A millennium in the future, megaconglomerates, ancient aristocracies, and the political hegemon known as the Supreme Republic of Man sprawl humanity across the solar system. Mankind has stumbled and sacrificed its way toward the stars only to touch the Kuiper Belt and see the stars beyond dimming. The Oort Cloud collapses, and humanity will never leave its home.
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Starset: The Great Dimming is a grimdark tabletop role-playing game focused on tension, strategy, and hope produced by Josiah Mork and Christian game publisher Hoodwink Games. The same creator that created the Basic and Generic (BaG) RPG is back with a fierce new world and aggressively tactical system for ambitious gamers.
Centuries of expansion carve human touch on every corner of the solar system. Across these years, powerful organizations vied for the hope of unlocking the solar system's wealth first. Competition ruined their hopes and sabotage obliterated their ventures, culminating in threats of open war.
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Humanity therefore agreed to bow to a joint power - the Supreme Republic of Man (SRM). A Supreme Senate elected by each citizen of the solar system would dictate order. Such a broad need for consensus, however, results in only eight edicts protecting its citizens in the fifty years since the SRM's inception. The power vaccuum of the ensuing neo-anarchy allows powerful factions to dole justice via might in their spheres of influence. Edicts forbid war, but loopholes abound for networks of assassins to theatrically dispose of one another in the public eye - much to the public's enjoyment.
The
universe
The tension of Starset's lore manifests in its original d6 dice pool mechanics. Players gain a pool of dice at the start of their turn equal to their vitality and may spend these dice to perform actions. Players roll against their own skills, which are modified based on the difficulty of the task.
character
creation
Characters are not heroes. Characters are everyday citizens struggling to survive the scrutiny of industry titans.
Players start by choosing a phase of life (Combat, Common, Exploration, Mercenary, and Slave) where their backstory begins. Then players roll and resolve semi-randomized events where they are forced to make difficult life decisions. These decisions determine starting skills, equipment, faction relations, and other starting keywords, and the number of decisions made determines the character's age. Certain choices also prompt players to move into new phases of life, threading together a character's backstory and linking it to important in-game mechanics.
On their turns, players may roll up to 5 dice per action and may perform as many actions as they desire until their dice pool is empty. This creates a tricky action economy: Players may attempt many frantic actions with few dice each--and therefore low likelihood of success--or may perform only one or two actions with surer odds.
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Further, any actions that target others, such as attacks, resolve at the end of the target's turn. This gives nearly everyone else in the situation a chance to help or inhibit the action, incentivizing players' full attention and careful planning. Even combat is ultimately just a re-application of this skill mechanic, with weapons granting extra dice to players' rolls. Combat, then, is not simply a turn-by-turn slog - it is a careful application of skills and strategy.
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Lastly, characters' dice pool also serves as their health. As characters suffer damage or incur fatigue, characters start their turns with fewer and fewer dice. In trying situations, then, players are forced to reckon with the risk of pushing forward despite diminishing chances of success, or surrendering and slinking back to pitiful obscurity.
Starset is born out of a realization that post COVID, huge portions of the young adult community are effectively disconnected from their peers. While we don't face destruction from a collapsing Oort Cloud, college students and young adults still exist in self-imposed isolation by adapting closed-off habits and fail to create meaningful connection with strong community. Starset aims to bring this generation hope.
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Despite its grimdark setting, Starset is ultimately focused on hope. Players are challenged to consider where their hope comes from, both in the game and in their own lives. Starset is a dark world, but in many ways our own can be as well. Players can explore what it means to find hope in community, in loyalty, in perseverance, and in God. And, ideally, they can experience hope via genuine community as they play with friends and family around their game table.
Our STory
Grow the Universe
Each week, we publish new Starset content to grow the Starset Universe, and you can join us! Submit a short story, item, NPC, or report of your game session, and we might canonize it for players around the world to use! Make sure your submission fits with the Starset Lore Guide before submitting. If your submission fittingly develops the Starset Universe, the story will be scheduled to post on this page in the coming weeks!
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If your story involves a multi-chapter plot arch, please submit one chapter per submission and check the "multiple chapters?" box with each submission.