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The senator from the Ultaian delegation tries to look nonplussed, but the coloration of their neck fronds betrays a frantic nervousness. The Expeditionite pirate pushes her blaster hard against the Ultaian's scaled back, twists its cold barrel, and growls at you.
"Please, I've done nothing, I'm a senator," they say with a quavering voice, their alien vocal tract elongating vowels and nearly dropping consonants. "Please—"
"You've been harvesting from our bio-stations for years now," she says. "Your synthdrones, twice every cycle. It ends now." She nods towards you. "You, Guenaški. You tell them."
The Ultaian's three eyes widen, and both theirs and hers turn towards you. What do you do?
The Emissaries of Guenašk
A Role-Playing Game
The Emissaries of Guenašk is a game about space, the peoples who have set out to explore and live in it, and those individuals who are tasked with mediating peace between those people. These individuals, the Guenaški, travel from planet to planet, station to station, star to star, equipped with the uneasy and contingent trust of an interplanetary coalition, and attempt to serve as peacekeepers, healers, mediators, and explorers to those they find, sometimes to their joy and sometimes to their chagrin.
The stars are limitless and varied, and the Guenaški are tasked by both convention and conviction to help keep them stable and avoid another war like the Last War. Sometimes they travel to the Shining Core and mediate political debates among the hundreds of thousands of political entities that exist in the galaxy, and other times they provide humanitarian aid to colonies or outposts in crisis, and yet other times they shut down smugglers or free political prisoners from the very edges of known space.
Before you Play
Creating a Character
Choose a background. Your Background will give you dice that you can use in subsequent steps: in particular, it tells you the dice you can use for your Stats, your Traits, and your Relationships.
Select your Stats. Your Background specified a number of stat dice: take these and divide them up among your four Stats. The minimum value for a stat is 2d6, and there is no maximum beyond what your stat dice allow.
Your four stats are Acuity, Body, Heart, and Will.
Decide on your Traits. Your Background specified a number of trait dice: divide these up to give your character Traits. A Trait is a phrase or sentence that describes a feature of character's personality, acumen, or history that is interesting to your character's story. Assigning dice to a trait means that you think that the trait in question is important in a way that will affect the outcome of a conflict.
As a player, you have a lot of leeway in how to frame your traits. For example, you might want to phrase them:
- as a statment about your character's history: "I flew at the battle of Altera Prime."
- as a straightforward fact about your character: "I am a talented pilot."
- as a skill your character has: "Flying."
- as an attitude your character has: "I'm comfortable in a cockpit."
Assign each trait at least one die. You can assign more than one die to a trait, but each trait must have a consistent die size: you can assign 2d6 to a trait, but you can't assign 1d4 1d6 to a trait.
Decide on a few of your Relationships. Your Background specified a number of relationship dice: use a few of these to give your character Relationships. A Relationship represents your character's relationship and history with another person and how important that history is to your character's story, but doesn't necessarily need to reflect your character's feelings or a breadth of history. You can, for example, assign 1d4 to your character's spouse and 2d8 to a stranger whom your character met in Adullar Station: this doesn't mean that your character loves the stranger more than their spouse, but it does mean that you think the stranger is more interesting to your character's story.
Unlike with your trait dice, your relationship dice don't need to be—and shouldn't be!—all assigned at the beginning. Keep some unassigned and then choose to assign them as events progress.
Additionally, if you have or come across members of your character's family, you can give your character a 1d6 relationship die with them for free, without having to assign it from your pool of relationship dice. If you want your character to have a relationship with that person other than 1d6, then you can still assign them dice out of your pool, but if you don't want to, you always have the option of letting that relationship be a 1d6, both at character creation and in play.
Decide on a few of your Belongings. The Guenašk order tends to give you the necessary equipment and the exigencies of your situation don't allow you to amass much of a fortune or a large set of belongings, but you do have some objects. All operatives will have at least a high-quality data-pad (2d6) and their Lun (2d6). If you can come up with another few objects that are important to you—and that you could easily keep in a small starship—you can also list them and assign them dice.
Be sure to specify any important details of your Lun, including the color of its plasma disc and the material and shape of its handle. Each Emissary builds their own Lun out of materials from their home planet, so each Lun is unique. Unless you have a good reason to argue otherwise, your Lun should be a 2d6 item, as it's a small but excellent item.
Decide on an Accomplishment you hope your character had while at the Guenaški Academy. You don't yet know if your character actually succeeded at their Accomplishment, as that will depend on a short section of play to be explored in a minute, but you have reasonably free reign, subject to the approval of both your GM and your fellow Operatives, to decide on an Accompliment that you think is interesting. It might be a specific event that happened during their time at the Academy: "I hope that my character bested their instructor in the Utebna Belt Starskiff-race," or, "I hope that my character rescued and healed a wounded Tanga-bird on Rakhmus Alpha." It might also be a broader statement about how you grew as a Guenaški: "I hope that I learned restraint," or, "I hope that I won honor in the eyes of the instructors."
After you've done this, you and your GM can
Fallout
Whenever you take a blow, you open yourself up to fallout. Fallout is a measure of the problems that arise from the conflicts in which the player characters are embroiled.
Each player character has four fallout tracks, each of which has three rows. The four tracks correspond to Physical, Mental, Social, and Societal fallout. When you take Physical fallout, it means your physical body is affected: this might be damage in combat, but it might also be sickness from an alien planet or simply fatigue from overwork. When you take Mental fallout, it means that your mind or spirit is affected: maybe you've been awake for days, or you're being subject to the whims of a mind-controlling alien, or you've been outwitted by a master strategist. When you take Social fallout, it means that your relationships with other people suffer: maybe you've made a decision that has made you less popular with your crew or has made you notorious among the local planet's population. When you take Societal fallout, it means your ability to engage with society around you has suffered: in a capitalist context, this kind of fallout might mean that you're short on money and can't pay for things in a way that limits you, but it can also mean that you've been stigmatized for breaching some kind of cultural norm or that you've lost the favor of the ruling political group in a moneyless future.
The stats you've brought into play will tell you how much fallout you take each time you take a blow. Whenever you take a blow, regardless of who struck the blow and how, you can decide which track it goes into and explain why your taking the blow led to that. For example, if you're in a conflict with the ambassador of the Etrinax system and they raise with a particularly clever treaty that puts your side at a disadvantage, you might choose to take the blow by:
- overworking yourself to come up with a rejointer, which would cause you to experience Physical fallout
- stammering and becoming intimidated by the ambassador, which would cause you to experience Mental fallout
- responding with a lackluster and showy speech that your crew sees right through, which would cause you to experience Social fallout
- conceeding the point and failing to protect an important interest of your organization, which would cause you to experience Societal fallout You can only put fallout points into a single track: you can't, for example, take 2 fallout points and put 1 into Physical and 1 into Mental.
You can also resist fallout by choosing to spend more dice from your pool. You can only do so by spending a single die, and the value on that die must exceed the fallout taken by at least 1: that is, if you take a blow and would take 2 fallout, then you must spend a die that reads 3 or more in order to resist the consequences of the fallout.
Each row of a fallout track has four squares and then a fifth longer area. When you take fallout, you start by filling in individual squares, one for each point of fallout your experience, but once you've filled up four squares, then the next point of fallout becomes a condition: this is a larger consequence, and could be any kind of descriptor or phrase, but whatever condition you take is up to the GM. If you're marking fallout and you fill in a condition, then don't mark any more for the fallout at hand: for example, if you have 3 boxes ticked, and you would take another 3 fallout, then you tick the fourth box, and write a condition in the fifth one, and then stop: the last point doesn't count. However, the next time you take fallout, you start on the next row.
In addition to the condition described, each full row will reduce your dice pool for a relevant stat in some way. A single full row will reduce that stat by -1d; two full rows will reduce it by -2d, and three full rows will remove that stat entirely: you can still bring it into play, but you can no longer roll dice associated with it. You also can no longer put fallout into a track if that track is completely full: you have to choose a different way to take the blow.
If you have two different tracks that have three full rows of fallout, then your character dies, although not until the end of the conflict that created the condition: you can arrange with the GM to figure out the most dramatic possible way for your character to die.
Getting Rid of Fallout
There are three major ways of getting rid of fallout. The first is for getting rid of individual ticks on a fallout track: after any conflict, you can choose a single fallout track and get rid of up to three ticks from the lowest filled-in row by describing a scene in which your character somehow alleviates any fallout related to that track. For example, if you're removing ticks from your Physical track, then maybe you can frame a scene of your character at the ship's doctor, or banding themselves up, or simply taking a bath. You can't remove conditions in this way: having a condition 'locks' that row of the fallout track, so it can't be simply removed.
To get rid of a condition, you need to have a separate conflict. Tell the GM that you want to remove a condition, and the GM will set up a 4d6 4d8 conflict standing in as the condition. If you win the conflict, then you can clear the entire row. This doesn't clear any ticks above or below the row, and it's of course possible to get new fallout during this process!
The last way of getting rid of a condition is to convert it to a permanent trait, which you can also only do once after a conflict. This trait will always be a trait at 1d4 and should reflect your character accepting that whatever condition they arrived at is now a permanent, non-fixable part of who they are. You can rephrase the condition in question so it makes more sense as a trait, if you'd like. For example, if your character took the physical condition severed hand, and you choose to turn this into a trait, then you can clear that row of the fallout track, but now your character has a 1d4 trait has a severed hand, because for whatever reason they can't right now get it replaced or regrown or otherwise mitigated. (But as usual, you can advance your traits, and as usual, you can rephrase or refocus traits when you advance them, so that 1d4 has a severed hand might after several advancements become a 2d8 has a robotic replacement hand.)
Assets
Certain things—large or important objects or organizations—are considered assets, and work a little differently than simple belongings. A belonging is on its own rated in dice, and bringing that belonging into play simply adds the dice. Something like a starship, on the other hand, is a big and complicated object, and therefore has stats of its own, as well as the ability to take fallout on its own.
Every asset has three stats (which get assigned in much the same way that player stats are assigned) and a single three-stage fallout track. The fallout track represents the degree to which the asset is usable by the player characters, which may or may not be simple damage. For example, fallout to a starship asset might be damage sustained in battle, but fallout to an organization might have to do with the player characters' standing in the organization (which might prevent the organization from providing aid when the player characters need it) or about the player characters' ability to contact or interact with that organization (which might prevent them from being able to even request aid).
Common types of asset include:
- Starships, which have the stats Engines, Hull, and Systems
- Cyberdecks, which have the stats Network, Storage, and Software
- Organizations, which have the stats People, Assets (?), and Clout
When an asset is brought into play, decide which of the stats is most relevant to the conflict at hand. For example, if your crew is trying to catch up to a smuggler in your ship, then you might want to bring Engines into play; if your crew is trying to store the cargo they've found on the moon's surface in your cargo bay, then you might want to bring Hull into play; and if your crew is trying to scan a seemingly-abandoned space station, then you might want to bring Systems into play.
(A good rule of thumb is: what would show up as important in the film adaptation of this story? If the camera would linger on the thrusters as they fired up, then maybe Engines is the right stat; if it would have a shot of the science officer peering at sensor readouts, then maybe Systems is the right stat instead.)
Every time you bring the stat associated with an asset into play, you open that asset up to fallout. Assets take fallout in the same way that player characters do, and like player characters, they have a three-row fallout track with fillable conditions. There are a few small ways in which asset fallout is different from player fallout:
- The amount of fallout taken by an asset is determined by how many of that asset's stats are in play, regardless of which player stats are in play. For example, if a player is using body + hard and has brought their ship's systems into play, and that player takes a blow, then can choose to take 3 fallout into a personal fallout track (because they're engaged in physical combat) or they can choose to take 1 fallout into the ship's fallout track (because only one of the ship's stats has come into play.) Similarly, if a player is using mind + soft but has brought their people + assets + clout into play from their organization, then they can take a blow by taking 1 fallout into a personal fallout track or by taking 3 into their organization's fallout track.
- Unlike player fallout tracks, each filled-in row of an asset fallout track reduces the number of dice you can roll for every stat associated with the asset: for example, if you have a ship that has engines 5d6, hull 3d6, systems 2d10, and you fill in the entire first row of its fallout track and give it the condition shot up, then you can only roll 4d6 for engines, 2d6 for hull, and 1d10 for systems. Once you've filled in all three rows of an asset track, then this asset is no longer usable.
- Clearing fallout from an asset works like clearing fallout from a player character: after a conflict, you can always remove up to three ticks from the lowest fallout row for each asset available to you in addition to clearing ticks from one of your personal tracks.
- There is no way of turning a condition into a permanent trait for an asset (as assets do not themselves have traits), so the only way to clear conditions is to win a 4d6 4d8 conflict against them.
Custom Asset Types
It's possible that in your campaign, you might want to have a different, special kind of asset: these will all work the same way, but you may propose three new stats for them. For example, maybe your story takes place on a world where it's common to flying dragon-like alien creatures as aerial mounts, so your GM might stipulate that their three stats are Ferocity, Size, and Cunning. Maybe your story takes place in a destitute shantytown on a wasteland planet, so you might have small gangs as assets that have Muscle, Gear, and Sharpness.
A good principle to follow when choosing three stats is that they should have intepretations for every instance of the asset, even if those interpretations might tend to be different from one asset to another. It's better for them to be overly-broad than overly-narrow: for example, all ships have Systems, but for one ship that might be sensor arrays, and for another it might be weapons subsystems. All organizations have Goods, but for some that might be money, while for others that might be actual physical resources on-hand. It's okay to leave them up to interpretation, and it's okay to allow for some wiggle room between which stat a player wants to bring into play.
Creating a Ship
Like characters, ships also have Stats and Traits. Unlike with a character, they're determined by the ship's class.
Decide the ship's class. If you're creating a shared ship, this will be a Frigate; if you're creating personal ships, then this will be a Fighter.
Select your ship's Stats. The ship's Class specified a number of stat dice: take these and divide them up among the ship's three Stats. Every ship must have at least 2d6 in each stat.
The three stats for a ship are Hull, Engines, Systems.