OUTCAST

An adventure setting for use with the Cepheus Engine Core Rules

Cepheus Engine and Samardan Press are the trademarks of Jason “Flynn” Kemp, and
Baggage Books, the author, and this product are not affiliated with Jason “Flynn” Kemp or
Samardan Press™

This book is Copyright © 2018, Paul Drye. The World Building Consortium is an imprint of
Baggage Books

ISBN: 978-0-9947809-4-2

Image Credits
Cover based on “Hegemon” by Grzegorz Pedrycz

“Temple Illo” and “Biosphere Illo” by Joyce Maureira

“Cloaked Sand Warrior with Rifle and Case” and equipment artwork by Jeshields

“Dead Spaceship” by Frybrix, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license

“Star Tyrant” by Jeremy Hart

“Plasma Monster”, “Maintenance Robots”, and “Sentry Robots” by Jacob E. Blackmon

“Alien Pilot Concept” by Mobbles1, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license

“Starwreck” by Christof Grobelski

“History Splash” by Jeff Brown

“Portal to Beyond II” by Vital HD, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License

“War Tag” by David Lewis Johnson

“The Local Group” is based on an image by Antonio Ciccolella and is released under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

Some artwork copyright Art of War Games, used with permission.

Some artwork © 2018 Earl Geier, used with permission. All rights reserved.

Some artwork by Maciej Zagorski of The Forge Studios

CONTENTS
Introduction .................................................... 1
Vatan ................................................................ 2
The Planet (EAA1634-5)......................... 2
The Settlements ........................................ 3
Government ................................................ 5
The Derelict Settlements ......................... 5
The Network ................................................ 11
Portals ...................................................... 11
The Via Vastha ....................................... 12
Runs .......................................................... 13
Warding Signs ........................................ 14
Starship Travel ........................................ 15
Technology .................................................. 17
Money ....................................................... 17
Equipment ............................................... 18
Characters .................................................... 23
The People .............................................. 23
Classes ..................................................... 24
Changes to Character Generation ...... 27
Alien Species ............................................... 31
Imperial Races ........................................ 31
Outcast Races ......................................... 36
Random Worlds .......................................... 47
World Size ............................................... 47
Atmosphere ............................................. 49
Gravity ...................................................... 50
Temperature ............................................ 51
Radiation Environment .......................... 52
Light Conditions ..................................... 53
Inhabitants ............................................... 54
Resources ................................................. 55
Connectivity ............................................. 56
Distance Between Portals..................... 57
Garden Worlds ........................................ 57
The Anvini Run ............................................ 59
Other Adventures ....................................... 69
Missions to Earth .................................... 69
Finding New Resources ........................ 70
Pure Exploration ..................................... 71
Treasure Hunting .................................... 72
Exploiting Existing Resources.............. 74
Colonization ............................................. 75
Criminal Investigation ............................ 76
Appendix A: The Local Group .................. 79
OPEN GAME LICENSE VERSION 1.0A .... 83
INTRODUCTION
“It’s been 500 years since the World Takers came. When they did, it’s not like we didn’t try
to fight back—it’s just that when we did we made things even worse. Every year we’d lose
more of the Earth to them and they’d impose more and more conditions on how we used
the planet they’d claimed from us. Every time we’d rebel we’d lose even more, and they’d
laugh off our attempts. You like ‘Ezar and The World Taker’? Sure, who doesn’t? But think
about this: it was so unusual for us to kill one of them that we made a story out of it. A
founding myth.

They didn’t kill us one at a time, that’s for sure. They just kept shoving us into smaller and
smaller parts of the world and let nature take its course. You get millions of refugees and
new rules banning more and more industrial civilization each time we annoy them? It was a
bad time, the worst we’ve ever had. After the Red Sands—and there’s another heroic tale,
no? —the peace terms pushed us right out of the solar system.

That was kindness on their part, don’t you think? They won’t kill anyone who doesn’t resist
them, and we’d finally learned not to. That’s the thing: they were never interested in killing
us off, or even defeating us. We’re too beneath them for that, and we were already
defeated the day they showed up in Earth orbit. How we were treated after that was just a
matter of how much of a nuisance we were after they decided to move in. Now here we
are, squatting in corners of the universe that Their Lordships don’t want. That’s our life.
What are you going to do about it?”

OUTCAST is a SF RPG setting where human beings are not on top, or even one amongst
equals. Instead they’ve been relegated to a lower tier of intelligent species who share the
universe with its real rulers on an unequal basis. These species live on worlds that no-one
powerful wants, dependent on the very races that have displaced them. On the other hand,
it’s true that much of the universe is inimical to life and unwanted, and so is open to what
remains of the human race. Using a vast, ancient network of portals, players explore, trade,
and fight their way through the ruins of lost alien civilizations and worlds belonging to
other outcast races, all in the name of survival.

This book is dedicated to the memories of Loren Wiseman and Hans Rancke-Madsen.

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VATAN
With the Earth lost to them, Humanity’s main place of residence is the planet Vatan, which
orbits Epsilon Indi, 3.62 parsecs from Earth. This planet was selected for them partly for its
proximity and partly because none of the Imperial Races wanted it—it is only marginally
habitable by both human and World Taker standards and requires supplementary
technology to live on.

THE PLANET (EAA1634-5)

Vatan orbits Epsilon Indi at a distance of 0.72 AU. As ε Indi is a K5 main sequence star
about six billion years old, this places Vatan toward the outer edge of the system’s
habitable zone. Even so, the planet is warm and arid, as the atmosphere is thick and has a
high percentage of carbon dioxide in it: 0.8%, about twenty times what humans are used
to breathing, with a corresponding increase in the greenhouse effect.

While Vatan is somewhat larger than Earth (15665 kilometers in diameter), but less dense,
so that surface gravity is only 0.92 of that on humanity’s homeworld. That relatively low
density hints at Vatan’s lack of heavy, radioactive elements, and the weakness of that
source of internal heating combined with the planet’s aridity locked up Vatan’s tectonic
plates some 500 million years ago.

This accounts for the extra CO2 in the air, as half a billion years of volcanic activity
(relatively quiet as Vatan is) have built it up without a countervailing creation of new
mountains to erode and pull it back out of the atmosphere. Similarly, there’s been 500
million years for weathering to iron out the wrinkles and basins formed before continental
drift failed, and so Vatan is a flat world, with rolling hills and valleys and vast desolate
plains of clay, pebbles and sand.

The planet is only slightly inclined to its ecliptic, and so seasonal changes are minimal.
Weather is driven by the planet’s day of 41h 17m, which in combination with the thick air
and carbon dioxide percentage gets temperatures over 30 Celsius by mid-afternoon most
days.

There seems to have never been life on Vatan, and certainly none can be found now, not
even in the shallow, salty ocean—most of the water has been sequestered below the
surface in deep, brackish aquifers. As a result, there’s no oxygen in the air, and after the
carbon dioxide is discounted the remainder is argon (2.3%) and nitrogen (96.9%). The

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surface pressure is high, at 1.67 bars
(1.70x that of Earth), but as the air is
chemically neutral to humans this has no
real effect on daily life. One needs a tank
of oxygen, but otherwise it’s possible to
walk on the surface unaided.

Though it has been inhabited by humans

for more than 400 years now, the low
population and desperate conditions for
human refugees have left the majority of
Vatan unexplored.

THE SETTLEMENTS
There are a little more than one million
people living on Vatan, all concentrated in
a small area near the equator in the
southern hemisphere.

With the high temperatures, long days,

and unbreathable atmosphere, society on
Vatan is subterranean. Specifically, the
Vatani’s ancestors were dumped into pre-
existing caverns the refugees dubbed
harza, meaning “settled areas”. Three are
used for cities, named Nar, Yaudon and
Guon respectively and a dozen more are
smaller towns. These are separated from
each other by tunnels a few dozen
kilometers in length and are home to up
to a hundred thousand people each. While
at various times the harza have been
independent of each other, for the last
110 years they’ve formed a stable
confederation.

Several other large harza are open but

glassed over. These have been made into
farms, with minimal population, and over

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time crop seeds have been imported from Earth to try in Epsilon Indi’s unenergetic light.
Altogether, food is the only necessity of life that Vatan supplies without aid.

Basic Functions and Infrastructure

Despite the farms, breathable air is a little more problematic than food, as the harza have
been impossible to seal off entirely. Without intervention Vatan’s unwholesome
atmosphere would replace the inside air on a month-level timescale. By treaty the World
Takers supply bulky gas crackers of their manufacture, which work with energy sources
that are not understood to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and then inject it into the air
inside the harza. While the pressure inside is kept at the same external 1.7x Earth pressure
so as to slow mixing between internal and external air, the crackers keep the oxygen and
CO2 levels in the harza safe for humans to breathe.

Supplying these units gives the World Takers leverage over humans that they use on
occasion, and when they break down the aliens can be neglectful of replacing them,
treaties be damned. During most peoples’ lifetimes they will live through two or three
periods where the air gets sour for weeks, enough to sicken and even kill people.

Drinkable water is another requirement and there simply isn’t enough native to the planet.
Fortunately, a little over a century ago a powerful earthquake at a portal (see The Network,
p.11) connecting to a lifeless but wet world shifted its end-point to the mid-channel of a
river. This portal is now left open as much as possible, with the resulting torrents refilling
the Pashi Canal, built through all three of the inhabited harza. While water remains a
precious commodity and is carefully used and re-used, as long as the rogue portal is open
there is enough for everyone.

Power is the final necessity of life, and the harza get it from two sources. Indigenously they
use wind power harvested from the surface, as Vatan’s thick atmosphere is suited to it.
Many people make a living by donning oxygen equipment every day, climbing to the
surface, and maintaining the windmills. It’s a never-ending process, but even so it’s not
possible to make enough electricity this way to supply all that’s desired by Vatan’s
inhabitants. Accordingly, the Vatani also trade for solar power cells, which are beyond their
level of technology but are available from the World Takers and other Imperial Races.
These don’t work at night, of course, so life in the harza slows down then and is more
dimly lit.

Transportation in Vatan is limited, and not just because the settlements are small. No
horses have ever been brought from Earth, and there are no fossil fuels to run engines
(biofuels are out of the question as farms are needed for food alone). Powerful batteries
are too high-tech, and so most people walk where they need to go. Streets are not very

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wide as a result, though main thoroughfares are wide enough to carry bicycle and rickshaw
traffic.

GOVERNMENT
Vatan is ruled by a hereditary oligarchy drawn from those who took place in Mars’s Red
Sands Uprising. For a century after Earth was lost and most people displaced to Epsilon
Indi, the human-run Martian colony maintained a precarious independent existence. They
were left alone as irrelevant to the World Takers and their taking of Earth but tried (and
failed) to oust the invaders and were themselves sent into exile.

As a backup plan they had prepared for displacement, preparations the original refugees
never had time to make. This gave them a considerable advantage when dropped into the
desperately poor and primitive theocracy that Vatan was at the time and they soon took
over in a coup d’etat. At the time the meant to build up Epsilon Indi as a base for a second
attempt at reconquering Earth, but they took too long: their children were less interested
than their parents, and the grandchildren not at all. Instead they settled for their new,
smaller domain.

At the top of the heap is Ruling Committee, with anywhere from eight to 20 members
depending on who can consolidate their power to the point that the others will let them
join. Theoretically it is an ad hoc spinoff of the larger Vatani Convention, numbering 150,
selected from Martian families and (in recent years) their most loyal original allies. In
practice the Convention is just a debating society whose powerful members get co-opted
to the Committee, which wields actual power. Those on the Ruling Committee use the title
Administrator, while those in the Convention are called Member.

The relationship between the government and characters with high Social Standing is
outlined on p.27.

THE DERELICT SETTLEMENTS

Human beings are not the first species relocated by the World Takers to Epsilon Indi. At
least two others have lived here in the last million years or so, and they have left behind
ruins to be encountered by the planet’s newest exiles.

In fact, the area now turned into harza are a pre-existing set of artificial caverns believed
to have been constructed by an Outcast race of approximately the same size and shape as
human beings, the so-called Predecessors. After they died out, the World Takers took note
of the fact that a pre-made reservation was close at hand, and so were ready to fill it again
when they encountered another species that they wished to displace: the human race. That
some of the hardest work was done beforehand was likely critical to the species’ initial

5
survival on Vatan. Altogether there are dozens of oval areas dug out of Vatan’s bedrock
and linked up by tunnels. Humans have considerable space left to use yet before all are
filled.

Adjacent to this old settlement is the now-dead area of the Maze Builders, so-called
because they consist of small, complex tunnels punctuated here and there with a chain of a
few side-chambers, none larger than a typical human dwelling. This species is a little better
understood than the so-called Predecessors who dug out the human-settled area, as they
carved many bas-reliefs into their tunnel walls and some show what appear to be them.
They also left behind a little of their technology, which in turn gives a more insight into
what they were like.

Some of this technology is useful now, even a minimum of a million years later (no-one
knows if the Maze-builders lived concurrently with the Predecessors or before them), and
so expeditions still go out into the Maze trying to find some more of it. So far there is no
sign that these explorers are reaching the edge of the volume that the Maze Builders made
into their home.

The other important alien area lies underneath the harza and is likewise of uncertain
extent. The Nightmare is aptly named, as it is dark, confusing, and dangerous within—most
specifically because it’s not entirely uninhabited. Whether this is by the remnant population
of another displaced race or just what’s left of their ecology, few explorers come back. As
there’s no known profit to be had down there, few try any more. Even so, the underlying
warrens have a moderating effect on the air and climate in the harza, and they’re a useful
drain for the effluent water of the Pashi Canal, so their access chimneys are not sealed off.

There are other deserted alien areas on Vatan, but information about them is extremely
thin. None are known to connect to the harza and few have bothered to make the trip
overland to see them. It’s possible that a connection to one or more others might be found
as the Maze Builders’ warrens are explored or, less likely, somewhere down in the
Nightmare.

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THE NETWORK
Like most worlds, Vatan is connected to the Network, a vast arrangement of portals that
allows travel from point to point throughout the Local Group of galaxies. One is a portal to
Earth in Nar, which the World Takers tightly control, but there are 26 others—17 in Nar
Harza and another 9 at a subsidiary port in Yaudon Harza. Three more have been found
scattered through the Maze Builder area These 30 destinations in turn have connections of
their own, whose destinations have more still and so on to (almost literal) infinity. The
number of explored worlds is far smaller than that of worlds available, and some places
just a few “steps” away are still unknown.

Even so, human explorers from Vatan have made at least a cursory exploration of many
thousands of places. The paths they blazed lead to sources of water and food, as well as
other treasures, and in a few cases even other worlds as marginally pleasant as Vatan
where people have founded new colonies. They have also made contact with many other
Outcast Races, each with their own exile world (and possible colonies), and each with their
own attitude toward the human race. Some are xenophobes, some have fallen into a
primitive state, and others are both amenable to and worthy of trading with. But for every
living world found there are a dozen more whose inhabitants have died out.

PORTALS
Stepping through a portal is an instantaneous form of transportation. Normally the other
side is nearby (relatively: multiple light years is usual) but some cover much more distance
and one can never know if the next step will lead right out of the Orion Arm, or to the
galactic center, or even the Triangulum or Andromeda Galaxy.

Portals are not built to any one standard, as the Network has been built up over a
tremendous period of time by many different species. It’s unlikely that any portals from the
earliest days of interstellar travel remain, but on dead vacuum worlds where the port is in
a protected place, it is not unusual to find one that is tens of millions of years old.

In the vicinity of Vatan, a plurality of portals are rectangular, proximity-activated, and made
of an extremely hard and temperature-resistant alloy of iridium and thorium (the latter of
which elements makes them slightly radioactive). Even so, several other forms are common
and include:

• Serrated rings of extremely pure copper hardened by unknown means. These are
activated by touching a plate that is always located on the left side of the ring.

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 • An area of material embedded in the floor, metallic with a blue tinge, which
activates when someone stands on a pressure plate at its edge. Unlike most portals,
this kind’s open aperture is “naked”: it protrudes up vertically from the metal
platform, hanging in space and one has to be careful not to clip the edges when
traversing it.
• An egg-shaped pod made of iridium and thorium, slightly radioactive due to that
second material, one half of which slots into the other. Standing on the circular floor
at the bottom of the egg causes one of the halves to rotate through 360 degrees,
forming a complete ovoid halfway through at which point the portal fires and
transports the contents to the destination. These are unpopular as they are slow to
cycle and limit the amount of cargo that can be transported to whatever can be
carried by the person standing in the pod.
• A short, squared off tunnel of a completely impervious, matte-black plastic-like
substance leading a short distance (about ten meters) into a wall. When the button
at the far end is pressed, anything in the tunnel is transported—travelers walk out
of the same end of the tunnel as they walked in, but they are now at their
destination.
• One rare type of portal appears to have no supporting mechanism at all. Rather
they appear as a “flaw” literally hanging in space, as if a stable hole has been
punched in the universe. Like the pressure-activated portal described above,
clipping the edges is a problem. As they activate when someone comes near them
and there’s no other sign they exist they can be a hazard for those running blindly
from danger.

Besides these known types, one-offs unlike any other portal are easy enough to find.

THE VIA VASTHA

While a Network traveler will need to arrange for their own food and shelter most of the
time, there is a small chain of human-run hostels found throughout important inhabited
nodes. Normally run as part of a permanent Vatani legation or large merchant
establishments, they promise a spartan but safe place where humans can sleep and eat.
There are also provisions for message dropping or sending and money-changing. While
they do cater to drop-ins at 100Ch per day, they also offer memberships that guarantee a
place (even if taken already by a non-member) and a few perks.

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RUNS
A map of the connections between all the portals on all the known destinations would be
enormously complex, and increasingly so over time as more and more of the Network is
explored. As it’s critical for the long-term survival of Vatan a reasonably complete map is
maintained by the Surveyors, but the more common way of showing the Network is to
focus on specific routes taken between two destinations; these are called runs.

Runs are mapped with one origin and one destination and a variable number of nodes in
between them. The intervening nodes are usually places that are uninteresting except for
the fact that one must pass through them, though sometimes they may have value in

themselves. While there will be other possible branches off of most nodes in the run, it is
usual to include only one in and one out unless the side branch leads to someplace
potentially important to the trip (e.g., if no world with breathable air exists near the point
in a journey that is covered in a day’s travel, a side branch may be shown that leads to one
so that the party may rest more easily).

Another exception to this rule is when the in-bound and out-bound portal on a node are a
substantial travel time apart. The Network is largely set up so that all portals are close to
each other—an area inevitably called a “port”—but this is not always the case. Sometimes
it is necessary to travel for hours or even days to get to the next one needed. These nodes
are traditionally mapped as two circles instead of one, with a dashed line between them
and an approximate travel time noted next to it.

For an example of a major run, see The Anvini Run, p.59. Random runs can be generated
using the tables beginning on p.47.

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WARDING SIGNS
Exploring a new run can be a frightening experience, as there is no known way of
determining what is on the other side of a portal besides stepping through. Alien explorers
tend to jealously guard their knowledge of runs too, and so a novice traveler may want to
stick to runs that have been traversed at least once or twice before. Some species have
taken up the idea of blazing something near a portal—a wall, a floor, sometimes even the
portal frame itself—with a symbol giving basic info about its destination. Near Vatan,
humans have taken up this task.

Some common human symbols are:

Radiation Hazard

Zero-G

Vacuum

Air Unbreathable

Air Corrosive

Very Cold

Unfriendly Inhabitants

Safe Camp

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 Drinkable Water

Use This One1

Danger2

Safe3

1
When more than one portal is available for use as a node exit
2
Used generically if no other danger symbol applies
3
Used if no other positive symbol applies

Travelers may also encounter symbols placed by alien species, but they are not common
and are poorly understood.

Warding symbols might be painted or chalked, and in some circumstances are even
scratched into surfaces. They are not used on commonly traveled runs, and in some areas
may not last long as they’re erased by those who want to keep other explorers away. The
truly devious will mark false symbols, but among humans this is considered reprehensible
and criminal. Anyone encountering one is strongly urged to fix the situation, if they’ve
survived the experience.

STARSHIP TRAVEL
There are occasions when a destination is not attached to the Network. This usually means
that it is far too dangerous to connect to or has been so unimportant throughout its entire
history that no-one has ever wanted to go there. In either case it is difficult to convince an
Imperial Race to supply an FTL ship for the journey, but that is the only other option for
travelling interstellar distances. Human scholars insist that faster than light travel is
impossible by the laws of physics as we know them, and so creating our own ships (or
portals) is beyond the pale. The Imperial Races do not sell ships to Outcast Races and have
refused all requests outright.

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Should a ride be forthcoming, the ship will be tailored to the needs of the race supplying it
and any humans on-board will have to adapt. Though ships can be highly variable, certain
characteristics are common for each race: The Machine Civilization favors craft of enormous
size, their “world ships”, and the Luren make confections of plasma and force fields, while
the Birrenlog’s are cylindrical and ponderous due to the mass of water aboard.

Each race builds ships from Jump-1 to Jump-6 range, with trips taking 148+6d6 hours.

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TECHNOLOGY
Humans possess a mixture of both low and high tech that’s unlike any that they’ve had at
an earlier point in history. As a low-population society, it’s impossible for them to
reproduce much of technology that existed from the 20th century onward. At its base,
Vatani society is early industrial TL3.

However, chance has preserved much of the technical knowledge through TL6, and so in
circumstances where the practical side of the problem is straightforward the Vatani
possess it. For example, their medical skills are sophisticated as they have germ theory,
know chemicals that work as anesthetics, and can even produce some simple antibiotics
and other medicines. Electrification is another anachronistic addition to their TL 3 society,
and they make quite good (if entirely hand-made) environmental suits. In general, the GM
can assume that TL3 technology is always available, TL4-5 is usually available, and TL6 is
available on occasion. However, anything higher than TL3 should be practical and easy to
make once the trick is known, or else no-one will make it.

On top of this, Vatan is punctuated with bits of technology as advanced as TL16. The
Vatani are in contact with Imperial Races and receive some support equipment from them
as part of the treaties that required humans to leave Earth. Other Imperial-made items not
covered by treaty can be obtained through regular trade. It may be expensive to acquire,
and there are many things that cannot be traded for (weapons, high-density power sources
like fusion, most computers, and jump technology, among others) but the Vatani know it
exists and that it can be very useful so they go out of their way to get it. About as
common but less impressive is technology traded for with other Outcast races, who range
up to TL8.

The final kind of tech on Vatan is spread across a range from TL3 to the equivalent of
Imperial technology: the equipment scavenged by human explorers from dead civilizations
found on the Network and brought back to Vatan. While useful in a way, this tech has the
disadvantage of not being available to order. One gets what one finds, and it’s not
possible to ensure that it is what one needs.

MONEY
One issue players will have to consider when their characters are looking to buy
equipment is how to pay for it. Human-made and scavenged items are purchased using the
Vatani currency, the chayo (symbol: Ch), which for game purposes is equal to 1Cr.

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Each Imperial Race has its own currency, but for simplicity’s sake they can all be taken to
be the same. The Vatani call this money jechan (symbol: Je). Imperial technology can only
be bought for jechan; the two currencies are not convertible. Characters looking to buy
Imperial goods will first have to find a way to obtain jechan as payment from an Imperial
client or, much more rarely, discover that there are jechan available for sale in Vatan’s
black market. Both transactions can be tricky, however, as by law all jechan are subject to
government purchase at the rate of 100Ch:1Je—and the government is always starving for
Imperial money to purchase the advanced tech they need to keep the colony running. The
black-market rate is higher but varies day to day.

For that matter, other Outcast species do not generally recognize chayo either. If they have
regular trading contact with humans they may do so, but generally they will prefer jechan
too, or barter.

EQUIPMENT
All equipment and weaponry listed in the Cepheus Engine core book up to and including
TL5 are available for purchase. The sole exception to this rule is vehicles using an internal
combustion engine: while the Vatani know how to make these, they don’t do so partly
because of the pernicious effects they have on the colony’s limited air and partly because
it’s difficult to obtain fuel.

Of higher-tech items listed in the core rules, necessity has made the Vatani experts at
hand-sewn environment suits, vacc suits and pressure tents. Though the world is only TL3-
55, they function the same as their higher level equivalents at five times the cost (2500Ch
for an environment suit, 45,000Ch for a vacc suit, 10,000Ch for a pressure tent).

As outlined above characters can purchase items of greater than TL5 using only jechan,
which they will almost definitely not have as beginning adventurers (the one exception
being those of the Agents species, see p.36). Bartering with other Outcast species does
open one route to obtaining items of greater than TL5—if still well short of Imperial levels-
-if the other species is well-off compared to the humans of Vatan, but it’s suggested that
these only be made available during the course of adventures and not as starting character
items.

Other items that characters may obtain on Vatan are:

Axe (TL1): Though also usable as a weapon, in the Network an axe is used more often than
not for opening doors and clearing debris in long-abandoned nodes. When used for this
purpose it causes 3d6 material damage. It is fairly unwieldy in combat and requires both

18
hands to use (-2 DM to the roll), but it deals 2d6 damage on a hit. Damage: See
description. Mass: 3kg. Cost 75Ch.

Black Powder Explosive Charge (TL3): In the absence of plastic

explosives and even more exotic items, explorers rely on black
powder charges to crack open unwilling volumes. For an amount
capable of causing 5d6 damage in a three-meter radius area:
Damage: See description. Mass 1kg. Cost 50Ch

Carbine (TL3): The excess mass and length of a rifle is often too
much trouble while exploring the Network, and breech-loading is
at the cutting edge of what can be made on Vatan. As a result, the
basic choice for firearm is a single-shot muzzle loading carbine.
Other options are preferable, though expensive, if one commonly
needs to shoot quickly, far away, or several things in short order
Reload time is 4 rounds. Damage 2d6-1. Cost 100ch. Mass 4kg.

Glare Goggles (TL0): Polarized or smoky glass is rare on Vatan, so

most explorers deal with excess light in a node by the simplest of expedients. A piece of
wood or (more rarely for decorative reasons, ivory) is carved into a bar that fits snugly over
the eyes. A slit is then cut through and along the length of the bar, just wide enough to
see through but thin enough to block most of the light. The whole thing is then tied to the
head with leather. Each pair of goggles is carved for a specific individual, as they are not
adjustable, but as long as two people are roughly the same size (i.e., not an adult and a
child, or large and small adults) they can each use the same pair of goggles well enough.
Mass: 0.1kg. Cost 10Ch for wood, 50Ch for ivory.

Hatchet (TL1): Much more suited to combat than its larger axe cousin, a hatchet counts as
a blade weapon, while also being useful for smaller clearance jobs or obtaining firewood.
Damage 1d6+1. Mass 0.75kg. Cost 40Ch.

Magnetic Boots (TL4): There are many places on the Network that are in freefall or
microgravity. Many of those in turn have ferromagnetic floor plates. Boots for walking on
these are normally electromagnetic in nature and TL8, but they’re useful enough that
necessity has been the mother of invention. In the absence of oxygen on Vatan, magnetite
is common, and a high-quality source was found some 20 kilometers overland from the
settlement area. After mining and hand-forming into boot-sole plates they can be
magnetized and made fit for purpose. Mass: 1kg. Cost: 500Ch.

19
Oxygen Cracker, Portable (TL15):
Breathable air is a problem
throughout much of the network,
but oxygen per se is not actually
that rare. Either it is present as part
of an unbreathable mix, in which
case an oxygen store (see below)
can be used, or it is present in compounds like carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrogen
oxides. An oxygen cracker is the Imperial tech solution for the latter case: given time it
cracks those substances and produces breathable oxygen, up to 12 hours supply of which
it stores within itself. Waste nitrogen is expelled as gas, carbon is manually removed as
little piles of graphite powder, and hydrogen only after acknowledging an alien warning in
its UI that explosions are possible if it’s released in a sufficient quantity into many
atmospheric mixes. This may also void the warranty.

These are smaller, portable versions of the large industrial plant that makes human life
possible on Vatan. In both cases their method of operation is unknown, as is their source
of power. Both run warm to the touch but no more than that.

When charged, an oxygen cracker can be hooked to a specialized attachment point sewn
into a suit so that bulky oxygen bottles are not needed. On another setting it will also
expel all its O2 so that a small sealed area can be given a breathable atmosphere. Note
that biologically humans do not need a buffer gas like nitrogen or helium to breathe 0.21
pressure in pure oxygen, and so this trick will work in vacuum. Mass: 2kg. Cost: 250Je

Oxygen Store (TL14): Less expensive and lighter than an oxygen cracker, this piece of
Imperial technology is a kind of “Maxwell’s Demon” for oxygen molecules. As such it does
require that there be some oxygen in the air (even if the atmosphere is tainted or too thin
to breathe), but when turned on it can absorb that oxygen selectively until it holds enough
for twelve hours of breathing. The time needed is 1 hour if the partial pressure of oxygen
(O2 percentage times atmosphere pressure) is equal to Earth’s, 0.21, and scales
accordingly.

Like an oxygen cracker, the store can be hooked to the same interface on a
environment/spacesuit or expel all its gas at once. Mass: 1kg. Cost: 100Je.

Radiation Detection Kit (TL4): One way of dying on the Network is by radiation exposure,
whether it’s from encountering the breached core of an ancient fission reactor or stepping
into a world that orbits too close to a large gas giant. Geiger counters are rare and
expensive pieces of equivalent that Vatan must trade for, so many travelers rely on a

20
simpler kit. Stored within a container the size of an eyeglass case, the kit consists of strips
of sensitized calotype paper, a vial of gallic acid and silver iodide solution, and a small
brush. The user brushes a strip with the liquid, then warms the paper over flame to
activate it. The strip turns a shade of grey to black with the depth of color depending on
how much radiation hit it as it dried. Most kits have a color guide pasted to the inside of
the lid to help the inexperienced user and as open flame is a problem in some
environments, some have a few sealed one-shot chemical heating pads. There are 20 strips
in each kit. Mass 0.25kg. Cost: 40Ch, 100Ch with 3 heating pads.

Storage Box, Vacuum (TL5): When carrying trade goods or other items that are sensitive to
vacuum (liquids or living items like seeds being two examples) a specialized cargo box is
needed if using a run of portals with no atmosphere at some of its nodes. This storage box
holds a seal for several days while still being light enough to move while carrying half a
cubic meter of goods. It can be fitted with small wheels for pulling over flat surfaces and
has a slightly pliant rubberized surface to resist hard knocks if dropped or otherwise
struck. Mass: 15kg. Cost: 250Ch

Storage Box, Corrosive (TL5): Similar to the vacuum storage box, but this item of
equipment is also resistant to corrosive atmospheres. Mass: 20 kg. Cost: 500Ch

Water Purification Crystals (TL4): Vatani industry produces a little bit of elemental iodine as
a side product of making gunpowder and low-tech fertilizer. Though potentially poisonous,
a character can use them to purify water when boiling it is not an option. As they dissolve
only somewhat in water, they can be re-used up to six times before they are gone entirely.
One application takes half an hour to purify 3 liters of water. However, the toxic nature of
the substance does require the character to make a Survival roll or else suffer 1 point of
damage after drinking. Mass: 0.01g. Cost 25Ch

21
CHARACTERS
THE PEOPLE
Outcast characters are usually human, though some other races are available as noted in
the Alien Species section of this book (p.31).

The relocation of some humans during the collapse of human civilization on Earth was a
chaotic and haphazard affair. The two largest groups were Hindi-speaking South Asians
and Mandarin-speaking Han, and the language spoken by most humans in the current
period is a creole of both, Hana. A second pulse of displacement saw what was left of the
shattered rebellion of Mars Colony dumped unceremoniously on Vatan two centuries later.

People from other groups were picked up between the two events so from a gameplay
standpoint any background is possible for a player who has a particular idea in mind.

These labels are one thing, but the cultures behind them were inevitably smashed to
pieces by the World Takers. What re-formed after is usually different. Now most people live
lives that are not culturally similar to how their direct ancestors lived on Earth. Societies
were reconstructed from memory, in a hostile world, next to neighbors they’d never had
before, and traumatized by the events the first settlers had experienced.

Life in the present day is:

• Hospitable. Anyone in distress and asking for basic help—food, water—will get it
so long as they’re not perceived as taking advantage of it in the long term.
• Distrusting of non-humans. There are always exceptions, but xenophiles are
considered strange and foolish.
• Inclined to cling to anything that is perceived as old human culture or technology.
This has the ironic effect of making people conservative while being enthusiastic for
change under the right circumstances.
• Pragmatic. The first century of life on Vatan was dominated by apocalyptic religions
and their theocrats. This ended in the aftermath of the Red Sands Uprising, and
while most people still celebrate Holi and the Winter Festival, few people are very
religious. They may not have much of it, but they know that high technology and
science work. This lack of religiosity may be the most surprising of the typical
personality traits found among human beings, as history suggests that they go in
the opposite direction when life is hard. But if the Priestly Era that dominated the
first centuries on Vatan had lasted much longer it’s possible that there would be
none of our species left at all by now so there is a selection effect in play.

23
Player characters are, of course, unusual by definition and players should decide how much
their characters adhere to these characteristics as they wish.

CLASSES
Scouts: There are many other professions critical to the survival of the human race, but the
Scouts are folk heroes on Vatan—the ones who blaze trails on the Network, exploring the
vast universe while finding things that people need or can use.

The reality is a little more mundane than that as the Scouts are as much a bureaucratic
organization at home, the Service organizing the expeditions that head out, as they are the
point of the spear that people admire. For that matter, it’s not like the explorers head out
willy-nilly either: there’s intelligence to be gathered from other Outcast Races and
evaluated, and the itineraries are often planned rather than leaps into the unknown. But
they do get to explore the universe, that much is true.

Merchants: Once the routes are plotted out—and some of the Runs are as old as
civilization on Vatan—the merchants follow. While scavenging gets most of the attention,
trade with other Outcasts makes up the bulk of what Vatan brings in from elsewhere to
keep its civilization ticking.

Human society is poor enough and small enough that large trading corporations don’t
exist. Instead merchant houses are family affairs or, more recently, small companies
capitalized by nobles looking to increase their wealth (but at the risk of losing everything).
They may not have the romantic air that the Scouts have, but what scout gets to retire in
luxury if his career is really successful?

Drifters; Like the Scouts, drifters feel the pull of the Network. What they don’t feel is any
obligation to share what they find, or to necessarily look for destinations with practical
uses. There’s a universe of wonders out there. Dangerous wonders, to be sure, drifting is
not a life for the faint-hearted. But who cares if other people think you’re selfish for
looking into it?

Adventurers: Cousins of the drifters, Adventurers aren’t as interested in the brand new and
tend to stick to known Runs. There’s plenty to do in the worlds we already know, and not
everyone is driven by a profit motive like merchants are. You can make a living by your
wits out there, and some people find that infinitely preferable to grubbing in the dirt back
on Vatan.

Diplomat: Humans must tread carefully when dealing with the Imperial Races, as they’re
utterly secure in their power and not shy about using it if they see an advantage to

24
pushing Vatan’s people around. Diplomats exist as a professional class simply because the
consequences of a misstep can be so dire.

So too are people needed to liaise with the many other Outcast races found throughout
the Network. The stakes there may not be as high, but trade and good relations are always
welcome. Wars between humans and other races on the Network are small-scale by
necessity, but they carry the threat of completely wrecking the small and fragile remnants
of both societies involved.

Mercenaries: That said, there is war.

The Imperial Races don’t care what
Outcasts get up to as long as it
doesn’t impact their interests, and few
Outcast Races are what you could call
well-adjusted after being displaced
from their homeworlds and likely dying
by the millions. Only the economic
inability of most worlds to support
large standing armies prevents things
from being worse.

That’s where the mercenaries come in.

When a war does break out, the
governments on both sides suddenly
find that they have a lot more money
to spend on arms than they did
before. There’s plenty of people who
are willing to take that coin when it
becomes available.

Hunter: There is little meat in the Vatani diet, as farming is just too marginal on the planet
for there to be food to feed cows, pigs or other animals. Hunters make up some of this
deficit. They must be careful, though, as the World Takers monitor human use of worlds
with compatible biospheres and will act if they feel hunters have taken a nebulously
defined “too much” from any one world.

Colonist: Many people think that Vatan will never be able to support even the mere million
people living there, or at least will never afford humans the opportunity to grow and one
day challenge the Imperial Races. Whether it’s because of a desire to have a better life now
or a grandiose vision of humanity’s future, some choose to be colonists and set up a life

25
elsewhere. No colony is even half as independent as Vatan can be, so colonists often travel
back to their “stepmother world”, with all the adventuring opportunity that implies.

Physician: It can be frustrating, to be a physician in the modern era. The final years of the
human race on Earth were a time of wonders in contrast, and the list of things a doctor
can do is now sadly curtailed. Thankfully the Martian refugees knew that their rebellion
against the World Takers was likely to fail, and systematically recorded what they knew of
medicine, a far better situation that what had prevailed with the first colonists. There are
hospitals now, and treatments are based on sound, scientific principles. A physician can
still do a great deal of good.

Noble: Vatan has a nobility, which grew out of the Fourteen Families that led the Martian
refugees who flooded the planet 300 years ago. After their Red Sand Revolution pushed
aside the old theocratic government, they led the all of Vatan into the modern era.
Unfortunately, their status has ossified into a tight grip on rule, and everyone else must
put up with their slowly increasing corruption. But if you are of this class, things are easier
for you.

Rogue: No surprise, then, that there are more and more people who are willing to steal
and cheat their way to a better life. As low-tech at the planet is, there’s plenty of cracks
where they can survive, and if things get really hot you can always make a break for the
Network and hide out for a while. Meanwhile, organized crime is extending its tendrils as
the government becomes less and less responsive to the people it rules.

Scientist: Like the physicians, the scientists have the Martian refugees to thank for much of
what they know. Even just the stories of what people once had has made it easier to
reconstruct Earth’s technology on Vatan. Half the battle in inventing something is just
knowing that it’s possible.

Much of that work has been handed off to technicians now (see below), and science has
moved on to a much tougher set of problems: trying to understand the technology of the
Imperial Races and of the items brought back by explorers in the Network.

Technician: Technicians are a run-of-the-mill but critical part of life on Vatan. Despite 500
years of effort, the colony is still not self-sustaining and it is up to the techs to keep
everything from the farms to the power running smoothly enough to prevent disaster. The
ones with a more adventurous streak can be found out on the Network serving a two-fold
purpose: expeditions need someone to keep their survival equipment in good order
(especially when the run traverses particularly harsh environments), and someone needs to
figure out how any new technology encountered works. The scientist in the group may

26
ultimately be able to explain how it works, but that often takes a back seat to just getting
it up and running.

Barbarian: Though low-tech by Galactic standards, life on Vatan is sophisticated enough to

keep its people from qualifying for this career. However, in the chaotic early days of Vatan
there were occasional small groups displaced by the World Takers who were not willing to
live on the world chosen for them and took to the portal network. Most of these died out,
but there are a few very small colonies and some wandering bands have carried on to this
day. None can support more than a TL1 lifestyle, with a little scavenged tech and some
traded for with Vatan.

Bureaucrat: The bureaucrats and the nobility go hand in hand, with the bureaucracy being
a useful dumping ground for younger sons who are not going to inherit. Unfortunately for
the good functioning of the Vatani government, this often means that they are even more
high-handed than their noble brethren, as they have far less influence and power and (as
people do) need something to set them apart from the bulk of humanity.

CHANGES TO CHARACTER GENERATION

As the Outcast setting is set in a society somewhat different from the base assumption of
the Cepheus Engine rules, there are a few changes and extra rules to follow during
character generation,..

Social Standing
Vatan’s society is hereditary oligarchy rather than feudal as assumed for the Social
Standing in the default Cepheus Engine rules. If a character has a Social Standing of A or
better (10+), use this table for their place in society:

SOC Place
A (10) Member of a “new money” government family not descended
from refugees of the Martian Uprising. Alternatively, direct
descendant of the priestly caste that ruled Vatan in its early days.
B (11) Unimportant member of Martian family.
C (12) A member of an important Martian family, but no close relatives
involved in government. Alternatively, a high-level bureaucrat.
D (13) Member of a Martian family with multiple individuals involved in
the government as bureaucrats and members of the Convention.

27
 Alternatively, close non-heirs of Ruling Committee member (third
sons, etc.).
E (14) Heir to an Administrator of the Ruling Committee, or a Member
of the Convention. Note that heirs to an Administrator are not
always relatives.
F (15) Member of the Ruling Committee (Administrator)

Skills
Though Vatan is a low-tech society, characters can obtain some high-tech skills during the
character generation process: the implication is that they have done work for an Imperial
Race at some point and have picked it up. Skills falling into this category are: Comms,
Computer, Electronics, Grav Vehicle, and Aircraft cascade skills.

However, many high-tech skills are not possible to obtain as Imperials will not put
Outcasts in a position to learn them: Battle Dress, Gravitics, Engineering, Gunnery cascade
skills (except for Heavy Weapons, i.e. roundshot cannon, mortars, and simple rocket
launchers), Navigation, Piloting, and Screens. The exception to this rule is characters of the
Agent species (see p.36), though players should bear in mind that even for those
characters obtaining the underlying technology to use is difficult.

If a character generation roll indicates that one of the banned high-tech skills has been
learned, use this substitution table:

Rolled Skill Replacement Skill

Battle Dress Zero-G
Gravitics Air Vehicle or Wheeled Vehicle, player’s choice
Engineering Electronics
Gunnery Always cascades to Heavy Weapons, no more than TL5
Navigation Survival
Piloting Air Vehicle, Wheeled Vehicle or Riding, player’s choice
Screens Recon

Note that characters can gain Energy Pistol or Energy Rifle skill during generation; though
those items are not available for sale to Outcasts, they are so highly desired that some

28
leak out on the black market. The character has had precious access to one of these at
some point, though he probably does not at the time he starts his player-run adventures.

Finally, some skills are modified slightly to fit the setting:

• Advocate: For each level of Advocate, the character is familiar with one species’ law.
Human and World Taker are the most useful, but any other species listed in this
book can be chosen. If the referee has created a race that will be important in their
campaign and that is often encountered by Vatani, consider informing players of
their existence during character generation.
• Energy Pistol and Energy Rifle: As noted above, characters can obtain this skill,
However, players will need to be circumspect: demonstrating that one possesses
this skill in view of a World Taker or one of their employed Agents is a death
sentence.
• Zero-G: Characters with this skill are familiar with the operation of pressure suits
and spacesuits, but not combat armor.

All other skills listed in the Cepheus Engine core book are available to characters.

Material Benefits
• Weapons may only be of TL5 or less (as a rule of thumb, gunpowder weapons and
melee weapons only).
• When generating end-of-career benefits, a roll of a starship is replaced with
10,000Ch.
• Likewise each starship share is converted to Ch1000.
• Rolls indicating that the character is entitled to a single starship trip are replaced
with Ch100.
• Any benefit indicating a membership in the Explorers’ Society gives a lifetime
membership to the Via Vastha system (see p.12)
• A High Passage result gives a free one-week stay in a Via Vastha hostel.
• A Mid or Low Passage result gives a free one-day stay in the same.

29
ALIEN SPECIES
Species can be divided into three classes of which the most important, the Imperial Races,
have the power to claim all worlds with a particular environment and to force the issue
with all other species who might live on one. The second is the Outcast Races, which are
those other species, the ones who have been displaced. In the past there have been
“Imperial Races” that were in reality confederations of sentients with similar biologies, but
this is not the case in the present day. In the Local Group of galaxies, at least, there is only
one type of Imperial Race for each environment capable of supporting complex life forms,
and they are so widespread that all are known to human beings.

Conversely, there are many Outcast Races suited to any environment that can support life.
In the case of humans this is carbon and oxygen based, at liquid water temperature.
Usually these other, minor races have evolved in the same kind of environment, simply
because the Network is connected that way, plus the hostility of other environments is so
great that the occasional portals which connect to one are rarely explored in detail.
Humans are aware of hundreds of other species that can live in relatively Earth-like
environments.

The third class is uncontacted or newly contacted races that have not yet been pushed
aside by their matching Imperial race to be a third category. In the human-habitable part of
the network these so-called Vestal Races are in the short period prior to their culture
developing world changing technology, which is usually no more than 100 or 200
thousand years—the World Takers have a habit of giving a species a wide berth so long as
they are not damaging their biosphere. Vestal Races are often so obliviously pleased to
trade the necessities of survival that when one is found the fact of its existence is jealously
guarded.

IMPERIAL RACES
The World Takers
The World Takers are the Imperial Race most commonly encountered by humans. This is
not just because they share a common set of requirements for life with our species, but
also because they control access to Earth—and being able to retrieve scraps of the
ecological and archaeological treasures of the human race’s original world are critical to
survival on Vatan. Trips to Earth are uncommon and highly coveted.

Ironically, it’s the ecology of Earth that led to the World Takers ousting humans from their
home. The World Takers have a near-religious reverence for life, one that has them taking

31
a hostile attitude toward intelligent species that obviously harm their own biosphere. That
that they must have gone through a similar period themselves long ago is irrelevant.

The World Takers are carbon-based lifeforms, and use air and water like we do, but their
chemistry uses D-amino acids and so is incompatible with Earth’s. Their regard for life in
general made them leave the biologically incompatible planet alone for eons, until humans
arrived on the scene. When the Anthropocene extinctions started to accelerate the World
Takers spent some time evaluating the
situation—no Imperial Race is hasty—and
then they acted.

We were contacted and given a

straightforward order to stop our
depredations, an impossible order to
follow when there were ten billion of us.
When we failed, they took over. They have
made themselves Earth’s caretakers and
cleaned humanity out accordingly. The
Martian Uprising three centuries ago the
final gasp of our resistance.

Since then World Takers have rarely

interacted with human beings directly,
preferring instead to work through their
so-called Agents, described below (p.36).
These are entirely artificial constructions
which monitor humans on Vatan and
report back anything that might concern
their masters.

On the rare occasions when a World Taker is seen, they are most often tall (2.8 meter), thin
beings standing on a tripod of tentacles. Oddly, their upper bodies share several points of
correspondence with humans: a noticeable head and two arms with muscles and joints in
the same position as primates. Their large, clawed hands and habit of wearing dark hoods
seem almost designed to intimidate humans, and some have suggested that this is exactly
the case—their commonly seen bodies simply don’t make much sense from a
xenobiological standpoint. Other configurations have been seen, suggesting that the World
Takers’ can rebuild themselves as they wish, further evidence that they have chosen

32
psychological advantage as the purpose their bodies should serve when interacting with
humans.

Luren
The Luren with the first alien species with which human beings made contact, and next to
the World Takers they are the ones with which we interact most often. Their habitat is one
of molten sulfur and high radiation,
so upon arrival in the Solar System
they staked out the Jovian moon Io
and began colonizing.

There was no overlap between that

desire and those of the people on
Earth, so contact was difficult, and
driven entirely by humans’ intense
curiosity about the aliens who had
arrived in their system. The Luren
were largely uninterested in the new
system’s native inhabitants but
engaged in some basic
communication and trade. They did
not even bother to tell us that they
were just a little in advance of the
World Takers, who had approved of
the Solar System’s takeover after
deciding that humans needed to be replaced.

When the World Takers arrived, a small faction of Luren was revealed to be concerned
about species being removed from their homeworlds to make room for colonization. This
is not to say that they were willing to ally with an Outcast race or aid them militarily, but
rather that there are some Luren who want to help them after relocation. Some of the most
useful high tech in human hands comes via the Luren, and they’ve been helpful to human
scholars researching the Network.

Unlike the World Takers they don’t rely on quasi-human agents, and so their starfish-like
glowing forms are occasional sights on Vatan and other worlds that humans access by
portal. As they are made primarily of molten sulfur contained within intense magnetic
fields, it’s unclear how they do this without massive environment suits, but it’s possible

33
that the fields are their environment suits. As always with Imperial Races it’s assumed that
the technology involved could be too advanced to understand.

Birrenlog
The Birrenlog came to the Solar System after the Luren, about a year before the World
Takers appeared on the scene. Like the Luren they settled in the outer system, particularly
the Saturnian moon Enceladus, though later they acquired Europa from the Jovian system’s
new masters. As might be suspected
from their choice of worlds, the
Birrenlog are aquatic, dependent on a
low-temperature mixture of ammonia
and liquid water, and built to
withstand tremendous pressures—up
to 2000 bars.

It is believed that the Birrenlog are the

newest of the Imperial Races, having
clawed their way to the top of their
environmental niche over a poorly
known previous species about 10
million years ago. They were
presumably aided in this by their
outlook, which is pack-oriented and
strongly predatory—records from Old
Earth describe them as acting
something like wolves or killer whales.

Unfortunately, this history seems to

have made them defensive, almost paranoid. Though they interact with humans only rarely,
they are the Imperial Race most likely to treat humans violently, and they view even
accidental visits to one of their colonies with deep suspicion. On the flip side, they are
deferential to the other Imperial Races, perhaps an indication that their high level of
technology is still not as high as that of their Imperial peers.

34
The Machine Civilization
Deep within many stellar gravity wells, the Machines live—soaking up the abundant light
and trusting that no organic species can withstand the temperatures that their refractory
bodies can. There are few machine-based
Outcast Races, as it’s the nature of this
Imperial species’ biology to allow the
assimilation of other machine species
with ease.

The Machines are thought to be the

oldest of the Imperial Races, with its start
somewhere several billion years in the
past. Though they change every time
they bring in a new mechanical species
to their civilization, the whole maintains
a frighteningly stable set of behaviors
that suggests that new additions to the
species are being reprogrammed from the ground up rather than joining of their free will.

The Machines may be the most widespread of the Imperial Races too, inhabiting almost
every star’s inner orbits. Fortunately, they are largely uninterested in lesser species,
engaging in trade for some radioactive isotopes but otherwise staying in their own
domain. Physically it seems that they can take almost any form and think no more of
changing it than a human would a suit of clothes. On the rare occasion one is seen in the
colder domains, it is exquisitely built for its mission and
the conditions it will find there.

The Deep Ones

Based on liquid hydrogen and superfluid helium, the
Deep Ones live in interstellar space, rarely approaching
even the inner bounds of a star’s cometary halo. They
are the Imperial Race that interacts with other races
(even other Imperial Races) the least. They do have an
ongoing conversation with the Machine Civilization,
with radio signals passing over the species in between
on occasion. As they are encrypted, and likely in an
unknown language, no-one outside of the two
conversing races knows what they are talking about.

35
 The Missing Race
There is complex life in Jupiter- and Saturn-sized gas giants which orbit within the liquid
water zone of stars. Unlike all other modes of animal life, however, there are no
intelligent species of this type anywhere. There are two competing theories to explain
this. One is the obvious one: that this kind of environment just happens to be unsuitable
to sentients, and so none has every developed. This is counter-intuitive, though, as all
other modes of life produce intelligence profusely, with hundreds or even thousands of
known intelligent species of each type.

The alternative theory points to a statistical anomaly in the distribution of large gas
giants. There are many “hot Jupiters” orbiting inside stellar habitable zones, and many
outside it, like the namesake of the class as a whole. Yet there is a noticeable dip in their
frequency right at the range where liquid water is supported. Based on this fact the
hypothesis is that there is one unaccounted-for Imperial Race which is a gas giant
dweller, and that whenever they colonize a world they move it somehow—to where is
unknown, but someplace else where it will not be found. There are still many gas giants
of this types around, though (deficit notwithstanding), and no-one has ever documented
a gas giant disappearing.

OUTCAST RACES
Agents
Strictly speaking not an alien species, Agents are what the World Takers use to interact
with humans much of the time. They are built from human DNA, and indeed are supposed
to resemble humans so that they can better fit in with the people they are meant to
interact with. However, it’s a measure of the World Takers’ alien misunderstanding of what
is esthetically important to humans that epigenetic factors make Agents look monstrous to
human eyes. In short, while they could look more human, their masters just don’t care to
put the effort into finding out what that means, and are so powerful in contrast to the
Vatani that they’re unconcerned over giving offense.

Agents fall into two categories: those that are working for the World Takers and those that
have been cast off for whatever reason—age, injury, failure, and so on. The latter (often
derisively called “Free Agents”) have no real option other than to live among the humans
that distrust them, but often have high-tech knowledge and first-hand experience of Earth
that can buy them a place in society. At any time there are several hundred Agents in this
category on Vatan, and about half as many still actively working for the alien authorities.

36
Physiology: All Agents are sterile, being manufactured for purpose, though they do have
biological sexes. Similarly, they have short lifespans relative to standard human beings.
While fundamentally similar to humans biologically, being humanoids based on human
DNA with the same external and internal arrangement, the process by which they are
cloned and forced to maturity in a few months causes severe malformations that (while
survivable, otherwise they would never be seen) make them monstrous to human
sensibilities: too few or too many fingers, bizarre skin textures, and even supernumerary
eyes or mouths belonging to unrealized twins.

Psychology: As a group they are quite

fragile, and are raised to be fawning to
World Takers while displaying typical
“kick at those lower still” behavior
toward humans. Free Agents have had
the metaphorical underpinnings of their
entire lives taken away from them and
are correspondingly erratic. In other
words, no matter their external
appearance, they are quite human in
their psychology.

Agent Characters: An employed Agent is

overbearing, but high-strung. They are
constantly driven by their pride, fear of
failure, and understanding that they are
hated by humans.

Free Agents despair in various flavors

from angry to alcoholic. Some of those
cast off end up pathetically eager to please. Only a few have the strength of personality to
turn actively against the species that made them and then abandoned them, and those
that don’t sometimes go to extreme lengths to regain their former position. However, if a
Free Agent does obtain a place of worth in human society, they guard that place
tenaciously and will viciously attack those they perceive as dangers to it.

Agents that are still employed by the World Takers have an automatic Social Standing of
12. Though despised, they are feared and they can call up considerable power simply by
giving a negative report to their masters. On Vatan, their word is law, though they are slow
to use this power unless they are sure they will not be disavowed; their masters have

37
better things to do than squash yet another insurrection, not that there is any doubt that
they could.

Put against this, an employed Agent has 2d6-2 Education due to their upbringing’s focus
on things that the World Takers consider useful to their purpose and no more.

Free Agents have 2d6-1 for Education (having presumably picked up a little after
“retirement”), but also roll only 1d6 for their Social Standing. Note that this is not a
statement about their physical appearance, but rather the extent to which they have a
impossible time fitting in with baseline humans who mistrust them deeply.

When rolling benefits, however, Agents can opt to receive any cash rewards in World Taker
currency (jechan) at the rate of 100Ch to 1Je, which confers a considerable advantage:
apart from weaponry, they are not restricted to TL5 and can purchase items up to TL15.
Any remaining jechan can be converted easily to regular chayo at 1:100.

Likewise, as outlined on p.28, Agents can obtain some high-tech skills during character
generation that mainline Outcast species cannot. Free Agents are under the same ban on
purchasing high-tech Imperial weapons and other dangerous items such as computers that
other species are

Jeysk
Some Outcasts have been in the Network for a very long time and come to an
accommodation with their new situation that lets them live there as well as they did on
their former homeworld. One of these is the Jeysk, who have been wandering between
nodes for a few million years now and have used the characteristics that they evolved on
their tempestuous world to carve out a quiet, almost monotonous existence.

Physiology: The Jeysk evolved at the last possible geologic moment on their world. It was
well into a moist greenhouse phase, where the upper atmosphere is saturated with water
vapor due to high solar input, and surface temperatures exceeded 60 Celsius. Huge
thunderclouds rose 30,000 meters high and pelted the surface with hot rain and the
occasional fall of kilogram-sized hailstones.

The proto-Jeysk wandered the coasts of this world living on plants and pseudo-mollusks
and evolving thick hemispheres of armor and tough skin to withstand all this tumult. Their
forelimbs became manipulators, picking up food and passing it to the mouth after the
Jeysk head became anchored in place by the ever-increasing layers of protection while
their back legs grew into stumpy pods capable of handling the extra weight. Their rounded
tails grew larger and heavier as a counterweight to the front of the body, allowing bipedal
travel, freeing up the arms even more.

38
By the time they reached civilization the Jeysk were 350-kilogram (770 lb.) beasts, of
which half their mass was a jointed, keratinous armored shell over their entire top side.
Underneath they carried their actual bodies horizontally so that it was barely 20
centimeters above the ground, and even there their bellies and chests were protected by
bony scutes covered with tough skin. Impervious to the environment and any predators,
they lived placid lives, plodding from place to place, eating and philosophizing.

Psychology: The Jeysk never developed settled agriculture in the technical sense of the
term, though they would maintain their coastal food-gathering areas in ways that would
maximize the number of calories available. The whole concept of a permanent settlement is
alien to them, partly because of their native nomadism and partly because when they lay
down to sleep or socialize with others they are as protected from the environment as they
would be in an artificial structure. A Jeysk troop is its own village the moment it settles
down. Even as their civilization advanced their response was to make an area more
hospitable and build infrastructure like sanitation, but still come and go as individuals and
groups. “Nations” were just sets of such spots that Jeysk would wander between during
their lives.

This behavior carried on into their exile in the Network. The Jeysk claim small circuits of
nodes where each of the component nodes have enough resources to support them for a
while. When they exhaust a node they leave it and move on to the next one, carrying on
until the first node has recovered and they can begin the circuit again. Sets of nodes that
support this lifestyle are not very common, but one is not far from Vatan up the Vura Run.
Most human interaction with the Jeysk is with this colony, but there are others much
further out here and there on the Network, known and mapped but too far from Vatan to
matter; the Jeysk have been Outcast long enough to spread far and wide throughout the
Local Group. Often the first sign that some are nearby is a node sporting apparently
abandoned, monumental infrastructure: wide stone roads, aqueducts, and the like. The
Jeysk will return eventually and don’t mind if someone passing through makes use of their
works while they are gone, so long as they leave it in the shape that it was found.

Jeysk Characters: A Jeysk PC will be strong, placid, and stubborn once set on a path. When
they reach the end of their day they will drop in place to recover, but odds are that they’ll
still have some reserves left when every other species in the group is done; they’ll amiably
“set up house” wherever others stop. They are not very curious and are more tolerant of
repetition than most species.

For Jeysk characters, roll 2d6+3 for Strength and 2d6+1 for Endurance. Both their size
and their relatively immobile hands make them clumsy, so roll only 1d6 for Dexterity. The

39
hard shell that is their most notable natural feature gives them 3 points of armor
(equivalent to Jack) for combat purposes. Unfortunately it also makes them slow, and they
can move only half speed, 3 meters per minor action.

Kasauru Gardeners
Naturally, the most commonly encountered aliens are the ones that spread themselves
across many nodes. There are many species that either do not thrive in the Network or by
nature choose to stay in one place, meaning that they will only be known by rumor (if at
all) outside of the Runs that contain their node. The Kasauru Gardeners are one of these.

Physiology: The Gardeners are frugivores, as one might expect from the name, and before
reaching sentience occupied the same ecological niche as giraffes on Earth. Rather than
take both arms and necks to extremes as
that creature did, the Kasauru gained
height through a biped posture—an
adaptation made further necessary by the
nature of plants on their homeworld.
Sharp spines warded off animals that
aimed for the plants’ fruit, and getting
their upper limbs off the ground let the
Kasauru develop long, clever hands that
could snake in and grab the nutritious
morsels without too much pain.

At first the primitive Gardeners just

dispersed the seeds of what they ate by
accident, but as they grew more intelligent
one botanical Einstein made the
connection between planted seeds and
later fruit trees. As long-lived as the species was (as much as 400 years), it was no great
matter to plant a stand of trees that wouldn’t bloom for a decade, so long as it paid off for
years after.

By the time the Kasauru Gardeners were made Outcast by the World Takers, they were as
tall and spindly as the trees they relied on, often 4 meters in height (13’) while massing
about 110 kg (240 lbs.) They were sculpted for the low gravity of their homeworld, just
0.68g, which meant they were somewhat restricted in the worlds on the Network where
they could live. Further, they were taller than any species that had designed the spaces of

40
the Network: moving from node to node was a problem for a Kasauru, usually involving a
long journey for which they’d be painfully crouched over most of the time.

In totality, the Kasauru are built approximately on the plan of a human being or ape,
though one whose limbs are greatly extended. As is commonly the case with alien species,
it’s the details are different. They have large, pear-shaped bodies, with the rounded part of
the “pear” uppermost and hunched forward. It contains most of the organs and is topped
with a neckless face, the Kasauru having nothing like a head separate from the main body.
They are hairless and covered with a rough greenish-brown skin, though they sweat a rank,
waxy substance that protects against the spiny underbrush. They have three eyes (two in
front and one in back), a holdover to an ancestral form of their type of animal and its
trilateral symmetry. Smell and hearing are handled by three bundles of frond-like organs
that grow out of their foreheads between the eyes.

Psychology: The Kasauru Gardeners live up to their names, especially as they are forced to
stay in one place by their dislike of traveling the (to them) cramped Network. They are
interested in plants and growing them, and all the different ways they can be used as well
as their sheer esthetic value. Their node, Vakisha, has been transformed from the usual
barren, leftover world Outcasts are forced to use into a garden for dozens of square
kilometers around its port, and they are primarily interested in tending it or setting up
stands of newly acquired plants that might be integrated into their pocket Eden. They
avoid terraforming entire worlds after becoming the only known species to be

Kasauru Gardener Characters: Though the majority of Gardeners feel constrained to

Vakisha, a few individuals can be found wandering the Network for their own reasons.
Some are just curious, though this is less of a drive for the Kasauru than most other
species. Many are looking for new plant species to bring back to their world (a lucrative
business with so many horticulturalists at home), and they are also in great demand on
other nodes that are struggling to maintain their own farms or oxygen-generating
greenhouses. A very few are noted for living outside of Vakisha among aliens and
engaging in a subsidiary craft industry that is a Kasauru specialty: the production of
alcohol from every conceivable kind of vegetation according to the taste of their hosts.

Neeanya
In a universe that can be confusing and misleading, it’s good to have at least one thing
line up with expectations. For the people of Vatan, this is the Neeanya: a species whose
thoughts and actions are as offensive as their physical form is disgusting to human eyes.
They’re slavers and cannibals, and most other intelligent species tolerate them at best.

41
Physiology: The Neeanya are colonial lifeforms made up of a dozen or so animals of the
same species, each of which is sculpted by epigenetic factors before birth to a different
role in the larger “individual”. In a sense, where humans (and most species) have organs,
Neeanya have sub-organisms living in complete symbiosis. While only lesser animals on
the Neeanya homeworld can split into separate living creatures, the instinct lives on in the
Neeanya, the sub-parts of which have a disconcerting habit of running for the shadows
when the colonial individual is killed.

A Neeanyan individual is made up in total of two or more eye-organism, several

manipulator tentacle-organisms, a beaked mouth-organism (which also serves for
excretion), and a breathing-organism, all of
which occupy roughly the middle of its body.
Above this is a crown of several gas sacs
which serve for hearing, and below is a sac
containing several “internal organ”
organisms and a mobility-organism like a
snail’s tread. There is some variation among
individuals for how many eyes, manipulators,
and hearing organisms they possess. Most
Neeanyans are near 190 cm in height (6’2”)
and mass 100 kg (220 lbs.).

Early Neeanyan civilizations also developed

techniques to “truncate” the process by
which the sub-organisms joined together so
that individuals lacking one or more of the
specialized types would form. Some
combinations were non-viable, but one with
no reproductive organ and no brain would
still function on the remaining sub-
organisms’ nervous tissues. Truncated
Neeanya served as both slaves and one of
their food animals.

Despite their unusual physical makeup, the Neeanya are chemically like most species
commonly found on the Network: they have carbon, water, and oxygen as the main
requirements of their biology, putting them in the World Taker clade of life types.

42
Psychology: Outcast races have a variety of different reactions to losing their homes and
ways of life to an Imperial Race, some of which are more adaptive to their new reality than
others. The Neeanya have gone down a path that often leads to an initial rebound before a
messy and fatal collapse. They want revenge and in the absence of any real way to strike
back at the World Takers they take out their hate on the other alien species around them.
Prior to losing their homeworld their culture tolerated different attitudes and points of
view as much as your average civilized species did, but afterward their society became
much more uniform, to the point of active hostility and violence towards Neeanyans who
weren’t “right-thinking”.

Couple this with their own hazy concept of the worth of individuals, both due to their
physiology and the presence of truncated individuals all throughout their society, and the
Neeanya became very difficult to get along with. At best, relations with a Neeanya colony
are desultory war punctuated with wary peace. When at peace they trade their truncated
slaves to other species that have no moral qualm with it, as some don’t, and when at war
they’re well-known for taking captives to vary their wares.

Neeanyan Characters: While they can be difficult to play (it’s suggested that prospective
players clear the idea with the referee and other players first), Neeanyan characters are
possible. Like humans they vary quite a bit as individuals, and while Neeanyan culture has
strong pressures towards uniform attitudes that doesn’t mean one individual can’t tone
down the worst of his species’ attitudes in order to get what he wants.

That said, a Neeanyan character should be arrogant and in general look down on other
people as less than them, if perhaps useful anyway. They can certainly be motivated to
work together with others if they share the same goal. They will always be looking for the
profit or purpose to something, and unless a permanent exile from Neeanyan society will
be interested in bringing home anything that gives his race a little more power. It may not
happen in his lifetime, but the World Takers are going to pay for what they’ve done.

A Neeanyan is -1 on 2d6 for Strength, but +2 for Dexterity, while their peculiar physiology
makes them resilient to the extent of +2 on Endurance. Outside of Neeanyan society they
are only 1d6 for Social Standing (2d6 within) due to the very poor reputation their species
has among virtually everyone else.

Stargazers
Of all the other sentient species, the Stargazers are the closest that the human race have
to friends. Their biology and psychology make them natural explorers and their homeworld
is sufficiently distant from Vatan that they present no competition for resources. What they
do have are several known outposts that are keen to trade knowledge of the Network for

43
goods, and Stargazers sometimes hire humans to investigate things they haven’t the
resources to look into themselves (or, to be honest, are too dangerous and require cannon
fodder).

Physiology: Stargazers are bilaterally

symmetrical hexapodal bipeds with two sets
of arms and a pair of powerful legs. When
standing they average 140 cm in height (4’
7”) and mass 70 kg (154 lbs.). Though at
first their heads seem human-like, a closer
examination shows that they are arranged
rather differently: an eating slit in the neck;
a pair of three-holed breathing openings
surmounted by curved, large hearing
tympani; and two pheromone sensitive
tubes high on either side that superficially
resemble ears but that in reality contribute
to their feeding and reproductive cycles. At
least their eyes are in the right place (by
human standards), though it is immediately
obvious that they are tri-lobed.

On a chemical basis, Stargazers are carbon-

based, oxygen-breathing and rely on water,
much like human beings; they too were turned into Outcasts by the World Takers. They
prefer warm climates by human standards (30-35 Celsius) and are in the long term are less
tolerant than humans of temperatures above and below this.

Also like humans, Stargazers use audible speech, but they’re incapable of making most
human sounds and vice versa—they “play” their breathing openings with the tips of their
upper arms to produce polyphonic whistles and hisses. However, both species have a
similar concept of writing and with World Taker glyphs as an intermediary at first, it’s
become common for them to write Vatani Hana or humans to learn their script. There are
also some Stargazers who understand human speech and humans who understand
Stargazer, and so in those circumstances it’s common for the two individuals to speak to
one another and act as interpreters for the rest of their group.

Another difference between humans and Stargazers is their reproductive cycle. The
sentient individual “mobiles” with which humans interact are asexual, each with only a

44
relatively small set of genetic material. To reproduce, they spontaneously double up these
genes at times when resources are abundant and give birth to an intersexual, immobile
“pod” creature with the ability to produce mobile reproductive cells. These pods are placed
within carefully guarded creche pools (invariably at the center of Stargazer colonies) where
they swap cells with other pods, and then grow a next-generation “mobile” within a year.
It’s a strategy which allowed proto-Stargazers to start new groups even if cut back to just
a single individual, but that has had a profound effect on their way of thinking and culture.

Psychology: In return for a greater ability to expand into newly found environments, the
Stargazer reproductive cycle runs a higher risk of inbreeding, especially among the small
groups that were the pre-agricultural state of the species. Proto-Stargazers evolved a
strong need to explore, both to find new places where they could expand but also to find
other groups of Stargazers with which they could trade pods and boost genetic diversity.

After being Outcast from their homeworld some 7000 years ago, the Stargazers turned
this urge on the Network. Then as now the most-hospitable nodes are already inhabited,
but the Stargazers have a knack for making themselves welcome and setting up small
communities of no more than a few dozen amongst a larger alien society. These serve as
forward bases for further exploration, and if they do find a reasonably pleasant place to
put a creche pond they’ll settle in and, before too long, start exploring again. Wherever
they go they’re noted for their curiosity about exactly where they are in real space (as
opposed to within a Network schematic) and their human name derives from their
astronomical pursuits, always trying to correlate what can be seen in the sky on one world
with what can be seen elsewhere.

Role-playing Stargazers: The species is very visual and likes to see things for themselves.
That’s not to say they aren’t very interested in knowledge about places they don’t know,
but rather that they use that knowledge to better plan where to visit. As well as having a
fondness for exploration, they find things like closed boxes and the other sides of doors
unpleasant, though they find puzzles and other mysteries where all information is at hand
but just in unobvious order of no interest. Their curiosity does not trump their sense of
self-preservation and statements such as “there is nuclear fuel behind that hatch and you
will die if you open it” leaves them perfectly capable of quelling their inquisitiveness.

Stargazers are xenophilic and inclined to get along with anyone who hasn’t proved to be
an enemy. Talk and trade are far better in their eyes, so long as the creche is not
threatened.

Stargazer Characters: Stargazers are suitable for player characters. Their small size makes
them -3 on 2d6 for Strength (with a minimum of 2), but they are +1 on 2d6 for both

45
Intelligence and Education. If the player desires (and they probably should), their Stargazer
character will automatically get Hana-1 so they can communicate with the other player
characters. It’s suggested that a Stargazer character have the ability to understand human
speech, and preferable that there be one human character who understands Stargazer.
There are interesting role-playing possibilities in only having the former be true,
however—The Stargazer will be able to understand the rest of his group, but would need
to communicate in return with mime or writing (the latter not being very practicable in
combat and other situations!)

46
RANDOM WORLDS
While a sample selection of worlds players can visit with their characters can be found in
the next section of this book, sometimes you’ll want a bit of inspiration for worlds of your
own, especially if you’d like a series of adventures opening a new run. In that event, these
tables can be used to nail down some of the many variables that help define a world and
how characters experience it:

WORLD SIZE
Roll (3d6) Result
3-4 Coffer
5-6 Station
7-9 City (enclosed)
10-14 Cavern system
15-17 World
18 1-4 World
5-6 Megastructure

Coffer: A coffer is any world too small for anyone to inhabit permanently. Outside the
habitable volume of the coffer there could be anything, though it’s generally something
that prevents the coffer from being bigger: a very hostile world, the deep interior or a
planet or ocean, a pulsar or black hole orbiting nearby, the galactic center and its fierce
radiation environment, and so on. Coffers often live up to their names in that many were
used to store things. Many of those times the contents were valuable and sometimes
they’re there because they were too dangerous to leave on an inhabited node. Explorers
can think of them as lottery tickets that might kill. Most coffers were looted long ago,
however, and most are dead ends with no exit portal.

Station: A little bigger than a coffer, stations are also not intended for long-term
habitation, though they may have hosted rotating personnel for extended periods of time.
Most are related to something that a long-gone race wanted to keep an eye on—reasons
for this include the scientific and military. Examples from Earth’s history would include
Antarctic bases, submarines, and the various space stations that once were built in LEO.

47
City (enclosed): A city is just that—a settlement intended to be somebody’s permanent
home in an urban style. By definition they are not on a planet that is easily accessible from
within the city (such a node would be classified as a world), but it may just be that the
planet is very inhospitable and the only place that can be visited is the city. Many cities are
overlarge stations: the dreamed of asteroid colonies and O’Neill cylinders of Earth’s past
would be examples, though of course all the ones encountered by PCs will be of alien
manufacture. Cities are not usually dead
ends, and are commonly the site of full-
blown sets of portals, so new ones are
eagerly sought.

Cavern system: Vatan is a sterling example

of this kind of node. Countless Outcast
races have built these on countless barely
habitable worlds, and some are immense—
underground highways connect multiple
cities, often to the point that a significant
fraction of the planet is riddled. After
they’re abandoned, most become of
interest only for their ports, with huge
enclosed areas being left to rot and (in
time) destruction by time.

World: Worlds are common, yet rare at the

same time. For a whole planet to be worth
visiting (as opposed to a cavern system or enclosed city), it usually has a biosphere, and if
it has a biosphere it is certainly under the thumb of an Imperial Race. See the section
Garden Worlds, (p.57), for more discussion.

Megastructure: There have been races in the past from whom even the Imperial Races
recoil, ones that have somehow made it past the long technological plateau that those
species inhabit and gone even further on. Ringworlds, Dyson Spheres, solar systems
enclosed within a protective event horizon, vast structures of energy in the centers of
globular clusters—the Imperials are as drawn to these as humans are to leftover tech
elsewhere in the Network. Megastructures are not common, and most are well-known—
abandoned again after being picked over—but finding a new one would be both an
enormous opportunity and a deadly danger.

48
ATMOSPHERE
Roll (3d6) Result
2 None
3 Trace
4 Very Thin & Tainted
5 Very Thin

6-7 Thin & Tainted

8-9 Thin
10 Standard
11-12 Standard & Tainted
13 Dense
14-15 Dense & Tainted
16 Exotic

17 Corrosive
18 Insidious

None: The “atmosphere” is vacuum. A full environment suit is needed.

Trace: From 0.001 to 0.11 atmospheres. These pressures are too low to prevent fluid in
the lungs from boiling (<0.06) or to overcome the partial pressure of CO2 in exhaled air,
and so some sort of pressure suit is needed even if enough oxygen is present.

Other atmospheres are as per the Cepheus Engine core rules, p.169.

Note: The final three atmosphere types are often (though not always) due to a “bios cross”
on the the Network. Worlds suitable for one kind of life usually connect to other worlds of
the same type, and have few reasons to connect to worlds used by other kinds of life. In
essence, the “carbon-based oxygen breather” Network is partially segregated from a “Io-
style plasma and sulfur” Network, and both are in turn partially segregated from a deep
space “hydrogen and liquid helium” Network and so on.

However, the Imperial Races do maintain contact, and a bios cross is where at one time or
another, they wanted to be able to move from one major part of the network to another.

49
Sometimes these reasons are still operational, but often the situation changed a long time
ago and the bios cross is abandoned.

Atmosphere Differentials
It’s very common for a portal to have nodes with different atmospheric pressures or
compositions on either side. One would expect opening the portal to then have dramatic
effects as the two begin to mix. However, portals appear to act as their own airlocks,
preventing this from happening. Human physicists look unhappy and mutter about
“Maxwell’s Demon”, but all other travelers simply count their blessings.

On rare occasions (GM’s fiat or roll 12 on 2d6) this function of the portal is broken and
those opening it will have to deal with a howling gale (either inward or outward) or the
transport of toxic air to the other side. On the plus side, coffers with no atmosphere can be
made more hospitable by the simple expedient of letting them fill up.

GRAVITY
Roll (3d6) Result

2-3 None
4-5 Artificial
6-9 Low
10-14 Earthlike
15-17 High
18 Extreme

None: Either the node is on a small object located in interstellar space far away from any
source of gravity, or it is in orbit and the “zero-gravity” is free-fall

Artificial: On some nodes, this is achieved by rotation. On coffer or station-sized nodes,

this can cause problems with balance as the human inner ear is not suited to short-radius
centrifugal forces like this: apply -3 to Dex of characters in this situation.

On other nodes, the artificial gravity is from grav plates. This opens the possibility of
different gravity levels as one moves from area to area in a node, and even places where it
is malfunctioning or broken altogether.

Low: A low-gravity node, as per the Cepheus Engine rules, i.e. below 0.75g

Earth-like: Earth-like gravity, between 0.75 and 1.25g

50
High: Above 1.25g and so a high-gravity node as per the Cepheus Engine rules. However,
characters can still move around with penalty.

Extreme: The gravity is so high that humans cannot move without special training and/or
equipment, i.e., above 5g. This could potentially be so high (due to a nearby neutron star
or black hole) that tides as well as the underlying force hinder or prevent characters.

TEMPERATURE
Roll (2d6) Result
1-2 Extreme cryogenic
3 Cryogenic

4 Cold
5-6 Cool
7-8 Normal
9-10 Warm
11 Hot
12 Very hot
13 Extremely hot

For coffers and stations, subtract 1 on the roll. For worlds, add 1.

Extreme cryogenic: The environment approaches absolute zero. Hydrogen and helium are
liquid. Protection required.

Cryogenic: The environment is very, very cold, and gases such as carbon dioxide and
oxygen may be liquid or solid. Protection required.

Cold: Temperature is near or below the freezing point of water. Without protection,
humans will die within a day or two, less depending on conditions (e.g., wind)

Cool: The temperature is between 5 and 15 Celsius. Humans may find it bracing, but
generally they can tolerate this temperature indefinitely and do not require protection.

Normal: Though there may be some variation (but not necessarily if the node is a coffer or
station), temperatures are pleasant, between 15 and 25 Celsius. Humans do not require
protection.

51
Warm: The temperature is between 25 and 35 Celsius. Depending on what a human is
used to, they may find this hot but in general they will not need protection.

Hot: The temperature is between 35 and 50 Celsius. Without a cooling suit or similar
protection, a human will need to restrict activity and drink extra water. With precautions
this environment can be tolerated for long periods of time.

Very Hot: Temperatures exceed 50 Celsius but are below the boiling point of water in one
atmosphere pressure. If the air is dry, humans can live in this environment for short
periods of time (<1 hour, less at the higher end). If the air is humid this temperature is life-
threatening within a few minutes at best. Protection strongly recommended.

Extremely Hot: Temperature is above 100 Celsius. Humans cannot live here for any length
of time without some sort of environment suit.

RADIATION ENVIRONMENT
Roll (3d6) Result
2-12 Clean

13-14 Low-level
15-16 Medium-level
17 High-level
18 Extreme

Clean: No more than the usual amount of background radiation on a terrestrial planet.

Low level: While the node can be visited almost indefinitely, long-term habitation (such as
founding a colony) is impossible. This includes planets around flare stars where the
environment is usually clean but spikes to high-level or more on occasion. Sometimes the
result of a long-ago war.

Medium level: Long-term visits (>1 month) are impossible without protection. Airless
worlds near the galactic center are an example. Can be induced artificially if a world has
recently (<5 years) been subject to nuclear attack or if a fission reactor has melted down in
a node of city size or smaller.

High level: Deadly in less than 24 hours.

Extreme: More than a few seconds of exposure is lethal. Most expeditions to new parts of
the Network carry some sort of radiation detector, even if it’s just a film badge, to guard

52
against the event a portal opens to one of these. While these kinds of environments are
common in the Local Group (anywhere in close to a large gas giant, for example), the
number of portals to these places is necessarily limited.

LIGHT CONDITIONS
It’s a measure of how much of the Network is decrepit or inhabited by non-human species
that the simple matter of light needs to be considered.

Roll (2d6) Result

2 None
3 Feeble

4-7 Low
8-10 Normal
11 Bright
12 Roll 1d6
1-3: Bright
4-6: Extreme

None: To the naked eye, there is no light. There may be some if vision-enhancing goggles
are worn, or there may be none at all.

Feeble: Comparable to starlight or candlelight. While objects can be seen, detail is difficult
and reading impossible.

Low: Comparable to electric illumination in a building.

Normal: Nearly full sunlight on Earth

Bright: Brighter than the sun on Earth, and so painful to without eye protection. With eye
protection, there is no penalty. Skin protection may be necessary.

Extreme: Even with eye protection it is difficult to see. Skin protection is necessary to
prevent blistering and burns after a short exposure.

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INHABITANTS
Roll (2d6) Result Population Digit
2 Mechanical (unintelligent) 0
3 None 0
4-9 Extinct 0
10 Small colony of Outcasts 1d6÷3, rounded up

11 Main colony of Outcasts (4d6+3)÷4 rounded up

12 Roll 1d6 Same as above
1-3: Main colony of Outcasts
4-6: Main colony, more than one race
of Outcasts

Coffers will always have a population digit of 0, while stations will have a population digit
no greater than 1. Reduce any higher rolls as necessary,

None: The world has no civilization, and never has. For whatever reason, the world is
untouched.

Extinct: There has been civilization here before, either once or several times. However, all
have died out and the node is currently abandoned.

Mechanical: While the civilization that once lived here has died out, they have left behind
machinery which is running still, and maintenance robots of various sorts roam.

Small colony: Humans are not the only Outcast Race with small colonies outside of their
main refugee world. Most species will found a few, either to access resources they cannot
get on the new homeworld, or because some of the population wants to be (or is forced to
be) separate from the main society.

Large colony: These are the alien equivalent of Vatan. A species that has been forced off of
its original homeworld by an Imperial Race (likely the World Takers, but not necessarily)
lives here.

Large mixed colony: In a few cases, two or more Outcast Races share a main colony world.
Sometimes they have been forced into this by the Imperial Races dumping them there (in
which case conflict may ensue), while in other cases they have found common cause and
set up a mutually supporting confederation of sorts.

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RESOURCES
A scout is always evaluating new nodes based on what good they can do the people back
on Vatan or as a replenish point for those moving further into the run. This can be:

Roll (3d6) Result

2-11 None
12 Oxygen
13 Water
14 Carbon-based organics
15 Metal
16 Food
17 Low technology

18 High technology

Roll on this table 1d6÷2 times, rounding down; rolling 1 on this check indicates that there
are no resources, the same as rolling 2-12 on the main check.

None: While the node may not be barren per se, there’s nothing here that’s worth bringing
back home. It may be too expensive, unconcentrated, tainted in some manner, and so on

Oxygen: Whether by means of life or technology, oxygen from here could be harvested for
use in Vatan. If previous rolls have indicated that there is no oxygen in the atmosphere (or
no air at all), there are salvageable bottles of air.

Water: There is potable water here, either liquid or in the form of ice. In a coffer or station,
it may be in bottles.

Carbon-based organics: While not edible, there’s something here useable as fertilizer. It
might be chemical fertilizer, a very welcome thing for soil-poor Vatan. Alternatively, most
carbon-based lifeforms do produce solid waste (so to speak) and a prior civilization here
may have left a pit of it behind that is now ready to be exploited.

Metal: There is little mining on Vatan (just an iron ore mine a day’s travel from Nar), so
scavenged metals are always welcome. Of particular interest are copper, aluminum, steel
alloys, to a lesser extent tin and lead, and the usual gold and silver.

55
Food: It may be lacking in micronutrients and vitamins, but still useful as bulk calories
when eaten with food grown on Vatan, or it may well be the jackpot: something portable,
complete, and stable long-term that can be used for long-distance runs into the Network.

Low technology: Whoever lived here had technology equivalent to Vatan’s which can be
scavenged. If the world has living inhabitants they produce the same, and it can be traded
for or stolen.

High technology: The Holy Grail of any expedition. Now the problem is figuring out what it
does and getting it back to Vatan without it killing you due to your monkey ignorance.

CONNECTIVITY
By definition, all nodes on the Network have at least one portal. Many have more, though,
and nodes with many portals—inevitably called “ports”—are highly sought after. A node
that otherwise has nothing going for it at all can be a bustling settlement simply because it
is a cynosure and its portals connect to a number of useful nodes.

All portal counts below include the portal used by the adventurers to enter the node.
Subtract 4 from the roll if the node is a coffer.

Roll (2d6) Result

2-3 One portal. The node is a dead end
4-9 Two portals.
10 Port: 1d6+2 portals
11 Large port: 4d6 portals

12 Cynosure: 6d6+6 portals

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DISTANCE BETWEEN PORTALS
Adventurers must travel between the inbound and an outbound portal. On higher rolls a
referee should consider adding an old, possibly still-running transport system between
locations or include some other way of finding the egress.

Roll (2d6) Result

2-7 All portals are within a trivial walking distance
8-9 The portals are several kilometers apart, if possible
10 Portals are 2d6×10 kilometers apart, if possible
11 The portals are as far apart as possible for this node.
12 Roll twice, unless there is only one exit in which case
roll again.

GARDEN WORLDS
It is possible to roll a pleasant world using these tables, and in fact it is almost inevitable if
you generate enough of them. If it is more hospitable than Vatan, though, there is a
question of why the entire human race wouldn’t want to relocate to it after discovery—an
obvious disruption to any campaign. Accordingly, all habitable worlds found will also have
one other characteristic, either randomly assigned or selected by the referee from the
options below:

R-chiral carbon-based life: The world’s biosphere is incompatible with humans but
compatible with the World Takers, and so it is inhabited by them. Intruders will be
intercepted within a few minutes of arrival and on pain of death be made to return through
the portal they used for entry.

L-chiral carbon-based life: While uninhabitable to the World Takers, humans could live here
easily. Unfortunately, these worlds are still monitored by them and the World Takers don’t
trust humans (or all Outcasts, really) to interact gently with this kind of world. Characters
can visit but must be very respectful of local life. The rules vary from world to world but
can include: wearing spacesuits or filter masks; not killing unless in immediate danger of
death; no more than eight humans on the world at once; and so on. Explorers have two
options: hike back to Vatan and submit a query to the World Takers about what the rules
are, or take a chance and cross while hoping they don’t notice

57
THE ANVINI RUN
The Network leading from Vatan’s 26 portals has been explored completely to a depth of
several “jumps”. However, the number of connections grows exponentially until it becomes
impossible to map it entirely. Travelers focus on particular “runs”, ignoring side tracks in
order to get from Vatan to a known and useful destination.

One example is the Anvini Run: nine nodes making a route to Port Null, a large trade nexus
which, like Vatan, has numerous outgoing portals leading to further runs. Many
adventurers begin their careers with a trip down the Anvini as it’s relatively well-traveled,
not too dangerous, and features several lesser-but-useful stops along the way.

Dayside Distance to Next Portal: 7.2 kilometers (1 hour)

Located on a tidally locked world around a dim red dwarf star, Dayside is a city-sized node
located in a deep cleft roofed over with strong, plastic-infused glass. Nineteen days out of
twenty, Dayside is perfectly inhabitable but its star flares roughly monthly and the hard x-
rays from the eruptions are inimical to life. When Dayside was a permanent settlement the
city was further protected by a radiation shield that arched above the glassy roof—some of
the equipment mounts can still be seen on the lips of the canyon. The surrounding stone
walls helped a lot too, but the shield was still a necessity. When it failed, the inhabitants
died out or moved elsewhere.

The city is a little warm by human standards, and there’s no water, but gravity and oxygen
levels are average. Given that it is usually borderline pleasant, Dayside has been picked
clean through the millennia. It’s still visited as part of the long run to Port Null, but anyone
staying for any length of time is advised to find a niche that’s recessed into the cliffs and
turns back on itself, so they can get stone on all sides in case a flare hits.

Gravity List Distance to Next Portal: 120 meters (>2 minutes)

This node is a station some 120 meters long in its largest dimension, orbiting a small gas
giant once every six days. There’s no evidence of artificial grav tech aboard, and there are
attachment spots for straps (since rotted away) typical for a zero-g environment. However,
something’s set the station tumbling since it was abandoned, and there is now “gravity” of
a sorts, pointing toward either end of the station. It’s not very strong, reaching a maximum
of 0.18g, but its varying effect as one travels between two portals can be dangerous.

While the station is otherwise still solid, its seal has loosened over the centuries since it
was built, and it now has no atmosphere. It does have some water, but as it’s frozen in its

59
tanks it is nearly impossible to get at. By and large Gravity List is a node for passing
through rather than staying.

Kayoshan Distance to Next Portal: 50 kilometers (1 day)

One of the nodes that takes up a significant fraction of the travel time on this run is
Kayoshan. Not only is the exit portal quite distant by usual standards, the planet has life: a
riotous jungle that puts any on Earth to shame. This makes travel difficult, not least
because the World Takers monitor it for Outcast incursions. Though the local conditions
are pleasant (if hot and humid) unsuiting is illegal and grounds for immediate expulsion

from the node. There are probably edible fruits and animals too, but there the penalty is
death. Both rules are enforced by autonomous AIs that patrol overhead on grav plates,
swooping down when they observe an infraction. Any planned chicanery is going to need a
distraction. Self-defense from animals is one possible exception, but the AIs tend to
assume anything that happens is a human’s fault.

Those just passing through can follow a path in the rainforest made for that purpose. It
threatens to grow over every few months, but the robots keep it fairly clear. There are
other paths leading away from both the inbound portal and along the main path’s route;

60
these are of varying quality from cleared to entirely overgrown but just barely visible.
Some lead to other portals that start lesser runs of various lengths, while some have never
been followed but presumably do the same.

Sardi Distance to Next Portal: 850 meters (10 minutes)

This node is a great lost opportunity for human colonization: the gravity is right, the air is
breathable if a bit thin, there’s water, and the local sun is like Sol. Unfortunately, Sardi is
on the very edge of the system’s habitable zone and is in the grips of an ice age like Earth
has never seen: the temperature at the equator rarely exceeds -20 Celsius (-4ºF), and the
oceans are frozen over (though still liquid in places under the icy crust). In the
mountainous region where the portals enter and leave, the temperature drops to -100
(-148ºF) at night—cold enough to start pulling some carbon dioxide out of the air and
turn it into frost.

Despite this obstacle, Sardi was the main source of water for Vatan until the fortuitous
opening of the Pashi Canal. Heavily bundled work parties would cut blocks of ice, then
take them to the next more-temperate node in Vatan’s direction (Kayoshan) to melt in vats
before transport home. Both the vats and the crude brick tower they built as a windbreak
can be seen, abandoned, by travelers passing through.

Ship Trap Distance to Next Portal: ~5 kilometers (1 hour)

Next out from Sardi, the so-called Trap is a bit of a mystery—a node far out in interstellar
space with no planet or star anywhere nearby. Instead it consists of the wrecks of many
large sublight starships, of many designs, some of which are showing battle damage. The
gates in and out (one of each) are just under two kilometers apart, and the trip involves
traversing flexible bridges in zero-g and open to space.

The best theory for what this node might be is a memorial to some long ago traumatic
event, largely based on the fact that holographic displays will sometimes light up when
someone goes by them and show a “talking head”—the sound of which can only be heard
if atmosphere is temporarily restored. The species and language of the speaker are
unknown, however.

The connected ships have long since been looted, but there are dozens of others which
can be reached by stepping out of what might have been viewing galleries in the main
area and jetting over to them. Most of these have been picked over too, but there’s still
opportunity for treasure-hunting as the dead ships slowly rearrange themselves under their
mutual gravity and fresh targets come into reach.

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Despite its small extent, Ship Trap has many other portals besides the one in-bound from
Sardi and out-bound to the next world, The Burnt Keep, further supporting the idea that
this was once some sort of public monument.

The Burnt Keep Distance to Next Portal: 33 kilometers (9 hours)

The Burnt Keep is home to the Tla-ari, a nearly extinct Outcast species totaling some 200
or so members.

This node is on the surface of an actual world, and a pleasant one by the standards of an
Outcast haven. Sometime in the last 100,000 years or so the surface was cleansed of life
by a gamma-ray burst emanating from a nearby star, the remnants of which is a noticeable
nebula hanging in the sky. Some unicellular creatures remain in the oceans, and maintain a
low but breathable level of oxygen, but the land is as deserted as the Moon.

The Tla-ari were displaced here sometime after that, but failed to thrive despite the air,
water, and relatively Earth-like sun (a K6v star which is far enough away to have not tidally
locked the planet). This is partly because, once it was clear that the World Takers weren’t
going to jealously protect the world’s primitive life forms from Outcasts it became a target
for other Outcast races looking to relocate from worlds that were less hospitable.

Unfortunately for them, the hexapodal Tla-ari are best characterized as a “warrior culture”.
They provoked World Taker invasion by fighting a multi-cornered world war with over 100

62
“Little Boy” fission weapons set off during the early TL6 conflict. The “Burnt Keep” refers
to the vast fortress-like structure at the in-bound portal to this node that the Tla-ari
colonized after becoming Outcast, and in particular the state that it’s in after an
uninformed invading species thought that a quick nuclear strike would allow a takeover—
they discovered to their dismay that the Tla-ari knew how to counterattack after one.

Even so the constant war has worn

down their numbers and something
about the conditions on this world
has badly skewed the sex ratio of
new generations: nine warrior
females to one parasitic male. The
population has crashed, and it will
only another century or so before
the Tla-ari are gone.

Until then, though, the Tla-ari are

actually quite hospitable to anyone
who doesn’t provoke their combat
instincts, and they quite willingly
trade sleeping space, food, and
water to anyone with goods to offer
in return. Those making the Anvini
Run often use the Keep as a
stopping point where they can sleep
safely and restock on supplies
before moving on to the rest of the
trip.

Dropshaft Distance to Next Portal:

13,000 kilometers? (28 hours)
While most nodes put their portals
within close proximity to one
another, others’ are separated by
some distance. Dropshaft takes this
to an extreme in that there are two
known portals and as far as anyone
can tell they’re on opposite sides of
a planet. On arrival, travelers find

63
themselves in what is a dimly lit, alien-looking, but still quite recognizable transportation
hub like a subway or train station. A deep circular hole about 30 meters across stretches
away from them, with tubular fencing around it to prevent the unwary from falling in. Every
few hours the station begins to shake and rumble with the arrival of a huge cylindrical
transport pod which rises up from the hole before locking in place and opening its doors
to the sound of alien klaxons. One hour later it leaves.

Only part of the pod is visible on arrival, but in the next 28 hours the travelers will have
the option to explore it and discover that it’s roughly the size of a container ship. There
are large cargo bays (empty now) and passenger lounges with benches and alien beds—
no rooms, as the builders seemed to lack the idea of personal privacy. On one deck there
are immensely thick quartz windows but there’s not a lot to see as the core of a planet is
lit only by its own reddish internal heat and there is certainly no possibility of caverns past
a relatively shallow depth due to the immense pressure. Upon arrival at the matching
terminal on the far side of the planet, the opposite end of the pod opens its bays and
doors and the travelers can file out and carry on their way.

Some of the time there will be someone else in the station waiting to board, alien fellow
outcasts on their way to Port Null as well, as this world is a bottleneck from the many
portals in Ship Trap. The etiquette is generally to ignore each other, but some species are
more inquisitive (or hostile) than others.

There is no provision for food or water aboard, so those boarding a pod should make sure
to bring at least 28 hours’ worth with them on-board.

Rahasi Distance to Next Portal: ~3 kilometers (3-4 hours)

This node is another subterranean settlement, though one far enough underground that
the planet’s internal heat makes it uncomfortably warm. The in-bound and out-bound
portals are in tunnels on far edges of the city, but within a few dozen meters of both
something has happened to the bulk of the excavation. The entire central region has been
scooped out somehow, producing a huge, spherical cavern some three kilometers in
diameter; the tunnel opens into a sheer drop, though previous travelers have chiseled
steps and handholds, and run ropes that allow one to work down the smooth surface to
the rounded floor below. Another makeshift effort enables the climb to the tunnel
containing the out-bound portal.

If the travelers have a sufficiently strong light source with them, the can see other,
inaccessible tunnels dotting the sides of the sphere here and there. A patchy waterfall runs
from one and eventually forms a stagnant pool 80 meters wide in the sphere’s lowest
point.

64
Rahasi has an evil reputation among those who travel the Run. Though it is uninhabited
and apparently long dead, there are occasional reports of life: the smell of burning faintly
in the air or sounds not made by those passing through. Occasionally those looking out
from either of the portal tunnels across the sphere can make out alien figures around the
pool, though they are gone by the time travelers who are passing that way reach it.

There are also a few documented cases of people disappearing when they were passing
through Rahasi, and “Rahasi got them” has become gallows humor that makes the rounds
if someone traveling the Anvini Run doesn’t make it to their destination.

Bug Town Distance to Next Portal: 700 meters (2-3 minutes)

This node’s name is deliberately short and to the point. According to the World Takers this
is a former garden world that they didn’t get to in time. The now-extinct intelligent species
that called it home unbalanced the ecosphere and the surface has been reduced to a few
furtive plants and animals dominated by the eponymous bugs.

Not much larger than a hand, the bugs build calcium carbonate “land reefs” riddled with
holes for them to live in—their 10-meter heights dot the landscape all around the in-
bound portal. It’s just seven hundred meters to the outbound portal but getting there is a
desperate sprint as the bugs swarm at the slightest sound or vibration. There are various
ways of making the run easier, but most go with the “throw passengers from the troika”
approach: dropping quantities of food large enough to distract the swarm as they run.
Actual passengers as a distraction are just a story. Probably.

Every other conceivable way of surviving for the length of the sprint has been tried, and
the curious can find out about the more spectacular failures from any bartenders or
publican on Port Null, who will tell the tales gleefully.

Bug Town has a few other portals visible at a further distance in the opposite direction to
the outbound portal for Port Null, but so far no-one has survived an attempt to get to one
and the return trip.

Port Null Distance to Next Portal: N/A

The usual end point for those making the Anvini Run, Port Null is like Vatan in that it
consists of a series of large caverns below the surface of an Earth-sized world. The air is
breathable, but only with a filter mask as there is a fraction of ozone in the air that causes
eye, lung, and nasal irritation. This is a hint as to the larger reason why Port Null has
become what it is.

Five different Outcast species have made Port Null their home; each once had their own
reservation world after losing their homeworld to the World Takers, but then lost even that

65
to war or migration. All were coincidentally tolerant of ionizing radiation and Port Null was
uninhabited because of it its outer crust is considerably richer in thorium and uranium than
most worlds, and their decay dumps enough radioactive radon gas into the caverns to kill
most carbon-based lifeforms within a year or two. In theory a large ventilation system
through the caverns would fix the problem, but the radiation-resistant inhabitants like it
the way it is. Their home is a poisoned chalice, and their earnest hope is that this is
enough to keep them from suffering another invasion and another forced relocation in the
Network. So far, they’ve been right.

Like Vatan, Port Null has many portals (20 in all, including the one in-bound from the
Anvini Run), and as the radiation levels are low enough for short visits, it has become a
trading hub for numerous other races. With the five inhabitant races enhanced by
multifarious others coming from elsewhere, this node’s underground bazaars are an
astonishing welter of sights, sounds, and potentially valuable alien goods. Much of the
alien technology found on Vatan comes through here, gathered from hundreds of other
nodes. The node is important enough to have one of the few permanent human
delegations to an alien world: though they’re rotated in and out within 120 days, there are
always a handful of humans in a low-slung “embassy” near the Chunya Market, the most
important of Port Null’s marketplaces. They’ll help with problems (to a point) and engage
in trade on behalf of the government to their own profit as a reward for their service.

Sun Machine Distance to Next Portal: N/A (Dead End)

Just on the far side of Port Null, Sun Machine is sometimes considered the eleventh node
on the Anvini Run as it is the only a dead-end of the Port’s many exits. This world is
another cavern-city notable for a gigantic orrery high above the city floor, believed to be a
reproduction of former inhabitants’ home system. While it must have been an impressive
sight when in working condition, its builders are long extinct and the mechanism has long
corroded into immobility.

The “sun” at the center of the model was once functional as a light source but whatever
power source it had has melted down. Stalactites of once-molten metal and various
peculiar compounds drip down a hundred meters from the now-lopsided sun to the floor
below where it destroyed a block of buildings before solidifying. This is the source of the

66
city’s radioactive hazard and travelers are advised to
avoid it; fortunately, the in-bound portal is on the
edge of the city.

Besides the radiation hazard, the substances within

the stalactite are toxic, and the dust it gives off is
carcinogenic. Moreover, the atmosphere is a mixture
of nitrogen, nitrogen dioxide, and nitrogen tetroxide.
Any open water is badly contaminated with nitric acid.
Not only does this make the air unbreathable, it’s
highly toxic and corrosive, tending to break down any
carbon-based substance in short order.

One species, the Vwiox, maintains a sporadic

presence here, as their biochemistry is compatible
with the air and the radiation in the city and in Port
Null has little effect on them. They mine the stalactite
for materials and scavenge technology that’s
remained all this time just because it’s so hard for
others to get to. What they obtain, they bring to Port
Null. Their stalking the markets in sharply reeking
metallic environment suits is one of the port’s most
memorable features.

67
OTHER ADVENTURES
Characters looking for adventure in the Network have many options, but they tend to fall
into several categories:

MISSIONS TO EARTH
The World Takers do allow expeditions from Vatan to retrieve treasures from Earth. They
have no interest in human museum pieces or documents and tolerate those who want to
take seeds and the like. That said, these expeditions are monitored for activity that the
World Takers dislike, and their frequency varies depending on how well they think humans
are behaving. While it’s possible (if difficult) to circumvent their oversight, anyone doing so
has to make sure they remain undetected on pain of punishment by the World Takers—
expulsion, at best—and strong displeasure from the Vatani authorities.

1. Paris was lost to humanity before it could be evacuated, but the Vatani have finally
obtained permission to recover what they can from the Louvre after the roof caved in a
few years back. A lot of items are likely to be in parlous state, but an adventuring
group and one add-on with art curation skills will be sent to decide what to retrieve
and then actually retrieve it. Why an adventuring group? Available evidence is that the
museum’s automated defenses are still running—and after the neo-iconoclasts in the
mid-21st century those defenses are quite fierce. Anyone taking anything will be up
against traps and security robots, the exact natures of which have been forgotten.

69
2. Somehow, after surviving centuries of poor conditions on Vatan, the strain of wheat on
which the farm harza rely has developed a new disease. Vatani scientists believe that
within a few years the grain might become extinct. The characters are tasked with
visiting places on Earth where different strains of wheat probably still grow wild to
bring back as many kinds of seeds as possible. It seems like a straightforward and even
boring mission but in their final stop they discover that the World Takers have been
“rewilding” North America with reconstructed versions of extinct Pleistocene fauna: dire
wolves, mastodons, cave bears, and saber-toothed tigers.

3. Even now there are still small bands of human fugitives living furtive lives on Earth. If
the World Takers catch them they get dumped through the portal to Vatan and left for
the Vatani government to deal with. So when a ragged native stumbles through on her
own with a tale that the aliens are simply looking to exterminate her band, an
investigation is in order. Concealed within a larger expedition allowed to travel to
Earth, the group must make clean breakaway and then travel to the Alaska Panhandle.
There the temperate rain forest and the mountainous terrain that comes right to the
shore have provided shelter for the two dozen or so of the new refugee’s tribe. The
goal is to retrieve them if possible and, if possible, find out why the World Takers are
hunting them.

FINDING NEW RESOURCES

Vatan is a difficult home and life is made easier by a constant flow of resources in through
the gates. The government specifically supports this flow, and as “mines” of useful material
runs out they are always on the lookout for new nodes worth exploiting. Wildcat
exploration is encouraged too and is a good (if chancy) way of making a living, or even a
fortune. A mission like this will often be acting on a specific tip obtained from an outcast
race and will move more slowly as it surveys the route it blazes.

1. A portal trip leads to a baffling series of tunnels whose mystery is only resolved
when the characters realize that they’re inside a living thing kilometers long. A
species of space-dwelling animals lives in vast schools around an otherwise non-
descript main sequence star, shelled like a mollusk to protect it from vacuum but
likewise quite edible beneath the surface. It’s a bonanza for meat-starved Vatan, but
humans aren’t the only ones looking to feed. Like any animal, these have parasites,
and as they’re scaled to their host these mites and worms and fleas are formidable
opponents.

70
 2. A long trip down an unexplored run has discovered a precious thing: a high-tech
Outcast mini-empire. The Avabaid are a solid TL9 and have slowly spread across a
few dozen nodes encompassing ten colonies now, a rare example of a species that
has managed to recover from losing their homeworld. The node the characters have
come across is an outpost, a series of balloon-borne stations floating 40 kilometers
high above a sulfuric hotbox of a planet. The locals flatly refuse to let strangers
pass through the next portal and move further into their domain, and it’s down on
the surface—put there before the greenhouse effect kicked in, presumably—so
sneaking through to the next node isn’t an option. The problem now is how to build
up trust and/or credit so that the Vatani can at least trade for Avabaid goods.
There’s got to be something the Avabaid need done, even if it’s just the dangerous
job of cleaning the balloons….

3. Chuwon is a ringworld, one of at least a dozen found throughout the Local Group.
Its surface was once rich with life, but the system has become unstable and now it’s
on the far side of a mass extinction. Whether it will recover or not remains to be
seen. The local intelligence died off a few million years ago, and the World Takers
seem to have taken up residence about 100 centuries back. Even so, they occupy
only a small part of the ring where they apparently are researching how to
repopulate the megastructure. Humans can visit the surface if they want, if they stay
distant and don’t stay too long. But doing that has always been easier said than
done: the in-bound portal opens into a chamber many kilometers below the
inhabitable inside surface. Those wishing to exploit the life and other resources on
Chuwon faced a long hard slog up and down and it just wasn’t worth the time to do
so. But now the ancient transportation system used by the ringworld’s builders has
been found. A twenty-minute journey is all that is needed now and a gold rush
atmosphere rules as parties try to find resources to exploit. Of course, there are
complications—in the opposite process from island dwarfing, some Chuwoni
animals out-grow the largest of terrestrial dinosaurs, mass extinction
notwithstanding.

PURE EXPLORATION
Just because Vatani society is necessarily tuned toward practical use of the Network it
doesn’t mean that any individual character (or group of them) has to follow the norm.
Some people go “’out there” just to see it, to the point that they blaze entirely new trails
looking for who-knows-what at the far end of node runs that have never been explored

71
due to difficulty or length. There are wonders out there, and it would be a shame to lose
track of that in amongst quotidian needs.

1. The group discovers a node that’s a large but frigid world orbiting a red star in the
outer halo of the Andromeda Galaxy. It spins on its axis once every eight hours and
both the star and the galaxy are lined up with the planet in such a way that
Andromeda takes a majestic route across the sky. As it’s close enough to cover
some thirty degrees overhead (sixty times the width of the full Moon) the view is
breath-taking. Some species thought so too and put the exit node a few thousand
meters away—not far enough that you’ll freeze, if you don’t dally. A short distance
under the frozen crust they’ve laid a ribbon on dim yellow light that guides the way
over ice bridges and crevasses. Here and there at the side of the road, a variety of
alien corpses sit or stand frozen solid, giving the sense that they came here to
breathe their last and remain forever under the light of an entire galaxy.

2. Closer to home, there are rumours of a second cluster of harza out in the desert of
Vatan somewhere. Like the human settlement it would have been built and
abandoned by the Predecessors, but this one was never occupied later by refugees
from Earth. As well as being a good target for a colony, there’s the possibility that
there might be more portals here, leading to new runs potentially highly lucrative to
their discoverers if they can be claimed.

3. The explorers come across a cyclopean city of recent vintage, strongly suggesting
that they have stumbled across a Jeysk band’s wandering route. If they can trace
the rest of it they’ll have mapped out a series of nodes that would all serve as safe
havens for further exploration, as well as made contact with a reasonably friendly
group of aliens with which they can trade for supplies and quiz about other nearby
nodes.

TREASURE HUNTING
Mixing the two previous motivations, this kind of adventure looks for the rarest and most
easily depleted resource of all: technology, possibly very high tech, that can be used if not
necessarily understood. Many previous races have had to live on worlds like Vatan and it
makes basic sense to scavenge what they’ve left behind. Unfortunately, every other Outcast
Race reaches the same conclusion and so treasure hunters must make extremely long runs
into the Network, or take their chances with destinations closer to home but so radically
dangerous that they’ve not yet been stripped

72
1. The characters have stumbled across a crashed and abandoned starship, looking
like an askew skyscraper under the open sky on a desert node, a tidally locked
world where the sun never sets. If they had come across it in, say, the first 10,000
years after it wrecked they would be looking at an untold bonanza. But it’s been
there for considerably longer than that and has been looted several times by the
looks of it. Even so the hull metal itself is beyond Vatan’s technology, which makes
it worth scavenging, and sketches of the engine room would be of interest to
engineer techs back home—they might even pay for someone to help them visit it
in person. And there’s always the possibility that there’s a room (or even a storage
box) that someone’s missed.

2. Shathnya is a node of no interest except as a long run that sees moderate traffic, a
rocky ball slowly being tidally locked to a small gas giant. The characters are
passing and notice that small earthquakes are trembling the ground every now and
then. If they think to look, there are signs that these are aftershocks of a much
larger quake that took place not long before. Even if they don’t make the effort they
will find one result of it: an entire cliff face by the side of the road has sloughed off
and blocked the path. The adventurers will be able to work their way over the
debris, but more importantly the newly exposed cliff side sports an artificial
chamber now open to the sky. It looks like it leads to a tunnel running deeper into
the mountain too. So far as they know, no-one has ever reported an abandoned

73
 settlement on the node, so it could be entirely unspoiled….

3. Life on Vatan isn’t solely about food, water, and air. People still like luxuries even if
they can’t afford them most of the time, and there’s a small number of jewelers
along the Pashi Canal in Nar who cater to one high-end desire. They need precious
metals, gold most of all, and it’s not common: the best ores rely on geologic
processes that only happen on Earth-like worlds. An elderly Stargazer of
acquaintance to the characters is dying and has decided to share with his final
friends an honest-to-goodness treasure map. Like many of his species he was fond
of making long runs into the unknown, and many years ago he discovered the
remnant of a long-dry riverbed on an arid world, one where those with sharp eyes
could pick up little nuggets of gold out of the gravel. The find had funded all his
explorations since. With the map of the run in hand, the characters are in position
to exploit it themselves. Unfortunately, it will turn out that the Stargazer told the
tale to a few others while returning to Vatan, and the group will not be the first on
hand.

EXPLOITING EXISTING RESOURCES

Finding resources is only half the problem: getting them back to Vatan is the other. While
a few sources of food and other materials are on well-worn trade routes, most are at the
other end of a chain of nodes that present varying difficulties. Even the richest source of
wealth can be worth nothing if it’s impossible to get that wealth back home in usable
quantities. In such cases, the clever or entrepreneurial explorer could try to find an alien
species’ home node that can be reached instead and set up trade with them. Vatan’s trade
on the Network has as many triangles as it does straight lines, and more complex polygons
exist too.

1. A distant node is home to Kasauru Gardeners who have been contracted to develop
new strains of plant for Vatan: not only food crops but a vine that will help clear the
air and watermoss that will make the water in the Pashi Canal safer to drink. The
fruits of their labor are now ready, but the run back from Vatan is a harsh one and
the plants are sensitive to conditions. Someone must get them home in a viable
state.

2. On Ruchit there’s a species that drinks a syrupy solution of phosphoric acid for the
pleasing buzz it gives them. They’ll trade food to anyone who brings them some.
Humans can’t eat it, but a species that trades on Port Null can. Those aliens don’t
have human currency but will trade thorium bars back. Vatan is not at the level of

74
 running its own fission reactors to burn the thorium, but there’s another species
down a deep run out of Port Null that does. They’ll give TL7 goods back, which are
gold on Vatan. The characters have one week to make the whole trip, beginning to
end—a Vatani gang is supplying the acid and will trade their hostages back if given
the high-tech goods. After a week, the deal is off, and the hostages will be sold to
the Neeanya.

3. Vatan makes and uses a lot of gunpowder, whether it’s for guns or just blasting out
new areas in the rock walls of the harza. Saltpeter comes from the farms and carbon
is no problem, but pure sulfur is hard to find. Fortunately the Luren are friendly to
humans and are willing to trade whenever we have something to trade them
(information, usually). As sulfur and its simple compounds are bulk materials lying
around on the surface of the worlds they inhabit, the match is obvious. The primary
difficultly is that those worlds are, to human standards, just this side of Hell:
freezing, yet with molten sulfur lakes and streams common, airless, and often
bathed in radiation. It takes a special kind of person using special environmental
suits to survive, let alone get a cargo of sulfur together for a trip back to Vatan.

COLONIZATION
As poor and unpopulated as Vatan may be, it nevertheless has a few small colonies
elsewhere on the Network. Some are officially supported, placed on worlds that are key
sources of resources or trading centers occupied by other species. More are independent,
willingly relying on their own efforts alone to separate themselves from something they
find objectionable about life on Vatan. Characters may be involved in supporting existing
colonies or, if they are confident enough, joining the list of clandestine colonies by starting
their own.

1. New colonies are vulnerable, and recent events have proven it. A raid by a group of
Neeanya has seen a few people dead and many more spirited away to be used as
slaves. The former can only be buried, but now that the characters have the
opportunity (having been elsewhere trading or otherwise hors de combat when the
raid took place) they can try to retrieve the captives. They can catch up with the
culprits while they are still traveling, but they may want to wait until the Neeanya
get back to their home node. It might be critical to know where such an aggressive
species is living nearby, and maybe engage in a little troublemaking after finding
out.

75
 2. The colony relies on a nearby node for a basic resource, be it water, oxygen, or
food. When the colony site was selected that node was noted as uninhabited, part
of the reason that the site seemed attractive. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the
home node of a bi-annually dormant Outcast race that digs itself into the mud for
months and then returns to life when conditions are better (warmer, wetter, cooler,
more food, or as the referee decides). The colonists are now facing the prospect of
learning to speak with them and then negotiating access to the resource on which
they are relying.

3. Manjal was founded in a node with a remarkable micro-ecology: though its cavern is
not much larger than a city block it has pseudo-trees, flowing water, and fresh air.
You can only support a dozen or so people here but for those lucky few it’s a
paradise compared to Vatan—the hardest part of daily life is heading out onto the
Network to scrounge for food, part of a policy of avoiding any damage to the local
life. At least, that was the hardest part before people started getting killed. There
seems to be something lurking in the less-hospitable tunnels that branch away from
the main chamber, though some think this is not a case of a wild animal causing
havoc. As a life-bearing world Manjal is theoretically under the aegis of the World
Takers; the colony’s founders had problems with the Vatani government trying to
stop them leaving and causing trouble, though to date there’s no sign that the
lordly aliens are really paying attention to the node. Still, a covert assassin would
explain the deaths just as well as some vicious creature. Someone will have to find
out which, or discover a third, unthought-of possibility.

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION
Note that the commission of crimes is spread across the other categories of adventures
listed here. Nowhere does it say that treasure hunting or exploiting existing resources
must be done on a legal basis!

1. A relative or friend of the characters has been murdered, and witnesses saw the
murderer—an all-around bad character named Azhar Fan—escape into The
Nightmare below Nar. As far as the watch are concerned that means he’s dead but
the PCs would be right to be suspicious that they’re just unwilling to go into The
Nightmare themselves just to look for him. Dangerous as it may be, the group are
experienced Network runners, they can probably handle a search on their own,
right?

76
2. Banditry is a periodic problem on the Network, as people reject the drudgery and
struggle of life on Vatan for a potentially lucrative life preying on off-world traders.
Non-humans sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between good Vatani
citizens and the bandits, so the government commits to clearing out any bands that
might pop up. A bounty of 10,000Ch has been offered for anyone capturing or
killing the four members of the Dhan Gang, or 1000Ch for definitive information
about where they’ve made their base. As it happens, they’ve set up on a run the
characters know from previous adventures, and they’ve met Nurena Dhar before,
back when she was a legitimate explorer. The group may be better positioned than
anyone to bring him down. If an additional twist is desired, the adventurers may
have been set up by a corrupt Vatani official who splits the proceeds of selling
captives to the Neeanya.

3. Fonguck is dead and he probably deserved it. In the years since he was discarded
by the World Takers he’s used an unusually close relationship with his still-
employed crèche brothers and sisters to funnel black market Imperial tech and
currency into Vatan. Both were useful enough that the authorities would look the
other way as long as he was discreet, but he inevitably mixed with all sorts of
unsavory types. The characters have been doing business with him (whether buying
equipment on installment or converting money) and are now out what he was
getting for them: not only does he have a hole the size of a fist blown through him,
his shop has been cleaned of anything valuable. If they don’t figure out who did it,
they’ll be looking at a severe loss in funds.

77
APPENDIX A: THE LOCAL GROUP
The Network connects a near-infinity of destinations throughout the Local Group of
galaxies. This is a gravitationally bound association of three large galaxies (in order of size:
the Andromeda Galaxy, The Milky Way, and the Triangulum Galaxy) as well as
approximately 100 dwarf galaxies ranging from the relatively large Large Magellanic Cloud
(a fifth the size of Triangulum) to the likes of the Willman 1 (with only tens of thousands of
stars).

For reasons that are unknown to humans, that gravitational bounding is necessary for
portals to function, and so the nearest cluster of galaxies outside the Local Group, the
Maffei Group about 3.5 million parsecs away, is forever inaccessible.

While the Network tends to be locally connected, as evidenced by Vatan being both one
portal and 3.6 parsecs from Earth, it’s not at all unusual to encounter nodes that lead to
destinations hundreds of thousands of parsecs away. As a result, the Scout Service
Presents this basic outline of the Local Group for use by travelers.

MAJOR GALAXIES
The Milky Way: A plurality of destinations easily reachable from Vatan, and all but one of its
portals, lead to destinations in our galaxy. The exception is Nid 3 Portal in Nar, which
connects directly to Chhar in Triangulum.

While generally hospitable to life, there is a region within the center of the Milky Way that
is too infused with radiation from the Galactic Core to be safe. While it’s likely that few
portals have been built that connect to this region deliberately, sufficiently old (>50 million
years) portals to star systems in relatively eccentric orbits around the core may have
moved too close for comfort. The Scout Service recommends that explorers carry radiation
and magnetic field detectors.

The original homes of the Birrenlog and the Luren are in the Milky Way.

Andromeda Galaxy: Andromeda is similar to the Milky Way and casual examination is not
sufficient to prove that any node lies within it rather than our home galaxy. However,
unlike its sister galaxy it does not have a zone of radiation in its central regions. Rather it
has something potentially much more dangerous: large-scale stellar engineering using
plasma and high-strength magnetic fields, obvious to the eye within 5000 parsecs of the
core. This cannot be seen from Vatan even in the most powerful telescopes, suggesting
that it is less than 2 million years old, the time it takes for light to arrive in our vicinity

79
from the Andromedan Core. None of the Imperial Races will admit to being the engineers
and the Network seems not to penetrate into this region, but if a run there is ever
discovered the Scout Network strongly urges an immediate retreat and return to Vatan to
inform the authorities.

Though the largest of the galaxies in the Local Group only one Imperial Race, the Deep
Ones, is believed to originate here.

Triangulum Galaxy (M33): Located a mere 250,000 parsecs from Andromeda (a third of the
distance of Andromeda to the Milky Way), this proximity provides an easy reference check
on nodes located there: if the observer can get a clean view of a dark sky Andromeda is a
distinctive object. Only if in the wrong hemisphere on planets or if M31’s core is
coincidentally in the way will it be unseen.

Though only having one-twentieth as many stars as its two larger brethren, the Machine
Civilization is believed to have originated here, as did humanity’s nemeses the World
Takers. There is also sign of a “failed Imperial Race” which controls just 40 million stars—
about 10% of this galaxy--having failed to spread beyond this due to a need to
“terraform” their worlds with a fluorine atmosphere, an arrangement never found in nature.
This is reason to believe that they are of artificial construction, if they exist, while current
speculation is that they must predate all current Imperial Races, else they never would
have been allowed to make such a radical change to so many naturally occurring planets.
Unfortunately, the poisonous and corrosive nature of fluorine means that few explorers
would even survive more than a few moments after passing into a node in this species’
possession, so hard evidence is rare.

OTHER NOTABLE GALAXIES

NGC 3109: The largest galaxy not associated with any of the main three, NGC 3109 and
its companion dwarf are a collection of old, red stars left over from their original
formation—very few are less than 8 billion years old. Elements beyond hydrogen and
helium are relatively rare, and a variety of chemically strange planets have resulted. A tell
that one has ended up here is that there are few, if any, bright stars in the sky.

There are only a few Outcast races native to this sub-cluster, but many more have
immigrated here to best avoid the Imperial Races: the Network nodes here are particularly
undesirable even by the standards of normal Outcast worlds and there’s little occasion for
the powerful to come here. These worlds are correspondingly busy with trade, bringing in
scarce resources like oxygen, iron, and fissionables from elsewhere.

80
IC 10: A small and distantly orbiting member of Andromeda’s retinue, this galaxy is
undergoing a burst of star formation. As many of these stars are bright and short-lived,
large chunks of IC 10 have been swept clear of higher life by supernova explosions. The
scavenging possibilities are large, but as this galaxy is relatively small there are few known
runs that lead here.

M32: Formerly comparable to the Milky Way, this satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy lost all
but its core to the larger galaxy during a close encounter some 800 million years ago.
What remains is a compact agglomeration of bright stars 2000 parsecs across. Half of its
stars—roughly a billion—are jammed into a region a mere 100 parsecs wide. Again, as a
small galaxy there are few known runs that lead here, but at one star every tenth of a
parsec the skies of a node located here are distinctive.

Caldwell 13: Another satellite of Andromeda, there are no known nodes of value in this
galaxy. However, by coincidence more than one useful run beginning on Vatan lead
through it, which makes it of some importance to travelers. It is a low-level Seyfert galaxy
with a bright, quasar-like core that gives off considerable ultraviolet and higher-energy
radiation. While not deadly in the short run, those passing through are advised to take
precautions.

Large Magellanic Cloud: This companion of the Milky Way presents a variety of typical
destinations and does not stand out in any particular way except one: the node Yamalo,
seven steps from Vatan via Chinan Portal, is in close proximity to the Tarantula Nebula. The
view is sufficiently spectacular to support a tourist trade, and expeditions leave regularly.

The Draco Dwarf: A relatively distant satellite of the Milky Way some 85,000 parsecs from
Vatan, the Draco Dwarf is a place of mystery. There are three known runs that lead there,
but all are closely guarded by Imperial Races and no human has ever visited it. Likewise,
no reports have ever been obtained from other Outcasts. The reason seems to have
something to do with dark matter, which even back on Earth was known to be extremely
abundant in the Dwarf, two orders of magnitude higher than in most galaxies. Theories for
the quarantine range from this unknown substance being exploited in some way for use in
advanced technology, to its enlarged presence being a signal of impending disaster that
frightens even the Imperial Races.

81
82
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Cepheus Engine System Reference Document, Copyright © 2016 Samardan Press; Author
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Other Titles from Baggage Books and World Builder’s Consortium

Into the Dark
The Solar System turned out to be a lot less friendly than
we expected. Dreams of Martian canals and Venusian
jungles died in the harsh light shone by Mariners and
Veneras and Voyagers.

But what we did get was an array of worlds of awesome

majesty, one that's enough to scare off 99% percent of
would-be explorers—but not you. Using the Cepheus
Engine core rules or other similar game systems, the Into
the Dark setting book lets you play OSR SF adventures in
the near-future of the Solar System as we understand it
now.

Local Heroes
Set your heroes loose on the streets of New York City: not
the shining towers and canyons of Manhattan, but the real
urban ground level. Down here, police battle crime
syndicates and drug lords with the help of everyday
people who just happen to have superpowers. There's
going to be no medals pinned on your chest for saving the
world, and the local press may just decide that you're
some sort of menace, but that's alright.

Local Heroes is a campaign sourcebook detailing present-

day Brooklyn and Queens, for use with the free OSR 4C
and FASERIP rulesets.