Interstellar travel
Nobody can command a Leviathan. You can only ask, offer, and hope it's headed somewhere useful.
Vast, ancient, space-native creatures that migrate between star systems along their own long, half-consistent paths. Nobody knows how old they are, how they perceive their surroundings, or whether their migrations are instinct, memory, or something else — but their routes may be older than the human diaspora itself.
A Leviathan doesn't jump or teleport. It compresses the space ahead of itself and lets it expand again behind it — genuinely moving, not skipping, but dragging the fabric of space along in a way that outpaces ordinary travel. The disturbance left behind is the wake: a turbulent, temporary corridor a ship can ride, if it can catch it and hold on.
"Toward the Coreward drift." "Wherever that one went last winter." "Away from here, fast." The Leviathan gets you generally that way, on its own route and its own schedule. The exact system you surface in is the GM's to reveal — which makes even a routine wake-ride an engine for discovery.
Not one roll — a sustained challenge across the journey, with accumulating strain and complications. Succeed and you arrive roughly where you meant to. Earn Perks and you get precision, a gentler ride, or a cheaper tribute.
A ship thrown from the wake lands in a liminal, torn region of compressed space that isn't quite anywhere. Derelicts that fell out generations ago are still drifting there. Getting out is its own kind of trouble.
Treat a specific Leviathan well — right tribute, right timing, no spooking it — and it comes to recognize you. A Bond is still not a gate and still not safe, but it's far better than a stranger's guess, and it grows over a campaign like a reputation.
Sojourners
Not a licensed guild, not a formal institution — just people willing to take the risk that most travelers, and all the gate-bound trade and politics of "civilized" space, avoid. It's a reputation and a way of life more than a profession: itinerant, welcomed with a mix of respect and pity, always passing through rather than settling.
This is the natural identity for the player crew. The game's title is literally what they live on.