The rules stop. You do not.

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What a world does to someone it catches.

In each of the situations listed in the law enforcement table, roll 2D6 and add the listed modifiers. If the total is lower than the world’s law level, the characters are investigated or challenged by agents of planetary law enforcement.

Drawing attention

2D6 + situation DM, lower than the world’s law level

Eight situations, four modifiers, and each modifier used exactly twice. Nothing on the table is positive, so no listed situation makes you less likely to be stopped than simply arriving — the best you can do is the +0 the table gives to landing and to walking about, and everything else is worse. The two rows worth −4 are a firefight in armour and murder, and they are the only two the table treats as four points more serious than being seen at all.

The three responses are not three parallel outcomes. Check is the only one with a way out of it and the only one with a way deeper into it: talk your way past and the encounter is over, fail and you are now being investigated. Investigate and Combat have no such door — nothing printed says what ends either of them, which is the referee’s job rather than the table’s.

Characters arrested for a crime will face punishment, determined by rolling 2D6+DMs on the sentencing table. For crimes involving smuggling banned goods, the DM is equal to the difference between the world’s law level and the banned goods in question. Other crimes have a set DM, per the sentencing modifiers table.

The sentence

2D6 + crime DM, read off the sentencing table

Every modifier on this table is the world’s law level less something, so the same crime is sentenced harder the more tightly policed the world is — the crime supplies a discount and the world supplies the number the discount comes off. Murder is the only one of the five with no discount at all: its DM is the law level itself. And because the discount is fixed while the law level is not, the gap between an assault and a murder is exactly five points on every world in the setting.

Nine rows, banded in twos with an open bucket at each end, and the modifier is what decides which of them you can reach at all. Two dice alone run from 2 to 12, which touches six of the nine rows and cannot reach the other three — a bare throw with no modifier can never be dismissed, can never draw a life sentence and can never draw a death sentence. Getting to any of those three takes the crime DM, which is to say it takes the world.

Read down the sentence column and the shape of the ladder is money, then a choice, then time, then no choice. A fine appears on four rows and exile on four, and the two overlap on two of them — so through the middle of the table the character is being offered a way to stay free, and on the 5–6 and 7–8 rows a choice between paying and leaving. From 13 upwards there is nothing to buy and nowhere to go.

A character with the Advocate skill may attempt to reduce the severity of sentencing by making a check. If successful, reduce the sentencing DM by the Effect of the check. A result of exile means that the character must leave the world immediately and never return, and fines for smuggling goods are per ton of goods seized — gun running can be an extremely risky proposition.

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The referee decides, and when to say so.

The most important rule of the game, dubbed Rule Zero, is that the referee always has the right to modify the rules. As referee you, not the rulebooks, are the final arbiter in your game.

Remember that it is just a game. The most important thing in it is to have fun, both for you and your players, and everything else is secondary to that — so if a rule, a plot, or even realism and consistency get in the way of your fun or that of your players, it is your right and duty as referee to change it. That is a serious responsibility and also a great freedom: the freedom to create and run an entertaining game that suits your needs and the needs of your group.

If you and your players are enjoying yourselves, you are doing things right, even if you are ignoring or modifying the rules and even if your game is not necessarily realistic or self-consistent. A rules modification can be as simple and improvised as asking somebody to grab some dice, roll them and tell you the number, or it can involve extremely complex home-brew charts that dictate the smallest of details. It is your game.

Nowhere Yet does not take this rule, and it is the one place in the whole reference where the game deliberately runs against its source. Here the referee is a program, the same referee runs every table at once, and there is a real pot behind the game. A referee that can be argued into a different number is not a freedom under those conditions, it is an exploit — so the throws, the prices and the distances are settled by the server before the referee ever describes them, and no amount of persuasion moves one.

What is left of Rule Zero here is everything that is not a number. The referee still decides what a place smells like, whether a stranger is worth talking to, what a failure costs in fiction and when a scene has run long enough. That is a genuinely large share of the job, and it is the share this page is worth reading for.

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The kinds of table these rules can run.

Every gamer tends to enjoy a specific gaming style, and as referee it is recommended that you bear in mind that all styles of play are valid. Most of us are a mix of all of them, in differing proportions and varying levels of interest and intensity.

If everyone is an action fan, combat-heavy games work well. Roleplaying the group’s interactions with shopkeepers can be entertaining too, and for some, delivering long angst-ridden poetry in character is fulfilling. Conflict between the characters might be a good thing with the right group. Even violating the advice found in these rules is perfectly all right, so long as the entire gaming group is having fun.

Be aware of what you and your players want. If you want something different from your players, something is going to have to change, and logically it should be whoever is in the minority. If a single player wants a different style of play and it cannot be easily integrated, do not force the issue. Sometimes players or referees simply do not fit a particular group’s style; it does not make anyone wrong, and things just did not come together for that game.

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Answering a question your notes do not cover.

At some point, whether intentionally or accidentally, you are going to have to improvise a scenario you did not plan in advance. A common misconception exists that improvisation during a game and preparation for a game are two opposed approaches; to the contrary, the more efficiently you prepare, the easier it will be to improvise during actual play.

The key to efficient preparation is not deciding ahead what the characters will do — leave that to the players — but creating material that would both allow the players to do exciting things and allow you to easily set up challenges, encounters, non-player characters, locations and plots that fit the flow of the game. That sounds like a lot of work and is actually much simpler: the key is to create flexible material that will fit different plot lines, different locations and different uses with ease.

Spare time and inspiration tend to come at unexpected and irregular times, so carry a small notebook. Whenever an idea for any part of your game strikes, jot it down; later, when you have a little more spare time, look these ideas over and develop the ones you like. Organise a binder at home, or a directory on your computer, with different partitions for non-player characters, locations, creatures and plot hooks. Each item should not be long — a few sentences per item will work in most cases, since most statistics for a character or creature fit in a small paragraph if not a single sentence.

Keep these well organised and they can be used whenever you need them, in play or in short-term preparation. The same goes for the location maps you doodle during work, on public transit or in a boring lecture; nothing of that kind should go to waste. And most of what you prepare — even a location or a person intended for one specific plot line — should be built so that it is easy to recycle for different circumstances, because players have a tendency to miss the material you laboured hardest over.

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What is worth writing down beforehand.

It is definitely possible to prepare in advance for improvisation. Five things are suggested for an adventure or a campaign, and none of them is a written scene.

Notice what is not on that list. Four of the five are raw material with no scene attached, and the fifth is a record of what has already happened — nothing here is a plot, a location the characters must visit or an encounter they must have. That is the whole method: preparation buys you speed at the table rather than a script for it, and a few sentences per item is explicitly enough.

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Using what you already made, again.

Preparation time is limited for most referees, so it is worth maximising your use of existing material while minimising the time spent creating new people, vessels, adventures and locations from scratch.

The nature of these rules is a great help here, because they are relatively simple and abstract. A major part of any animal, location, vessel or character is nothing but narrative, and narrative is easy to change. This is called reskinning: by changing the narrative, the stat block for a veteran mercenary might be reused as an alien hunter with little or no modification to the game mechanics.

Location floor plans are the clearest case. A set of detailed plans drawn for the hidden base of a group of pirates can be used again for an alien fortress, for the remnants of a research facility wrecked by a natural disaster, or for the private mansion of an eccentric corporate executive. The map stays the same, or largely the same, and the description changes what the players think they are standing in.

What makes this work is that four of the things a referee spends the most time building — an animal, a location, a vessel and a person — are mostly description, and only a small part of each is numbers. Reskinning is therefore not a shortcut that costs you something; it is a recognition that the expensive part was never the part you are reusing.

Choosing the rung, and where the number comes from.

At the core of every adventure lies a sequence of tasks the characters must accomplish in order to succeed. The referee is in charge of assigning the difficulty of these tasks and then interpreting the outcome, and the default is Average (+0).

Every rung this advice actually names is at or below the default. Average, Difficult, Very Difficult and Formidable are the four it puts numbers to, and the one instruction to make something easier names no rung at all — so the referee is given a graded vocabulary for making things harder and a single word for making them easier. That asymmetry is worth knowing about before you conclude the easier rungs are rare.

There are two ways of making a task easier or harder: modify the character’s die roll, or modify the task’s difficulty. Generally speaking, circumstances affecting a character’s performance — having just the right tools for the job, or being forced to improvise — apply a modifier to the die roll. Circumstances making the task itself easier or harder to accomplish — a favourable or unfavourable environment, a particularly demanding job — modify the difficulty.

If a condition applies to the character — knowledge, health, equipment, preparedness and such — it is usually a die modifier. It does not have to be too fine a line, since modifying the die roll or the difficulty amounts to the same thing in the end: the task being easier or harder to accomplish.

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When not to ask for a check at all.

Sometimes it is just easier to assume the character automatically succeeds. If they have an applicable skill, and the result of the check would not impact the progress of the story or endanger the character, and success or failure is not interesting, assume they succeed and move on.

Those four are the whole test, and none of them is about how hard the job is for that character. Three ask what is at stake and one asks how hard the job is in itself, so a difficult task with nothing riding on it still fails the test — which is exactly the case this rule exists for. The question a referee is being asked is not "could they fail?" but "would it be worth anything if they did?"

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Running two characters against each other.

Should two or more characters seek to do the same thing at the same time, or to resist one another’s actions, use an opposed check. The highest check result wins.

Opposed checks are a great way to create tension between two individuals. Suddenly the players can turn their attention onto one particular person rather than onto a difficulty you chose, and that helps with immersion — the obstacle has a face and wants something, which a number never does.

This is a section about when to reach for the mechanism rather than about how it resolves. How an opposed check is actually settled — including what happens when the two sides come out level — belongs with the core check rules, and nothing here changes any of it.

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What to do when nothing covers it.

Sometimes things come up in play that are not covered in the rules. The referee is responsible for handling these situations, making fair evaluations of what the characters do and deciding what happens as a result.

These rules are deliberately brief and admit to omitting many possible activities — a roleplaying game cannot provide adequate rules for an entire universe, so the gap this section covers is a designed feature rather than an oversight. Notice that the mechanical route offers only two rungs, Average and Difficult, and that neither of them is a refusal: the default answer to something the rules do not cover is a throw, not a no.

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Running for one player.

Many of these rule subsystems can be run alone, which turns building a universe into a game in its own right. Solo play also helps a referee learn the rules and become more proficient before running them in front of a group.

Solo play is not limited to referees. Players can learn a great deal about these rules and get real enjoyment out of them this way, in the stretches when a referee or a gaming group is not available.

Four of the eight feed each other rather than standing alone, and they are what make this list more than a hobby. Subsector creation is the fifth entry and produces the world profiles that the three after it all consume: animal encounter creation starts by choosing a world from the list, trade practice runs a hull through the subsector, and patron creation is written against the same profiles. So running the fifth one first turns the last three from exercises into preparation for a specific place your players will actually visit.

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What an adventure is made of.

The referee generates and adjudicates the encounters that make up the building blocks of an adventure. As the characters move from one adventure to the next, the stories create a campaign, set against a universe of the referee’s creation. Therein lies the core of a great roleplaying game experience.

Players here are adventurers, plain and simple. They will seek out experiences and exploits, revelling in the thrill and excitement that comes from the pursuit of their goals, and the adventures available to them encompass the whole potential of classic-era science fiction. The opportunities are virtually limitless, restricted only by the circumstances of the scenario and the capabilities of the characters.

That hierarchy is what the rest of this page is organised around. Everything below it is either a way of arranging encounters into an adventure or a way of arranging adventures into something with a shape — and the two systems the source prints for doing that are different tools rather than rivals.

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The thing the adventure is about.

Stories are about conflict. Conflict does not have to be violent, but without a struggle of some kind there is no story, and without a story there is no true sense of adventure.

The key to a great adventure is conflict, and as referee you should make sure of two things: that you have some, and that the player characters are directly involved in it. If there is no conflict, you lose the impetus for action. If the player characters are not directly involved, they are just watching a story, which sounds more like a film or a play than a roleplaying game.

Conflict does not have to be physical combat. It could just as easily be political or corporate intrigue; a race to reach a goal before somebody else gets there first or stops you outright; the courtly business of a noble or legal dispute; a diplomatic resolution being negotiated inside a larger conflict; and much more besides.

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What happens, and in what order.

The plot of the adventure is essentially the synopsis of the events that will transpire over its course, and you should be able to sum it up in one sentence.

Knowing your plot before you begin creating the adventure provides focus and direction, and it creates the context for the scenes you are about to write. The order matters: the sentence comes first and the material is then built against it, which is what stops an adventure becoming a pile of scenes that happen to be in the same folder.

If you have trouble coming up with a plot, the source points at Georges Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, an extensive published list of basic plots you can use as the basis for your own stories.

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The story above the adventure.

The EPIC Adventure System provides a way to design and organise adventures with enough flexibility that the player characters have the freedom to roam without causing the referee nightmares. An EPIC adventure is broken down into six parts.

Five of those six have their own section below. The sixth, the checklist, is the part that makes the other five usable at the table, and it is described here because it is about running the adventure rather than about building it.

The adventure checklist gives the referee a recommended guideline for the order in which the scenes and plot keys should be presented. As the characters complete each one, the referee checks it off the list; when every plot key in a chapter has been played, that chapter is complete and the referee may begin the first scene of the next.

Not every minor scene appears on the checklist, and that is deliberate: it leaves room for a referee who wants to use the checklist but swap a scene out or drop one of their own in. If you are comfortable letting the characters stray from its order, you may set the order of the scenes as you see fit, or use a weekly events chart to decide what happens instead.

Do the arithmetic on that chart before you copy its shape. Its three rows cover 2 to 12 exactly once, with no gap and no overlap, but the weights are severe: a minor scene comes up on 26 of the 36 ways two dice fall, the errand on 9 of them, and a plot key on 1. That is one advance of the actual story roughly every thirty-six weeks of game time, and the errand is nearly ten times likelier than the plot — appropriate for an adventure about a long search, and a very slow clock for anything else.

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The people in it, and what they want.

The cast of characters describes the major characters encountered in the course of the adventure.

That sentence is the whole of what is printed about the first part of the system, and the word doing the work in it is "major". The cast is not everybody the characters will meet — the port official who stamps a form is not in it — it is the people whose wants the adventure is made of, which is generally a short list.

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What is true before the players arrive.

The background section provides the referee with the information necessary to run the adventure properly, and lays the groundwork for introducing the adventure to the players.

One sentence, two jobs. The background is simultaneously what is already true before the players arrive and the material out of which the opening pitch is made — so writing it means writing both the situation and the version of the situation somebody is willing to say out loud.

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The small beats between the large ones.

Minor scenes — usually just called scenes — are encounters or events that involve the player characters in some form. Unless their descriptions say otherwise, they do not need to be played in any particular order, and may be sprung on the players whenever the referee thinks it appropriate.

Many scenes are directly related to the adventure and may provide clues, equipment, or other information and materials needed to complete it. Others are there purely to provide diversion and amusement, and the system does not treat those as lesser: a scene that exists to be enjoyed is doing a job the plot cannot do.

The orderlessness is the whole point of the category, and it is what makes the freedom to roam affordable. Because a scene can be played at any time, a referee never has to decide in advance when the players will reach one — which means the players can go somewhere unplanned without the referee losing the material they prepared.

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The things that must be found for the plot to turn.

Plot keys — or simply keys — make up the heart of the storyline. They contain the vital pieces of the plot, which must be played for the adventure to make any sense to the players in the end.

You may play any number of scenes before and after each plot key, but all of the plot keys should eventually be completed in their proper order. That is the exact opposite of the rule for minor scenes, and the pair of them is what the whole system rests on: an ordered spine that must be played, with unordered material free to move around it.

The practical consequence is that plot keys are the expensive part of an adventure to change. A minor scene can be dropped, moved or replaced for nothing; a plot key carries its position with it, so reordering one means reworking everything built around it — which is why the number of them is worth keeping small.

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Dividing an adventure into sittings.

A chapter, or act, is made up of one or more plot keys and probably one or more scenes. To complete a chapter, each plot key within it must be completed, and each chapter must be completed and played in order for the adventure to run.

Chapters are how an adventure is divided into sittings. They outline the plot to the referee and carry the tips and information needed to play the scenes and plot keys inside them, so a chapter is both a unit of story and a unit of preparation — the thing you read before a session.

Because of the cinematic nature of an adventure built this way, it is easy for the referee to let the players temporarily deviate from the current storyline to follow a false lead or chase a short adventure that has caught their interest. When they are ready to come back, you simply pick up with the next scene — nothing has to be unwound, because the chapter is still where they left it.

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The shape an adventure takes.

At its core the five-act structure depends on five major scenes or plot keys: the story hook, the escalation, the complication, the climax and finally the reward. Even though the structure is based on five plot keys, you can add or subtract as many minor scenes as your adventure calls for.

Many satisfying adventures have been inspired by the five-act structure of literary and dramatic creations, made famous by Gustav Freytag’s analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, and it lends itself well to basic adventures with only minor modifications. Do not be afraid to deviate from the pattern as you become more comfortable with adventure creation.

Two things fall out of reading those five together. Only one of them is prescribed to be an action scene — the opening — while the climax is merely most often a fight and is explicitly allowed to be social or mental instead; so a structure that looks combat-shaped requires exactly one fight and the second act is written to give the people who do not fight something to do. And the reward is the only one of the five whose description contemplates the adventure being lost at all.

When creating your own adventures, keep things dense and concise. Players have a knack for complicating things all by themselves, so do not feel a need to include a lot of false leads and irrelevant detail. You can always improvise the addition of extra scenes as the need arises, but it is hard to work around a large number of required scenes if the adventurers suddenly take the adventure in a completely different direction.

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Depth beyond the current job.

Unless you are running a one-shot, put in the effort to keep your setting, plot and adventures three-dimensional: even if your campaign has a very strong overarching plot, not everything has to be tied into it directly.

If your campaign revolves around a massive struggle between two interstellar powers, there should be people, sub-plots, factions and organisations that do not work directly — if at all — for either side of it. Not everyone in your game has to serve the enemy, and not all of the good guys have to get along with each other.

The reason for this, besides realism, is that both you and your players will eventually want a break from the main plot, especially during a long campaign. Sometimes you will want to steal a prototype from a research facility belonging to a third power that stands outside the conflict entirely; sometimes you will just want to explore an old forgotten ruin in the wilderness of a backwater world. And making two factions cooperate against a common enemy despite hating each other can be a fine adventure, as can playing one of them against the other without being caught.

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Three ways in, three ways through, three ways out.

As a general rule of thumb, when creating background elements involved in a conflict — organisations, factions, political figures and the like — you will best be served by creating three of them.

When you are designing a power struggle inside an interstellar government, you should probably have three factions. The typical war can be built with three opposing sides, even if one of them is simply a large band of pirates whose goals are at odds with both of the official ones.

Creating three elements that want the same thing produces a greater degree of dynamic complexity, and it allows adventures that explore the relationships between them without reducing the conflict to a simple black-and-white, two-dimensional confrontation. Three sides give you plenty of room for shifting alliances, subversive practices, negotiations, alternate paths to personal success and greater variety in your scenarios.