Spacefaring

Your crew of scoundrels and punks is surrounded by powerful factions with inscrutable agendas and immense resources. You live on the fringes and between the cracks, but it’s hard to avoid being pushed or pulled by the slowly-turning gears of power and influence that run the Foundation. Without some kind of edge, contending with these sleeping giants is almost impossible. Luckily, you have one: your very own ship. Your ship isn’t just a vehicle: it represents freedom and independence, and a kind of autonomy that most people never get a chance to realise.

This game assumes you are a group of spacefaring scoundrels, but that’s not a requirement cast in stone. If you don’t want to have a ship, the game will run just fine without one. The scope of your exploits will probably be a lot more local, and your group will have fewer options to avoid the repercussions of their actions. The overall tone will probably be grittier as a result, so make sure everyone is on the same page before you choose this option!

Table of Contents

• Ship Creation
• Using Your Ship
• Upgrading Your Ship
• Space Travel

Ship Creation

Creating your crew’s ship is a collaborative exercise. Working together, the players will flesh out the details of the vessel their characters share, one step at a time. As a group, you’ll answer a series of questions from the GM about your ship and its history. If you’re not sure which option to pick, the first option is always a safe bet, or you can roll a d6 to make your choice randomly. When all these questions have been answered, your ship is ready to play.

1. Choose your ship’s origin

Your ship changed hands before it ended up in yours, possibly many times. Once upon a time, though, it was shiny and new. Why was it commissioned in the first place?

• 1-2. It was a Scarab, a modest civilian freighter. It’s a scout-class ship, and it gains the Cargo Bay upgrade.
• 3-4. It was a Hound, a racing ship or swift interceptor. It’s a scout-class ship, and it gains the Afterburners upgrade.
• 5. It was an Aurochs, a heavy-duty hauler. It’s a corvette-class ship, and it gains the Cargo Bay upgrade.
• 6. It was a Seraph, a military gunship. It’s a corvette-class ship, and it gains the Point-Defense System upgrade.

Your decision here affects the scale of your ship and assigns its first ship upgrade. It also determines what your ship looks like, what it was built for, and how other people will tend to perceive your ship and its crew. It’s a lot easier for a civilian freighter to fly under the radar than an enormous military gunship, loaded for bear. The scale of your ship also affects how easy it is to fly and land in atmosphere.

2. Choose your ship’s previous owner

Your ship belonged to someone else before it belonged to you. Who was the most recent owner? What did they use it for?

Decide on the ship’s previous owner by picking from the list of factions operating in your system. Depending on which category of faction your choice falls under, assign your ship’s second upgrade:

• The previous owner was an institution. Pick one upgrade: Armor, Hangars, Missiles, or Point-Defense System.
• The previous owner was a megacorp. Pick one upgrade: Planetary Sensor Suite, Point-Defense System, Railgun or Rooted Transponder.
• The previous owner was a clandestine group. Pick one upgrade: Afterburners, Hidden Compartments Point-Defense System, or Railgun.
• The previous owner was a fringe group. Pick one upgrade: Hidden Compartments, Point-Defense System, Unusual Weaponry or Workshop.

Your ship’s previous owner doesn’t just determine the nature of your second upgrade. Whichever faction you pick is connected to your party in some way, and is likely to figure heavily in your first adventures.

Your ship's previous owners were screwed over when it fell into your hands. How do they feel about you now?

There’s no way you’re getting out of this unscathed, but if you pay through the nose you might be able to lessen the heat. Pick an option:

• 1-3. You paid them off. They’re mollified, but they still don’t like you. Every player pays 1 Cash, and you have one grudge from them.
• 4-5. You blew them off. It’s your ship, fair and square. If they don’t like it, that’s their problem. You have two grudges from them.
• 6. You bent the knee. As far as they’re concerned, you work for them. Gain one grudge from them when you refuse an order, and three if you ever cut them loose.

3. Pick a flaw

What's the catch? How did a ship like this end up in the hands of a bunch of scoundrels like yourselves?

Pick a unique flaw that hangs over your ship:

• 1-2. Leveraged: Your ship isn’t really yours. You’re deep in debt to some unpleasant people, and must make regular payments to keep them happy. Pick a faction to be your creditor; whenever you get a payout from a mission or adventure, pay them Cash equal to your ship’s quality or gain a grudge from them.
• 3-4. Clunker: Your ship is held together with duct tape and dreams, refitted and retrofitted so many times that something’s always on the verge of failure. The ship rolls with +1d whenever the GM checks for a crisis.
• 5. Finicky: Your ship has strange quirks that only one of you understands, and it doesn’t cooperate with anyone else. Pick a member of the party (usually the pilot or mechanic). When they’re not onboard, reduce the ship’s quality rating by 1. If they die, its quality drops permanently.
• 6. Messy: Your ship suffers from a certain lack of finesse. Weapons, engines, scanners - they’re all loud and chaotic. When you use your ship as part of an action roll, the result is always noisier and messier than it otherwise would be.

Your flaw will probably be with your ship for quite a while. If you’re determined to get rid of it, you and the GM might agree on a path to erase the flaw entirely. For example, you might give the ship a total overhaul from top to bottom and refit every system, or find a way to escape the cycle of debt and interest once and for all. Doing so will probably require multiple long-term projects or some kind of special mission or adventure.

4. Pick an edge

There’s something special about your ship that sets it apart from all the other ships out there. It has nothing to do with its specs or capabilities. What is it?

Pick a unique edge for your ship:

• 1-2. No Place Like Home: When you enter the downtime phase, everyone clears 1 point of stress as long as you’re able to return to your ship.
• 3-4. Ship of Theseus: It doesn’t matter what kind of beating your ship takes - it can always be fixed, and with just about any old junk. When you enter the downtime phase, you can automatically restore 1 level of damage, or restore functionality to one damaged upgrade.
• 5. Part of the Family: Your ship seems to have a mind of its own, and it can participate in (but not lead) a group action as if it was a cohort. When it does so, it rolls using its quality.
• 6. Leaf on the Wind: When you’re on the verge of disaster, that’s when your ship sings. When you use the ship as part of a desperate action, you get +1d to the roll but -1d to resist any consequences from the action.

The edge you pick is part of your ship’s essential nature, and it can’t be lost or taken away. You can only ever have one edge per ship, although in special circumstances you and the GM might agree to swap your current edge out for a different one.

Using Your Ship

When you use your ship as part of an action, your ship’s unique capabilities factor into the position and effect of the action. When you engage with another ship (in combat or otherwise), compare the capabilities of the two vessels.

Quality factors into the critical systems and overall capabilities of the ships that are being compared. Every ship has a quality rating from 0 to 6; it’s a general representation of how sophisticated and powerful it is. Having a higher-quality ship than your opponent gives you an edge, but it’s not the only factor to consider. Your ship is quality 1 when the game begins.

• Quality 1: A ship that has seen better days. It’s old and creaky. Most of the ship’s parts and systems are several years obsolete, and it shows.
• Quality 2: A decent vessel, albeit a basic one. Thoroughly adequate, but nothing special. No better or worse than most of the ships flying out there.
• Quality 3: An excellent vessel. Might be an older model, but it has it where it counts. Its dependable systems will reliably outperform a more basic vessel.
• Quality 4: A state of the art vessel. One of the newest models, or an old model retrofitted to the newest standards. Fully modernised, with sophisticated systems.
• Quality 5: A top of the line vessel. The best you can get on the open market, constructed at an advanced shipyard with no expense spared. Blows most other ships out of the water.
• Quality 6: A bleeding edge vessel. An experimental military warship, megacorp prototype, or similar. You’ve never even heard of the tech that this ship is loaded with.

Scale factors into the class of the ships that are being compared, if they differ significantly in size. Ships in the Foundation are rated by the class of their hull: fighter, scout, corvette, cruiser or titan. Sometimes an action will favour the smaller ship, but often the side with the larger ship has the scale advantage. Consider whether this is a situation where being agile and maneuverable is more helpful, or if it’s one where one side can overwhelm the other with sheer force.

Potency usually factors into the upgrades installed on the ships that are being compared. Potency might be the dominant factor if one side has an upgrade that clearly gives them an edge against the other. Regardless of quality, a ship with missile launchers is going to be a serious problems for an unarmed freighter!

Ship Weapons

Ships in the Foundation are not armed by default; most civilian ships have no weaponry at all, or only carry defensive weaponry like a Point-Defense System. These are mostly only useful for blasting micrometeors, taking down incoming missiles, or as a last-ditch defense against ships at boarding range. Most space combat takes place at large enough distances to make these weapons pretty much useless for offensive purposes.

If you want your ship to be outfitted with offensive weaponry, you’ll need to take a special upgrade that reflects this - such as the Railgun, Missiles or Heavy Laser upgrades. Different weapons have their own advantages and disadvantages, which are described in more detail in the descriptions of those upgrades. Note that ships with offensive weaponry are treated very differently from “unarmed” vessels, and they can rarely get away with being considered civilians or noncombatants.

Taking Damage

Consequences that inflict physical harm on your ship will cause permanent damage and degrade the performance of its systems. When your ship suffers damage as a consequence of an action, the position of the action determines how many levels of damage it takes - 1 for controlled, 2 for risky, 3 for desperate. There are four levels of damage your ship can suffer:

1. Hit. The ship either accrues minor damage in the form of a point of upkeep, or one of its upgrades are damaged and becomes unusable until repaired.
2. Impaired. Any action rolls that rely on the ship or its systems suffer a -1d penalty.
3. Broken. The ship is disabled and limping on emergency systems. It can’t be used for anything that would require an action roll.
4. Destroyed. The ship is totally compromised, and the lives of anyone onboard are in immediate jeopardy.

If you need to mark a damage level but it’s already marked, then the damage moves to the next level. For example, if your ship suffers level-2 damage from a risky action but it’s already Impaired, then it would become Broken instead.

Emergency repairs might be able to restore some functionality to your ship on a short-term basis, the ship equivalent of first aid. With a successful action or fortune roll, the ship’s mechanic might be able to temporarily ignore the penalties for being Weakened or Impaired, get an inoperable upgrade working temporarily, or even allow action rolls on a Broken ship.

Upkeep

Ships are expensive to keep running - they need fuel, supplies, ammunition and constant maintenance. To represent this battle against entropy, your ship has an upkeep rating that starts at 0 and can go up to a maximum of 4. It gains 1 point of upkeep whenever one of the following triggers occurs:

• When you enter the downtime phase after an adventure where your ship played a significant part.
• Immediately after you complete an interstellar voyage using your Llewellyn Drive.
• When your ship suffers a Hit and the GM inflicts upkeep as a consequence.

You can clear all of your upkeep by travelling somewhere that’s suitable for resupply and maintenance, and by paying Cash equal to the ship’s quality in fees. Paying for upkeep is optional; you can always choose to skip it. By doing so, however, you risk a crisis; at the worst possible time, the GM will make a fortune roll using your ship’s upkeep rating.

The result determines which consequences occur (they can be resisted as usual):

• 1-3. The ship groans and creaks, but it pulls through.
• 4-5. The ship suffers from a temporary glitch, causing one of its systems to malfunction (but there is no permanent damage).
• 6. The ship suffers from a serious fault and it takes 1 level of damage.
• 66. The ship suffers a catastrophic failure it takes 2 levels of damage.

Crises tend to strike at the worst possible moment, when you need your ship the most. If one of your systems is malfunctioning, you can probably resolve it with an appropriate action or fortune roll (or failing that, lots of time and elbow grease). More permanent damage will require proper repairs, though.

Repairing Your Ship

If your ship sustains damage, you can make repairs to the damaged parts as a long-term project. The quality of your ship is what determines how many ticks the repair clock takes to fill:

• If your ship’s quality is 0 to 2, then it’s a 4-clock.
• If your ship’s quality 3 or 4, then it’s a 6-clock.
• If your ship’s quality 5 or 6, then it’s an 8-clock.

When the repair clock fills, clear all damage on your ship and restore any inoperable upgrades to functionality. You can work on repairs and fill in the repair clock as a downtime action, just as you would for any other long-term project. If you’re at a spaceport or shipyard with access to labour and replacement parts, you can also fill in the clock at a rate of 1 Cash per tick.

Upgrading Your Ship

If you want to increase your ship’s quality by one level, you must find a shipyard that’s capable of performing the necessary improvements and pay Cash equal to 4x the new rating. For example, increasing your ship’s quality from 3 to 4 will cost you 16 Cash. You can improve your quality up to a maximum of 3 at just about any shipyard, but improving it beyond that might require access to special resources or cutting-edge equipment.

You can also improve your ship by adding new upgrades to it. Exactly how you go about obtaining an upgrade depends on which type of upgrade you’re after:

• Common upgrades are freely available and can be installed at just about any shipyard. As long as you have access to a shipyard and enough money to cover the costs, you can always get them.
• Rare upgrades are harder to come by. They might require cutting-edge technology or rare resources to construct, or they might just be unusual and bespoke modifications. To obtain one, you might need to visit a specific facility, cultivate connections who can find one for you, or do some information gathering to find one yourself.
• Restricted upgrades are usually weapons and other military tech. Sometimes you can get them for self-defense purposes with a license, but their construction and sale is usually tightly monitored. Restrictions are looser on the Rim, where travelling armed with aftermarket missile racks and railguns isn’t unusual.

Purchasing a new upgrade for your ship “off the shelf” usually costs Cash equal to 3x your ship’s current quality. If the upgrade is rare or illegal, you’ll need to provide answers about where and how you’re going to source it. If you’ve already obtained an upgrade for your ship and just need to install it, all you need is access to a spaceport or shipyard and someone with the appropriate skills (either a party member or a hired cohort).

Common Upgrades

Afterburners: Powerful auxiliary thrusters that can dump fuel into the engines to provide short bursts of speed and maneuverability. Your ship is more agile than others of its class, and gains potency when maneuvering, dodging or outracing another ship.

Antigrav Grapple: Allows you to board enemy ships if you can get close enough, by redirecting your ship’s antigravity engines to “grapple” them. You’re all in zero-gravity while it’s in use. Available for legitimate purchase as a salvaging tool, and can also be used to manipulate and tow other things in space.

Armor: Hull reinforcement, ablative plating, and resistant polymers. Mark your armor to reduce incoming damage to your ship by one level; for example, instead of being Broken your ship would merely be Impaired. Once marked, your ship’s armor does not refresh until your next downtime phase.

Brig: Space jail, with room for a couple occupants on a scout or half a dozen on a corvette. Doubles as a panic room or a secure storage room - if you need to keep something in or out, you’re covered.

Cargo Bay: Extra space for storage, including large doors for ease of access. Increases your capacity for cargo and gives you enough space to carry a shipment of goods.

Cutting Laser: A heavy duty hull-mounted laser used for salvage operations. Can cut through steel or vaporise rock. Slow to power up, too unwieldy to use effectively in combat unless you’re grappled.

Hangars: One or more vehicle bays, depending on the size of the ship. They can hold ground, water, air or spacecraft. Includes basic tools and facilities to maintain or repair your vehicles. If your ship is a scout, the hangar is big enough to hold a shuttle or fighter-class ship. If it’s a corvette, it’s big enough to hold a scout-class ship or a few fighters.

Planetary Sensor Suite: Directed atmosphere-penetrating scanners that can gather detailed information about a planet or other body at long range. You can scan for information about significant features, life forms and signals, local conditions, etc. With enough time, you can perform a detailed planetary survey.

Point-Defense System: A network of agile, short-range weapons that use high-velocity slugs or even high-powered lasers to disable incoming missiles and other threats before they reach your ship. Very short range makes them fairly useless offensively, although they are still deadly in atmosphere or at “point-blank” ranges. Generally classed as defensive weaponry and available to anyone who can afford them.

Remote Control: Your ship’s maneuvering and engine systems are wired into its computers, allowing you to pilot it remotely. Requires a good connection and a pair of smart glasses or similar augmented reality interface. If the ship has an autonomous system, it can fly itself according to simple orders.

Workshop: A garage, medical bay, library, science lab or similar workspace. Depending on the type of workshop, it might give you a way to work on projects, provide medical assistance, do research, and so on - all from the comfort of your ship.

Rare Upgrades

Autonomous System: Your ship’s computers house a weak AI that is capable of executing simple tasks and commands, automating the ship’s functions, and limited problem-solving or decision making. When the capabilities of the AS are tested, roll using the ship’s quality.

Hidden Compartments: Secret places to hide things, used by smugglers. Shielded against scanning; the better your ship’s quality rating, the harder they are to detect.

Hypersleep Bay: Spaces for the crew to be placed into suspended animation for long journeys or critical medical emergencies. Commonly seen on colony ships or long-haul vessels that spend months at a time in otherspace.

Llewellyn Drive: Allows you to travel between star systems by shifting your entire ship into otherspace. You must be outside of any significant gravity well to engage the drive. The better your ship’s quality rating, the faster and further you’ll be able to go.

Maintenance Drones: A unit of small automated drones, capable of performing routine maintenance and minor repairs continuously. Because of their tireless efforts, reduce the cost of upkeep by 1 Cash and roll at -1d when it’s time to check for a crisis.

Unusual Weaponry: Flamethrowers or gas projectors for use in atmosphere, or any other unique and unusual weapon that isn’t commonly seen on a starship. Includes grappling hooks, robot arms, and the like.

Restricted Upgrades

Jamming System: Allows you to jam another ship’s communications at combat range, preventing them from signalling for help or performing detailed scans.

Heavy Laser: A precision weapon with high accuracy and a very long range; harder to find than other ship weaponry. Good at disabling specific systems or engaging fast ships, not so good at punching through a hull or getting through armour. Doesn’t run out of ammo, but it can overheat and become inoperable until it cools down.

High-Energy Scanners: Extremely powerful electromagnetic and gravimetric scanners allow you to “look inside” another ship at combat range. You can see the internal structure and general activity levels on board, and may be able to ask the GM specific questions about it. The greater the quality rating of your ship, the more specific details you can make out.

Missiles: Projectiles with mounted drive - the really big ones are called “torpedoes”. Their range is long, but not unlimited. Within their effective range, they cannot usually be outmaneuvered and must be shot down. Missiles are expensive and limited; overuse might result in running dry.

Railgun: Much shorter range than missiles, but railgun rounds are extremely difficult to dodge within that range and can’t be shot down. Railguns are power-hungry and wear down quickly; overuse might fry your systems or cause upkeep.

Rooted Transponder: The security protocols in your ship’s transponder have been overridden, allowing you to broadcast a fake signal and to change your transponder signal whenever you want. If your signal doesn’t match official records, then it won’t hold up under intense scrutiny.

Stealth System: Vents heat into otherspace, masking the energy signature of your ship. Doesn’t make you invisible, but makes it much harder for sensors to detect you. The system is experimental and power hungry, and each use gives your ship a point of upkeep.

Space Travel

Travel through the vastness of space comes in three categories: local travel, interplanetary travel, and interstellar travel.

Local travel is travel within a region of a star system. Examples include travelling between two locations on a planet’s surface, going from the surface to one of the planet’s moons, or to a space station in orbit. This kind of travel usually takes no more than a few hours. A broken ship or a short-range shuttle might take up to a day to complete the same journey.

Interplanetary travel is travel between two regions of a star system. For example, going from one planet to another; or from a planet to the edge of the system. It takes up to a week with a functional drive; a broken ship or one that has no fuel would take at least a month to complete the journey by limping along on emergency thrusters and backup engines.

Interstellar travel is travel from one star system to another. Only ships with a Llewellyn Drive installed can shift into otherspace and perform this kind of travel. Llewellyn Drives can’t function in the gravity well of a star or other celestial body, so you must first travel to the system’s edge. Otherspace voyages are faster than light, but that doesn’t mean they’re fast - a journey can take anywhere from a week to several months or even years. It all depends on how far you’re going and how good your drive is.

When you travel between planets or star systems, the GM might tick progress clocks to reflect the passage of time, just as they would during downtime.

Perils of the Void

When you make an interplanetary voyage across the system, the GM makes a fortune roll starting from 1d to see how dangerous the journey is. If the journey is exceptionally safe or routine, you can forgo the roll entirely.

Adjust the number of dice down for any factor which makes the voyage safer, such as: travelling by a heavily-patrolled shipping lane - travelling with an armed escort or as part of a convoy - a ship armed well enough to discourage pirates.

Adjust the number of dice up for any factor which makes the voyage more dangerous, such as: a very long route or remote destination - a route that takes you through dangerous or hostile territory - a ship or cargo valuable enough to tempt pirates.

The results of the roll are as follows:

• 1-3. No dangers arise, or some small advantage is gained.
• 4-5. A hazard protects something of value along the way.
• 6. A hazard strikes, but there is time to react and prepare.
• 66. A hazard strikes without warning.

Landing

Not every ship has the ability to survive atmospheric entry, fly in atmosphere or make landfall on a planet. While some ships are designed to transit between atmosphere and vacuum on a regular basis, most larger classes of ship need to rely on shuttles and landers for sub-orbital travel. You can purchase a shuttle as an ordinary asset, but you will need the Hangars upgrade if you want to keep it on your ship.

How your ship performs in atmosphere depends on its scale, specifically its ship class. Fighters and scouts are designed with aerodynamics in mind, and are equally comfortable in atmosphere or vacuum. Corvettes can fly in atmosphere, but they’re extremely unwieldy and awkward. They need a proper landing pad to safely land, and trying to touch down on an open field or the ocean is a very risky business. Cruisers and titans are completely incapable of atmospheric flight, and will break up if they attempt it.

Restricted Space

Like aircraft in the modern day, a starship can be a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. Accelerating to relativistic speeds, even a civilian starship is a WMD that can be a threat to cities or whole continents. For this reason, inhabited regions tend to have significant defense platforms - including gravitic brakers that can deflect relativistic projectiles. When you enter the restricted space of a planet, major space station or other important area, strict rules apply about where you can fly and how fast, and these rules are backed by heavy weapons.

When you’re in restricted space, you’ll be expected to obey a speed limit and to lock in a flight path to your destination, which you are not allowed to deviate from. It is also common practice for the final part of the landing or docking process to be automated. Speeding or flying an unplanned route will be met with warnings, and ultimately with escalation.

Sensors

In space, the range of your sensors is effectively infinite - but outside of a light-minute or so, most objects are pretty much just a radar “blip” on your scanners. If you know where to look, you can tell whether an object is a cold rock or a warm ship, but that’s about it. As you get closer, your sensors can give you more detail:

• Minimal Detail: Within a light-minute, you can identify the basic shape, size and trajectory of the object. If it’s a ship, you can tell what size class it is. A ship that’s about a day out from the planet you’re orbiting.
• Limited Detail: Within a few light-seconds you can make out prominent features, such as identifying markings or whether a ship is armed. You can also identify its energy signature, and get a broad idea of its capabilities. A ship in deep space near the planet you’re orbiting.
• Full Detail: Within one light-second, you can see fine visual details and identify individual systems such as the reactor and weapons. You may be able to notice energy signature fluctuations, such as weapons powering on or engines warming up. A ship that’s orbiting the same planet as you.

The better your ship’s quality, the more detailed information and resolution you’ll get at each of these sensor ranges. If your quality is higher than the other ship’s, you’ll also generally see them first and get the first chance to react to them.

Transponders: You don’t need your sensors to identify most ships. Every ship has a transponder, and most civilian vessels keep them on all the time; these transponders are effectively constantly broadcasting the ship’s name and flight path to anyone listening. Of course, transponder signals can be faked; they can also be switched off. This is common practice for military vessels, ships that have docked, and ships in less heavily regulated areas (including most of the Rim).