A life, four years at a time

Every step of character creation, in order.

You do not buy a character. You live one: pick where you came from, pick a career, and then throw for what four years in it did to you — again, and again, until you leave. The steps below are that walk in order, and the order matters, because several of them take modifiers from the ones before.

The species and homeworld you come from, chosen before any die.

Before you touch a die you decide what you are and where you grew up. The rules draw no distinction between members of the same species, whatever their gender or race — and what an alien species is, in a given setting, is the referee’s to define.

Within one species the rules draw no distinction between members. Gender changes nothing on your sheet and neither does the colour of your skin — heroes in this kind of fiction came in every shape and were unhindered by either, and the rules are written to match. In Nowhere Yet a chosen sex changes your portrait and nothing else.

An alien species may go further than that. A species can attach characteristic changes or outright abilities to a gender choice — the worked case is an insectoid species with four of them, queen, soldier, worker and drone, each carrying its own bonuses and penalties. Where a species does that, it is the species doing it, not the choice.

Nowhere Yet offers a fixed short list of origins rather than an open one, and each has its own entry at the end of this chapter saying what it changes. Two of them are human and differ only in the portrait they draw.

The other half of where you come from is the world itself. Your homeworld is a real place with a law level and trade codes of its own, and those decide the first skills you own before any career touches you. Every character has one, and the background-skill rules are where that draw is made.

The six scores, what each governs, and how they are thrown.

Roll 2D6 six times and write the results down in the printed order: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, Social Standing. Those six numbers are your character before anything happens to them.

The six measure your most basic abilities and they touch almost everything you do. The first three are physical and the last three loosely mental. Above average buys you a bonus on rolls that lean on it; below average costs you one.

There is an option for players who have a character in mind before they have the dice. With the referee’s approval, roll 2D6 six times and then assign the six results to the six characteristics however you like — highest to Education if you meant to play a scholar, and so on. Nowhere Yet rolls them where they fall.

Turning a score into the modifier a check uses.

A score is not what you add to a roll. The modifier is: divide the score by three, drop the fraction, and subtract two. An average score of 7 is worth nothing either way, which is the point the whole ladder is built around.

Characteristic modifier

floor(score / 3) - 2

The floor, the ceiling, and what happens at zero.

A player character’s score does not normally go above 15, and does not normally fall permanently below 1. Both are ordinary limits with exceptions behind them rather than hard walls.

Scores move during play as well as during creation, and how they move decides whether the loss sticks. Ageing lowers physical scores permanently. Damage from combat, a fall, disease or poison lowers them temporarily. Mental trauma — a head injury, a psionic attack — lowers the mental three the same temporary way. Some medications and enhancements push a score up instead, and those can be either.

Every time a score changes, work out its modifier again before the next roll. That is the whole reason a change matters — the number on the sheet is only ever a way of getting to the modifier.

Zero is the circumstance the floor is excepted for, and it is a crisis rather than a resting place. A score driven to zero by injury or by ageing forces an immediate and expensive decision, and the rules that drive it there are the ones that spell out what happens next.

The social standing ladder and the title each rung carries.

Where a setting has a nobility, a high Social Standing is not just a good modifier — it is a title, and people use it. The ladder below is the usual one.

These are examples, not law. Which scores are considered noble, and what each one is called, varies from setting to setting — the referee decides where the line falls and what the people on the far side of it are addressed as. The forms in parentheses are the ones traditionally given to women.

The ladder runs past the ceiling a player character’s scores are normally held to. Its top rungs are therefore mostly people you meet rather than people you roll, which is worth knowing before you plan a character around being addressed as one.

The six-digit string that states a character at a glance.

Your six characteristics are written as one unbroken string of six pseudohex digits, in the order they were rolled. It takes a little practice and then it reads at a glance.

Universal Persona Profile

123456, or 123456-7 for psionic characters

The seventh digit is not part of the six and is not rolled with them. It appears after a dash only once a character has a psionic strength at all, which is why an ordinary profile is six characters long and stays that way.

The template a finished character is written out in.

A finished character is written out in five lines, in a fixed order. It is the form other players and referees will expect to read your character in.

The skills your homeworld gives you before any career.

Before you embark on any career you get a handful of skills for having grown up somewhere. The number is three plus your Education modifier, and every one of them arrives at level 0.

Background skills

3 + Education modifier

Up to the first two come from your homeworld. Growing up somewhere gave you skills that world had a use for, so you may take any skill matching its planetary description or one of its trade codes. If the world was already established in the referee’s setting, its description is where you look.

Whatever the homeworld does not fill comes from a formal education instead, and any character may take from that list: Admin, Advocate, Animals, Carousing, Comms, Computer, Electronics, Engineering, Life Sciences, Linguistics, Mechanics, Medicine, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and Space Sciences. All at level 0, like the rest.

Throwing to enter the career you want.

Wanting a career is not the same as getting one. Each career prints a throw you must make to enter it, against the characteristic that career cares about. Miss it and you cannot enter that career this term.

A military career calls the same throw enlistment rather than qualification. It is the same check under a different name, and nothing about how it is made or what failing it costs is different.

A work history counts against you. Every career you have already entered is worth -2 on this throw, and it is cumulative — a third career is harder to get into than a second. Once you leave a career you cannot go back to it, either.

Qualification throw

2D6 + characteristic modifier - 2 per career already entered, against the career’s target

Failing leaves you two ways forward and you must take one of them: submit to the draft, which you may do only once in a whole character, or take the Drifter career for this term. The Drifter career is always open, and the rules for that career say on what terms.

Where a failed qualification sends you instead.

The draft is what happens when you do not get to choose. There is no throw to qualify: roll one die, and the result is the service you are now in.

A draftee serves the term like anyone else, with one restriction: you may not attempt a commission in that first term of service. You may attempt one afterwards if you stay on. And you may only be drafted once in a whole character — after that the option is gone and Drifter is what is left.

The draft is also one of the two ways past the rule that a career once left cannot be re-entered. It can put you back into a service you were previously in and were thrown out of. It cannot put you back into one you left cleanly.

The four-year block a career is served in.

A career is served in terms, and a term is about four years. Every lap of the career cycle — survive, throw for rank, learn something, age — is one term, and it adds four years to your character.

You start at the age of majority, typically eighteen. Every time you reenlist, and every time you enter a new career, it is for another term and another four years — so a character’s age is really a count of how many times they went round.

Age

age of majority + 4 years per term served

The skills a first term in a service gives you.

Your first term in a new career teaches you the basics of it. What that is worth depends on whether this is the first career of your life or a later one.

That asymmetry is the rule rather than an oversight, and it is a real reason to think about which career you start with. Your first is where the breadth comes from; everything after it is one skill deep.

The throw that decides whether a term goes as planned.

Every term in every career opens with a survival throw, against the target that career prints. Make it and the term goes as planned. A natural 2 is always a failure, whatever your modifiers would have made the total.

The source is blunt about what failure means: your character is dead and you make a new one. It then offers an optional rule — with the referee’s approval, keep the character and roll on the survival mishaps table instead. Something has gone wrong enough to force you out of the service, but you are alive.

Nowhere Yet always takes that optional rule. A failed survival throw here is never fatal; it always sends you to the mishap table, and the mishap rules say so again in their own right. This is a departure from the printed default and not a correction to it — the source means what it says, and this game has chosen otherwise, because a creation path that can end in nothing partway through is not something you can hand a player.

What a failed survival throw does to a career, and to you.

A mishap is the career going wrong badly enough to end it. Roll one die on the table below; the result is always enough to force you out of the service, and you forfeit the benefit roll for that term.

In the source this table is optional and the default is death. In Nowhere Yet it is where every failed survival throw goes, always. Said twice on purpose: it is the one place this game departs from the printed lifepath in a way a player will feel, and it is a design choice rather than a reading of the page.

A mishap ejects you after half a term — two years rather than four — so the term you were part-way through is cut short rather than completed.

Becoming an officer, and what the rank is worth.

You begin every career at Rank 0. If the career offers a commission and you are still Rank 0, you may throw for it once in the term — and succeeding makes you a Rank 1 officer, on the officer rank ladder from then on.

In a military career a commission means joining the commissioned officers. In a civilian one it means getting a position in whatever hierarchy the work has. Some careers have no established hierarchy at all and offer no commission throw — for those there is nothing here to attempt.

A successful commission pays twice over. You take any bonus skills the rank ladder attaches to your new rank, and you gain an extra roll on any of that career’s skill tables this term. Trying for a commission is optional, and you may try once per term.

One character cannot: a draftee may not attempt a commission in their first term of service. Stay on past that term and the throw becomes available like anyone else’s.

Promotion within a career, and the skills it brings.

Advancement is promotion within the career you are already in. At Rank 1 or higher you may throw for it once each term, and succeeding moves you up one rung.

A successful advancement pays exactly as a commission does: you take any bonus skills the ladder attaches to your new rank, and you gain an extra roll on any of that career’s skill tables. You may attempt it once per term, and you may attempt it in the same term you were commissioned in.

Every career that offers a commission offers advancement, and a handful of careers offer neither — those have no hierarchy to climb. A career with no commission and no advancement gives you a second skill roll every term instead, which is its own kind of compensation.

The injury table, and the characteristic each result takes.

Some things that happen during creation hurt you. When they do, roll one die on the injury table — and what it takes off is permanent, unless you pay to have it put back.

Low is bad here, which is the opposite of every other throw in this chapter. It is a table lookup rather than a check, so nothing you have adds to it — a strong character and a frail one roll the same die.

If an injury takes any characteristic to zero, that is an injury crisis. As printed, the character dies unless they can pay 1D6 × Cr10,000 for medical care, which brings every characteristic back up to 1 — ability to pay is the test they live or die by. Survive a crisis and you are marked by it: you automatically fail every qualification check from then on, so you must either stay in the career you are in or become a Drifter if you want more terms.

Nowhere Yet replaces that branch rather than following it, because no character dies during creation here. The treatment happens: characteristics are restored to 1 exactly as paying for it would, and its cost becomes medical debt you carry out of creation. Being able to afford it stops deciding whether you live and starts deciding what you owe. This is a departure from the printed rule and not a reading of it.

The rest of the printed consequence stands untouched. A crisis still fails every later qualification check, so it still ends your career ladder — it just no longer ends you.

What treatment costs, what a service covers, and what you owe.

An injury can be undone, and it is expensive: Cr5,000 for each point of characteristic you want restored. If you were hurt in the service of a patron or an organisation, some of that bill may not be yours.

Restoring a lost point

Cr5,000 per characteristic point

Throw 2D6 and add your rank. The result says what proportion of the bill your employer covers, and which row you read depends on the career you were serving in — the services cover most of it, ordinary employers rather less, and some careers have nobody to send the bill to.

You do not pay any of this as you go. Whatever medical care and anagathics have cost you is settled at the end of creation, out of your muster-out benefits, before anything else is spent — and if you cannot cover it, you go into debt.

The throw that starts at a certain term, and what it takes.

Ageing begins at 34. Once your character is that old, throw 2D6 on the ageing table at the end of every term and subtract your total number of terms — so the longer you have served, the worse it gets.

Ageing throw

2D6 - total terms served, once the character is 34 or older

If ageing takes any characteristic to zero, that is an ageing crisis, and as printed it works exactly as an injury crisis does: the character dies unless 1D6 × Cr10,000 is paid for medical care, which brings every characteristic back up to 1, and a character who has been through one automatically fails every qualification check from then on.

And it is replaced here on exactly the same terms as the injury crisis. The characteristics are restored to 1, the cost is carried out of creation as medical debt, and nobody dies. Stated again rather than cross-referenced, because you can arrive at a crisis by damage taken in service or by years elapsed, and the replacement has to be where you land.

Buying off ageing, and the debt and catch-up that follow.

Anagathic drugs hold ageing off. While you take them, add the number of terms you have been taking them for as a positive modifier on the ageing throw — so each term on the drugs offsets one of the terms the throw subtracts.

They only cancel ageing outright if you have been on them since your first term, because the count that helps you starts when the drugs do and the count that hurts you started when you did. Come to them late and you are slowing the decline rather than stopping it — the gap between the two numbers is however many terms you served before you started, and it never closes.

They cost 1D6 × Cr2,500 for every term you use them, paid out of your eventual muster-out cash like any other medical bill. Fail to cover it and you go into debt for the difference.

There are two catches and both are serious. Getting a reliable supply is dangerous and the drugs disrupt your biochemistry, so in any term you pass your first survival check you must make a second one — and failing either means a mishap and ejection from the career. And if you ever stop taking them, throw on the ageing table immediately, to represent the shock of a system starting to age again.

Throwing to serve another term, and being made to.

At the end of every term you decide whether to stay or go — and then you throw for it, against the target your career prints. Fail, and you cannot reenlist: you must leave the career whether you meant to or not.

A natural 12 is the other way the throw takes the decision away from you. Roll one, and you cannot leave: you are held for another term whatever you had planned.

This is the one throw in the whole of character creation made on flat dice. No characteristic modifier applies to it, so a brilliant character and a hopeless one are held or released on exactly the same odds.

Leaving after long service, and the pension it pays.

Seven terms is the end of the road. A character who has served seven or more must retire and can take no more prior experience — the one exception being a natural 12 on reenlistment, which holds them for another term regardless.

Five terms in a single service earns a pension, and you draw it annually for the rest of your life even if you go adventuring afterwards. The terms must be in one service: five terms spread over three careers earns nothing.

The cap itself is offered as the referee’s to move. A referee who wants characters in their prime rather than deeply experienced might set it at three or four terms; another might remove the maximum altogether. Nowhere Yet uses the printed seven.

The benefit rolls a career ends with.

Leaving a career pays. You get one benefit roll for every term you served in which you did not lose your benefits, and rank pays on top of that — one extra roll at rank 4, two at rank 5, three at rank 6.

Each roll is taken on one of two tables, cash or material, and the tables are printed per career. Cash is credits. Material is everything else — characteristic improvements, passages, ship shares, a weapon, sometimes a vessel.

Several material benefits are obligations wearing the shape of a gift. The courier is a surplus 100-ton TL9 vessel held on a reserve basis from the scout exploration service, which also gives you free maintenance and fuel at any scout base and leaves every other expense to you; the research vessel is a 200-ton TL9 hull from a foundation, corporation or other affluent patron, who covers annual maintenance and nothing else. Both still belong to whoever granted them — you may use one as you see fit, and you may not sell or abandon it without consequences — and a courier comes with a standing liability to recall you and the ship to active duty at a moment’s notice. Each ship share is worth about Cr2,000,000 toward buying a vessel and cannot be redeemed for cash. A passage is one ticket, good for one jump to any destination. Society membership brings a free high passage every two months plus access to the society’s information network and its resorts; it is received once, and further receipts of it are worth nothing.

A starship can be bought for a fifth of its base value with a forty-year loan attached. Every further fifth you pay, in cash or in ship shares, takes ten years off the loan.

Name, appearance and the things no die decides.

A set of scores and a skill list is not yet a character. The last few decisions cost no dice and are what make the one you have just built worth playing.

A name, at the very least — one that fits your group and the referee’s setting. Take a real one, take one off a character you like, or build one out of pieces of two.

A gender, which in most games means male or female though a referee or a setting may offer other options. Nothing says you must play a character of your own, and many people find playing a different one honestly a worthwhile challenge.

An appearance — height, weight, hair, how they dress. It costs nothing and it is what lets everyone else at the table picture your character; a distinctive feature is usually worth more than a paragraph of them.

And a personal goal, which is the one of these with teeth. It should take more than a single adventure to resolve — learning what an ancient civilisation was hiding, mastering the psionic arts, taking political power. A goal tells the referee what you are interested in, which is what lets them build story around you. It is fine for it to change; a goal that changes is usually a sign the character has grown.

Reference rule — not active yet

The non-human species the source describes.

Humans are the assumed species and have no special abilities or disadvantages as a species. Everything else is defined by the referee — the source offers the examples below as common archetypes rather than as a closed list, and some settings have no aliens in them at all.

The species described are Avians, Insectans, Merfolk, Reptilians and Espers. Each origin this game offers has its own entry further down; a species described here without one is published as background rather than as something you can be.

Espers are humans, or near-human humanoids, who have made psionics an ordinary part of life. They tend to be tall and slender, aloof and detached enough that other humans find them hard to read, and more inclined to the mystical or the philosophical than most. Mechanically they follow the standard human rules and add the psionic trait.

They are published here as a described species rather than as a playable origin, because the one thing that distinguishes them is psionic and no part of the shipped game reaches psionics.

One rule cuts across all of them. An alien species may measure standing by something other than Social Standing — caste, or charisma — and when you are dealing across that line, every modifier from Social Standing or its alien equivalent is halved, positive and negative alike.

Reference rule — not active yet

The rules an alien body changes.

A species is described by the traits it holds, and the traits are what actually change a rule. Each entry below is one, and a species entry names which of them it has.

The three tables above are one printed list, split here by what a trait actually touches — the body, its tolerances, or the mind and the sheet. The split is this site’s, made because thirty-odd entries in one column is a wall rather than a reference.

A species entry may also name a movement rate — a distance in metres beside a fast or slow speed. Those are that species’ own mechanics rather than entries on this list, so the number is on the species and there is no general speed trait to look up here. The origins below carry theirs.

The baseline species, no characteristic changed.

Human, male. The baseline: no characteristic is changed, no trait is added, and every die you roll is the standard one.

Offering human as a choice at all is this project’s framing rather than a printed rule. The source has no human species entry — humans are the assumed default and its species section describes only the departures from them — so this entry exists to put the baseline on the same shelf as the four alien origins rather than leaving it as the thing you get by not choosing.

The sex is a portrait choice and this project’s own division of one printed species into two selectable bodies. It changes nothing on the sheet, which is what the rules say in terms: no distinction is drawn between members of the same species on grounds of gender. No per-sex characteristic difference is invented here, because none is printed.

The baseline species, no characteristic changed.

Human, female. The same baseline as its counterpart: no characteristic changed, no trait added, every die the standard one.

The same original framing, for the same reason. The source offers no selectable human origin, so both of these entries are this project’s addition rather than a transcription — and the two differ only in the portrait they draw.

The rules are explicit that gender makes no mechanical difference within a species, and this build takes that at its word. An alien species may attach characteristic changes to a gender choice; the human species does not, and nothing here quietly invents one.

Feathered and flight-capable on smaller worlds.

Avians are a small winged race descended from omnivore and hunter flyers, capable of flight on smaller worlds — light, fast and fragile.

They are homeothermic and bi-gendered, average about 1.2 metres tall, span over 2.5 metres wingtip to wingtip, and mass around 35 kilograms. Their natural aptitude for spatial awareness, both conceptual and physical, lends itself immediately to piloting and navigation.

Chitinous, many-limbed, and built for a harder world.

Insectans are an insectoid race descended from carnivore and chaser stock, hard for most other species to understand and community-conscious to the point of putting the colony before the self.

They average 1.8 metres and around 90 kilograms, and are poikilothermic — they take their warmth from their surroundings. Their sense of individual identity is very limited and they more often think of themselves as an extension of the queen, though better nutrition and contact with other cultures have grown a minority with a stronger sense of self. They tend to serve the whole of interstellar society in service roles.

Their genders are worker and soldier, both sterile females, drone, a fertile male, and queen, a fertile female. There is little gross anatomical difference between them; carapace colouration and bearing are what let a non-Insectan tell one from another.

They have no Social Standing. In its place is a characteristic called Caste, generated exactly as Social Standing is, and every modification to Social Standing anywhere in character creation applies to Caste equally.

Gilled and webbed, at home in water.

Merfolk were genetically manipulated from pure human stock for life on a waterworld, and with each passing generation they resemble their genetic ancestors a little less.

Their skin has shifted toward pale greens and blues, and gills, webbed appendages and a thin layer of protective blubber give them a distinctly amphibian look.

Scaled, cold-blooded and heavily built.

Reptilians descend from homeothermic carnivorous chaser stock and bear a strong saurian appearance — driven by territoriality and a primal need to hunt.

Their scales are brilliantly patterned, particularly among the males. They stand about 1.9 metres and mass around 85 kilograms, and they keep many of their saurian ancestors’ features. Discovering the jump drive gave them entire new worlds to claim.