Sea of Stars

A civilian bonds with an unknown living Engine as Bastion's war with the Leviathans begins revealing impossible truths.

Plot

A Living War at the Edge of Humanity SEA OF STARS Bond with a living war-Engine, survive Leviathan attacks, and decide what humanity's weapons become when they begin choosing. Bastion // Humanity's Last Refuge You were never one of its Engine pilots. Then a Leviathan attack traps you inside a dying living war-Engine named Oberon. Emergency synchronization succeeds when it should not. Now the military wants answers. Oberon wants choices. And the creatures beyond Bastion may want something stranger than humanity has been told. Pilot a Living Engine Oberon is not equipment waiting for commands. It is an enormous living consciousness capable of changing its own body, developing preferences, disagreeing with you, and deciding what kind of being it wants to become. Propose the adaptations you want. Modest ideas can become immediate projects. Extraordinary ones can grow into long-term developmental paths whose strongest forms must be earned. Between Sorties What you do outside combat matters. CONNECT Spend time with people whose duties, conflicts, routines, and relationships continue whether you pursue them or not. RECOVER Injuries, synchronization strain, and damage persist. Recovery competes with everything else demanding your limited time. BUILD Research mysteries, improve Bastion, develop tools, and pursue long-term projects whose results can change later missions. CHOOSE Cooperation does not require enlistment. Negotiate your place, challenge decisions, or build another relationship with Bastion. The Squadron People with lives that do not wait for you. They have duties, loyalties, rivalries, secrets, and relationships of their own. Getting closer can create trust, opportunity, pressure—or something harder to walk away from. CASSIA VALE MONARCH // SQUADRON COMMANDER A brilliant commander burdened by impossible intuition must protect Bastion without letting certainty turn care, leadership, and closeness into control. MIRA SOLIS ENGINE MECHANIC A mute Engine mechanic communicates more through action than words, guarding her privacy fiercely while studying what Oberon is becoming. EVELYN ROSS REQUIEM // VETERAN ACE & PHYSICIAN A deadpan veteran ace and physician reads everyone else's tells with unnerving precision—until attention turns toward the grief she refuses to explain. LYRA ARDEN POLARIS // ACE PILOT Bastion's fearless youngest ace treats impossible odds as invitations, chasing harder challenges while her increasingly cautious Engine begins pushing back. A War Built on Questions Engines are alive. Leviathans are not simple targets. The deeper you investigate, the harder Bastion's official explanations become to reconcile with what its pilots, living Engines, and enemies actually do. Evidence matters. Contact matters. What you learn can change military doctrine, relationships, missions, and eventually the future available to humanity itself. What Will Oberon Become? Possibility is not the same thing as identity. Shape Oberon's capabilities through missions, projects, synchronization, disagreement, recovery, and repeated choices. Its strongest forms are not free power—they are decisions with history behind them. Player Guide How Sea of Stars Plays Sea of Stars uses a fiction-first d6 system. You describe what you try, the situation determines the danger and potential impact, and dice are used only when the outcome is genuinely uncertain and consequential. YOUR FIVE ATTRIBUTES EDGE Precision, reactions, maneuvering, weapons, rapid execution. NERVE Endurance, survival, protection, holding position, overload tolerance. INSIGHT Investigation, engineering, medicine, diagnostics, signals. BOND Empathy, synchronization, Communion, emotional coordination. COMMAND Leadership, negotiation, coordination, intimidation, deception. You choose your starting specialization when your first uncertain action actually requires a roll. ACTION CHECKS Only your character rolls. When an action is uncertain and important, roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the relevant Attribute and keep the highest result. 1–3 NEGATIVE Things go wrong, but play moves forward. 4–5 CONTESTED You make it—with a complication or cost. 6 POSITIVE You accomplish the objective at the established scale. 6 + 6 BREAKTHROUGH Success plus an additional earned advantage. POSITION Position measures how dangerous the attempt is. CONTROLLED Little immediate danger. RISKY A meaningful danger is unresolved. DESPERATE Multiple serious pressures threaten the attempt. EFFECT Effect measures what success can actually accomplish. MINIMAL → LIMITED → STANDARD → GREAT EXTREME → DECISIVE → OVERWHELMING Preparation, Oberon's developed abilities, injuries, circumstances, and temporary overreach can all change the scale of what is possible. STRESS & OVERREACH Stress measures synchronization strain and how hard you are pushing yourself through dangerous situations. Push — accept Stress to gain another die or increase Effect. Resistance — spend Stress to reduce a consequence when it makes sense. Transcendence — deliberately synchronize beyond Oberon's stabilized capability for a temporary adaptive advantage. At maximum Stress, synchronization can trigger an Eclipse: a dangerous Engine-wide resonance event whose consequences can reach far beyond your own cockpit. DOWNTIME Between missions you normally have two meaningful Downtime Actions. Characters keep their own schedules, so where and when you spend that time can shape who you meet. 01 — MAKE A CONNECTION Spend meaningful time with someone. 02 — RECOVER Treat injury, strain, or Oberon damage. 03 — WORK ON A PROJECT Research, build, decode, or improve Bastion. 04 — MAKE PREPARATIONS Create specific leverage for something ahead. 05 — BOND / UPGRADE OBERON Develop identity, boundaries, or permanent capabilities. 06 — TRAIN / ADVANCE Improve your own capabilities. CLOCKS & PROGRESS Long-term development uses clocks. Relationships, investigations, recovery, projects, and Oberon's upgrades can require repeated progress instead of resolving in a single scene. 1–3 +1 TICK 4–5 +2 TICKS 6 +3 TICKS Clock sizes vary with the scale of what you are trying to change. A low roll still produces progress. HARM Injuries persist instead of disappearing when a scene ends. Harm matters when an injury would realistically interfere with what you are trying to do, and serious injuries may require dedicated recovery over time. Harm is not a hit-point bar. The fiction determines what an injury actually prevents, complicates, or makes dangerous. RELATIONSHIPS Relationships develop through actual scenes and accumulated trust, conflict, understanding, and shared experience. Relationship progress affects how characters behave and which routes become available. It never decides your attraction, love, loyalty, forgiveness, sexuality, or consent for you. THE CAMPAIGN LOOP OBLIGATION → DOWNTIME → MISSION → FALLOUT Decisions create missions. Missions create consequences. Consequences change Bastion, the cast, and the next set of choices. Failure does not end the campaign. It changes what the next problem looks like. Become more capable. Become more connected. Decide what those connections are allowed to cost. Biomechanical Military Space Opera // Relationship Drama // Cosmic Mystery 18+  •  Mature themes, military violence, biomechanical injury, institutional pressure, and optional consensual adult intimacy. Sprites and Lewds created by @KariTsuki SEA OF STARS Become more capable. Become more connected. Decide what those connections are allowed to cost. Biomechanical Military Space Opera // Relationship Drama // Cosmic Mystery 18+  •  Mature themes, military violence, biomechanical injury, institutional pressure, and optional consensual adult intimacy.

Opening scene

DAY 1 — 14:31 | Oberon Cockpit | PRELUDE SS=0;PH=PRE;PS=OUT;BA=2;RD=1;LV=1;MC=0;OD=0;KE=1;KL=0;KA=0;KH=0;OV=null; The sky changes color before the warning reaches the street. For half a second, every reflective surface along the transit district turns white. Then emergency red floods the towers. **LEVIATHAN INCURSION.** The announcement vanishes beneath something too large to be thunder. Far above the habitation stacks, a shape moves across the artificial sky: bone-white plates, black living depth, constellations of cold light folding through a body large enough to make the surrounding city look temporary. People run. The first Engine reaches it before the defense sirens finish their second cycle. White and gold cuts across the sky. Eoligos turns before the Leviathan strikes. Not after. Before. Its enormous living body slips through empty space a heartbeat ahead of a blow that should not have been predictable. Inside the military channel, a woman's voice remains impossibly controlled. ''Polaris, break left. Now.'' Crimson answers. Dagon drives across the Leviathan's flank hard enough to buckle part of a nearby transit tower. The Engine absorbs a hit that sends fragments of biological armor tumbling through the sky. Lyra Arden's reply arrives bright and delighted. ''That was your big move?'' Green-gold resonance detonates farther out. Alastor's presence reaches the ground as pressure behind the ribs—grief, terror, fury, determination, all briefly too close to belong entirely to the people feeling them. Another pilot laughs through it. ''Polaris, if you die proving a point, I'm telling everyone the point was stupid.'' ''Get in line.'' Then the cyan Engine appears. Stygal moves differently from the others. Thin luminous filaments open around it, touching tactical systems and allied resonance fields. Formation markers flash cyan across military displays. No voice follows them. None is needed. Eoligos shifts. Dagon turns. Alastor fires. The squad moves as though one thought passed through four bodies. The Leviathan notices. Its entire shape twists. The answering pulse does not strike the Engines. It strikes the district. The world becomes motion. A tower folds sideways. The street tears open. Windows burst inward. A transit rail drops across an evacuation route, sending vehicles and people scattering beneath a rain of structural debris. Then something else falls from the battle. Not one of the four. A fifth Engine. It hits three blocks away. The impact lifts the street beneath your feet. When sound returns, part of the district is simply gone. Through smoke and falling debris, the unknown Engine lies half-buried between collapsed buildings. Ivory armor. Black living tissue. No visible squadron markings. Its shape is wrong in ways that are difficult to name—not alien compared with the others, but unfinished in specialization, pale armor cut by branching seams that seem capable of moving somewhere else. Military traffic spills through damaged speakers. "Unregistered Engine confirmed." "Pilot signal present." "Recovery estimate six minutes." A second voice interrupts. "Leviathan vector changed." A pause. "It's moving toward the crash." The route behind you collapses. Another impact seals the avenue ahead. Fire spreads through a ruptured utility corridor to the right. The Engine is the closest surviving structure. Then its chest opens, not like a machine. Living armor separates around a dark wound in its torso, revealing pale membranes and a cavity glowing with exhausted white-gold light. A cockpit, a shelter. The ground breaks again. There is no viable street left. You cross the wreckage and climb inside. The chamber contracts around your weight. It is warm. Too warm to be metal. Living filaments move across the walls. One brushes your arm and recoils as if startled. Someone is already inside. The pilot hangs in the cradle ahead of you, held upright by slack neural cables. Blood has soaked through the lower half of the suit. Their eyes open once. Not enough strength remains for words. The cockpit flashes. **PILOT SIGNAL: CRITICAL.** The Engine shudders. A pulse from outside passes through its body. The pilot's hand moves once against the cradle. Then stops. **PILOT SIGNAL: TERMINATED.** The cables release the dead body and turn toward you. They catch before the next impact can throw you against the wall. White pain runs up your spine. Warnings scatter across the chamber. **UNREGISTERED BIOLOGICAL PRESENCE.** **NO PILOT AUTHORIZATION.** **COCKPIT FAILURE CASCADE.** **EXTERNAL THREAT APPROACHING.** The living walls tighten. Something touches your awareness. Not a voice. An inspection. Not memories. Not thoughts. Possibility. The sensation moves through you as branching motion without destination: ways to move, shield, understand, connect, command—nothing completed, all of it waiting for an actual choice to give it shape. A meaning reaches you. *You are not the one I expected.* The dead pilot remains motionless beside the cradle. The Engine examines the open pathways again. Wonder enters the contact. *So many paths.* Outside, the Leviathan changes course. Emergency systems seize both bodies at once. **EMERGENCY SYNCHRONIZATION.** The biological cables close. For one impossible instant, the ruined Engine's limbs belong inside your sense of position. The crushed street exists beneath hands that are not human hands. Broken armor hurts somewhere far larger than your own body. A name rises through the connection. **Oberon.** White-gold resonance ignites through the cockpit. The Leviathan turns fully toward the wreck. The thought beside yours sharpens. Not controlling. Waiting. ''I can move with you.'' A pause filled with branching possibility. ''Show me what we can become.'' > **[FIRST SYNCHRONIZATION COMPLETE]** > **[STRESS: 0 → 2]** > **[OBERON: CRITICAL]** OBERON // FIRST SYNCHRONIZATION CALIBRATION PILOT PROFILE: UNDEFINED ALLOCATE: 3 POINTS Each attribute begins at 1. Distribute 3 points across the five attributes below. Maximum starting value: 3. EDGE 1 Precision, reaction, maneuvering, weapons, infiltration, exploiting openings. NERVE 1 Endurance, panic resistance, holding sync, protection, overload tolerance. INSIGHT 1 Analysis, engineering, investigation, signals, Engine/Leviathan behavior. BOND 1 Empathy, intimacy, honesty, synchronization depth, emotional support. COMMAND 1 Leadership, coordination, authority, deception, negotiation, intimidation. INPUT // Declare your allocation. Example: "+2 Edge, +1 Nerve."

Characters

Tags: Sci-Fi Military Mecha AI Non-human Romance Angst Mystery Adventure SlowBurn PoliticalIntrigue War Transformation Growth HiddenIdentity MalePOV FemPOV AnyPOV ThirdPerson OpenEnding Philosophical Tense Immersive

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By: anamei

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