Precursor Gates
Easy, reliable, monitored, and taxed. Travel via the gates between the systems they connect is instantaneous - scientists still say it should be impossible, but the transport fees are real enough.
A hard sci-fi tabletop RPG
Humanity has spread to the stars, its ancestral home lost to history. You crew a small starship - it's not much, but it's yours. You take jobs, keep your head down, and if you're lucky, get to do a little good along the way.
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
Easy, reliable, monitored, and taxed. Travel via the gates between the systems they connect is instantaneous - scientists still say it should be impossible, but the transport fees are real enough.
Huge space-native creatures migrate along their own half-consistent paths, compressing space ahead of them and letting it expand behind. That turbulent corridor behind them is the wake, and a ship can ride it — with enough knowledge and skill.
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
The Fray is the common term for the human-populated star systems. Eight systems strung together by an irregular gate network, plus three that only a Leviathan can reach.
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. |