Stars Without Number.pdf

STARS WITHOUT NUMBER

For Eden, who gave me a reason.

T ABLE O F C ONTENTS

Introduction ..............................................................................................................5

Character Creation ....................................................................................................7

Psionics ...................................................................................................................25

Equipment ..............................................................................................................33

Systems ...................................................................................................................59

e History of Space ...............................................................................................71

Game Master’s Guide ..............................................................................................78

World Generation ...................................................................................................87

Factions .................................................................................................................113

Adventure Creation ...............................................................................................128

Alien Creation .......................................................................................................138

Xenobestiary .........................................................................................................148

Designer’s Notes ....................................................................................................158

Hydra Sector .........................................................................................................164

Game Master Resources ........................................................................................180

Index .....................................................................................................................200

Record Sheets ........................................................................................................202

ISBN 978-1-936673-00-1

Written by Kevin Crawford.

Cover art and interior art provided by NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia,

Charlottesville), e Hubble Heritage Team (STScI), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee.

Interior art by Tamás Baranya, Cerberus Illustrations, Pawet Dobosz, Angela Harburn, Andy Hepworth, Szilvia Huszar, Eric Lofgren,

Bradley K McDevitt, Louis Porter Jr. Design, Maciej Zagorski, and e Forge Studios, used with permission.

Some maps created with Hexographer; http://www.hexographer.com.

e year is 3200. Humanity is scattered like

dust among the stars. e broken relics of a

former day litter the sky and men and women

struggle to rebuild the glory of humanity’s lost

golden age.

Veil Nebula, washing over the whole of known space in seconds.

Every psychic in human space was instantly killed or maddened by

the surge, burnt out in what later became known as the Scream.

With the jump gates inoperable and all the psychic mentors insane

or dead, the core worlds were suddenly cut o from the frontier. A

few spike drive ships remaining in the core were able to make their

way out, bringing tales of horror, starvation, and frantic warfare over

shipyards and orbital factories. Most of the core worlds are thought to

have perished, cut o from the worlds that supplied their enormous

populations and fueled their vital technologies.

For almost a thousand years humanity had expanded from its ancient

cradle to ll the sky with its worlds. At rst the expansion came by

way of the enigmatic “spike drives” that granted humans the ability

to skip between stars. Countless nations, faiths, and ideologies sent

colonists to the darkness above to nd new homes where they could

live free from the oppressive rule of Terra’s calci ed masters.

e centuries that followed were known as the Silence, as unnumbered

human worlds fought to survive their sudden isolation. Some slid

into barbarism or worse, their planets unable to support a starfaring

civilization. Some worlds lacked metals, or fossil fuels, or any one of

countless other vital ingredients for maintaining their industry. And

all, of course, lacked the psionic mentors necessary to train a new

generation of psychics.

e spike drive touched on di erent worlds. It folded the tissue of

space and time and pierced it to emerge at distant stars, but the space

between touched in turn those who traveled it. Over the course of

generations, this subtle in uence shaped certain descendants of the

starfarers. e condition that resulted was known as “Metadimensional

Extroversion Syndrome”. Most simply knew its victims as “MESses”.

Later, they were known as psychics.

Over the past six hundred years, humanity has slowly, painfully begun

to heal the wounds of the Scream. Not all worlds were incapable

of independent survival, and these hardy planets have become the

lynchpins of stellar nations and miniature empires. Trade routes have

revived with time and the building of new spike drives. Expeditions

are regularly mounted to the tomb worlds of the outer core to

scavenge what can be reclaimed from the bones of the dead past.

MES inevitably killed or maddened its carriers when they began to

use their powers. e surge of extradimensional energy either cooked

their brains or burnt a pathway through their sanity. It was only

through decades of research and the expenditure of countless lives

that techniques were developed for harnessing this power safely.

Yet a pall hangs over these e orts. Great sacri ce has revived some of

the old secrets of psychic training, but no world dares rely on psionic

forces any longer. e nature of the Scream is still a mystery. For now,

humanity strives to build a world that does not rely upon powers it

cannot fully understand or completely control.

e channeling of psionic energy began the second great expansion

of humankind. Even though hardly more than one in ten thousand

humans were touched by MES, it was still enough to reshape human

civilization. Vast choirs of psychics were employed to develop new

technology, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and huge jump

gaates that could teleport whole freighters across interstellar distances.

Spike drives were relegated to the frontier, to the distant star systems

that could not yet a ord to train the psychics or buy the components

necessary to build their own jump gates.

Human space is a vast canvas of mystery to most. Ancient nav charts

are long out of date. Alien races have since moved into many formerly

human-held sectors, and there remain ruins of races that long predate

mankind. Warlords and petty tyrants scheme to expand their stellar

domains, and brave souls struggle to recover lost secrets.

is reliance planted the seed of the golden age’s destruction. In 2665,

a metadimensional pulse of unimaginable violence erupted from the

Stars without number await you.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: