Design notes 03 · Space combat
Space combat
I wanted a system built around the Spotlight, but I did not want one character to control the whole fight. A ship is a shared scene. Every player has a place at the table, and every station gives them something useful to do.
FLIGHT SIM // PLAY THE ENCOUNTER
R-TYPE // THE NEXT HULL IS LARGER
A small fighter. A line of incoming ships. Each wave raises the stakes. Move through the field, put the Gunner on target, and keep the Engineer ahead of the heat.
MOUSE / DRAG TO FLY · HOLD TO FIRE · ARROWS / WASD + SPACE · REINFORCE: 1 FRONT / 2 REAR / 3 ABOVE / 4 BELOW
The simulator is an arcade illustration, not the full naval procedure. It uses published hull profiles, weapon expressions, Mount Ratings, shield arcs, regeneration and Hull damage bands. Stations, rolls, range, tags and the complete turn structure remain in Corebook 12.06, Chapter 17, pp. 158–165.
Spaceship pixel sprites by Raphael Gonçalves. Assets used with the artist’s public-domain license; credit appreciated. Characters and consoles by BarelyApes.
01 / PILOT · GUNNER · ENGINEER · CAPTAIN
A station for every kind of hero
The Pilot uses Instinct to maneuver and evade. The Gunner rolls Finesse or Knowledge to fire. The Engineer manages Heat, repairs and shield power. The Captain uses Presence to give Command Dice to the crew. Specialists handle Sensors, Comms and medical support. Each player spends their own Spotlight at their station.
The crew’s ship has no single turn. It is a shared scene made of player Spotlights. The Keeper runs each hostile vessel as one turn. That keeps a complicated battle moving without giving one player the whole bridge or letting the enemy fleet multiply its actions by its crew size.
02 / SHIELD ARCS
Four arcs. A decision every round.
I remembered the shield controls in some older Star Wars games like TIE Fighter. I liked deciding where the shield energy went. It turns the fight into a resource puzzle: the front arc is failing, but the next missile is coming from below. Where do you reinforce? At the end of a round, each arc restores two Armor Slots. The Engineer can move shield energy or reinforce one arc at a cost in Heat.
The book calls the arcs Fore, Aft, Port and Starboard. The scene maps them to front, rear, above and below so you can see where a hit lands. A hit reduces the impacted arc; its Armor Slots take damage before Hull.
The hull is what is left when the shields fail
Shields are not the ship’s life bar. The ship also has Hull Integrity: the damage it can take before it starts to die. Armor Slots absorb a hit first. Any damage that gets through is converted into Hull loss using the ship-scale damage thresholds.
Heat puts a price on every action
Weapons, hard maneuvers and shields all produce Heat. I added it to limit how much a ship can push its systems before technical trouble starts. Reaching the Heat Cap is safe; going above it is where systems begin to fail. The Engineer can cool the ship, reroute power or reinforce an arc. Every option asks what the crew needs most right now.
03 / MOUNT RATING
Mount Rating
I ran into a scale problem: how effective should a personal fighter be against a super freighter? And how do I keep the damage from turning into an endless pile of dice? Mount Rating was my answer. A hull’s scale determines how much output its weapon mounts can support. A huge freighter can devote the space and reactor power of entire rooms to its weapons; a small craft cannot.
The rule stays simple: roll the weapon’s complete damage expression, including its flat modifier, then multiply by the firing ship’s Mount Rating. A Tier 1 small craft has MR ×1, a Tier 2–3 standard vessel MR ×2, and a Tier 4–5 capital vessel MR ×3. Character Proficiency never replaces that ship statistic.
MR ×204 / PROTOCOL
I need an idea!
One danger of space combat is how quickly a run of bad rolls can turn into a TPK. I wanted a way to push back against that without making the danger feel fake. I called the protocol “I need an idea!” after an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I loved it.
When everything looks lost, the Keeper asks the whole group to brainstorm a way out. The crew agrees on a plan, explains it and tries to carry it out. The Keeper decides whether it can work and what it will cost. Maybe the ship survives, but loses a system, takes on a new Quirk or limps home with a story it will never forget. It does not have to end with everyone dead or drifting as inert bodies through space.
What would your crew do when the numbers say you are finished?
