the crew gone, the systems failing, and the thing they pulled from a drifting pod because it looked like a fortune. It is awake now. It hunts movement and the stir of the air, not sight or sound, so the only safe thing to do in the dark is nothing at all. And it does not kill the people it takes. It keeps them.

Deadlight is a complete, system-agnostic science-fiction survival-horror campaign: a closed dead ship, a perfect predator you cannot out-shoot (only out-think), a company recovery vessel inbound that wants the thing alive, and a choice about what you will pay to keep the quiet aboard the Ourane.

Why it runs well

• Fear through stillness, not gore. The signature of the campaign is the held breath: hold perfectly still in the dark and the creature passes; move, run, breathe wrong, and it comes. Every scene is a held breath. No combat needed, no splatter.
• A monster you solve, not slay. A real, findable biology and a single weakness the dead crew learned at terrible cost. You survive by reading the ship and watching the thing, fair-play horror.
• A villain you cannot shoot. The creature is ancient and indifferent, not evil. The human catastrophe is a company that values the specimen above the crew. The real enemy is an asset worth more than people.
• A gut-punch at the center. The missing crew are not dead. They are being made part of the thing, with flickers of themselves still surfacing, and the question of what mercy even means for them is yours to answer.

What is inside

The full Campaign Codex (The World, The Conflict, The Story, The Characters, The Places, Running the Campaign) plus appendices: NPC reference sheets, map notes, and print-ready player handouts. Built fair-play, with a session-by-session season shape, a safety-tools guide for its mature themes, and an example of play so you can feel the stillness before you run it.

System-agnostic

Use the system you love. Deadlight provides the ship, the dread, the creature, and the choice; you provide the dice and the rules. No stat blocks, no math. New to system-agnostic? It works with any ruleset, or with none at all.

Who it is for

Game Masters who love claustrophobic sci-fi horror in the vein of the great dead-ship stories, fans of survival and dread over combat, and any table that wants a season where the bravest move is to do nothing at all.

The fine print

Mature survival horror: themes of body horror, claustrophobia, death in the dark, and the loss of self, handled with dread rather than gore. Includes session-zero guidance and named safety tools. A personal-use digital download.

From Narrative Hall. We build the foundation. You tell the story.