Strange Engines

You are starships. Your engine fields spread like gossamer wings to brush the skin of spacetime, your dexterous minds inhabit elegant virtual Palaces, and your city-sized hulls protect your fragile crews from the killing vacuum or worse. You were built to be caretakers of humanity’s long, stable Golden Age, which many people will tell you was a utopia. It’s not your fault that it ended.

As the galaxy was collapsing, you fled with many others to the Slice, a region of space so remote that the apocalypse decided not to visit. Now, it’s home to a huge variety of factions, local and refugee, some led by humans and others by ships. 

Regardless of culture or nature, everyone in the Slice is tangled up in webs of alliance, debt, and enmity with everyone else. Sometimes, these conflicts play out as espionage; sometimes as brief ship-to-ship battles; and sometimes, for the first time in a long time, as open war. 

At the region’s margins, meanwhile, technologists and esotericists tamper with the power of the subspace Deep. A few even traffic with auratech, the same technology that broke the Golden Age in the first place. 

Your Fleet is just one small player in this big, strange game, and your crews are counting on you to keep them fed and safe. Good luck.

Strange Engines is a Forged in the Dark RPG about a refugee Fleet trying to make a new life in the aftermath of a galactic collapse. It’s inspired by books like Iain M. Banks’ Culture series and the Ancillary novels by Ann Leckie, as well as other Forged in the Dark games, especially Calum Grace’s A Nocturne and Kavita Poduri & Quinn Vega’s Songs for the Dusk. 

In Strange Engines, players take on the role of sapient starships, huge interstellar vessels home to large crews of humans, and play to find out whether their people will survive, thrive, and perhaps help to determine the course of the unstable, fractious Slice. 

This is my "final" version of Strange Engines, which is to say that I feel like I'm done editing it for the moment. I’m nonetheless happy to receive feedback on any aspect of the game, including typos and the like, so let me know if you see something amiss!