A Nocturne: In Space No One Can Hear You Scheme
Goodreads changed their user-added books policy, and indie RPGs are no longer valid books. Itch.io only shows reviews to the author and your followers, because content moderation is hard and review bombing scary. But I like reviewing things, and I think good games deserve some attention, so expect more RPG reviews here.
A Nocturne is a Forged in the Dark (FitD) game inspired by the dark cosmological sci-fi of Alistair Reynolds, among other touchstones. You’re a crew of exiles, bad people who’s past crimes range from ordinary theft and assault up to planet-killing war crimes and making ontological threats to reality itself. You have a spitter ship, a massive slower-than-light craft with a hold full of forgotten assets and weapons, warped by time and the uncanny evolution of semi-autonomous technology. Can you score enough profit to keep the lights on before a system collapses into chaos and you have to flee into parsecs of distance and decades of cold sleep?
A Nocturne shines in the character playbooks. They feel perfectly fit to the implied fiction of the setting, and the special abilities are notably potent. You’re not some guttersnipe with a knife, you’re an ancient survivor of the interstellar void and you have powers beyond human ken at your command.
The rest of the game makes some minor tweaks to the BitD core. Scale goes way up, and so does the profit that you’ll need to operate your ship. One thing I liked was the Vice mechanic has been replaced by an Outlet, which lets you take a downtime action to externalize stress and move it from your sheet and onto the ship, which becomes increasingly haunted and hostile the worse things get. Trauma can be removed with long term projects or in a crisis, a score. Vice and random stress recovery is very common in FitD, but getting to choose a number ups the sense of competence, and helping yourself by harming the ship feels very on brand. Finally, the downtime mechanism of escalating system chaos caused by the players, which manifests in random tables about how star systems evolve, are a thematic and GM-friendly modification of the basic heat and wanted mechanics.
There are lots of good options for science fiction roleplaying games out there, but in the microgenre of powerful people doing awful things, A Nocturne is a triumph of a game.
