A NOCTURNE is a hard sci-fi Forged in the Dark roleplaying game by Calum Grace about space travel, power, and transhumanism. It casts the players as the crew of an interstellar spitter craft - a vast, weird, scarred old spaceship - and charges them with a simple task: make Profit by any means necessary. Will they be smugglers and thieves? Scavengers? Diplomats? Con artists? Or mere war-criminals, leaving nothing but dust in their wake? Will they let their stress and guilt consume them and their craft, or will they rise above it and retire to some peaceful world, rich as kings? Will they even survive 'til the next inhabited system? That's what we play to find out!You should all be dead. Or at least dying along with the ship, in a coma in your sleep capsules, organs finally failing when the emergency systems of the spitter craft eventually fail.
(Spitter Craft: A massive, decrepit sublight spaceship. Filled with forgotten horrors. Dripping with bad memories. Ancient. Alive, technically. Home.)
There was an accident, en route to your destination, in the vast nothing between anything of note. An uncalibrated rod. Some bad bacteria in the ship's veins. The wrong command in the wrong console. Boom. Systems failure, cascading throughout the ship. And then silence.
The craft's AI should've woken up an emergency response team, but if it did, they've failed. The ship is drifting, horribly off course, running on batteries that'll drain any day, now. In an effort to conserve what little power remains, the AI itself has shut down everything "non-essential," leaving you deep in coldsleep while the alarms chime, unheard.
There you would've stayed. But here you are: awake. Due to an astoundingly improbable turn of fortune, a still-active, still-automated vestige of the ship's AI woke you up and spat you out of your capsules. Out here in the void, your craft now warns you of a proximity alert: a cannibal craft, scavengers drilling through your hull to come murder you, blow your ship to pieces, and eat the parts for scrap.
You didn’t think you’d be that lucky, did you?
Step 1: Restore power to the drive. Restore craft-wide life support.
Step 2: Bring the AI back online.
Step 3... We'll see if we get to step 3...
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3-4 Players is the ideal number. Character and Craft creation will be done at the table, and should be familiar to those who've played FitD games (though that's not at all necessary!). On the subject of content: A NOCTURNE is an often bleak vision of the human future and can push towards some fairly dark or heavy content, especially body horror, psychological harm, and violence (both direct and structural) enacted on a large scale.
We'll be using safety tools (specifics tbd, likely lines & veils and/or the X-card)!
1. Jason
2. Charles
3. JB
4. Hugh
5. Lisa
