Tag Archives: Ashen Stars

See P. XX: Using Interpersonal Abilities on Other GUMSHOE PCs

See Page XX A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws During a session GUMSHOE players sometimes wonder if they can use their interpersonal investigative abilities on each others’ characters. I’m not sure this special case needs to be heavily featured in any of our core rule sets but here’s how you might handle it […]

If You Want to Ever Feel Your Past Again, Pay Up

An Ashen Stars scenario hook Interstellar commodities magnate Agnes Moro wakes up in an unfamiliar, disabled ship floating in space near the planet Bifrost. Its primary holo screen plays an audio-only recording on loop. The electronically distorted voice says: “Search your recollections and you will find that you have none. We have confiscated your memories. […]

What You Can Tell About a Crew That Drives a Hauler

Once again we look at a common small ship of the Bleed and see what your Ashen Stars characters can typically deduce about the people who drive it. Whenever your console pings the presence of an approaching small vessel, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s going to be a hauler. Ninety-eight of those times, […]

The Plain People of Gaming: Return to Mandible

The Accretion Disk supplement for Ashen Stars (available from Pelgrane’s shiny new webstore) contains detailed writeups for six common Laser ship designs – the Runner, Hammer, Rampart, Speeder, Porcupine and Hauler. It’s also got deck plans for, er, seven ship designs. Some meson shrapnel interference unaccountably scrambled communications, so the Mandible got a set of deck […]

In Space No One Can Tell It’s Solstice

In space, the darkest day of the year is every day. Nonetheless, five of the Combine’s seven major species evolved naturally on home planets before reaching for the stars, and to various degrees remember rituals and holidays that marked the turning point between encroaching and receding night. Before the war, human secularism confined Christmas celebrations […]

What You Know About a Crew That Rides a Hammer

Your freelance law enforcement crew may have formed and then found a ship with which to ply the justice trade out in the Bleed. Or perhaps you joined an existing laser gang that already had a ship. Whether or not you had a say in the class of ship you crew on, it has an […]

God is Between the Frequencies

A nufaith For Ashen Stars After the disaster of the Mohilar War, new religious movements swept the ravaged region of galactic civilization called the Bleed. Among these so-called nufaiths is a belief system dependent on the personal detachment inherent in long-distance electronic communications. Onandeteria, named after its balla founder, Onandeter, teaches that great spiritual force […]

Too Many McGuffins

An Ashen Stars scenario premise Before the Mohilar War, many of the Bleed’s planets were settled by proponents of the Synthculture movement. They created worlds to replicate past periods of human and alien history, often filtered through a pop culture lens. The self-described film noir world of Lost Angeles (spelling intentional) functioned surprisingly well until the […]

Armada of Rust

A scenario premise for Ashen Stars The lasers take a contract to stop an isolated planetary despot from starting a disastrous, self-destructive war. The mystery: how to do that. Since the Mohilar War the the planet Endemia has retreated from the rest of the Bleed. Their economy locked into a failed policy of self-determination, its […]

Planet of War

From the planet Sumter the call goes out: the wargames are on. Before the Mohilar War, Sumter existed as a synthculture planet. It appealed to both permanent and transient populations wishing to relive the period of the US Civil War, including its major battles. Those reenactments took place with fake weapons and robust technological safeguards. […]

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