Category Archives: Ashen Stars

Community Content Spotlight: Solo Laser

In the Community Content Spotlight, each month I write up a short review of a GUMSHOE community content title, all of which are available on DriveThruRPG. See this page if you’re interested in creating something for our Community Program! ————————————— Stick around after the review to hear the results of the GUMSHOE Community Contest! An […]

Community Content Spotlight: Rogues’ Galaxy

In the new Community Content Spotlight, each month I’ll be writing up a short review of a community content title, all of which are available on DriveThruRPG. See this page if you’re interested in creating something for our Community Program! —————————————— With Rogues’ Galaxy, Chris Sellers turns the standard Ashen Stars setup on its head. […]

GUMSHOE Community program

It’s official – the GUMSHOE Community program is live! We announced in our Swords, Spies and Shoggoths panel at Gen Con (which you can listen to here, thanks to our friends at the Plot Points podcast) that we were launching the GUMSHOE Community program, making Ashen Stars content available to creators. If you’re not familiar […]

Station Duty: Bitter Vigil

A previous article outlined an alternate campaign frame for Ashen Stars. Here’s a worked example. (The inspiration for this example, by the way, came from an episode of 99% Invisible about the Great Bitter Lake Association.) In the Ashen Stars setting, ships travel fast-than-light along translight corridors. The largest starships – massive industrial supercarriers, mobile refineries, and […]

(Space) Station Duty

The 2nd edition of the Esoterrorists includes the Station Duty campaign frame, in which a Esoterrorist team is placed on long-term assignment to a particular small town for an ongoing investigation instead of the usual mystery-of-the-week. That approach also works in Ashen Stars. (The obvious worked example: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine swapped out the […]

See P. XX: Bad Contracts of the Bleed

A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws In Ashen Stars, players portray freelance law enforcers working the spacelanes of the frontier sector known as the Bleed. Their ability to secure lucrative contracts depends on their reputation, which goes up when they solve cases well and honorably, and drops when they get caught cutting ethical […]

Rogue Paleontologist Rewrites Planetary Ecosystem

Replication A scenario seed for Ashen Stars The lasers pick up a contract from an independent scientific consortium to investigate the fate of one of their Sherlock-class survey vessels. It sent out a distress call several days ago and has not been heard from since. The Linnaeus was orbiting a supposedly barren planet in the […]

Ashen Scoundrels: Running a game of smugglers in Ashen Stars

by Chris Sellers I recently ran a short campaign of Ashen Stars where the group played crooks instead of Lasers. They were honorable thieves, like the crew of “Firefly,” or maybe the Han Solo we’ll see in Solo. The game was set in a vast Bleed where they also had to dodge a still-powerful Combine. […]

Star Trek: Discovery, Ashen Stars, and Episode Structure

[Contains a mild spoiler for the most recent episode of Discovery…] A note on tone in Ashen Stars invites you to think of it as the gritty reboot of a beloved TV space opera show from the past. Enough episodes of Star Trek: Discovery have dropped to see that it is very much reading out […]

The Plain People of Gaming: Icons of the Ashen Stars

There are a lot of books in the pipeline right now, but none of them are quite cooked yet, so here’s a little bit of whimsy before the cannon of self-promotion is brought to bear on this space. As you know, Bob, Icons are a lovely little mechanic from 13th Age that model the player […]

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