Stillfleet – all-new through Mon 14 April

Through Monday, April 14 we present the Stillfleet Bundle featuring Stillfleet, the far-future SFRPG from the Stillfleet Studio about exploring ruined spacecraft (“hulks”) and habitable earth-like planets, cut off from contact with Terra for decades or centuries. Players are voidminers, explorers working for the Worshipful Company of Stillfleeters, known simply as “the Co.” Their home, the alien space station nicknamed Spindle – a sea slug made of undulating black stone, kilometers long – is a mystery to its own inhabitants. The Spindle harbors timespace gates called stiffworks, many of which lead to habitable worlds. Using the flexible Grit System, you can play any sapient species, from a (post)human to a giant bug, a mobile xeno-cactus, or an AI that projects an invulnerable hologram. No matter what type of voidminer you create, you’ll have to contend with a venal Co. that sends you out on dangerous ventures at short notice for confounding reasons. The cosmos of Stillfleet is hilarious and horrifying – the struggles, all too real.

Over the æons many human and alien civilizations have risen and fallen in the void, littering Terra and countless other worlds and world-ships with glittering layers of technological ruins. Some are useful, some dangerous, but all are valuable to the greedy, human-run Worshipful Company of Stillfleeters (“the Co.”). For 300 years (Terrasol Standard Time) the Co. has amassed technological power, and today its anonymous directors effectively govern provinces of a few billion sapients (primarily different groups of humans and giant cricket-like bugs named wetans). The inhabitants of the worlds beyond Spindle remain locked in unequal trade agreements, gaining little from the Co.’s voidmining.

Will the player characters – the voidminers – choose to execute their corporate duties in faithful servitude? Malinger and build new bases of power among their fellow voidminers on Spindle? Ally themselves with resistance movements in the provinces? Or might they even join the anarchistic Honourable Company or the nonhuman-centric Federation of Unhuman Kingdoms?

Stillfleet is both a game about epic space adventure – you can run around killing acid-spitting xenos and stealing biolasers from flying fungi – and a thought experiment about how to enact positive social change when you work for the Man. Get rich or die trying? Kill your masters? Find new tools to dismantle their house? Most of all, Stillfleet is just fun to play. The Grit System has a gambling element (boosting grit), and there are infinite worlds and dead alien ships (stillfleets) to explore.

This all-new Stillfleet Bundle provides much of the Stillfleet line to date – everything you need to explore weird character options and bizarre settings across threespace and beyond. Pay just US$9.95 to get both titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $34) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Stillfleet Core Rulebook and the nanotech-themed character expansion Subtle Fluid.

And if you pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $19.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with three more titles worth an additional $44, including the espionage-themed gazetteer Qadida, the eight-venture anthology Peregrinations, and the full-length Venture (scenario) The Sleeper in the Sky.