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1. The Basics

What is Frontier Worlds?

In a Nutshell

Frontier Worlds is a game about a dysfunctional spaceship crew wandering the backwater colonies of a hard sci-fi space future and trying to make meaning out of their lives. The crew will trade, trick, and fight; legally or no; to keep themselves alive and their ship running.

All the while, the crew try to chase their petty personal dreams and deal with the bickering, fighting, and messy relationships that come from trapping a group of broken and over-ambitious people on a cramped spacecraft for weeks at a time.

The Narrative

The tale of Frontier Worlds is one of small people making their way in a world far too big to change, of outsiders and broken people seeking solace, satisfaction, or simply a place to call home.

The player characters and the people they meet are not heroes seeking to overthrow the status quo and make things better, it's too late for those grand ideas. Humanity reached a new golden age a few hundred years prior, but instead of fading it became diluted across the vastness of human space until it calcified into an unchanging status quo.

This is especially true in the Backwaters, the least populated and developed region of human space and where Frontier Worlds takes place. Life is wearying and forlorn on the many small colonies of the Backwaters; there are many dangers and few hopes for things to improve, but the disinterest of wider human civilisation is a boon to those seeing solace, obscurity, or somewhere to hide their dealings.

Among and between these worlds fly a small and scattered fleet of private spacecraft, plying their trades shipping supplies, hunting fugitives, exploring, stealing, dealing, and pirating. Every spacer in the Backwaters has a reason to be out on the edge of civilisation, be it chasing a dream or running from a nightmare, and life aboard those ships are rarely harmonious.

The Gameplay

Frontier Worlds leverages the Forged in the Dark system, with some added changes inspired by other systems, to craft a game where the crew and their actions and conflicts are front-and-centre.

In a typical session the crew will choose and carry out a 'job' for themselves or for the denizens of the Backwaters. Jobs earn the crew resources to improve their ship; buying new modules that provide various bonuses, equipment that gives special benefits, or upgrading its core systems.

During and in between jobs, the crew members play out narrative 'beats', either advancing their personal stories to improve their attributes and unlock new abilities, or managing the stress incurred on jobs through stoking and resolving conflict with their crewmates.
These beats (and the arcs they fit within) are designed to be flexible improv prompts for playing out familiar and satisfying stories of interpersonal conflict and self-actualisation.

Frontier Worlds' system is designed to encourage players to embrace their characters' ambitions and flaws, and tease them out through a shared story. At the right table, Frontier Worlds should feel like the player characters are a messy found family, constantly torn between their own ambitions and their love and frustration for their crewmates.

Themes & Tone

The Tone

Put succinctly, Frontier Worlds aims for a tone that is rugged and wistful; humanity has reached a golden age, but political will has stalled and the laws of physics reign supreme, so the prosperity and plenty the core worlds bask in have never established themselves out in the Backwaters.

However, Frontier Worlds is not hopeless. Despite their economic and political powerlessness, the people of the Backwater muddle on because for all its flaws the region is their home and they're proud of it. It's a life hard-earned, but it's a life all their own.

In contrast, the player crew are relatively privileged but broken people. Owning and crewing a spacecraft is a powerful position to hold in the Backwaters, but most ship crews would rather be making their fortunes around the centres of human civilisations. Each member of the crew has some reason they signed on with a ship in the Backwaters; be it a desire to prove themselves, a need to escape their past, or simply dissatisfaction with life in the core worlds.

On the ship the tone should be messy but cosy, like a dysfunctional family or a group of bickering housemates. Everyone has something they're unhappy about and are constantly getting into arguments, fights, silent treatments, and messy one-night-stands with each other, but at the end of the day they're in this together and the only people they have to rely on out in the Backwaters is each other.

The Themes

As a work sat between space western and space opera, there are certain themes that are inevitable. Some Frontier Worlds embraces, while others it seeks to avoid.

First and foremost, in Frontier Worlds humanity has never encountered alien life and thus every world discovered, terraformed, and colonised has been empty and free for the taking. This choice is absolutely not an attempt to minimise or erase the massacres, forced displacements, and innumerable other atrocities of real-life settler colonialism.
Frontier Worlds instead depicts a humanity dealing with a fundamentally different problem; colonisation of a space that is achingly empty and unmanageably vast. Instead of a moral tale of stolen land and flimsy justifications, it is an existential tale of humanity grappling with access to more worlds than it could ever hope to fill.

As a story set several hundred years in humanity's future, the lines drawn by discrimination are very different to our own in some respects. Matters of race, religion, gender, and sexuality faded with the post-War and the recovery of Earth; only the most extreme fringes discriminate along these lines and they are often judged for 'digging up issues buried on the homeworld'.

In contrast, issues of wealth, power, labour, and class still reign supreme. Corporations hold enormous formal and informal sway in government and most outright own the worlds they exploit. By law, labour rules must be negotiated between unions and employers, but the dispersal of humanity across innumerable worlds allows worker representation to be co-opted and abuses to be hidden from authorities. Atop it all a class of politicians and the ultrarich enjoy all the fruits of humanity's golden age, while on the bottom corporate wage-workers and denizens of far-flung colonies still struggle to make ends meet.

Alongside these continuing inequalities, discrimination also exists between regions, and between neighbouring worlds. Many colonies have their hated local rivals, and those from the Backwaters are particularly maligned as uncivilised simpletons and criminals.
Finally, AIs sit legally below all humans; afforded broad protections by law but denied full personhood, and often mistreated in life and work as a result.

Inspirations

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