Through Monday, November 16 we present the Death in Space Bundle featuring Death in Space, the rules-light SFRPG from Stockholm Kartell (the collective behind Mörk Borg) and Free League Publishing about grimy survival and uncertain journeys in the void of the Tenebris star system. The Gem War has bled Tenebris dry, the gems that powered interstellar travel are mined out, and the void – a strange presence at the edge of reality – seeps into everything it touches. You’re a laborer, a scavenger, a cyborg, or a cultist, one of a ragtag crew on a creaky spacecraft or station. Your crew’s reputation matters more than cash, and you face slim odds of surviving long enough to raise either. Patch the hull, scrounge spare parts, steal what you can’t earn, and build your rep before rival crews, void cultists, and your own mutating body finish you off. Take the job. Loot the wreck. Don’t stare into the void.
Funded in a big March 2021 Kickstarter campaign (3,549 backers), Death in Space combines the doom-laden artpunk angst of Mörk Borg with the run-down blue-collar squalor of Alien, The Expanse, Firefly, and Mothership. Your character gets one of six origins: Carbon, Chrome, Void, Velocity-Cursed, Punk, or Solpod, who wake every few decades to study slow cosmic phenomena. Build your crew’s hub from more than 60 salvaged modules. Task resolution is a d20 roll against a target 12. Spend Void Points for an edge, or to unlock one of 20 mutations like Feedback Loop, which jumps you back ten seconds at the cost of a memory. But when you summon the void, the void summons you right back, and corruption starts.
The setting is a universe on its way to a Big Crunch, left in ruins by the decades-long Gem War. The war was fought over the gems of Inauro, a moon of the Tenebris system, which powered the “bridger” spacecraft. Now the moon is mined out, shipbuilding has stopped, and travel between star systems has dwindled. Even within Tenebris, trips are long and dangerous. The game hints at this background in brief, evocative entries: the Iron Ring, a cluster of crowded stations and derelict ships orbiting Inauro; the ship graveyard of Rimtursar 581; and four sinister cults.
Your character has four attributes (Body, Dexterity, Savvy, and Tech, each from -3 to +3), an origin with two special abilities, a background (isotope coder, bounty hunter, monolith cultist), a drive that gets you out of your bunk each morning, and a trinket, such as a cartridge holding the AI of a dead pet. Character creation is quick, which is handy because combat is lethal. And the lead-up to combat is especially tense, because anyone who starts a hostile action tops the initiative order. At any time, someone could pull a gun on you and turn a discussion into a fight – and they get the first shot.
Spacecraft confrontations use four range bands – Detection, Identification, Firing, and Boarding. You can turn the tide of battle with a “risky maneuver,” if you have the fuel to burn. Repairs and salvage are crucial parts of the game: Nothing you own is new, and when you use anything, there’s a risk it breaks. Scavenge spare parts to keep your hub together, and take any contract that pays for them. The Contract Generator gives you Mad-Libs contracts that mix-and-match a mission, payment, person, group, object, event, and location. The tables, like Death in Space itself, are light on detail but heavy on atmosphere. Your group together fills in the gaps in the setting description. Your crew in Death in Space becomes your found family. In a star system of warlords, corrupt company officials, and space pirates, your fellow ordinary, hard-working folks might be the only ones you trust.
This all-new Death in Space Bundle gives you everything you need for a campaign of hand-to-mouth survival in a rattletrap starship in a decaying civilization in a universe collapsing into inevitable, encroaching, consuming, eternal nothingness. Pay just US$19.95 to get all eight titles in our Death in Space Collection (retail value $80) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 136-page Death in Space Core Rules along with four third-party adventures by German designer Christian Eichhorn: the sandbox campaign CLVSTER, where you explore a haunted mining belt and fight the followers of the Marrow Goddess Yust’Nata; Derelict, which sends you to loot nine wrecks orbiting a rogue black hole; Xenophilia, a trip to three corrupted planets bathed in mutating delta radiation; and the short dungeon-crawl pamphlet adventure Tyrwal 17. And Stockholm Kartell has added three mini-scenarios from its itch.io page: Katali XI, Nunsuaq Station, and Search and Salvage.
Get this Death in Space offer before the Big Crunch Monday, November 16.
