Playtest Alpha— unfinished and still changing.
Rulebook

How to Use This Book

This book holds everything you need to play Wanderstar — the world, the rules, the character creation, and the guidance for running a game. It's organized so you can read it front to back, or dip into whatever you need. Here's the shape of it, and the fastest path through.

How the book is organized§

The book runs in ten parts, plus reference material at the back.

  • Part I — Welcome to Wanderstar (Ch 1–4) introduces the game, the setting, and the core vocabulary, then shows the whole system running in one example of play. Start here.
  • Part II — How to Play (Ch 5–13) is the rules engine: the dice, characteristics, Momentum, skills, trauma, combat, scale, and hazards. This is the heart of the system.
  • Part III — Creating a Wanderer (Ch 14–20) walks you through building a character step by step, then how characters advance and close out a session.
  • Part IV — Careers in Detail (Ch 21–22) holds the twelve careers and the Life Events tables you draw on during creation.
  • Part V — Skills & Equipment (Ch 23–24) describes the thirty skills and the gear a Wanderer carries.
  • Part VI — Travel, Trade & Hardware (Ch 25–28) covers ships, jump travel, vehicles, drones, and the trade economy.
  • Part VII — The Setting (Ch 29–31) is the deep lore: the full timeline, the Shore, and the four peoples.
  • Part VIII — Running the Game (Ch 32–36) is for the Game Master: adjudication, adventure design, faction play (with the corporations roster), contacts, and a ready-to-run starter adventure.
  • Part IX — The Sector & Adventure Toolkit (Ch 37–41) holds the dice-driven generators: sectors and worlds, jobs and salvage, instant NPCs, adversaries, and encounters.
  • Part X — Playing Without a GM (Ch 42–45) is for solo and cooperative play: the oracle that answers the questions a GM would, and how to run a session alone or as a group with no one in charge.
  • Reference at the back groups the at-table play aids first — a quick rules summary (A1), an index of every table (A2), the character sheet (A3), the GM record sheets (A4), the solo journaling shorthand (A5), and the pregenerated Wanderers (A6) — then the reading reference: the conversion guides for published adventures (A7), the named characteristic profiles (A8), a glossary (A9), and a full subject index (A10).

Ready-to-play example Wanderers — one per people — are collected as stat-blocks in Appendix A6, with the full worked creation logs in the Quickplay/Characters/ folder to read alongside Part III.

A note on content. Wanderstar's setting runs on hard material — a lost home, isolation, trauma, and a history of enslavement and rebellion (the Companions were made as property and freed by force). The book treats these as serious, not decoration. Before you play, read Session Zero & Safety (Chapter 32) and agree as a group on what your table wants to explore and what to leave aside.

The fastest path in§

You don't need to read all of it before you play. A good order for a new group:

  1. Everyone reads Chapters 1–3. What the game is, the world in five pages, and the vocabulary you'll meet everywhere.
  2. Skim Part II, then read the example of play (Ch 4). You don't have to memorize the rules — just meet them. The core test (Ch 5), Advantage/Disadvantage (Ch 6), and Momentum (Ch 7) are the three you'll use constantly, and the example of play shows all three running together in one scene.
  3. Build characters together with Part III open in front of you, learning the rules as they come up. Character creation is dice-driven and best done as a group; watching each other's histories unfold is half the fun. In a hurry, hand out the ready-made Wanderers in the Quickplay/Characters/ folder and start playing.
  4. The GM reads Part VIII before the first session and can run the starter adventure (Ch 36) with no prep, keeps Part IX (the toolkit) within reach for rolling up worlds, jobs, and NPCs on the fly, and skims the setting (Part VII) for whatever corner of the Shore the campaign will start in.
  5. Keep the Reference handy. The quick rules summary covers almost everything you'll look up mid-game.

Playing solo, or as a group with no GM? Read Chapters 1–3 and skim Part II as above, build a Wanderer with Part III, then go straight to Part X. It introduces the oracle (Ch 43) and the GM-less session loop (Ch 44–45) and points you back to the Part IX toolkit, which does the work a GM's prep would. You don't need to read Part VIII first, though its principles (Ch 32) are worth a skim.

A few conventions§

  • Dice notation. "2D6" means roll two six-sided dice and add them. "3D6 keep highest/lowest 2" is Advantage/Disadvantage. "D66" reads two dice as a two-digit number (11–66) for table lookups. Wanderstar uses only six-sided dice. The full notation is in Chapter 1.
  • Cross-references. Rules point to the chapters where they're explained in full — "(Chapter 10)" and the like — so you can follow a thread without hunting.
  • The target is always 8. You'll see this everywhere. Difficulty changes through Advantage and Disadvantage, never by moving the number. It's the single most important habit to internalize.
  • Players roll; the GM mostly doesn't. When a threat acts, the player rolls to meet it. This keeps every roll as a player's stake in the outcome.

Make it yours§

Wanderstar is built to be adapted. The "now" of the setting is undefined on purpose — you set the era and draw the map. Invent new Companion lineages, rename the corporations, reshape a world to fit the story you want to tell. The rules are a foundation for play, not a fence around it. Where this book offers a ruling and your table prefers another, yours is the one that counts. Read what's here, take what serves your game, and make the rest your own.