Psychic Space Opera in the Wreckage of a Dead Alien Galaxy

By fits and starts, humans finally developed hyperlight travel and took to the stars. But everywhere they went, they found only vast emptiness. They established colonies on other worlds. Then they found the remains: Primordial ruins left by impossibly ancient alien civilizations, scars in the crust of planets like our own. Hulking derelict space vessels floating silently, their life support systems disabled in ancient eons, their crews reduced to films of lifeless carbon residue.

Despite their loneliness amid the stars, humans forged a sprawling and fractious galactic empire. Novel arts and sciences sprang into being, while disconnected colonies lapsed into varieties of barbarism. Fleets of star ships enforced factional interests in crucial trade corridors, and the houses of baroque imperial power played long strategic games of intrigue for dominance.

Scattered across the galaxy, a generation of espers was born. The noble houses seek these gifted ones to train them and use them as weapons against each other.

You are the crew of a small vessel: a mercenary, a spy, an esper, a titled noble, a scientist, a robot, a rogue, or some other pawn in a bleak and byzantine space opera. But even a pawn may become a queen when it reaches the other side.

Touchstones

• Dune as if drawn by Mœbius
• Alien and H.R. Giger art
• Caprica
• Blade Runner
• Bubblegum Crisis
• Lovecraft
• Akira
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Weird Tales

System: Mercenaries Spies & Private Eyes, 2019 Combined Edition; with supplemental psionics rules adapted from GURPS Basic Set, 3rd edition.

MSPE is a fast and flexible game in the Tunnels & Trolls family. But unlike T&T, there are no classes and character competence is based on the skills you choose to advance.

• Quick Character Creation
• Psionics