SWN-EB-Final-120510B, Darmowe RPG, dtrpg, dtrpg-2012-02-01 03-25am(1), Nowy folder
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STARS WITHOUT NUMBER
For Eden, who gave me a reason.
T
ABLE
O
F
C
ONTENTS
Introduction ..............................................................................................................5
Character Creation ....................................................................................................7
Psionics ...................................................................................................................25
Equipment ..............................................................................................................33
Systems ...................................................................................................................59
e History of Space ...............................................................................................71
Game Master’s Guide ..............................................................................................78
World Generation ...................................................................................................87
Factions .................................................................................................................113
Adventure Creation ...............................................................................................128
Alien Creation .......................................................................................................138
Xenobestiary .........................................................................................................148
Designer’s Notes ....................................................................................................158
Hydra Sector .........................................................................................................164
Game Master Resources ........................................................................................180
Index .....................................................................................................................200
Record Sheets ........................................................................................................202
© 2010, Sine Nomine Publishing
ISBN 978-1-936673-00-1
Written by Kevin Crawford.
Cover art and interior art provided by NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia,
Charlottesville), e Hubble Heritage Team (STScI), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee.
Interior art by Tamás Baranya, Cerberus Illustrations, Pawet Dobosz, Angela Harburn, Andy Hepworth, Szilvia Huszar, Eric Lofgren,
Bradley K McDevitt, Louis Porter Jr. Design, Maciej Zagorski, and e Forge Studios, used with permission.
Some artwork copyright Talisman Studios (c) 2007, used with permission. All rights reserved.
4
e year is 3200. Humanity is scattered like
dust among the stars. e broken relics of a
former day litter the sky and men and women
struggle to rebuild the glory of humanity’s lost
golden age.
Veil Nebula, washing over the whole of known space in seconds.
Every psychic in human space was instantly killed or maddened by
the surge, burnt out in what later became known as the Scream.
With the jump gates inoperable and all the psychic mentors insane
or dead, the core worlds were suddenly cut o from the frontier. A
few spike drive ships remaining in the core were able to make their
way out, bringing tales of horror, starvation, and frantic warfare over
shipyards and orbital factories. Most of the core worlds are thought to
have perished, cut o from the worlds that supplied their enormous
populations and fueled their vital technologies.
For almost a thousand years humanity had expanded from its ancient
cradle to ll the sky with its worlds. At rst the expansion came by
way of the enigmatic “spike drives” that granted humans the ability
to skip between stars. Countless nations, faiths, and ideologies sent
colonists to the darkness above to nd new homes where they could
live free from the oppressive rule of Terra’s calci ed masters.
e centuries that followed were known as the Silence, as unnumbered
human worlds fought to survive their sudden isolation. Some slid
into barbarism or worse, their planets unable to support a starfaring
civilization. Some worlds lacked metals, or fossil fuels, or any one of
countless other vital ingredients for maintaining their industry. And
all, of course, lacked the psionic mentors necessary to train a new
generation of psychics.
e spike drive touched on di erent worlds. It folded the tissue of
space and time and pierced it to emerge at distant stars, but the space
between touched in turn those who traveled it. Over the course of
generations, this subtle in uence shaped certain descendants of the
starfarers. e condition that resulted was known as “Metadimensional
Extroversion Syndrome”. Most simply knew its victims as “MESses”.
Later, they were known as psychics.
Over the past six hundred years, humanity has slowly, painfully begun
to heal the wounds of the Scream. Not all worlds were incapable
of independent survival, and these hardy planets have become the
lynchpins of stellar nations and miniature empires. Trade routes have
revived with time and the building of new spike drives. Expeditions
are regularly mounted to the tomb worlds of the outer core to
scavenge what can be reclaimed from the bones of the dead past.
MES inevitably killed or maddened its carriers when they began to
use their powers. e surge of extradimensional energy either cooked
their brains or burnt a pathway through their sanity. It was only
through decades of research and the expenditure of countless lives
that techniques were developed for harnessing this power safely.
Yet a pall hangs over these e orts. Great sacri ce has revived some of
the old secrets of psychic training, but no world dares rely on psionic
forces any longer. e nature of the Scream is still a mystery. For now,
humanity strives to build a world that does not rely upon powers it
cannot fully understand or completely control.
e channeling of psionic energy began the second great expansion
of humankind. Even though hardly more than one in ten thousand
humans were touched by MES, it was still enough to reshape human
civilization. Vast choirs of psychics were employed to develop new
technology, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and huge jump
gaates that could teleport whole freighters across interstellar distances.
Spike drives were relegated to the frontier, to the distant star systems
that could not yet a ord to train the psychics or buy the components
necessary to build their own jump gates.
Human space is a vast canvas of mystery to most. Ancient nav charts
are long out of date. Alien races have since moved into many formerly
human-held sectors, and there remain ruins of races that long predate
mankind. Warlords and petty tyrants scheme to expand their stellar
domains, and brave souls struggle to recover lost secrets.
is reliance planted the seed of the golden age’s destruction. In 2665,
a metadimensional pulse of unimaginable violence erupted from the
Stars without number await you.
5
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