Welcome to the year 3200, spacer. You are a citizen of the Aegean Verge, and specifically the Aegeus System, where you work as a crewman on a traveling free merchant. Your days as an ordinary tramp merchant trawling the ice-hauling routes between Mycenae and Olympus are coming to a close, as you’ve been given an opportunity that will bring you to the fringes of the Verge and along the edges of the most dangerous political situation in the sector, a localized conflict between the worlds of Carolingia and Merovingia that could become the sector’s first interplanetary war in over a hundred years.
The system is Stars Without Number (SWN), a phenomenal, entirely free tabletop RPG you can download right here. The overarching setting is described in great depth in the SWN sourcebook, but the particular sector that we will be playing in is one of my own design, the Aegean Verge, which you can take a look at here.
The characters are the crew of an independent spaceship ala the Millennium Falcon, the Serenity, or the Rocinante of Star Wars, Firefly, and The Expanse fame, respectively. What you and your fellow crewmembers do with that ship is almost entirely up to you. SWN is a very sandbox-oriented game. I will, of course, be providing you with plot hooks and adventures to engage in, but the world is an open one, and you and your crew are free to make your fortune among the stars of the Aegean Verge.
Character Creation will conform to the guidelines of the SWN Revised rules. For a quick guide to the Aegeus System, which may be helpful in determining who your character is and what they’re doing in the world, please consider the following descriptions of some of your potential homeworlds. Come join us on Discord, linked above, to discuss the game further.
Interesting Origins & Intriguing Places
Core Worlds, and the System Alliance of New Corinth New Corinth, Thebes, and Athens are the Core Worlds of the Aegeus System, united together under the loosely confederated banner of the System Alliance of New Corinth, which is in turn a signatory to the Knossian Accord. They are a trinity of modern, cosmopolitan worlds, possessing access to the best available technology in the sector, a well-developed supply chain and market structure that keeps the system’s billions of residents supplied with the basic sustenance, and a military powerful enough to secure its status as a local power among the Verge’s worlds.
New Corinth, home to over eight billion people, is the crown jewel of the Aegeus System, a beautiful, cosmopolitan world with a diverse, productive economy. New Corinth is most famous, however, not for what is on the planet’s surface, but hangs in orbit. The Aegeus Shipyard is a massive, Mandate-era spaceyard, and its corporate proprietor, Corinthian Drive Yards, produces over fifty percent of the vessels operating in the local stellar cluster. This includes not only the System Alliance’s navy, but also the great capital fleet of the Twelve Houses of Knossos. Major cities of interest on New Corinth include New Corinth City and San Sofia.
Thebes is a hive world, home to some twenty billion individuals who live in massive skyrakers and arcologies. Though a small planet, over 80% of Thebes’s continental landmass is covered in urban sprawl, a megapolis that is itself called Thebes. The planet is renowned for its industrial production, with heavy industry serving the cornerstone of its economy, though its megacorporate masters turn profits across a vast array of sectors and industries. Thebes is ruled by an oligopolistic council of the ultrawealthy whose plutocratic empires have been built on the backs of wageslaves who eke out a living on corporate scrip to survive day today.
Athens is the breadbasket of the Aegeus System, and one of the primary centers of food production in the Aegean Verge. Home to some 2.4 billion citizens of over a hundred thirty different local political states, Athens is a beautiful world famed for its rolling plains and fertile land. The International League of Athens, or ILA, is the complex governing body under which a supermajority of Athens’s local countries has gathered to conduct planetary and interplanetary relations and policy. The ILA is seated at Hera, the largest city of Athens’s largest polity, Illyria.
Sparta is the red-headed stepchild of the Aegeus System’s inner planets. For reasons beyond the understanding of the 33rd century’s postech scientists, the pretech terraforming processes in place on Sparta failed during the collapse, and the modern, inferior postech terraforming processes have failed to produce the same results on the world as they have done for the Prospero Colonies and similar planets across the Verge. As a result, the 1.7 billion citizens of Sparta live out their lives in bubble cities, without any hope of seeing a green, terraformed Sparta in their lifetimes or the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren. However, Sparta’s collection of the best engineering minds in the system—indeed, in the Verge as a whole—has led to prodigious developments across its military-industrial base. In the past hundred years, Sparta has emerged as a local rival to New Corinth and threatens to upend the comfortable stability of Corinthian hegemony in the Aegeus System. Sparta maintains association status with the System Alliance of New Corinth and is a signatory to the Knossian Accord.
The Gulfworlds refers to the collection of asteroid stations and terraformed and colonized moons of the gas giants Parnassus and Olympus. There are dozens of asteroid stations across the Argolic and Saronic Gulfs, the twin asteroid belts of the Aegeus System, but the largest, most populous and important of these are Rhodes, Argos, and Mycenae. Home to a collective 17 million people, these three asteroid stations are the primary bases of operation for the extensive mining operations present in the Gulfs and across the outer planets of the Aegeus System. Additional points of interest in the Argolic and Saronic Gulfs include Delphi, Nemea, and Eretria. Beyond the asteroid belts, the Paranassian moons of Naxos, Paros, Thera, Andros, and Delos, and the Olympian moons of Kos and Karpathos serve as the farthest major hubs of human colonization in the Aegeus. Altogether, the Gulfworlders number approximately eighty million people, total.
