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Title: Out to the Black Footer: Numenera, the Cypher System, No Thank You, Evil!, Invisible Sun, and their respective logos are trademarks of Monte Cook Games, LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. All Monte Cook Games characters and character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are trademarks of Monte Cook Games, LLC. Content derived from Monte Cook Games publications is © 2013-2022 Monte Cook Games, LLC. Full Disclaimer.
Out to the Black
Out to the Black is space sci-fi campaign run in a homebrew fictional universe, run in the Cypher System.
Campaign Synopsis
Humanity has spread to the stars. Humanity has lost record of what happened to Earth, but it is believed to have suffered a total biosphere collapse, and in its waning days, spaceships were launched in all directions, humanity's last chance to find survival among the black, abandoning their doomed world.
Many were invariably lost in the act of desperation, victim to the emptiness of space. The known survivors reached Xi Tauri, and spread among its many planets. Waking from cyro-sleep, the original explorers staked out humanity's new future among biomes hospitable and not, establishing agrarian villages, land stations, and basic terraformed lands.
As time has passed, humanity has salvaged its roots, good and ill. Travel between the stellar system and its planets is long but commonplace. Civilization resides in hundreds of scattered settlements across the planets, moons, occasional asteroid or comet, and space stations. The system's government focuses on a core set of planets, exploiting the resources of the rest of the system for only its settlements. The outer worlds rely on local law, and some remnants of the initial settlement of the system still drift in orbit, latent.
Notes
- Likely to steal liberally from...
- Firefly
- Star Trek
- Farscape
- Alien
- ...mashing up elements of hard sci-fi and space opera under an advanced technology rating (space travel inside a system is relatively ordinary, but traveling beyond a system is almost never undertaken; FTL travel doesn't exist but gravity generation does; generally things follow known physics, but there's always the opportunity for psionics, alien stuff, etc.)
- Characters: "mercs fighting the good fight"?
- Think about if any of you is going to need piloting skills.
Character Creation
At their basic level, characters are defined as NAME is a [adjective] [noun] who [verbs]. Adjectives are descriptors, nouns are types, similar to character classes, and verbs are foci.
Chapter 4 of the Cypher System Rulebook details character creation, with description of the mechanical elements, and a small sidebar summarizing the steps to take to create a character.
Sources
The majority of the options below are found, and best described, in the Cypher System Rulebook, with an open gaming version available via the Cypher SRD. Most others come from The Stars Are Fire. Anything homebrew we'll write up and link to here.
I skipped listing a lot of the core content, because there's no point in repeating that everything in the core book/SRD are fair game --- the exception to this are the foci, which are tailored below.
...
Science Stuff
- Xi Tauri
- The three blue-white B-type stars could form planets, though they don't have a ton of time in main sequence. Likely require some form of shelter for life. Alien life, lots of meteor strikes and young planet activity.
- The F-type star yields the most earth-like planets.