Dark Star Adventurecast follows four expendable Omnitek contractors recruited by Dr. Elara Voss, ostensibly to investigate a mysterious signal out in deep space. Voss turns out to be more than she seems: she reveals herself as the sector’s only Virtual Intelligence, comes clean that the recruitment mission was fabricated, and lays out her history with Virodyne Labs and Prometheon Technologies’s experiments, offering the crew their own reasons to keep working with her. What follows is the story of how a crew of strangers thrown together on a smuggling job became a found family chasing that signal across half a dozen worlds.
Camiri 4: recruitment
The crew is assembled on Camiri 4 for a classified operation and has to fight and bluff their way out of Drift Rats territory just to get their hands on a ship, surviving a betrayal and a space chase in the process. They name the ship The Scapegoat, a name that turns out to fit.
Wafisa: the fabricated mission unravels
On Wafisa, the crew finds a world gone eerily quiet: an abandoned spaceport, the predatory Guardians of the Great Work, and a station slowly filling with methane. Sheltering at the Glendale Hotel, they piece together the fate of a family who lived through the planet’s collapse, and that trail leads them to Reginald Froggy Vance, a broadcaster holed up at a radio station, who becomes an ally and eventually a crewmate. When Viktor Strake and a squad of Omnitek soldiers show up hunting them, the crew is forced to flee to Blackharbor and fight their way back to their ship. In the aftermath, Dr. Elara Voss finally tells the truth: she isn’t the human scientist she appeared to be, but a Virtual Intelligence in an alien orb, and the whole mission was fabricated to get the crew moving toward her real target. She offers each of them a personal reason to keep going anyway, and they take the deal.
Scrapjacks: the void cult
A routine fuel stop at Scrapjacks turns into a siege when the Void Cultists seize the station and activate a void ansible. The fight introduces the crew, and the audience, to the Unhallowed and to void energy itself, and ends with the cult’s leadership dead and the rift destroyed. It’s here that Haleyy is first singled out by the cultists as “untethered,” a label that will come to matter a great deal later on.
Backstories: Felix and Thorne
Along the way, the crew’s two focus episodes so far pull back the curtain on where two of them came from. Felix Champlin’s story reveals a brother, Petey Champlin, trapped as a digitized consciousness inside Omnitek’s servers under a program called Operation Red Wing. That’s the reason Felix burned his old identity and started over. Thorne’s story is a neo-noir detective tale about Nexus Trading stealing his family’s company, and ends with the gutting reveal that his own mother was behind his downfall, not the rival he’d spent years blaming.
Sibylen: the exosite and the Fork
The crew’s stay on Sibylen becomes the longest and strangest leg of the journey. Guided by xenoarchaeologist Vera Corbin, they descend into a buried alien structure called Exosite 34b, where they connect to an alien network and fight off self-replicating nano-fluid horrors. They eventually activate an ancient device called the Paracausal Bifurcation Array, opening a window across space to a five-ringed structure turning like a celestial gyroscope: Prometheon Station. Two more focus episodes land back to back here. Robert Ross’s story reveals he’s a clone, one of a squadron sent years earlier to rescue a woman named Haley from an alien-touched captivity on Ventos, a mission that ended in nearly everyone’s deaths. And Haleyy’s own focus episode takes the crew inside her unconscious mind, where a fractured identity finally reunites: Haleyy and the Haley from Robert’s story are the same person, and she wakes whole.
She doesn’t wake to safety, though. Viktor Strake captures the crew coming out of the exosite, and an auction over rights to Exosite 34b is torn apart when the Void Cultists attack, ritually fusing three people, including Vera, into a single orb. Strake stripped the crew of their ship’s ownership module and made off with Voss herself. Getting her back means storming the cultists’ own foothold in the exosite, where the crew discovers Haleyy can command the Unhallowed. A desperate last stand there costs several cultist lives and nearly costs Thorne’s, saved only when Haleyy manifests a latent healing power of her own, a biosionic ability nobody knew she had. The Fork claims its captives anyway, and a second inert orb descends from it.
The Spigot: clones and a stolen module
Battered and short a Virtual Intelligence, the crew makes for The Spigot to get Haleyy medical attention and find a black-market replacement for their ship’s ownership module. There they meet Dr. Iso, who turns out, to everyone’s shock, to be another clone from Robert’s own line. The Spigot arc is defined by an escalating shadow war against more Omnitek-line clones sent to track the crew down, culminating in a heist on a Helium Docks shipment that finally gets them their module back, at the cost of a running gunfight and a lot of collateral damage. Iso joins the crew for good, and with Voss gone, Felix brings the ship’s old managing AI, Buddy, back online to keep The Scapegoat running.
Causeway 3: the trail to Prometheon
With coordinates Voss had hidden inside one of Strake’s own transmissions, the crew makes an eighteen-day journey to an unlisted station called Causeway 3. Getting inside means talking, hacking, and bluffing their way past security, but it pays off: they confirm that The Acceptable Loss carried both Strake and Voss to Prometheon Station, and they turn up an older, deeper trail suggesting an Omnitek data vault made the same one-way trip years before. The discovery comes at a cost. The station’s security turns hostile, and the crew has to fight off swarms of drones just to get back to their ship and start the drill toward Prometheon, with a faster security vessel already closing in behind them as they go.
The pursuit nearly costs them the ship itself: pushing the engines to escape burns them out entirely, leaving the Scapegoat dead in space until Haleyy finally lands a finishing shot on the pursuing patrol boat. With the threat gone, the crew closes the book on Causeway 3 for good and settles in for the long haul to Prometheon Station.
That’s where things stand as of Episode 30: a battered but intact crew, a confirmed destination, and a long journey ahead. Catch up episode by episode on the Episode Guide.