Death in Space

The war is over, the governments are gone, and the corporations that were left behind can barely keep the lights on. Death in Space is a gritty sci-fi horror roleplaying game about the people still out there: a ragged crew of salvagers, mercenaries and misfits, trying to make rent in a star system that’s slowly falling apart.

Christian Plogfors and Carl Niblaeus of Stockholm Kartell designed it, and it’s published by Free League. The game is set in the Tenebris system, a forgotten frontier still scarred by the Gem War. Comms crackle with endless static, machines only run if you keep patching them, and every job could be your last. Your crew’s home is a battered spaceship or space station, its hub. You build it together from scavenged frames, power systems and modules, and keep it running with spare parts and stubbornness.

The rules are fast and lightweight, in the OSR style. You roll a d20, add one of four stats and try to beat the difficulty. Every failure earns you a Void Point. You can spend Void Points to push your luck or unlock strange cosmic mutations, but lean on the void too much and it starts leaving its mark on you. Characters are created entirely at random. You might play a short-lived clone, an AI stuck in a body of flesh, someone knocked loose in time or a void-touched mystic.

If you like the blue-collar dread of Alien, the scrappy found-family crews of Firefly or the stripped-back style of games like Mothership and MÖRK BORG, this is the game for your table.

Inside you’ll find:

• Random character creation with unusual origins, backgrounds, traits and drives
• Hub creation rules for building your crew’s ship or station, with more than 60 modules
• Void Points, cosmic mutations and void corruption rules
• A repair and maintenance system built around scavenged spare parts
• Space travel, ship-to-ship combat and boarding rules
• An introduction to the Tenebris system, its factions and cults
• Welcome to the Ring, an introductory scenario set on the Iron Ring
• More than 40 random tables and generators for jobs, encounters, malfunctions and more

Specifications:

• Designers: Christian Plogfors & Carl Niblaeus (Stockholm Kartell)
• Publisher: Free League Publishing (Free League Workshop)
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: approx. 136
• Size: approx. 6.25 × 9.5 in (15.9 × 24.1 cm)
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• EAN: 9789189143401