Chapter 37 — Sectors & Worlds

This is the first of the toolkit chapters (Part IX): dice you reach for when you need a place to point the crew and don't have one ready. It builds a corner of the Shore from the top down — a system, the bodies in it, the stations that orbit them, and the settlements on the ground — fast enough to do at the table while the players are jumping toward it.

Wanderstar worlds are made of fiction and a hook, not a profile. There are no universal world codes to fill in, no atmosphere ratings to cross-reference. Every entry below gives you a defining trait and a thread to pull; the numbers that matter (a hazard, a trade good, an adversary's damage die) come from the chapters that own them when they come up (Chapters 13, 28, 40). Roll what you need, ignore what you don't, and let the results argue with each other — the friction between a frozen world and a thriving port is itself an adventure.

Index§

• Building a system
• System contents (D66)
• World character (D66)
• Moons & belts (D66)
• Space stations (D66 ×3)
• Settlement detail (D66 ×3)
• Naming what you find
  • Place name — shape (D6)
  • Place name — first element (D66)
  • Place name — landform (D66)
• Technology Levels (TL)
  • The scale
  • Where the Shore sits
  • TL at the table

Building a system§

When the crew jumps somewhere new, roll in this order, taking only as much detail as the session needs:

1. System contents (D66) — what's actually here to visit.
2. For the main world, world character (D66) — its defining trait and a hook.
3. For each moon, belt, or secondary body that matters, moons & belts (D66).
4. For any station the crew will dock at, space stations (D66).
5. When they go groundside, settlement detail (D66) for the place they land.
6. Whenever a place needs to be spoken aloud, give it a name (D66×D66 + D6, below).

A whole sector is just several systems rolled this way and a few factions (Chapter 34) whose reach stretches between them. You rarely need more than three or four developed systems to run a campaign; sketch the rest as names on a chart (Chapter 39 names them) and flesh them out when the crew turns that way.

System contents (D66)§

What the jump drops you into.

World character (D66)§

The main world's defining trait, and the hook riding on it.

Moons & belts (D66)§

What a secondary body offers, or threatens.

Space stations (D66 ×3)§

Type, who runs it, and what's wrong. Roll D66 separately for each of the three columns and make one place of the results — the friction between an unlikely type and an unlikely owner is the point. (If you'd rather, roll once and read straight across.)

Settlement detail (D66 ×3)§

When the crew puts boots down, the place they walk into. Roll D66 separately for each of the three columns — who runs it, what it needs, what it fears — and make one place of the results, read together with the world's character (above). (If you'd rather, roll once and read straight across.)

Naming what you find§

A system, a world, a station, a settlement — the moment the crew talks about it, it needs a name, and the name does as much work as any roll above. Shore places are named by whoever got there first and mattered most: surveyors stamp a descriptor, arks land carrying a hope, banks and combines file a registry code that the locals wear smooth, and Seeders carry old surnames across 160,000 light-years and hang them on a valley (Chapter 29). A name tells the table who holds the place before anyone explains it.

Roll D66 on each table — first element + landform — then roll D6 for the shape the name takes in people's mouths. The shape matters as much as the words: a system where every place is Adjective Noun sounds invented, while a mix of single words, elisions, and worn-down codes sounds lived in. Build a handful and vary the shapes deliberately.

Two habits make a sector feel real. Let a couple of places borrow a person's name straight from the four lists in Chapter 39 — a town that's just Okonkwo, a port called Caldwell Landing. And let neighbors share a root and split at the landform — Providence the world, Providence Gate the station, Providence Rest the town below — so the names read as one settled place rather than three unrelated coinages.

Place name — shape (D6)§

How the name is actually said. Roll or pick; some shapes only fit some roots — see the notes.

Place name — first element (D66)§

The root: a descriptor a surveyor would stamp, a hope an ark carried, a number off a registry, or a surname carried across the crossing.

Place name — landform (D66)§

What kind of place it is, or the feature it grew around. A core-tap world (Chapter 29) earns a Furnace*; an ice world a* Shelf or a Cut*; an ark's first foothold a* Landing*.*

Technology Levels (TL)§

How far up the energy ladder a world has climbed.

A Technology Level (TL) is shorthand for how much a civilization can do — not what gadgets it happens to own, but the scale of energy it commands and the physics it has learned to bend. Wanderstar rates technology from TL 0 to TL 15, tied to the Kardashev measure of civilizational energy use:

• TL 8 = Kardashev Type I — a civilization that harnesses essentially the full energy budget of a world.
• TL 15 = Kardashev Type II — a civilization that harnesses essentially the full energy budget of a star.

Everything below TL 8 is the long climb to planetary mastery. The seven rungs from TL 8 to TL 15 are the climb from a single world to a whole sun — each rung roughly a hundredfold jump in the energy a civilization can put to work.

TL is descriptive, not a modifier. A TL number never adds or subtracts from a roll. It's a worldbuilding dial — for the GM to set the level of a world, faction, or piece of salvage, and for everyone to know roughly what's possible there. Where TL touches the dice, it does so through Advantage and Disadvantage, never flat bonuses (Ch 6).

The scale§

Where the Shore sits§

The modern Shore is a patchwork, and that patchwork is where adventures happen.

• The common standard is TL 12. FTL defines the era; worlds that trade and travel together share roughly the same toolkit — jump drives, gravitic flight, deep automation, engineered biospheres.
• Seeder core worlds run higher — TL 13–14 in their oldest, richest systems.
• Frontier worlds and young colonies run lower — TL 9–11.
• Wanderstar at boarding was TL 7, climbing to TL 12 over the fifteen centuries it took to crack FTL.
• The lost and the regressed run anywhere — TL 4–9: a ballistic ark that arrived to no one waiting, a colony that forgot how its own machines worked, a Sleeper community woken into a changed world. Salvage from a higher TL in lower-TL hands is a classic Wanderer's prize.

TL at the table§

A TL never changes a target number. When the gap between technologies matters, express it through the existing economy:

• Using gear far above your world's TL — half-understood salvage — works at Disadvantage until you're trained on it (or buy a relevant Boon).
• A profound mismatch in a contest — a TL 6 militia firing on a TL 12 combat frame — can hand the higher-TL side Advantage and leave the lower-TL side with no meaningful answer, exactly as the scale traits handle weapon-against-armor mismatches (Ch 12).
• Most of the time TL grants nothing mechanical. It tells you what a place has — whether there's a working jump pad, whether a wound can be regrown or merely stitched, whether the lights come back on after a quake. That texture is the point.

This is the tech-level subsystem Chapter 24 deliberately keeps off the dice: TL lives here as setting colour and GM dial, while weapon traits (AP, scale, Smart, Radiation) carry whatever combat weight a technology gap needs — so the two never have to be reconciled on the same roll.