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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 Engineswhich 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!

StatusReleased
CategoryPhysical game
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorApsychist
TagsForged in the Dark, Sci-fi, Tabletop role-playing game

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Strange Engines v1.0.pdf 5.8 MB
SE_Class_Playbooks.pdf 452 kB
SE_Fleet_Playbooks_0.2.pdf 1,023 kB
SE_Faction_Sheet_0.1.pdf 207 kB
Slice_Map.png 264 kB

Development log

Comments

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The game looks really, really good! 

I had a question about crew and their equipment. How are you meant to handle weapons, armor, tools, vehicles, and other items at human-scale? For example, fighter pilots have multiple mentions throughout the PDF, but would this circle of pilots consider these fighters as part of the cost of activating the cohort OR would they need to be a system like shuttles? 

Also, two discrepancies I noticed...

Page 87 says the Fleet begins with 1 utility marked and then choose 2 more, for a total of three, yet each Fleet Playbook begins with 2 utilities marked. I'm assuming the latter is what's intended.

Page 101 says the Fleet can activate 1 cohort for free, but the Autonomous Shuttlecraft utility on page 88 says you can activate 2 for free.

(+1)

I'm really glad you checked out the game, and thanks for the feedback!

Concerning your question on crew, everything a cohort needs in terms of equipment, etc. is considered to be a part of the cohort, so building/repairing/fueling fighters is part of the activation cost. I'll make this clearer in the next edit.

Thanks for pointing out the errors with utilities and cohorts, too. Each Fleet should indeed start with two utilities marked, and doesn't mark more during creation. As you might be able to tell from the fact that the text disagrees with itself, I was going back and forth on this and decided that choosing utilities slowed down Fleet creation too much. As for cohort activation, the Fleet can activate 2 cohorts at the beginning of a journey for free, not just one.