Saturday, 9 November 2024

Update 3 for Sixty Years in Space is out

Update 3 is out for Sixty Years in Space is out. And I'm incredibly proud of it.


There's enough changes here that in many ways, this feels like an 1.5th edition. But the key improvement is I've found the shape of the game in a way that was unfortunately lacking in earlier versions. I've slimmed down the core (now called the Crewed) rules and put the focus firmly on space travel in the core game.  It includes significant revisions to the way actions work and a lot of new actions and activities such as phoning home, immigration and hull breaches, and moves the whole exploration of the surface of worlds to a new supplement (A)-Base (D)-Landing where it belongs: as a preamble to a whole new base building scenario for those players who like the idea of exploring and exploiting extraterrestrial worlds in much more detail.

The key change is tying encounters to the expansion of exoinfrastructure. As you move on the High Frontier map, you'll see other factions building factories and colonies and anchoring Bernals in a way that should make the solar system feel much more of a living and breathing thing without having to learn a whole lot more rules in This Space Intentionally or All Errors are My Own. And encounters have been expanded and simplified by adding encounter cards, so you can quickly create adversaries and allies without having to roll on a whole lot of tables every time you have an encounter.

In making this change, I've also tweaked and enhanced rules across all the supplements. But the Crewed Rules (the new name for the core rules) have received the most attention and polish to make Sixty Years in Space an easier version of the hardest sci fi TTRPG. The full release notes are available on the itch.io devlog post.

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