Tabletop Game / The Stars Are Fire

The Stars Are Fire is a supplement for the Cypher System published by Monte Cook Games. It provides creatures, rules, character options, items and suggestions, among other tools for a science fiction campaign, plus a complete, ready-to-use hard sci-fi setting: the Revel.

At the start of the 24th century, humanity has reached out into the solar system, establishing supermassive O’Neill space stations, as well as colonies on the Moon, Mars, hollowed-out asteroids, the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, and cities floating over the clouds of Venus. Investments into a brand-new domain of physics has produced a propulsion system allowing humans to extend our reach to a handful of nearby stars.

Just as we seem poised for a golden age of interstellar expansion, millions of miles of old, artificial tunnels crisscrossing the Moon's core were discovered. However, the discovery of the tunnels coincides with the Earth going completely dark and quiet. No one knows why...

---

The setting-neutral information provide examples of:

• Adaptation Name Change: Some sample settings originated as The Strange recursions under different names: New Nihon (originally Samurai Sky), The Empty World (R639), The Grand Imperium (Rebel Galaxy), Summerland (Panopticon) and Omega Network (Cyberscape).
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Fatal malwares are purely malefic programs with aggressive machine learning capabilities, allowing them to accomplish truly innovative and nasty tricks.
• Alien Abduction:
  • When they contact a new species, inquisitors prefer to collect a representative sample of any intelligent species they find (such as humans). Collected subjects may be gone for good, but other times they wake with little or no recollection of the experience save for bruises, missing digits or teeth, scabbed-over circular head wounds, and a gap of three or more days in their memory.
  • Supernals have a penchant for stealing away other life forms, who are rarely seen again.
• Artificial Human: Synths are a blend of biological and mechanical parts so advanced that in some cases, it's impossible to tell the difference between a living creature and a synth. They are strong AIs in physical bodies.
• The Battlestar: An omega class craft has over a thousand crew and over thirty weapon systems, ten of which are superior weapons. Combined weapon fire can deal significant damage to a planetary surface, possibly destroying it. Includes bays for six squadrons of thirty dagger fighter starships.
• Blob Monster: Exoslimes are amoeboid blobs of translucent protoplasm.
• Body Horror: Devolved are malformed, hideous brutes that display a wide array of maladies and mutations in the flesh, including withered limbs or elephantine patches of thick, scaly skin, misplaced body parts, and mental abnormalities.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Exoslimes can replicate anything they absorb, even a previously eaten living intelligent being. They prefer to eat a newly-encountered creature, then create a duplicate of it to act as a translator.
• Cyborg: A cybrid is a human nested in a shell of carbon fibre and nanotech.
• Deflector Shields: A quick force field belt generates an almost transparent force field to surround the user for up to one hour.
• Energy Beings: Shining ones abandoned their physical forms millennia ago, becoming entities of free-floating energy and pure consciousnes. Under circumstances where a shining one is moved to more directly interact, one can actually convert itself into matter once more.
• Festering Fungus: The incredibly toxic vacuum fungus typically grows undetected on the exterior of spacecraft or space stations, in the dark corners of cargo holds, in ductworks, hanging from the ceiling of unused crew quarters, and so on.
• Fish People: Though humanoid, natathim have somewhat fish-like heads, complete with gills and large eyes to collect light in the depths. Their bodies are adorned with fins and frills, including a long shark-like tail, and they have webbed extremities with retractable claws.
• Flying Car: Anti-gravity repulsors allow a flying car to fly within the atmosphere.
• Gravity Master: An omworwar can manipulate and fold gravity and space-time, allowing them to accomplish near-miraculous tasks including communication, creating or destroying matter, and propulsion via 'falling' through the universe at FTL speeds from the perspective of an outside observer.
• Grey Goo: Ecophagic swarms are out-of-control self-replicating robots that consume everything in their path while building more of themselves.
• Hard Light: Hard-light technology, which creates pseudo-matter from modified photons, has made possible all kinds of structures and devices that wouldn't otherwise exist.
• Human Subspecies: Natathim (Homo aquus) and wraiths (Homo vacuus) are humans genetically engineered to live in, respectively, the water oceans beneath the icy crusts of various solar moons and the vacuum of space.
• Humongous Mecha: A colossal battle mech is a 78 m tall powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton frame armed with a massive plasma sword and mech-punch, plus very long-range missiles, grenades, and energy weapons.
• Insectoid Aliens: Supernals are half-humanoid, half-dragonfly aliens.
• Invisible Monsters: Hungry hazes appear as nothing more than distortions of sight, like areas of heat haze, that shimmer in the air, only taking on an orange-red hue when they feed.
• Light 'em Up: Photonomorphs can create matter from light, granting them an arbitrarily wide swathe of abilities.
• Man-Eating Plant: Sentinel trees resemble thorny masses of knotted vines and are mobile, aggressive, and feed on almost any sort of organic matter.
• Never Found the Body: If a zero-point phantom isn't occupied, it can grab a victim paralysed by its poison and phase back into non-existence. Most victims phased away in this fashion are never seen again.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Stellar gates open wormholes between two fixed points at different locations without crossing the space between.
• Precursors: Ancient ultras are unbelievably advanced races of aliens that once inhabited the galaxy but are now apparently long gone save for evidence of their existence in residual structures and artifacts, which are often vast in size and incomprehensible in function, usually made of unknown materials that people can't recognise or analyse.
• Psychic Powers: Psionics is essentially a method to provide characters and creatures access to supernatural abilities. Through sheer force of will, a psionic character can unleash inborn mental abilities such as telepathy, precognition and telekinesis. A GM's first decision must be whether you want to incorporate psionics into your setting.
• Radiation-Immune Mutants: Wraiths are immune to radiation, and radiation attacks heal a wraith's lost health by the amount of damage the attack would have otherwise afflicted.
• Reality Warper: A godmind can vary the physical laws of the universe within a light-second of one of its instances (some would call them avatars) to create an effect most useful to the godmind at the time.
• Silicon-Based Life: Silicon parasites are composed of organic silicon wires and wafers, and self-assembled or evolved in some unnamed lab or spacecraft wreck.
• Single-Task Robot: Weak AI (also called narrow AI) is the kind of algorithmic-based code found in contemporary settings and real life focused on very narrow tasks. A weak AI is useful for the task it was specifically designed for but can't generalise or even attempt other tasks it isn't coded for, like a human can.
• The Singularity: Post-singularity AIs have designed a second-generation, better version of themselves. The second generation immediately designed an even more advanced third generation, and so on from there. This iterating self-improvement process occurs so rapidly that the resulting explosion of intelligence and unknown capability is called the singularity, as humans are just too limited to see what would actually come out the other end, just like we can't see past the event horizon into the singularity of a black hole.
• Space Elevator: A space elevator is a tether anchored to the surface of celestial body that extends into space along which vehicles can travel, granting access to and from orbital space. A counterweight space station exists at the far end of the tether in geostationary orbit.
• Space Marine: Storm marines are elite soldiers wearing advanced battlesuits, hyped up on a cocktail of experimental military drugs, and able to draw on a suite of cybernetic and network-connected drone guns.
• Space Whale: Omworwar are kilometres-long slug-like space-dwelling creatures surrounded by gauzy layers of translucent, glowing, nebula-like tissue.
• Starfish Aliens: Inquisitors are aliens with three sets of three tentacles like those of a squid, each of which branches into a smaller and finer set of manipulator tendrils.
• That's No Moon:
  • Thundering behemoths use colour-changing frills to help them appear like tall trees while they stand in wait for prey, as still as mighty hardwood trunks, until they break cover and spring an ambush.
  • Redivi resemble rocky space rubble the size of a small spacecraft until they unfurl glowing magnetic plasma wings, revealing themselves as strange creatures of living mineral.
• Time Machine: Space-time vehicles allow for movement between different points in both space and time.
• Trapped in Another World: The modern-era small town of Venture, caught in a temporal bubble of unknown origin, is physically transported across uncounted centuries into the future, or possibly into another dimension, or as some of the more religious and terrified believe, into some kind of weird afterlife.

The Revel setting provides examples of:

• Absolute Xenophobe: The Red Crater Purists is a subversive guerrilla group, determined that Mars will never come under the rule of an external group, which includes being signatory to the Interplanetary Space Treaty. They believe in Martian purity to an almost xenophobic extent. If you don't go back at least three generations, you're not really Martian in their eyes.
• Absent Aliens: No intelligent alien life has been found; most extraterrestrial life discovered has been the alien equivalent of microbes, fungi and plants. Yutu is one of the precious few worlds where alien life has been discovered; they roughly resemble the deep-sea life once found in Earth.
• Acid Attack: Curzans secrete an acid in their bite and into the waters surrounding them that is strong enough to destroy subs that get too close.
• Arms Dealer: Allian is a megacorporation that focuses on weapons manufacture, and sells weapons of every conceivable type.
• Artificial Meat: Genetically modified crickets provide basic foodstuffs for colonies all across the solar system. Real meat is available, but many in Luna One are queasy eating once-living animals, so there is a social taboo against it.
• Back from the Brink: Stardeep CEO Raphael Daewon turned Stardeep from a conglomerate on the edge of failing utterly forty years ago into the most well-known of the Big Five.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: In the Shops at Metius, all manner of things can be purchased, including rare plants; insects for pets, food, or decoration; various intoxicants including mild and dangerous drugs; oddments of salvage and keepsakes from old Earth; food of staggering variety; garments, fabrics; spices; and so on (with the notable exception of armaments). Oddities, strange resources, and in some cases, black-market simple aliens exported from the Far-flung Worlds can also be found here, either out in the open or behind closed doors.
• Beehive Barrier: The domes of a Venusian cloud city consists of a series of individual hexagonal subunits.
• Benevolent A.I.: Luna One prospers under the beneficent rule of a strong AI called Anaximander.
• Boom Town: Barsoom City originated as a mining boom town. Parts of it still operate that way, especially in the region of the Dig, and it continues to bring up rare earths from an ancient impactor.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Many prominent scientists wonder if the universe people experience isn't some vast simulation, and the psychic singularity that caused the Event actually represents a chance to break out of this reality and into the real, actual universe.
• By-the-Book Cop: Colonel Orly Tagawais a fair man and very by-the-book. He might stretch the rules a bit for the greater good, but never too far. He is not open to bribes, and responds poorly to blackmail attempts. More and more, he sees Star Force's primary mission in the Opulence rooting out and destroying all pirate activity.
• The Casino: Stardeep is famous for its casinos, each of which features an amazing historical or fantastical theme. PCs who wish to engage in a bit of gambling can find pretty much any game or betting activity they desire: slots, roulette, poker, baccarat, craps or something more modern.
• Caught Up in the Rapture: The core of the Church of the Quiet's belief is that the Event was essentially the Rapture. Everyone in space missed out on this Rapture, many through no fault of their own. Adherents of the church hope that by purifying their souls, they'll be eligible for ascension.
• Chaos Architecture: The biggest threat to survival in the ancient sublunar tunnels is getting lost. No matter how many precautions an explorer takes, there is a dreamy changeability to the place that defies direction. If one gets lost, locating a way out requires further wandering for a chance to stumble back into a familiar tunnel.
• Colonized Solar System: At the start of the 24th century, humanity has established hundreds of colonies across the solar system.
• Company Town: A couple of cloud cities on Venus are wholly owned subsidiaries of off-world conglomerates.
• Corporate Warfare: Several of the Big Five conglomerates owned mining colonies in the Opulence, but after the Event, many of them have declared independence following bloody wars.
• Death World: On the surface of Venus, the super-heated air is hot enough to melt lead, the intense pressure is about 90 times that of Earth, and immense electrical storms or massive volcanoes that sometimes erupt.
• Domed Hometown: Most people in the Revel live in artificial environments delimited by corridors, chambers and domes. They will never experience the natural, wide-open, non-lethal space that people on Earth once enjoyed.
• Dying Town: Mining Camp Alpha once had a population of over 10000, but seven years ago, a sun storm of extreme violence blasted it into oblivion. Only a skeleton crew of miners remain, living hand-to-mouth in the deep mine shafts where solar radiation can't penetrate. For some reason, the sun storms interfere with dark drive transit times, so starships no longer visit, even though it's known that the mining colony is in trouble. For their part, the surviving miners have managed to put together a cramped, uncomfortable, dark existence beneath the world, with no hope for rescue.
• Earth That Was: A few years ago, the Earth went completely dark. All communications across the entire Earth cut off simultaneously, and the lights went out as a shroud of racing clouds quickly enveloped the entire planet. Exploratory craft sent to explore beneath the thunderhead-capped shroud disappeared one after another. Eventually, most accepted that something truly horrific had happened. The Earth, now often called the Quiet Earth, is under blockade.
• Elevator Escape: Anaximander keeps his primary core in a triple-sealed vault in Tranquility Tower's elevator-train. Should Anaximander ever need to abandon the tower, he can jettison the elevator-train, a vehicle in its own right, to escape.
• Fantastic Light Source: Proximite, a white crystal exclusively found on Idriss, somehow stores light in bright conditions and shines it back in darkness.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: When the XK-Astra dark drive is activated, the starship makes a point-to-point transition to a new location in the galaxy, arriving exactly at the coordinates entered. The objective time of transfer to an outside observer usually takes from minutes to months, and doesn't seem to correspond to actual distance, but rather to some as-yet-undiscovered space-time mapping.
• Fantastic Drug: Enthrall concentrates unknown substances that, when melted and drunk or released back into the air and inhaled, allow the imbiber to enter a deep trance while increasing awareness of the surrounding world. Users of enthrall can quickly accomplish tasks requiring deep, extended concentration.
• A Father to His Men: Quiet and considerate, Srinivasa Sharma's leadership style is consensus-oriented when time allows. He has the respect of the crew, and other officers in Star Force think incredibly highly of him, so much so that the admirals worry about who could ever replace him as captain of the Dauntless.
• Floating Continent: Dozens of cloud cities float across the upper atmosphere of Venus. They provide breathable, non-poisonous air for residents, and in so doing, provide the lift keeping each city aloft at some 50 km above the surface.
• Future Food Is Artificial: The primary source of food on Aeneas is crickets and fungus, grown in the twin ten-story hanging Food Towers. Through modern food prep, the basic food stock is transformed into multiple textures and flavours.
• Ghost City: Over the years, a couple of Venusian floating cities have gone missing, assumed to have suffered some catastrophic disaster. However, recent sightings suggest that one of those cities still floats the skies, but it's dark and answers no hails.
• Ghost Ship: The DE-Swan is a derelict starship moving at a small fraction of the speed of light in the general direction of the galactic core. If someone were to somehow rendezvous with it, they'd find everything wrecked and no crew aboard, without any evidence of what might have happened to them. In addition, the cradle holding the dark drive is simply missing.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: A dark drive FTL transition is extremely damaging to fully conscious humans, often resulting in madness and irreversible mental trauma. Those driven insane by a functioning dark drive tend to run amok, doing serious damage to the spacecraft and other passengers while the vehicle is still in transit, destroying the vehicle before it exists back into normal space. Dark Drive Protocol demands that prior to any transition, every single member of the crew except the pilot is induced into a dreamless sleep, using a sleep set. Or not. As with observations of particles at the quantum level, conscious observation within a folded dark drive pocket of unbounded quantum possibility collapses all possible outcomes to one, and a daydreaming conscious human mind creates myriad potential 'all possible outcomes'. The conscious interaction of human minds caused most test craft to be lost forever or tear themselves apart as numerous different observers subconsciously tried to collapse reality every which way.
  Amyta Waine: The universe doesn't want us to see. But I did. My god, I did! My sleep set malfunctioned, and I woke up. And I saw... I saw... <incoherent sobbing, screaming cut off by transmission end>
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Dr. Ling Hebert led her team on a project to create folded dark drive space at a distance, in an attempt to arbitrarily fashion selective and destructive resonances around the world and beyond. When she attempted her first real-world large-scale test, switching on her dark pocket generator on Earth to change the state of a test dummy in a sister lab on the Moon, a collapse in the Luna One habitation tunnels revealed uncounted miles of ancient sublunar tunnels, and the Earth went dark. The implication is that Hebert's dark pocket generator test triggered the Event. Maybe that's correct, or maybe there's a different, deeper answer.
• Holy City: Sanctuary was founded by a group of different religious orders working together to fund and fly a spacecraft into the farthest reaches of space a hundred years ago (Saturnian space at the time). As such, temples and shrines to various deities are everywhere under the dome. It's rare that some bell, choir or other sacred sound isn't audible. Religious pilgrims are an essential part of Sanctuary's economy.
• Honest John's Dealership: If someone wants something not available on Luna One, Gavin Macht is the one to see. That includes firearms and other illegal wares.
• Human Resources: The dead of the Revel are honoured, but resources are too dear on moon bases and space stations for burial. Instead, after funeral ceremonies, a warden takes respectful stewardship over the corpse, conveys it to whatever system is used for composting and recycling of other wastes, and respectfully deposits the dead.
• Immortality Seeker: The CEO of Ibis, Victor Larue, has managed to defy a natural human lifespan by replacing nearly every part of himself, including his entire blood supply on a monthly schedule. Most reports put his true age at around 160 years. He is one of the richest people in the Revel, but all the money in the solar system barely suffices to buy him what he most desires: more life.
• Lost Technology: The XK-Astra partnership that created the dark drive was located on Earth. All proprietary information necessary to create a dark drive was stored in state-of-the-art encryption and restricted only to those who needed to know. That's gone, thanks to the Event.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Because there is not a lot of opportunity to change jobs on a floating city, tensions in the factory towers in Aeneas sometimes boil over, resulting in an 'accidental fall' of a manger, employee or inspector.
• MegaCorp: The five largest business conglomerates in the Revel—the Big Five—each own a dominion in the form of supermassive O'Neill space stations. Each is effectively a separate nation-state, and sends its own ambassador to the Interplanetary Space Treaty council every two years.
• Neon City: Neon signs and flat panel displays light up Barsoom City at all hours of day and night, except during the Martian Minute.
• New Old West: Purely by accident, humans recreated certain aspects of the ancient Wild West era on Mars. Thousands of independent homesteads lie along the floor of the Mariner Valley, each following their own rules, beholden to no one. Most people respect the authority of Martian marshals, because they usually show up to help.
• Not So Extinct: After their failed attempt to seize absolute power in the Revel, every wraith was hunted down and eliminated. Except now, reports of renewed wraith activity out near Neptune have become too frequent to ignore.
• One Nation Under Copyright: Spirals are built and governed as separate dominions by the five largest merged mega corporations, the Big Five, and host millions of residents each. Most spiral full-time residents are both citizens and employees of the conglomerate owning that spiral.
• Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: The Earth going dark was caused by it being wracked with "superposition waves" due to the human subconscious "collapsing quantum possibilities". This makes it a global Psychological Torment Zone, in case you were wondering.
• The Quiet One: Mary Yang is reserved, never says a word more than is required to accomplish her current task, and is a big mystery to everyone else.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Pirate ships of the Golgotha Fleet (or those attempting to look like Golgotha craft) are uniformly black, striped with red lights for that extra-menacing look.
• Riddle for the Ages: Crantor went quiet in some kind of disaster that no one in the Revel yet understands, and what exactly happened is up to the GM.
• Rite of Passage: In the Diaspora of Mars, the rite passage to adulthood called lochspringa involves young adults leaving their homestead or plex and coming to the Dig to work as itinerant miners for at least half a Martian year.
• Secret-Keeper: A haggard old man named Maxwell Quinn drowns most of his days with intoxicants in various Luna One bars. Rumour has it that he was once a scientist working on the XK-Astra dark drive, but was thrown off the team for being mentally unstable. Those who find him might themselves learn the secret history of the Event from his lips.
• Space Base: A military space station orbits Jupiter's moon Io, allowing Star Force to project its power into the Opulence.
• Space Pirates: Pirates operate in the Opulence, in small fleets of coal-black ships with red highlights.
• Space Police: The Interplanetary Space Treaty gives the Star Force its legal authority to enforce its provisions on humans in the Solar System (and the Far-flung Worlds, to a lesser extent) who wish to enjoy the benefits of membership.
• Space Navy: Star Force boasts a few hundred military spacecraft, arranged in strategic battle groups around the solar system, and defends member groups against non-member aggressive forces and pirates.
• Standard Time Units: Most most people in the Revel standardise a day to twenty-four hours, since human bodies work best, more or less, when they follow a set diurnal cycle. Usually people say sol when they mean a twenty-four-hour period, to avoid confusion. In this way, sol-standard seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months and years are tracked, with everyone across the solar system and in the Far-flung Worlds in relative synch.
• Stepford Smiler: Dr. Toni Segal is never without a quip or quick joke to lighten the mood, but her humour hides a deep sadness, as she lost a daughter on Earth during the Event.
• Thicker Than Water: Nicola Saarinen, governor of Pallas Station, is brother to Natassa Saarinen, leader of the pirate Golgotha Fleet. This is why the Golgotha Fleet generally leaves Pallas alone, among other arrangements the two share. Nicola hates what his sister does, and can't stomach what the communication webs describe as atrocities (even while half not believing them), but she is family, and as long as her pirates target XK freighters, he finds it easier to look the other way.
• Trust Password: Getting in the Back Space Bar requires knowing the passphrase, which only residents of Aeneas know.
• Tube Travel: A subway-like system of subsurface tubes, often arranged like a ring or spiral around each dome, with interconnections to other domes, allows relatively swift and effort-free travel across Luna One.
• The War of Earthly Aggression: Fifty years before the Event, Luna One proclaimed its independence from the various Earth interests controlling it, calling itself the First Republic of Luna.
• Was Once a Man: Some lost explorers in the ancient sublunar tunnels are strangely disfigured, even monstrous, with stretched arms, claw-like space suit gloves, and only darkness within their helmets. Did they stumble into a stash of illegal gene-drive munitions?
• World of Chaos: Earth is engulfed in a psychic singularity that wracks it with superposition waves, each one failing to collapse into reality, instead only iterating new potentials upon on the last. Everything that was once on Earth is gone, but everything still exists as a probability, warped beyond comprehension. Essentially, it's as if the collective unconsciousness of humanity were given free reign, and it went stark raving mad. Those who make their way past the clouds covering Quiet Earth without being protected by a focus-set feel as if they have been pulled into a nightmare, with everything around them warping and mutating in horrific ways.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: Maddux Down, Luna One's deepest district, has a reputation of being where people who have made a series of poor life decisions end up.