A science-fiction tabletop RPG
Nobody remembers where Earth was. The gates were here before us, and they don't go everywhere. When you need to reach somewhere they don't, you find something enormous and very old going that way — and you ride its wake.
The pitch
A crew works a small ship from world to world, taking jobs, dodging trouble, and stumbling into wonders and dangers older than anyone remembers — because not even historians are entirely sure where humanity actually came from.
Earth became uninhabitable millennia ago. Humanity scattered. Enough time passed, through enough collapses and rebuildings, that the coordinates are simply gone. Earth is myth, not memory — not a conspiracy to unravel, just a permanent low hum of lost history that makes the whole galaxy feel like an archaeology dig.
Precursor ruins lie scattered through known space, sometimes beneath inhabited cities. Most are dead or unreadable; a few may still hold artifacts beyond anything humanity can reproduce. Even the vast environmental domes sheltering whole settlements are inherited artifacts: perfectly clear, glass-like shells no tool can cut and no instrument can explain. People can maintain them and build within them, but nobody can make another sky.
Hopeful scrappiness. The universe is not kind and resources are not infinite, but the crew looks out for each other and finds meaning in the open road between the stars.
Space opera · Crew-for-hire · Pulp exploration
Two ways to cross the void
Safe, fast, mapped — and entirely inherited. Someone built it long before anyone alive, and nobody knows how to build more. Trade, law, and politics all live where the gates reach. The network connects however it connects; nobody has ever found a pattern in it.
Vast, ancient, space-native creatures migrate along their own half-consistent paths, compressing space ahead of them and letting it expand behind. That turbulent corridor is the wake, and a ship can ride it — with a harness, tribute, and someone who can ask nicely.
At the table
You always roll two dice, the size is determined by your skill. Unskilled? 2d4. Skilled? 2d6. Up to master at 2d12.
Meeting the target is a Tier 1 success. Every 3 points above that raises the result another tier. Beating a target by a lot is always worth something.
Twelve pips in six circles — the same track for everyone, forever. Nobody gets tougher with experience; they get better at not getting hit.
The default sector
Eight star systems strung together by an irregular gate network, plus three more that only a Leviathan can reach. Systems work like nations; the habitable worlds, moons, and stations inside them work like states.
Every system can feed, water, and power itself — and every one of them trades anyway, because self-sufficient and comfortable are very different things.
| Systems | 11 (8 gate, 3 fringe) |
|---|---|
| Gate links | 9 |
| Wake routes | 3 |
| Sector government | None. That's the point. |