What is Distant Suns
Distant Suns is an original tabletop role-playing game set in a civilization connected by a network of Stargates. Humanity has reached other stars, but distance has not stopped being a problem. Ships still need energy, trade needs reliable routes, and access to a gate may depend on the government controlling it.
Players take the roles of people working within that civilization: a frontier surveyor, gate engineer, naval officer, scientist, or corporate liaison, for example. A referee presents the worlds, other characters, and problems they encounter. Together, the group discovers what happens when professional responsibilities, personal convictions, and unexpected dangers collide.
The game combines an interest in engineering and scarce resources with cinematic adventure and the wonder of discovery. Its faster-than-light travel and gate technology are fictional premises. The design asks what practical and political consequences follow from those premises, rather than treating travel as an unlimited convenience.
A connected galaxy with limits
Most civilian and commercial ships rely on the Stargate Transitioning System, or STS. These vessels use established gates, making interstellar journeys in hours or days. They are comparatively economical, but their crews depend on working infrastructure, transit schedules, and permission to pass.
Rare FTL Self-Propulsion vessels, or S-Pro ships, can travel beyond the gate network under their own power. That independence is expensive. Their voyages can take months or years, and their loss can have consequences well beyond the crew. They are the pathfinders that survey unconnected systems and help extend the network.
Even a functioning gate has limits. Moving too much ship mass through a corridor risks a dangerous collapse. Those limits affect shipping, exploration, and military planning. A damaged gate is not just scenery: it can interrupt the connections on which a world depends.
How play works
When an action is uncertain and its outcome matters, the core rule is straightforward: roll two six-sided dice and add the relevant Attribute and Skill. The result can be a failure with a complication, a partial success, a success, or a strong success. Routine work does not require a roll simply to keep everyone busy.
Characters have six Attributes: Perception, Reason, Presence, Resilience, Adaptation, and Drive. Skills supply professional expertise, from navigation and medicine to gate engineering and negotiation. The same basic approach supports solving a technical fault, dealing with an official, or responding to a dangerous encounter.
A character’s convictions also matter. Personal Drives, such as scientific truth, personal freedom, or preserving infrastructure, can earn Momentum when followed under pressure. Momentum helps a character influence a difficult outcome. Acting strongly against a Drive creates Dissonance, bringing internal conflict into the game rather than leaving beliefs as decoration on a character sheet.
Danger without a mountain of hit points
The rules track harm through Physical Stress, Cognitive Stress, and Environmental Exposure. Injury, psychological strain, and a hostile environment are different problems, and recovering from each may require different help. Pushing a track to Critical incapacitates a character; further severe harm can become fatal.
Combat is intended to be brief and consequential. Suppression, maneuver, defense, and stabilizing an injured companion offer choices beyond firing again. Ships are treated as vulnerable systems too, with damaged equipment and lost integrity putting the crew under pressure.
What an adventure might look like
The following is an illustrative situation, not a published scenario. Your crew reaches a gate where a technical problem has interrupted transit. A commercial operator wants the route reopened. The authorities want to control who leaves. Your engineer needs time to investigate, while your liaison tries to keep the disagreement from becoming a confrontation.
Repairing the machinery is only part of the problem. Do you accept a risky transit window, insist on further tests, or challenge the order to proceed? A character committed to protecting infrastructure may see the situation differently from one committed to personal freedom. The adventure grows from those decisions and their consequences.
The referee also has tools for creating governments through three ratings: Centralization, Civil Liberty, and Economic Control. Cultural context gives those ratings meaning, while stability and political-change rules help worlds respond to crises over a campaign. Politics can create the mission, not merely provide its backdrop.
Where the project stands
Distant Suns is in development. This introduction describes the current core-rules manuscript; it is not a declaration that every rule is final or that a finished edition has been released. Rules and terminology remain subject to review and playtesting.
This page is a project overview, not a complete ruleset. No public rules download is offered here yet.