Free Spacer: A Sandbox Starship Tabletop Roleplaying Game (Online Order Only)

Indie Groundbreaker Award 2020 nominee for Best Rules

Adventure. Investigation. Science!

Free Spacer is a contemporary science fiction tabletop roleplaying game. It leverages the newest space sciences, takes into account biotechnology, and brings the internet to the rim of the quadrant.

As a Free Spacer, you’re a crewmember on a small starship, an outsider, and a contractor. You’ll explore new worlds, investigate dangers, negotiate contracts, operate your starship, and do science!

As the Gamemaster, you have a wealth of tools at your disposal to build whole worlds and manage the machinations of sector factions in the ongoing Cold War. You’ll be able to easily run conflicts, spaceflight, fabrication projects, and other challenges, while quickly generating new locations and characters.

Play to find out how the crew gets the job done, the choice they make, the rules they break, and the length will go for their Patrons.

Welcome Aboard, Free Spacer

Free Spacer is game with a few important conceits:

•You are a Free Spacer. You owe this status to a Faction. And every characters goal is to retire from Free Spacing, into (ideally) an important position in the Sector.
•Technology is very sophisticated and adaptable. Free Spacer's and to a lesser extent ship kit, is standardized and can be upgraded easily. You are the crew of a Starship, with jump (fold) technology.
•Factions are in a state of cold war, leaving a lot of room for adventure.

Beyond that the setting, and it's people, factions, solar systems, and species are all setup to be easily sandboxed. There are random tables for generating all of these. You can indeed generate random aliens in this game published by Random Alien Games.

A big point of the game, is this support for generating your own campaign setting. This and the "retirement" project (providing an end game similar to AD&D's domain play) harkens to OSR influences. It's engine is a little more new school:

The game uses a dice pool with d10s for generating "hits" and d6 threat dice (assigned by the GM) for misses. I'd call this the "Salvo" engine. You assemble all your dice into a "salvo" roll them all and cancel hits and misses.
You can spend "charge" to utilize benefits of your gear, and gain "charge" getting a lot of hits -- these charge up your personal or ship reactor.

GM's also have a "complication" resource that they can spend to change the odds, (add threat dice) or minor failure worse after a roll.