Part 1 | Part 2
System: DEATH IN SPACE
Tools: One Page Solo Engine
- Player thoughts and meta commentary are in Arial.
- The action occurring in the game world is in Times.
- Rules and tools are in Courier.
Character Creation
After playing D&D 5e and Arkham Horror, I wanted to make another genre hop – so I’m back with DEATH IN SPACE, an OSR Sci-Fi game from Free League publishing. This takes me back to a d20 system, but with very simplified rules; there are only four abilities, no skills, and pretty much every check is rolling versus a challenge of 12.
As with my other solo plays, I want to be inspired by rolling up something completely random, starting with character creation.
A few rolls of the dice…
BODY: 0
DEXTERITY: +3
SAVVY: 0
TECH: +1
Okay, so I’m nimble and nerdy, but not very strong or intuitive.
ORIGIN: VELOCITY CURSED. Ill-fated ones that have started to lose their connection to reality. They shift and flicker in and out of spacetime with glitching faces.
BENEFIT: POCKET WORLD. You start with a portable non-phys server, housing a virtual reality where you store memories to connect the past and future of your life. Up to ten users can connect simultaneously.
I love this kind of game design, where they throw out some big ideas like this but no details. What is a “portable non-phys server?” What does connecting to it look like? Can I see into the future, travel through time? There are no details anywhere else in the book; it’s all open for interpretation.
BACKGROUND: Asteroid Archaeologist
TRAIT: Savage
DRIVE: Harmony
LOOKS: Trucker cap with patch
Between the savage trait, my loss of connection with reality, and my drive to find harmony, maybe I’ve been alone for a long time and I’m looking for balance or purpose to get my head right.
PAST ALLEGIANCE DURING THE GEM WAR: WINNING SIDE. You happened to side with the winners, but in the end, did you really win?
Quick note on the setting of DEATH IN SPACE: this is not a generic fill-in-the-blanks sci-fi setting, but a very specific corner of space in very specific circumstances.
In short, the game takes place in the Tenebris system, where 100 years ago explorers discovered gems that allowed advanced technology and FTL travel. Competition over the gems escalated into the Gem War, which ended 10 years ago. One corporation declared victory, but the supply of gems dried up, so all the advanced technology and space travel stopped - now player characters are pretty much trapped here, and everything is old and ramshackle and falling apart.
There are various locations painted with the same broad brush as the origins in the core rulebook, with the exception of The Iron Ring, a “massive ring-like structure assembled from thousands of old spacecraft and refinery modules” that gets a lot more detail.
Oh, and the universe is collapsing, being consumed by a void that bleeds static and monsters into space. Fun!
MAXIMUM HIT POINTS: 4
DEFENSE RATING: 15
Finally, gear and bonuses. Not so much as a starting weapon here, but a bunch of random stuff; and since the sum of my ability scores is positive, no starting bonus like a cool mutation for me.
SAVINGS: 20 holos
STARTING GEAR: NOMAD. Liquid purifier, hover hammock, box of spices, pack of incense sticks, rechargeable battery with compact solar panel
PERSONAL TRINKET: A letter from someone you love.
In addition to characters, a group (or in my case, a single player) gets to roll up what the game calls a “hub”; a spaceship or station that serves as a shared space. I’m going to roll up a spaceship so my character can get around.
STARTING SPACECRAFT: Defense Rating 11, max condition 5, fuel capacity 6
POWER SOURCE: Standard chemical engine, slow, Output Power 3
BACKGROUND: Was part of the renowned Eyemaster squadron of the Union Alliance fleet.
QUIRK: There is a constant drip of diluted chemicals all through the hub.
What a piece of junk! Again, I love the detail of “the renowned Eyemaster squadron of the Union Alliance fleet” with no further details. I’m getting a feel for this scientist who has been studying asteroids alone in space, in this falling-apart ship.
Before I start I’d better come up with some names for my character and their ship. DEATH IN SPACE has a ton of random tables I can roll on, including one for NPC Names - let’s start there for a PC name.
19 “Bo”
16 “Crowne”
Badass.
And for a ship name I’m not seeing a table. I’m imagining this converted military craft as some kind of research vessel, something to do with asteroids and history. Maybe the Delver, like delving into caverns and delving into history.
Okay, somewhere in the Tenebris system we find Bo Crowne, an asteroid archaeologist searching for meaning aboard his ship the Delver. Let’s see what happens.
Plot Hook and First Scene: A Mission to Lliad
I’ve really enjoyed using Mythic 2e as a gamemaster emulator for my playthroughs so far, but this time I’m switching things up to try out the One Page Solo Engine. In name and design, it’s obviously a lot simpler than Mythic, but I’m intrigued by some of the options and oracles and the fact that it uses both dice and playing cards as a resolution mechanic. This provides a lot of variety, with suits acting as categories (physical, technical, mystical, social) and ranks providing more details.
OPSE recommends starting by drawing a Plot Hook and Random Event, then Setting the Scene.
Plot Hook
Objective: 3 “Recover something valuable”
Adversaries: 3 “Guardians”
Rewards: 4 “Support of an ally”
This seems pretty clear; somebody is guarding something valuable, and an ally is asking Bo to recover it. I can draw a few more details about the valuable thing I’m recovering.
DETAIL FOCUS: 2 of diamonds “Technical / Small”
ACTION FOCUS: 9 of spades “Mystical / Command” (in this case “mystical” doesn’t necessarily mean “magic,” but “meaning, capability”)
And just to give myself a little more to play with, I’m going to roll on some DEATH IN SPACE charts for a couple more details.
LOCATION: 9 “Abandoned bunker”
NPC: 12 “Company marshal”
NAME: 20 “Elizi” 8 “Casker”
Okay, now a random event:
ACTION FOCUS: 7 of spades “Mystical / Create”
DETAIL FOCUS: Jack of clubs “Physical / Unexpected”
I think I know what happens on this junky old ship: something unexpectedly fails and “creates” an explosion.
Finally, “Set the scene.” The OPSE says to “describe where your character is and what they are trying to accomplish, then roll or choose a scene complication.”
Soooo Bo has a job to recover something - let’s call it a small “Command Module” - from an abandoned bunker. He was tasked with this mission by Elizi Casker, a security officer for the Union Alliance. The Delver is falling apart and he’s running low on holos, and maybe he’s already in the area, so he jumps to take the job. En route, something explodes.
Set the Scene
Scene Complication: 5 “All is not as it seems”
Altered Scene: 1 “A major detail of the scene is enhanced or somehow worse”
Well, things are not starting out well for old Bo Crowne. Let’s see if he even makes it to this bunker with his 4 hit points.
Bo would bet all his holos that the four least trustworthy words in the entire universe are, “It’s a simple job.” Specifically in that order.
He swings out of the cockpit of the Delver, grabbing a fire suppressor as he does, and floats his way through zero-gee towards the sound of the explosion. Red warning lights shade his face crimson and the smell of sheared metal and burning oil assaults his nostrils.
To be fair to Elizi, most of the trip from the Messier 51 Asteroid Belt to the Habitable Zone had been straightforward. Leaving the belt and spending nearly a month burning fuel to close the distance hadn’t been the most exciting journey, but after nearly a year on his own, Bo had gotten used to being alone. And the taste of rehydrated food was even halfway tolerable.
But it would seem like his luck had run out. The Delver was patched together at the best of times, with strange chemical leaks dripping in every other corridor, and the push across even a small section of the system seemed to be too much for her. She was far overdue a trip to the Iron Ring and a vacation in an engineer’s repair bay.
Of course, repairs cost holos, and Bo is short on those. As he locates the source of the explosion - a panel near the engine room - he runs over the details of Elizi’s “simple” job in his mind again.
Throughout the Gem War, the Union Alliance (a deceptively pro-labor name of an alliance of manufacturing and mining concerns) built and maintained weapons and technology bunkers on the planets and moons of the Tenebris system. Even a decade after the war, they were still retrieving the assets that had been stockpiled in those bunkers – an objective that was complicated by the lack of any new FTL technology.
One of the planets with a bunker was Lliad, which was just a year ago hit by a massive meteor. The planet shattered, with some chunks of the landscape floating as far away as the Messier. At that point, UA chalked it up as a lost cause. But according to Elizi, they had just recently gotten a ping from the half-planet’s surface: something is still intact there, and it’s important enough that they’ll pay a local freelancer to retrieve it.
In the grand scheme of things, the Messier is close to the Habitable Zone, and Bo happened to be there, and he’s still on good terms with UA. The fact that he needs holos sealed the deal.
He braces himself on a bulkhead and sprays the fire suppression foam into the panel, coating it in a fluffy white marshmallow frosting. Then, moving quickly but calmly, he closes off the doorways to the corridor, and taps in the code to vent it. The foam and charred wires seem to shoot into the wall vents, leaving the ship for good.
As he waits for oxygen to refill the corridor, Bo thumbs the letter folded in his breast pocket – so creased and worn that it resembles a piece of fine fabric more than paper. Maybe Elizi’s call was fate. He’s been out here on his own practically since the end of the Gem War, but with holos to spend, he could make his way back to the Iron Ring. With the Delver in a repair bay, he could pay a call to an old friend. It’s the sort of thing that just might make him feel human again.
His eyes focus on his reflection in the corridor’s pane. Hair too long. Beard too wild. Eyes too sunken. Still has most of his teeth, though. No cosmic mutations to speak of, despite all those late nights when he could hear the void crackling in his communicator, seemingly on the ship with him – calling to him. He might need a little re-socializing, but he imagines he’s ahead of a lot of the folks fighting for scraps or hits of KRYb gel.
The light over the door turns green, and Bo pulls himself over to the burned-out panel.
From just a glance, it’s easy to see that things are worse than he thought. The burned out panel is (or was) part of the fuel regulation system. Without a way to regulate fuel consumption, he could burn through his whole supply unknowingly, and end up stranded far from help. Scavenging parts in the Messier would be easy, but here near Lliad… well, he’ll just have to hope that there’s something salvageable in the Union Alliance bunker.
Delver Condition
5 –> 4
This is maybe more flavor than anything else – a decrease in condition like this wouldn’t mechanically mean that the ship is over-burning fuel – but I think it’s a good reflection of “a major detail of the scene is enhanced or somehow worse.” Now Bo has more to worry about on Lliad than just completing his mission; he also needs to find some way to repair his ship.
With a careful hand on the controls, Bo guides the Delver through the debris field around Lliad towards the half-planet that remains. Over the hum of the engine, the navigation computer pings more and more insistently as he approaches the coordinates that Elizi forwarded to him.
If mankind ever thinks he’s mastered nature, Bo thinks, Lliad is a strong counterargument. You can build faster than light bridger ships, program artificial general intelligence, and fling humanity out into the far reaches of space, but a big enough rock moving fast enough can blow it all to smithereens.
Lliad was small and dense enough that the shockwaves didn’t completely scour the far side of the planet, though it still doesn’t look like the sort of place Bo would book a romantic getaway. It’s barren, rocky, gray and black; mountains and canyons with all the green life shriveled in a now less-than-hospitable atmosphere.
Flying low, he spots his target; a squat metal superstructure, jutting from the boulders on the surface like an abscess. He finds a flat stretch of gravel a hundred meters away and brings the Delver down with a crunch.
Within minutes Bo is in his EVA suit and striding through the buoyant gravity. He wonders if anyone has bothered coming back to Lliad since the meteor strike. Most of the action in Tenebris is closer to the Iron Ring, and Lliad isn’t the proper environment for gems. Its only value in the war was a somewhat strategic fallback location, and with the war over, that’s a moot point.
Upon closer inspection, the superstructure has two entrances: a massive hangar bay door, and a smaller personnel-sized entrance in the lee of a pile of boulders. Bo approaches the door panel…
OPSE Oracle Question: Is the power on?
Odds: Even
Results: 6 = Yes
…and sees that it’s lit.
He squints at the panel. Taps the diodes. Looks over his shoulder at the gas giant Tenebris, to make sure the dim red light isn’t reflecting and playing tricks on his eyes. No, the power is definitely on.
How is that possible? Back-up power? Elizi had mentioned a “ping” from the command module here, but Bo figured that was from the device’s remaining local power, not the bunker itself.
There are two buttons on the panel: an intercom and a door control. Bo pauses for a moment, then taps the door control. Best not to announce himself, in case the power is on because somebody is home. The door hisses open and he steps into the airlock.
OPSE Oracle Question: Is there a ship in the hangar?
Odds: Even
Results: 1, 6 = No, and...
Large, high floodlights bathe the empty hangar in light. Nobody is home, and it doesn’t look like there’s been a ship here in a while; there’s not a single piece of salvageable equipment that Bo can use to repair the Delver. His EVA suit indicates that there is breathable atmosphere, though, so he pops open his helmet and doffs it as he looks around.
One Page Solo Engine has some interesting rules for dungeon crawling, which I suppose this dangerous location would be. According to the rules, the first room in the dungeon always has three exits, and when the player explores they roll 4d6: location, encounter, object, and total exits.
I suppose one exit would be the one Bo just came in through, so I’ll say there’s another exit at the back of the hangar and one on the wall to his right.
Bo heads to the door on his right and taps another glowing panel.
LOCATION: 1 “Typical area”
ENCOUNTER: 3 “Hostile enemies”
OBJECT: 3 “An interesting item or clue”
TOTAL EXITS: 2 “Dead end”
Okay, I guess I need to figure out who the “guardians” are in this bunker. I’ll use the NPC generator in OPSE:
IDENTITY: Jack of Hearts “Leader”
GOAL: 3 of Hearts “Learn”
NOTABLE FEATURE: 6 “Unexpected age or origin”
Alright, a hostile leader who’s here to learn, with an interesting item or clue. I can work with that.
The door slides open to reveal a security room; racks of storage crates, uniforms, viewscreens, computers and keyboards. Behind the desk in the middle of the room is an ancient woman, gray hair cascading over narrow shoulders, tapping out something on a terminal. At the sound of the door opening she grabs the pistol on the desk and aims it at Bo.
There’s a slight wobble in her hands, but not enough to keep Bo from quickly putting his own hands in the air.
“Who are you?” she says. Her voice is like a scatter of pebbles across the empty room.
“I’m nobody,” says Bo. He scans the room, looking for anything he can use as a weapon. If there’s anything here, it’s probably locked up in the crates.
“Cute,” she says. “But that’s not going to work for me. So what is it, really. Pirate? Scrapper? Corporate? I’ll give you until the count of three.”
Bo’s mind races. Why the hell would somebody be on Lliad, anyway? A question that’s certainly been at the front of his mind in the few moments since he had a gun pointed at his face. What the hell am I doing here, anyway?
“My ship needs repairs,” he says, which is true. “I was hoping to find something to salvage here,” he says, which is also true. “It was the only place I could reach with the fuel I have,” he says, which he doesn’t even know is true or not.
As far as I can tell there isn’t much in the way of “social” rules in DEATH IN SPACE, so I think I’m going to ask the oracle.
OPSE Oracle Question: Does she believe Bo?
Odds: Unlikely
Results: 6 = Yes
The pistol drifts slightly away from Bo’s head. “Tough place to get stuck,” she says.
“I thought the place would be deserted,” he says, without adding because that’s what Elizi told me.
“This is an old corporate bunker,” she says. She pauses and seems to decide something, then rests the pistol on the desk and goes back to typing. “Union Alliance. The bad guys in the Gem War.”
“Didn’t they win?” says Bo.
The lady snorts. “Nobody won the Gem War,” she says. “But, yes, maybe Union Alliance lost less than some of their competitors. Us, for example.” Something pings on the computer. “Ah-ha!” she says.
“Did you, er, find something?” says Bo. He’s not exactly sure what his role is in this interaction. And he’s still looking at the gun.
“Yes,” says the woman. “Something very important. Something proprietary.” She hits a key and squealing sound under the desk produces a sheet of paper.
“Who are you?” Bo finally asks. “What are you doing here?”
She scans her eyes over the paper and addresses Bo without looking at him.
NAME: 6 “Mirai” 12 “Keone”
“Mirai Keone. Former Chief Technology Officer for Erebus Extractions. Current…” she trails off. “Not quite sure.” She brandishes the paper. “But once I get this, I’ll be back in the C-Suite.”
“What is it?” asks Bo.
“Listen,” Mirai says, rounding the desk and returning her gun to its holster, “you seem a little out of your depth here, and maybe you don’t know much about the Gem War, so here’s the important thing: Union Alliance? They were the bad guys. They stole something from Erebus that put us at a disadvantage, a sort of backdoor into our technology, and I got handed the blame.”
Sounds an awful lot like a control module, thinks Bo. He nods thoughtfully. “Tough break,” he says.
“I thought it was secreted away where we would never find it, but it recently pinged Erebus from this bunker. So I’m going to get it back, and then I’m going to get back to my former position. And somewhere in between,” she claps a hand on his shoulder, “I’m going to help you get off this rock.”
This feels like a good spot for a scene/chapter break. So Elizi sent our poor hero Bo to Lliad to recapture some stolen technology before the rightful owners could get to it, but Bo’s old junker wasn’t quite fast enough. The hostile enemy in this room is a rival who hates Union Alliance, but that very lucky oracle roll defused the situation.
As far as an interesting item or clue, I think it stands to reason that Bo could get a weapon or some armor from this security room. There’s a good table on the OPSE to find out just how lucky he is.
OPSE Oracle Question: How good is the equipment Bo finds?
Results: 1 = Surprisingly lacking
Dang. So no Ultimate Hyper Disintegration Beam or anything like that. Let’s say all the good stuff is locked up in the crates as Bo expected, but he is able to find a melee weapon – an oscillator knife that has a condition of 2 and does damage of 1d4. No armor, no ranged weapons, no explosives.
There are still some unanswered questions here: Where is this control module? What caused it to power up in this abandoned bunker? And how long will Bo’s cover hold up?
Continue Bo's Story -> Part 2
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