With A Billion Suns, I want you to have the ultimate spaceship gaming toolkit. To this end, I’ve divided the game’s content–its factions, missions and game modes–into Eras, each a period in the rise and fall of humanity’s first interstellar epoch.
Each Era is both a chapter in humanity’s epic arc and a unique game mode. They are each sandboxes to tell very different, but iconic, types of sci-fi story: whether corporate greed and reckless expansion; desperate rebellion against a galaxy-choking regime; or total interstellar war against inhuman foes. Each provides rules, factions and missions tailored to the stories of that Era.
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These ages are presented chronologically within this book, but you are free to jump around these next four sections. Each age presents its own factions and missions to offer a particular gameplay style and evoke a particular set of tropes.
The Age of Unity and The Unhuman War have no additional rules: you just pick your faction and roll up some missions. Hypergrowth has a number of additional rules to simulate the cut-throat world of hyper-capitalism, and is an expert game mode.
Each Age features its own list of factions, highlighting some of the key antagonists in the stories of those epochs.
You are free to play with any faction in a game set in any age, as there’s always an explanation. The first AI warfleets were originally constructed during the era of expansion (that’s what led to the AI Warfighter Injunction) so it makes perfect sense to play AEGIS against a corporate fleet using the Hypergrowth missions. Similarly, the corporations were active right through The Unhuman War. These factions, and these ages, are presented as a way to tell epic interstellar stories of your own, so treat these as tools for the construction of your own tales: they are beholden only to you and your table.
To get started with A Billion Suns, read the Core Rules, gather some miniatures to represent the Training Fleets then play the two Basic Training missions: Combat Simulator and Management Training.
Once you have the basics down, you pick a Era of Play:
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The discovery of the μ-drive, reverse-engineered from the first captured alien warships, triggered a mad gold rush into the galaxy. The Registry—a de-centralised and distributed ledger of all human activity, transactions, property and people—began to fill up with claims to newly registered systems and planets as both space-faring corporations and entrepreneurial individuals rushed to exploit this new interstellar frontier. Humanity exploded outwards: surveying, developing, colonising and consuming without pause.
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This era offers a light-hearted take on cyberpunk corporate competition and battling for money and resources. Hyper-capitalism, in space, with battleships.
Complexity: High.
Factions: