Chapter 1 — What Is This Game?

Wanderstar is a tabletop roleplaying game. If you already know what that means, you can skip ahead to Chapter 2 and meet the world. If you don't — or if it's been a while — this chapter is for you. It explains what a roleplaying game is, what this one is about, what you need to play, who does what at the table, and how to read the dice notation you'll see throughout the rest of the book.

What a roleplaying game is§

A tabletop roleplaying game is a story you build together by talking. One person describes a situation; the others say what their characters do in response; and when the outcome is uncertain, dice decide which way it breaks. There is no board to win and no script to follow. The game is the conversation, and the rules exist only to settle the moments where the story could plausibly go more than one way.

If you've played a video game with quests, choices, and consequences, you already understand the shape of it. The difference is that nothing here is pre-rendered. The world is described in words and held in everyone's imagination, which means it can do anything any of you can picture — and you are never limited to the options a designer thought to program. If your character wants to try something, they can try it. The rules will tell you how likely it is to work.

A session usually runs two to four hours. A series of sessions following the same characters is a campaign, and a good one can last months or years. You can also play a single self-contained evening, called a one-shot. Wanderstar supports all of these.

What this game is about§

You play Wanderers: people who, for whatever reason, are not staying put.

The setting is the far future of a strange history, told in full in Chapter 2. The short version: humanity once rode a sunless rogue planet — Wanderstar — out of the solar system and across intergalactic space to a satellite galaxy called the Shore. That crossing took thousands of years and split humanity into four peoples with very different histories. The Shore is home now. It is vast, unevenly governed, and full of systems with their own politics about who belongs and who doesn't.

Wanderers are the people moving through the gaps. Maybe the Shore's institutions failed them, maybe they walked away from those institutions on purpose, maybe they're chasing something or running from something. Whatever the reason, they go where settled people won't, and that willingness is what makes them the protagonists of this game. What you do with that life — on the frontier, inside the institutions, and in the spaces between — is the story you'll tell.

Wanderstar is built to handle a wide range of stories: frontier exploration, hard-luck trade hauls, political intrigue, criminal enterprise, salvage and survival, and the slow business of figuring out where you belong. The rules don't assume your group wants combat every session. They assume your characters are competent people in a dangerous galaxy, and they let you find your own balance of action, travel, and talk.

What you need to play§

You need very little:

People. As few as one. The classic table has one person as Game Master (see below) and three to five others playing Wanderers, but the game also runs with fewer or more — including two modes with no GM at all: solo, just you and the dice, and co-op, a group sharing the GM's role between them. Both are covered in Part X.
Dice. A few six-sided dice — the ordinary kind from any board game. Wanderstar only ever uses six-sided dice, and most rolls need just two of them. A couple of dice per person is plenty.
This book, or at least access to it. Most of the rules you'll use often fit on the quick-reference summary at the back.
Character sheets. A blank sheet for each player to record their Wanderer. There's one in the back of the book to photocopy or recreate.
Something to write with, and ideally something to take notes on. Campaigns accumulate names, debts, and complications, and you'll want to remember them.

That's all. No board, no miniatures, no app. Many groups add a battlemap and tokens for combat, or play entirely in the imagination — both work.

Who does what at the table§

The table has two kinds of seat.

Players each control one Wanderer — a single character who is theirs to speak for and decide for. You describe what your character does, says, and tries; you roll the dice when an action is uncertain; and you make the choices that define who your Wanderer becomes over the course of play. Your character is the lens through which you experience the world. Building that character is covered in Part III.

The Game Master (GM) plays everyone and everything else. The GM describes the world, voices the people in it, sets up the situations the Wanderers walk into, and decides what happens in response to the players' choices. The GM also adjudicates the rules: when a player wants to do something, the GM decides whether it just happens, whether it's impossible, or whether it calls for a roll — and how hard that roll should be. The GM is not the players' opponent. Their job is to present an interesting, consistent world and let the dice and the players' decisions determine how the story goes. Guidance for running the game is in Part VIII.

This division is the engine of the whole game: players push, the GM responds, the dice resolve the uncertain moments, and the story emerges from the back-and-forth. It can also be collapsed into one person or shared among a group — when there's no GM, an oracle (a way of asking the dice the questions a GM would answer) takes over the second seat. That's solo and co-op play, and it's the subject of Part X.

Reading the dice notation§

Wanderstar uses only six-sided dice, written D6. The notation throughout this book is consistent and worth learning now:

2D6 means roll two six-sided dice and add them together. This is the core of nearly every roll in the game — results range from 2 to 12 and cluster around 7. Most actions resolve as 2D6 plus a skill bonus against a target of 8 or higher. The full rule is in Chapter 5.
3D6 keep highest 2 and 3D6 keep lowest 2 describe Advantage and Disadvantage — you roll three dice and keep the best or worst two of them. This is how your character's nature tilts a roll without changing the math you're adding. Covered in Chapter 6.
1D6 means a single die, used here and there for smaller decisions.
D66 is a special roll for reading off long tables. You roll two dice one at a time (or two distinguishable dice), read the first as the "tens" digit and the second as the "ones," and get a two-digit result from 11 to 66 — 36 evenly weighted outcomes. Career benefits, gear, and life events all use D66 tables. (Note that there is no 0, 7, 8, or 9 — the only digits are 1 through 6, so the results are 11–16, 21–26, and so on.)

You'll also see shorthand like "+2" attached to a roll, meaning add 2 to the total, and target numbers written as "8+", meaning the result must be 8 or higher to succeed.

That's the entire dice vocabulary of the game. Everything else is built from these pieces.

Why Wanderstar?§

A short, honest section for anyone deciding whether to bring this game to their table. If you've never played a 2D6 science-fiction game, you can skip it. If you're coming from one — and most people are — this is for you.

Almost nobody finds this game first. If you're reading it, you've probably run Traveller or the Cepheus Engine, rolled up a sector in Stars Without Number, or journaled your way across the void in Ironsworn: Starforged. Those are good games. This section won't pretend otherwise, and it won't tell you to abandon them. It will tell you, plainly, what Wanderstar does differently, and when one of those other games is still the better pick.

What Wanderstar is built to do well§

A specific world, already authored. The other 2D6 sci-fi games hand you a toolbox and an empty galaxy; their settings are either a sprawl you have to learn or a blank you have to fill. Wanderstar hands you this one — a sunless planet humanity rode out of the solar system, a satellite galaxy called the Shore, and four peoples carrying eight thousand years of who-left-and-who-stayed into every room they enter. The premise does work no generator can: it tells you what your stories are about. That is the reason to be here, and nothing else ships it.

A core with almost nothing to carry. The target number is always 8. Characteristics give Advantage or Disadvantage, never a column of modifiers to sum. There are no hit points, only trauma; no NPC stat blocks, only a damage die and a sense of how tough something is; no enemy dice at all, because the players roll and the world doesn't. The math you do at this table is lighter than at any of the games you're coming from, and the difficulty lives in the fiction instead of on a chart.

A galaxy that runs itself. The toolkit (Part IX) builds worlds, patrons, jobs, salvage, encounters, and walk-on faces from dice when you need them, and the faction turn (Chapter 34) moves the powers you're not watching between sessions, so the Shore changes whether or not the crew is looking. You can prep a campaign or improvise one cold.

A table of any size — including none. The same rules run a classic group with a GM, a single player alone with the oracle (Chapter 43), or a leaderless group sharing the world between them (Chapter 45). Solo isn't a bolted-on appendix that fights the system; it works because the system already hides no enemy dice and never moves the number.

Growth that keeps going past the cap. Skills stop climbing at Expert — the math never inflates, and an Expert is no better than anyone else at an ordinary roll — but the ceiling is a doorway, not a dead end. From there, XP buys Masteries: narrow signature techniques that grant a permission rather than a bigger number (Chapter 20). A long-served Wanderer is set apart by what they can do that no one else can, not by a stat line pulling away from the table. The flat, lethal core that keeps early play tense doesn't plateau into nothing — it opens out.

The rest of the hobby, portable. Because the spine is 2D6-against-8, the conversion guide (A7) lets you run decades of published Traveller, Cepheus, Stars Without Number, and OSR/NSR adventures on this chassis with a few rules of thumb. The back catalog of the genre is available to you here.

When to reach for one of the others instead§

This is the honest half, and it matters more than the list above.

Play Traveller if you want its canonical universe, its deep first-party line of adventures and supplements, or the tactile crunch of tonnage-ledger ship design and granular world profiles. Wanderstar can run a Traveller module, but it will not give you the Third Imperium or the joy of a power-budget spreadsheet — that thinness is deliberate, and if it's the part you love, you'll miss it.

Play Stars Without Number if you want the finest-grained sandbox generators in the genre — full world codes, tagged factions with their own numeric tracks, the famous free edition — and the enormous community and ecosystem behind it. Wanderstar's toolkit covers the same ground in a lighter, fiction-first idiom, but SWN simply has more dials and more years behind it.

Play Starforged if solo or GM-less play is the main event, not one mode among several. It's solo-first by design: the whole engine — vows, progress moves, asset cards — exists to scaffold a dramatic arc for a player with no GM, and it's polished across editions and carried by a deep solo community. Wanderstar takes solo seriously too — a native oracle and a journaling mode (Chapter 45) that keeps the log as you play — but its core is a GM-style engine with an excellent solo layer on top, not a solo-first design. When you want the game itself to shape the arc, Starforged specializes where Wanderstar generalizes.

The short version§

Wanderstar is for the table that wants a strong, specific science-fiction world and a system that stays out of its way — light to run, playable with or without a GM, and able to borrow from the whole genre when it wants to. What the older games still hold over it is incumbency: the depth and variety of decades-long adventure catalogs, mature communities, and a third-party ecosystem — next to which Wanderstar's own published line, the Sunless Saga, is young and single-author. That's a real gap, and an honest one — but it's narrowing. The free companion app at playwanderstar.com already does more than make characters: it builds and runs a Wanderer, gives the GM an infinite hex-map table to run a session on, and keeps an oracle and the rulebook's own tables a click away on every page — free, in the browser, with nothing to install. That's more running play than most games twice this game's age can manage; the rest is something Wanderstar hasn't done yet, not something it can't. The world, though — the world is here now, and the world is the reason.

Where to go next§

If you want the world first, read Chapter 2 — The World in Brief, which lays out the setting and the four peoples. If you'd rather understand the dice before anything else, skip to Part II — How to Play, starting with Chapter 5. And when you're ready to build a Wanderer of your own, Part III — Creating a Wanderer walks you through it step by step. A new player's most efficient path is to read Chapters 1–3, then build a character alongside Part III, learning the rules as they come up — or let the free companion app at playwanderstar.com roll or guide a Wanderer for you and track the sheet as you play — with the oracle, the rulebook's tables, and a GM map a click away when you need them.