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Rulebook

Chapter 27 — Jump & FTL Travel

The Shore is reachable at all only because of the jump drive — the breakthrough Wanderstar's core physics finally gave humanity. This chapter is how a starship crosses the dark between worlds: by hexes, one jump at a time, a week to a crossing, and alone the whole way.

Index§

The starmap§

Interstellar space is mapped in hexes, each one parsec across. A hex may hold a star system — its worlds, stations, and traffic — or nothing but empty space and the occasional derelict. What lies in which hex is the GM's to draw; this chapter covers only how a ship moves across the grid.

Jumping§

A jump-capable ship crosses the map by jumping from hex to hex. A ship's Jump rating (Jump-N) is the most hexes it can cross in a single jump, and it may always jump up to that rating. The standard hull is Jump-1 — one parsec per jump; faster drives (Jump-2, Jump-3) are a craft-design customization (Chapter 26), and everything here takes a higher rating wherever "Jump-1" appears.

Every jump takes one week, no matter the distance covered, and for that week the ship is cut off — blind to the universe outside, unreachable by it, alone in jumpspace until it falls back into real space at the destination.

Plotting the jump§

A jump has to be plotted — the navigator's work, and a matter of Physics (Intellect). But plotting a clean course is routine for someone who knows the craft, so most of the time no roll is needed:

Roll to plot only when the navigator is Untrained, or under pressure. A Trained-or-better navigator plotting an unhurried jump with decent charts simply succeeds; the ship arrives in a week. Call for a Physics (Intellect) test (8+) when the plot is genuinely in doubt — an Untrained hand at the astrogation console, or a jump made under pressure: rushed, under fire, fleeing, thrown together from deep in a gravity well, or aimed into uncharted or poorly-surveyed space. Conditions tilt that roll with Advantage or Disadvantage as ever (Chapter 5).

When a plot succeeds (or didn't need rolling), the jump runs true: one week, and you're there. When a required plot fails, the drive engages on a flawed solution — check for a misjump.

Misjumps§

On a failed plot, make a second Physics (Intellect) test (8+) as the drive fires:

  • Success — the navigator wrestles the error down mid-throw. The ship still reaches the intended destination, but the rough passage costs it: it arrives 1D days late, on top of the week.
  • Failure — the ship is flung off course. It tumbles out of jump 1D × 1D hexes from where it meant to be, in a random direction (roll 1D6 for the hex face it scatters along). That is anywhere from a single parsec wide to a thirty-parsec stranding — perhaps an empty hex, perhaps somewhere no chart names.

This is how ships get lost — how a crew ends up in a system the Shore forgot, how the silent arks and broken-off colonies came to be where they are. A misjump is rare (it takes a failed plot and a failed save), but it is the abyss under every voyage.

Recovering. A misjumped ship is off course, not doomed: it plots again and jumps on. But replotting from an uncharted hex, with no survey to work from and perhaps a battered ship, is squarely the "under pressure" case — a Physics test, often at Disadvantage. A run of bad throws is exactly how a short hop becomes an odyssey.

Arrival — the system fringe§

A ship can neither enter nor leave jump from deep inside a gravity well, so it emerges at the fringe of the destination system, well clear of the star and its worlds. Closing from there to the actual planet, station, or ship is a short in-system flight under Piloting (Chapter 23) — hours to a day of gravitic travel, not tracked unless something makes it matter: a picket to slip, a deadline, a pursuer on your tail. The fringe is the chokepoint every arrival must cross, which is exactly why pirates wait there, customs patrols loiter, and ambushes are sprung at the edge of the light.

The week in jumpspace§

A week sealed away from the universe is dead time that is rarely dead. It is a natural stretch of downtime: damage control and repair (a Wrecked or Offline ship can be nursed back over the course of a jump, the way a Maimed character mends across a full recovery session, Chapter 10), trauma healing, training, scheming, and the slow pressure of a crew shut in together with nowhere to go. It is also where a GM springs what can't be outrun — a stowaway, a systems casualty, a thing aboard that wasn't there at departure.

No word travels faster than a ship§

There is no faster-than-light communication in the Shore. A jump carries its crew and cargo and nothing else; news, mail, orders, and rumor all move the way people do — one jump at a time, roughly a week per parsec, and often stale on arrival. You cannot call ahead, cannot be recalled mid-voyage, cannot know what a world is — only what it was when the last ship left it. Much of what makes the Shore the Shore — its isolation, its drift, its lost places and late-waking Sleepers (Chapter 15) — falls out of this one hard fact. It is also the engine of the trade game (Chapter 28): a trader buys a hold without knowing what it will fetch on arrival.

Fuel§

Hand-waved, for now. Assume a ship tops off by skimming a gas giant or cracking cometary ice at its stops; fuel is not tracked, and "can we refuel here" is a question for the fiction, not the rules. (Passage fares for those who buy a berth rather than crew a hull are in Chapter 28.)