Core Rules

This page is the rulebook for Worlds in the Dark, a Forged in the Dark game about causing problems and getting into trouble in an interstellar near-future dystopia. Some of the biggest inspirations and influences for this hack include Neon Black, Scum & Villainy, Mothership, Runners in the Shadows, Starforged and Stars Without Number.

This work is based on Blades in the Dark, product of One Seven Design, developed and authored by John Harper, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Table of Contents

Character Creation

Before you start creating your character, there are a few player principles you should read. This is a sandbox game, so these touchstones are the only predefined markers that will tell you what kind of characters will resonate with the stories this game is designed to tell. Keep them in mind when you make and play your character!

  1. The system is not your friend. Your characters are here because the networks of power and capital that rule society failed them, or because they couldn’t bear to live under them for another moment. At times, you may be forced to go along with the powers that be. If you ever find yourself complicit with them, though, you’re not scoundrels any more.
  2. Aim to misbehave. No one ever beats the system playing by its rules, and your characters know that better than anyone. Take risks; don’t be afraid to break things; drive your character like a stolen starship. The game will reward you for doing so.
  3. Be messy. Your characters are compromised, complicated individuals. They didn’t get where they are today without picking up some history and some baggage. Lean into it! Don’t always choose the safest or most efficient option. Choose the one that sounds the most interesting, fun, or dramatic.
  4. Play to find out what happens. You don’t need to know everything there is to know about your character from the beginning. Start with a simple sketch, and find out who they really are through play. The details that come up at the table and the decisions you make in the moment are what will truly define your character.

1. Choose a playbook

First, choose a playbook. Your playbook tells us what kind of scoundrel your character is, but it’s just a starting point. It isn’t a “character class” or “archetype”, and it doesn’t restrict any of your choices after character creation. Your choice of playbook only determines three things: your playbook trigger (how you earn XP), which specialties you start the game with, and your starting assets.

There are seven playbooks to choose from:

For example, if your character is an Expert, then they will gain XP each session if they address problems with education, insight or compassion. They also start with Study 2 and Observe 1.

2. Decide some details

Next, decide on a few details to flesh out your character’s backstory and motivations.

Your character’s Background is the mold that society poured them into and the life they knew before they became a scoundrel. It represents the circumstances of their birth and upbringing, and the things they did before they broke away from their old life. Make it up, pick one, or roll a die:

1d6 Background
1 You grew up with spacers, more comfortable around air recyclers and bulkheads than terrestrial horizons. You’ve always lived with a thin skin of metal between you and the void.
2 You grew up among the dispossessed - the marginalised and the desperate. Your childhood was bitter and mean; most of the people you grew up with aren’t around any more.
3 You grew up on the frontier, part of a fledgling colony or struggling community. Life was hard, there was no safety net when disaster struck, and you learned harsh lessons early on.
4 You grew up on the fringe. You belonged to an isolated and unusual community - like a religious commune, a clan of wandering nomads, or an isolated megacorporate enclave.
5 You grew up in comfort and security. Your parents were probably academics, professionals, or other members of the enfranchised class. You never felt the bite of hunger.
6 You grew up wealthy. You were surrounded by power and privilege, and you wanted for little. The troubles of those less fortunate than you were kept safely out of sight.

Your character’s Moment of Truth was the inciting event: it’s the trauma that tore them from the predictable life that was laid out for them, and set them on a different path. Make it up, pick one, or roll a die:

1d6 Moment of Truth
1 You angered the wrong person or stumbled across something you shouldn’t have, and your existence became an inconvenience to someone with power.
2 Someone you cared about fell into the cracks of the system, and they came back changed - if they came back at all.
3 You fell into a pit too deep to climb out of, and the only option was to run away. Are you running from your debts, or something else?
4 A terrible injustice occurred to you or someone you cared about, and it was covered up or just ignored by the powers that be.
5 Someone or something pulled the wool from your eyes and showed you how the system really works. Were you left radicalised, or just disillusioned?
6 You were safe and comfortable, until you weren’t. When push came to shove, your loyal service didn’t protect you from losing everything.

Your character’s Drive is the singular motivation that propels them forward - at least for now. Don’t worry too much about it; you can and will change it as your adventures unfold. Make it up, pick one, or roll a die:

1d6 Drive
1 Build a legacy that will outlive you. What mark do you want to leave on the system?
2 Right an injustice or seek vengeance for a wrong, whether real or perceived. Why pursue this cause, and not another?
3 Uplift a person or a group that can’t look out for themselves. What did they do to deserve your protection?
4 Search for forgiveness, closure or absolution. What is it that torments you?
5 Look out for you and yours, and make sure that “your people” are protected. Where do you draw the line?
6 Keep a promise or fulfil an obligation that you made. Why is it so important to you?

Don’t worry about getting the details perfect, or having a complete answer to every question posed above. You can amend or replace them later on if you need to, or you can leave them vague and play to find out the specifics. These three details are there to ground your character in the world and give them something to care about. However, they also factor into your character’s advancement: you receive extra XP at the end of any session where they explored their background, moment of truth, or drive.

3. Assign your specialties

Your character is defined by their specialties, which represent their specific skills and aptitudes and are each rated between 0 and 4. Your character’s specialties tell us what they’re good at or have experience with. When you need to roll to see whether you achieve something challenging and uncertain, you generally use one of your specialties to do so.

There are 12 action specialties that every character has access to. These are verbs that cover a broad spectrum of actions and approaches. The action specialties are:

If you want your character to be skilled in some specific topic or field that doesn’t line up neatly with one action specialty, you may create a career specialty that covers it instead. Career specialties are nouns rather than verbs, and they cover an area of competency or expertise. They allow you to specialise in the range of skills required by your discipline, allowing you to do things which might otherwise by covered by various different action specialties. They won’t be much help for matters outside of your expertise, however.

Here are some examples of career specialties:

The playbook you chose for your character gave you a few pre-assigned action specialties already. Now you can assign 4 more points (or “dots” on the character sheet):

No specialty can be increased above rating 2 during character creation.

4. Determine your attributes

Your character also has three attributes, which are used when resisting consequences: Insight, Prowess and Resolve. However, you don’t pick or assign these attributes yourself.

Instead, the rating of each attribute is determined by the number of different specialties you have that are linked to it (on the character sheet, it’s the first “column” of dots). For example, if you have two specialties linked to Insight, then your Insight rating is 2. The more well-rounded your character is, the better their attributes will be. Like specialties, each attribute caps out at a max rating of 4 and can’t ever be increased above that.

Each of the action specialties given above is already linked to one of the three attributes. If you create a career specialty for your character, you should also decide which attribute it is linked to:

The attribute linked to each specialty is descriptive, not prescriptive. If you decide that your “Medicine” specialty is linked to Insight, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to perform surgery (which requires manual skill and coordination). It just means that Insight is the best fit for the training and education you’d expect someone with a medical background to have. In short, just choose what feels right - and if there are two attributes that seem equally correct, just choose the one you like most for your character.

5. Pick a talent

Talents are special abilities that allow your character to bend and break the rules in various ways. They are divided up into the same playbooks you chose when assigning your specialties, like The Expert or The Soldier. These categories are just a guideline: you’re not restricted to talents from one playbook, either during character creation or later on when you advance by spending XP.

During character creation, you pick one talent to start with. Talents often give you fictional permission to do things that might otherwise be difficult or impossible, give you some kind of mechanical bonus in a specific circumstance, or allow you to spend stress or use your trump card to activate some special effect.

Your trump card is a special resource that every character has; it is used by certain talents. If you have chosen one of those talents, you can use your trump card in order to activate the talent and receive its benefits. Once your trump card has been used, it usually doesn’t come back until your next downtime phase. If you don’t have any talents that use your trump card, then you can ignore it.

Advanced talents are additional special abilities that cannot be taken until you meet some specific requirement. For example, you may be required to learn the secrets of a certain mystic order before you are able to unlock certain types of psionic discipline. These requirements must be met in play before the corresponding advanced talents become available.

6. Pick starting assets

The final step is to decide which assets your character has when the game begins. These are their most significant possessions; you don’t need to write down every trinket or article of clothing they have, just the important stuff.

Everyone starts with the following:

Depending on your chosen playbook, you also start with some additional assets:

You can also start with as many cybernetic prosthetics as you want. They don’t get any extra tags, though, they’re simply a replacement part that works about as well as the flesh and bone you used to have. These augments have upsides and downsides - see the assets page for more info.

Character Advancement

Each player keeps track of the experience points (XP) that their character earns, and they accumulate XP from the following sources:

When you allocate end-of-session XP for your character, you get to decide how much XP to award for each category. XP is not “given out” by the GM or other players, although it’s totally fine for other players at the table to advocate for you and remind you about stuff your character did that you might have forgotten about. At the end of the day, though, it’s your call.

If your character’s central motivation has changed, you can also change your current drive at end of the session. You can do this as often as you like! When picking a new drive, try to avoid anything hyper-specific or anything too broad to meaningfully explore. It should be something that matters to your character, and something that drives them forward towards a specific goal or objective.

Spending XP

When you accumulate enough XP, you can use a downtime action to advance your character in one of two ways:

Buy a specialty. You can spend XP to add a dot to any action or career specialty (including a brand new one), up to a maximum rating of 4. The cost is 6 XP per point of the new rating. For example, increasing a specialty from rank 1 to 2 would cost 12 XP. To raise a specialty to rating 3 or 4, you must find an expert or a master to teach you.

Buy a talent. For 12 XP, you can select a new talent for your character from any playbook. You can select an advanced talent as long as you have satisfied its requirements in the fiction.

Faster Advancement. The advancement rules above are tuned for longer campaigns. For a short campaign that builds up faster, you can change the advancement cost to 6 XP for specialties and 8 XP for talents. For a one-shot, do the same and take a break in the middle of the session to award end-of-session XP.

Assets

Assets are the equipment and resources that your character can draw upon. Your character is assumed to have the basic possessions they need to get by in their daily life, including things like a personal datapad. You only need to write down your most important and significant items as assets. You can find a selection of available assets here.

As well as assets, your character also has Cash. Cash is an abstract measure of your wealth tracked in simple units. Just like their assets, Cash is separate from your character’s petty funds and basic expenses - it represents extra savings and the proceeds of their exploits. Trivial purchases or basic upkeep don’t normally cost any Cash, unless you’re being extorted.

Here’s some general examples of how much Cash is worth:

Tags

Assets generally have fictional properties rather than mechanical ones. If you have a pistol, you can attack different enemies than if you are using a knife or your bare fists - and this will be reflected in the risk and effect of your actions. Most assets only have fictional properties; some, like armor, also have their own special rules.

Some assets have tags to help define their fictional properties; tags are short descriptive words or phrases that tell you something about the asset’s constraints or capabilities. Most assets can have the Cheap or Fine tags, for example. Cheap assets cost 1 less Cash, but are unreliable and more likely to break or malfunction. Fine assets cost 1 more Cash, but will give you an edge when the quality of your gear is an important factor.

Load

You don’t have to tell the GM exactly which assets your character is carrying on them at any given time. Instead, you just decide what load your character is carrying:

Whenever you want to use one of your assets, you use up some load to have it with you - usually 1 point, but sometimes 2 if it’s heavy or bulky. Some assets cost 0 load, meaning you can have them on you for “free”. Once you’ve marked an asset off, you have it on your person until something happens to deprive you of it. Load resets whenever you get a chance to access your equipment and resupply, which is usually during downtime.

If you pick something up during an adventure, just add it to your character sheet and mark it; you don’t have to spend any load. Load is mostly about how visibly prepared and/or armed you are, and how much of your stuff you’re carrying around. If you picked up a bunch of heavy stuff and it’s weighing you down, just handle that in the fiction.

Consumables

Consumables that are part of an asset, like ammunition or power cells, don’t have to be tracked separately. These consumables run out when it makes sense for them to do so in the fiction, usually as a consequence of a roll. Usually, you can reload or replenish them simply by spending a point of load for extra mags or spare power cells (or whatever).

Some consumables, like performance drugs or grenades, are limited in number. For these, you do have to keep track of how many you have left. Apart from that, they work like any other asset - spending one point of load is enough to produce 6 grenades or so, assuming you actually have that many.

Augments

Augments are a special kind of asset; like ordinary assets, they have a description and may have some tags that define their capabilities. They tend to be more expensive than the equivalent assets, but are part of your body and are always with you. You never need to spend load to gain the benefits of an augment (although the flipside is that you can never choose to not have them with you).

To install an augment after character creation, you must obtain both the augment itself and the services of a surgeon capable of installing it. If the quality of the surgeon and their equipment is less than the Cash value of the augment, then it will be installed with the Glitchy tag.

Cohorts

A cohort is a special kind of asset. You don’t own a cohort, but you may be able to hire one for a while. There are two kinds of cohorts you can hire.

If you hire an expert, you acquire the services of a skilled NPC for a time. Different types of expert will have their own areas of expertise - for example, they might be a scientist, pilot, bounty hunter or infiltrator. They roll their quality when you direct them to do something or their quality is tested in some way. Experts are always individual people, so their scale is 0.

Instead of hiring a single expert, you can instead hire a gang of people. Gangs also have a type - such as mercenaries, smugglers, spies or researchers. The quality of a gang is one step lower than an expert of the same price, so you could get a quality 2 gang for the same price as a quality 3 expert. The gang’s quality represents the gang as a whole, not each individual member. Gangs also have scale equal to their quality - for example, a quality 2 gang would be comprised of at least a dozen people.

Hiring a cohort for a short period is the same as purchasing any other asset. If you wanted to hire a quality 3 expert or a quality 2 gang for a job, you would pay them 3 Cash. You might also obtain the services of a cohort if you convince an NPC or a group of them to help you with something. Getting a cohort on a more permanent basis may require you pay them a regular retainer, or complete some kind of project or mission to secure their loyalty and convince them to join you.

Action Rolls

The core of this game is a conversation. The players describe what their characters do, and the GM tells them what happens. If you attempt something trivial or impossible, the GM will simply describe the outcome. If there is an unavoidable cost that must be paid or a consequence that must be suffered, the GM will tell you what the price is.

When you face an avoidable consequence from a dangerous opponent or a challenging situation, the GM will describe the potential consequences (the risk). They will also tell you about the impact of your approach (the effect). Then you roll the dice to see if you can avoid the consequences.

The “avoidable consequence” you’re rolling to avoid might be the threat of failure, if you’re attempting something particularly uncertain. It might be some straightforward unpleasantness, like suffering a physical injury or getting caught. It might be a complication, like alerting a sentry or accidentally starting a fire. Sometimes, there will be multiple consequences that you’re rolling to avoid at once.

1. Choose a specialty. Depending on what you’re trying to do or how you’re trying to avoid the consequence, decide with the GM which of your action or career specialties is most relevant to the roll. This determines how many dice you’ll start with.

2. Add dice for additional threats. If there’s more than one threat or consequence you’re rolling to avoid, add 1d for each additional threat. Feel free to suggest potential consequences to the GM for more dice! More threats means more danger, but the extra dice mean that you’re more likely to avoid any single threat.

3. Add bonus dice. You can spend 2 stress to push yourself for either +1d or increased effect. You can also get +1d if an ally makes a setup action to assist you.

4. Roll the dice. After you roll, assign one die to each of the potential threats you’re facing. If you ended up with 0d in your dice pool, then make a desperate roll with 1d instead.

Devil’s Bargains. As described above, any player can suggest additional threats to the GM in exchange for bonus dice. You can do the same thing with a more straightforward kind of trouble: a cost that must simply be paid, or a complication that arises no matter what. For example, you might declare that you’re going to rapid-fire at an enemy, using all your ammo regardless of how you roll. Since this devil’s bargain occurs no matter what, you don’t assign a die result to it. Either accept or reject the bargain, and take the bonus die if you accept it.

Judging Results

After rolling the dice, the player assigns one die result to each of the potential threats they’re facing. For each threat, judge the results as follows:

Critical Success. If you have any left over 6s at the end of the roll, you can spend them to increase the effectiveness of your action, to set up an ally, or for some other benefit or useful outcome agreed with the GM.

Desperate Rolls. When you’re outnumbered, outclassed, or badly impaired, you might need to make a desperate roll instead of a normal one. A desperate roll is all or nothing: a 6 is a success, but a 5 or less means you suffer the full consequence.

Risk and Effect

Most of the time, the GM can simply describe the potential consequences and impact of your actions in terms of the fiction. Sometimes, though, it’s helpful to have a more concrete way to talk about them.

If needed, both risks and effects can be categorised into four levels: limited, standard, great and (rarely) extreme. Standard is the default starting position for both risk and effect. If you’re rolling against more than one threat, then each threat can have its own risk level.

Here are some factors the GM might take into account when setting risk and effect:

If multiple factors apply, consider which one is the dominant factor when adjusting risk and effect. It doesn’t matter that one side has slightly better weapons than the other if they’re outnumbered 3-to-1, for example.

It’s usually possible to trade risk for effect and vice versa. For example, by going all-in and fighting recklessly, you might take a bigger risk to achieve a greater effect. By keeping your distance and fighting defensively, you might reduce both risk and effect.

Controlled Position. If you are in control and there’s no impending danger, there’s no need to make a roll. The GM simply describes what your character is able to accomplish without taking a risk or paying a cost. You only have to roll if you’re not satisfied with what’s on offer, and want to push your luck for more.

Setting Difficulty. Most of the time, the GM can represent the “difficulty” of a player’s action by adjusting risk or effect - either it’s hard because it’s dangerous, or it’s too hard to work very well. For the specific kind of all-or-nothing difficulty posed by something like a “hail mary shot”, though, you might want to use a desperate roll instead.

Setup Actions

A setup action is an ordinary roll where the intent is to assist another player. For example, you might create a distraction or protect an ally while they line up a shot. Assuming your roll is successful, pick one: add +1d to the roll you’re supporting, reduce the risk, or increase the effect. With great effect or a critical success on your setup action, you can pick two.

As usual, you only have to roll if there’s an avoidable consequence. If you can set up an ally without taking a risk, or simply by paying some cost, then you don’t have to roll.

Group Actions

When your characters work together to overcome some obstacle as a team, everyone rolls individually to see how their part of the consequences manifest. If you’re all trying to pull a vehicle out of the mud, for example, each member of the party would roll separately to see if they become tired from their exertions.

When you combine your efforts, it usually modifies the risk or effect of a roll. In some cases, you might even have controlled position when you work together, allowing you to skip the roll entirely. The same applies for NPCs joining a group action. They don’t roll, but their participation factors into your fictional positioning and informs the potential consequences.

More isn’t always better, though. If you’re trying to sneak through an enemy encampment, a smaller group will be easier to conceal. Adding more people won’t make the task any easier - it might even make it harder!

Fortune Rolls

When the GM isn’t sure of the answer to a question and it isn’t something that should be handled by an action roll, they can make a fortune roll to disclaim decision making and determine the answer. A fortune roll basically tells you “how much” something manifests, without taking risk or effect into consideration. You should make a fortune roll when you need to determine the outcome of something the player characters aren’t involved in or when luck is the dominant factor. The players can also make fortune rolls when the outcome is uncertain, but an action roll is not appropriate because there is no threat at hand.

Examples might include:

In short: if there’s something uncertain that isn’t covered by a rule, the GM can call for a fortune roll instead of simply deciding the outcome.

If any kind of trait or rating is applicable to the roll - such as a character’s specialty or attribute rating, the quality rating of a cohort, the Tier of a faction, or a starship’s quality - then you can use that to build a dice pool. If no rating applies, you can start from 1d for sheer dumb luck. Then add +1d for every major advantage and -1d for every major disadvantage that applies.

The results are as follows:

Effect Levels

The fortune roll is an abstract mechanic that’s meant to be interpreted by the GM. Exactly what “full impact” means in each situation depends on context, and it’s totally fine to decide for yourself how to interpret it. If you do need to determine the corresponding effect of a fortune roll, ask yourself if you were rolling for whether or not or how much.

If the outcome of the roll is truly uncertain and you were rolling for whether or not it manifests at all, then “full impact” is equivalent to standard effect. “Partial impact” is equivalent to limited effect, and so on. An outright failure means the thing you’re rolling for didn’t manifest at all, or that it didn’t make any real difference. If the outcome is extremely unlikely, then even “full impact” might only be equivalent to limited effect.

If the outcome is fairly certain but you’re rolling to determine how much it manifests or you accomplish, then “full impact” is equivalent to great effect. “Partial impact” is equivalent to standard effect, and so on. In that context, even an outright failure just means that you accomplished disappointingly little, rather than nothing at all. This is the kind of fortune roll you usually use when working on a long-term project, filling a recovery clock or gathering information.

Engagement Rolls

When the player characters encounter an uncertain situation, the GM is responsible for describing the first threat they encounter and the starting situation they find themselves in. Instead of simply deciding these details, the GM can make an engagement roll to disclaim decision making and determine how simple or troublesome the situation is. You can think of an engagement roll as a way to transition between scenes; whenever you need to “cut to the action” or transition into a more tense scenario, you can use an engagement roll to determine how dire the situation is when the scene opens.

You might make an engagement roll:

An engagement roll is a standard fortune roll, starting with 1d for sheer luck. As usual, adjust this by giving +1d for every major advantage, and -1d for every major disadvantage. If you’re rolling to execute a plan, for example, you might consider:

The outcome of the engagement roll determines the risk their characters face when the threat manifests, or when they encounter their first obstacle:

Consequences

Enemy actions, bad circumstances, or the outcome of a roll can inflict consequences on a PC. When you make an action roll, consequences are what you’re rolling to avoid. A given circumstance might result in one or more consequences, and they can take many forms. A few are given below.

Failure is a potential consequence whenever the thing you’re rolling for is inherently uncertain. If there’s a chance that what you’re trying to do might not work at all, then a bad roll might result in reduced effect or even no impact at all.

Complications are narrative events which change the fictional positioning of the situation, making things tougher for our heroes. For example, the player characters may attract unwanted attention, the room might catch fire, or someone’s weapon might jam or run out of ammo. Complications typically factor into subsequent actions, requiring you to change your approach or accept a greater risk or less effect.

Progress Clocks are similar to complications, but they represent the threat of a future problem rather than one that’s happening right now. They’re useful when you want to represent a big impending threat, such as “the entire facility goes into lockdown”, rather than a momentary complication. See the section on progress clocks for more.

Harm represents everything from a transitory affliction or psychological malady, all the way up to serious physical injuries like a broken arm or punctured lung. See the next section more information on how harm works.

Harm

One of the possible consequences that can arise from an action is to suffer harm. There are three levels of harm you might suffer depending on the risk:

All three kinds of harm are mechanically identical; the only difference is how difficult it is to get rid of them and how frequently they apply. The GM can invoke any of your harms whenever they judge that it makes sense for your character to be impaired by them. When that happens, they pick one:

If your character has any, the GM may also invoke trauma in the exact same way as harm. When the GM invokes one of your harms or traumas, you immediately gain 1 XP. Feel free to remind the GM of your harm and/or trauma if you’re angling for extra XP!

Death’s Door

When you’re on death’s door, it means you’re in critical condition and need serious medical attention right away. You can end up on death’s door if you sustain two serious injuries; you can also end up there if you take on a risk so great that you’re rolling against the threat of a mortal injury.

If you don’t get medical attention within a few minutes, you’ll die. If someone manages to treat the wound and stabilise you before that happens, the fatal wound doesn’t go away. You’ll need to go to a hospital or somewhere with proper medical equipment, then spend time in recovery to clear it as usual.

Last Stand. When you’re on death’s door, you can always choose to take your last stand instead. When you do this, your character’s death is set in stone. Before you die, however, you will manage one last feat of dramatic defiance. No roll is required; decide with the GM and the other players what the impact of your final act will be, then die.

First Aid

Emergency medical attention and/or the judicious use of pharmaceuticals won’t heal injuries, but they can keep someone going for a while. If you receive appropriate first aid, you get one of the following benefits:

Giving first aid is usually an action roll in a dangerous situation, or a fortune roll otherwise.

Resistance

Whenever your character suffers any consequence that you don’t like - including harm - you can choose to resist it. Resistance is automatically effective, but is not without cost. When you resist a consequence, the GM will tell you which attribute you should use for the resistance roll:

When you resist a consequence, you suffer stress equal to the lowest die result on the resistance roll. If your lowest roll was a 2, for example, you suffer 2 stress. If you have 0 rating in the attribute, then roll 2 dice and take whichever result is higher. You can only roll to resist each consequence once.

Usually, a resistance roll reduces the severity of a consequence. If you’re going to suffer a serious injury, for example, a resistance roll would reduce it to an injury. The GM also has the option to rule that your character completely avoids the consequence. Which consequences can be avoided and which can merely be mitigated is a way for the GM to decide how gritty the game is.

Resisting a consequence changes how much of the danger manifests or how bad it is, but it doesn’t negate the fictional outcome of the action roll. It doesn’t turn back time. That’s important, because we never want to roll for the same thing twice in a row. Whether you suceed or fail, whether you resist or not, every roll moves the fiction forward and puts you in a new position.

Stress

Stress is an abstract resource that represents your character’s reserves of fortitude, skill and luck, but also represents the prep and legwork they do in their downtime - gathering equipment, doing research, recruiting friends, and so on. There are a few ways for characters to spend stress:

Once you accumulate 9 points of stress, you reach your breaking point and become overwhelmed. Choose whichever of the following you think is most appropriate for your character in this moment:

While you’re overwhelmed, you can still make rolls as usual if it makes sense to do so - for example, rolling to attack someone or to get away from a threat. However, you can’t spend any stress until you snap out of it (not even to resist consequences). When you’re done being overwhelmed, usually when the threat has been dealt with or the scene is over, reset your stress all the way back down to zero.

Being overwhelmed has more repercussions than just freaking out in the moment. At the end of the session, you’ll either gain a new and permanent trauma (if you had less than four), or one of your existing traumas will transform into something more problematic. This represents the permanent scars acquired from the stress and pressure your character has been through.

Trauma

When your character becomes overwhelmed, they either acquire a new trauma or worsen an existing one. Each trauma represents a permanent issue that can cause trouble for your character or make their life tougher. They might manifest in the form of an old injury, an addiction or dependency, a traumatic response to certain situations, or even a change in the way your character approaches or thinks about the world.

Even as your character becomes more competent and skilled over time, they will accrue trauma as the strain of their perilous lives takes its toll and makes it harder for them to function.

You don’t pick traumas from a list; when a character picks one up, they should discuss with the GM and decide what seems appropriate. The only rule is that they must be troublesome and that they must be innate to your character. Being in debt, being wanted, or having a bad reputation are not good traumas because they are transient conditions, not part of your character.

Here are some example traumas:

Trauma can be invoked by the GM to make your current situation harder, just like harm. Just like harm, you get 1 XP every time they do so. You can never have more than four traumas; instead of gaining a fifth, one of the traumas you already have transforms into something more extreme and troublesome.

Taking a Breather

When the party goes on an extended mission or adventure, they might spend long periods of time in a dangerous environment where entering the downtime phase just isn’t an option.

Once per mission or adventure, the party is allowed to take a breather during a lull in the action. It might happen while you’re travelling between planets; when you find somewhere safe to rest for a while; or when the party takes a break to plan and strategise. All that’s required is that everyone agrees it makes sense to take a breather right now.

When you take a breather, everyone gets to roll 1d and clear that much stress.

Downtime

When your characters complete a mission or adventure and get a chance to rest, time zooms out a bit and the downtime phase begins. During downtime, a few things happen in a specific order:

  1. Each player clears any conditions from their character sheet, and resets their trump card if they used it.
  2. The party acquires heat depending on the nature of the mission or adventure they just completed.
  3. The GM presents any escalations that occur - advancing progress clocks, allowing factions to act, and introducing entanglements.
  4. Each player gets a chance to make downtime actions to clear stress, recover from injuries, or work on long-term projects.
  5. The players enter free play - they can talk to each other, go places, do things, and make rolls as needed until it’s time for their next adventure.

Heat

To reflect the notoriety and bloody noses you leave in your wake, your crew acquires heat according to the outcome of your most recent mission or adventure:

Add +1 heat if the mission involved a high-profile or well-connected target. Add +1 heat if the mission happened on hostile territory. Add +1 heat if your ship played a significant role in the mission. Add +1 heat if there was a firefight, regardless of who started it.

To get rid of heat, you can spend a downtime action trying to get out from under the weight of it. You might also be able to get rid of some heat when you do something that improves your crew’s reputation or makes amends with a faction you’ve crossed.

When you reach 9 heat, gain a grudge from an appropriate faction and clear your heat. The GM should pick whichever faction was most directly impacted by the player characters’ recent activities, or else whoever they’ve annoyed the most lately. If there’s no existing faction that fits, make one up and give the players a grudge from them.

Escalations

The players get to make special “downtime actions” during the downtime phase. The GM gets to make some special actions of their own, which are called escalations. As the name implies, they represent things escalating in the background while the player characters rest - NPCs and factions make their moves, pursue their agendas, and advance the fiction.

There are three escalations for the GM to use during downtime:

The GM doesn’t have to perform all of these escalations every downtime phase; they can pick whichever options seem appropriate for the current situation. They should always pick at least one, though. The world doesn’t stand still while your characters are out of the fray.

For example, let’s say the players have a grudge from a faction, but they’re currently in hiding. The GM judges that spending the grudge right now doesn’t make much sense, so they make a progress clock instead - the faction is trying to track you down. They’ll tick it up every time you gain heat, and when it’s full, the faction has found you. Then they can spend a grudge or two to send someone after you.

Downtime Actions

Most of the stuff your characters might want to do in the downtime phase - like talking to each other, talking to a contact, gathering information, purchasing items, and so on - can be handled in free play. Your characters can do as much of those things as they want, within reason. There are also certain special actions they can take during the downtime phase, which are called downtime actions. During the downtime phase, each player may take two downtime actions.

Cut loose. Narrate how your character chooses to relax or blow off steam, and skip past the events or roleplay them out. Then, clear stress by rolling whichever attribute seems most appropriate:

This roll works like resistance in reverse - whatever number appears on the highest die, reduce your stress by that number. For example, if you roll a 4 then you would clear 4 points of stress.

Recover. Spend time resting and recovering from an injury or a serious injury. To recover from harm, you must fill a recovery clock with 4 segments. Taking this downtime action fills in 1 segment. If another player character or an NPC is available to give you medical attention, they can make a fortune or action roll to fill in additional segments (this doesn’t use up a downtime action for them). When the clock fills, reduce all of your harm by one level: your serious injuries become injuries, and your injuries become mere conditions.

Reduce heat. Say what your character does to smooth things over or lower your crew’s profile, then make an action roll. Reduce heat according to the result. 1-3: 1 heat. 4-5: 2 heat. 6: 3 heat. 66: 5 heat.

Work on a project. To work on something that will take a significant amount of time - like writing a new program, building up a network of contacts, or assembling a medical laboratory - start a progress clock to track it. Based on the goal of the project, the GM will tell you the clock(s) to create and suggest a method by which you might make progress. When you spend time working on the project, describe what your character does to advance the project clock and make an action or fortune roll to advance the clock.

Acquire an asset. You can start a project to obtain a new asset for your character without paying for it in Cash. This might represent building it yourself, making connections in the black market, scavenging and searching scrapyards, and so on. Acquiring an asset works like any other long-term project, and is tracked with one or more progress clocks representing various stages of the acquisition process. The cost of the asset determines how much work it will take to obtain:

Asset Value Project Clock
1-2 4 ticks
3-4 6 ticks
5-6 8 ticks
7 10 ticks
8 12 ticks

Train. Spend XP to get a new specialty or talent for your character, as described in the section on character advancement.

Shore Leave. Instead of cutting loose or recovering during downtime, you have the option of taking extended “shore leave”. When you do so, your character disappears until the next downtime phase (at least). Play a different character in the meantime. When they return, all of their stress is cleared and they automatically fill a recovery clock.

Progress Clocks

A progress clock is a circle divided into 4, 6, 8 or 12 segments. Draw a progress clock when you need to track ongoing effort against an obstacle, or when you need to telegraph the approach of impending trouble.

Some examples of things you might track with a progress clock are:

One way you shouldn’t use a progress clock is as a health bar or difficulty meter. “Okay, you get 2 ticks towards picking the lock, roll again to finish the job” is often boring because you’re rolling for the same thing twice without moving the fiction forward. If picking this lock is especially challenging, you’re better off representing that by adjusting the risk or effect, or by introducing additional threats - for example, it takes much longer than usual, or there’s a danger of jamming it, or breaking your tools.

Progress clocks work best when you apply them to a broad goal or complex task that can be advanced in many ways. Long-term projects are a great example of this. If you’re trying to make your ship run better, you might replace old parts by spending Cash; you might spend your days rerouting power conduits and replacing filters; you might even track down rumours of an experimental aftermarket upgrade. Each of these is an action that may require a roll and may have consequences, moving the fiction forward regardless of the outcome.

Ticking Clocks

As the GM, you can tick progress clocks whenever it feels appropriate. If a clock is counting down to something and some time passes in the fiction, go ahead and tick the clock. If the player characters do something to advance whatever it is the clock’s tracking (good or bad), tick the clock. If someone’s about to make an action roll that might tick a progress clock, tell them how much progress they might make or trouble they might cause before they roll the dice.

When ticking a progress clock, judge how many ticks to apply by starting from the fiction. If you’re not sure, you can use risk or effect as a rule of thumb:

Since the default risk and effect is standard, you can use that as a rule of thumb when creating clocks. On average, a 4-clock will take 2 successes or consequences to fill; a 6-clock will take 3; and an 8-clock will take 4. Obviously, this can be changed by different approaches or spending resources, but it’s a good baseline.