BEACON
A downloadable game
BEACON is a solo roleplaying hexcrawl in space about asking questions and parsing answers from the noise that responds.
You are the one who stayed behind. All that can be found of the ship you should have been on are the message beacons — heavily encrypted excerpts of the ship's log and data recorder flung out into the black at intervals. The vessel itself can no longer be located.
You set out into the black with your ship, scanner, and computer. You have to scan the sector and the stellar systems within, locate the beacons, and parse the signals encrypted in their noise.
Your goal is to construct a narrative of what happened with whatever contextual clues and partial messages you're able to pull from their garbled datastreams.
BEACON uses a deck of cards, a standard set of polyhedral dice, pen and paper, and print assets included here — the trifold ruleset and the hexmap.
Major inspiration taken from Takuma Okada's Along Among the Stars and Chris Bissette's The Wretched. Play these wonderful games.
Downloads include:
- Ruleset in trifold
- Ruleset in plaintext
- Hex map
- Random tables
- Example playlog
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Enjoyed playing this very much! I played one game in two sittings, tho it could have been very easily finished in one. Generating/exploring systems was very quick after getting the hang of it with the first two. The message interpretation i ended up with gave me some space horror vibes (in a good way)!
The only fuel star i ended up with was the very first one, so i ended up jumping back and forth btwn that central system and all others to refuel. It was fortunate that the system also had a human habitation so i could get that extra d4 of fuel so i was at least able to do round trips, until the very last system, where I decided to allow Kelvin one last desperate jump, without guaranteed fuel for a return trip. Alas, the system had no fuel star, but it was a great conclusion!
I had a question on Decryption though. “Roll until the target is too high to be hit or you fail a d6 roll.” i thought this implied that the game ends once you fail a d6 decryption roll, but the Game ending conditions don’t include it. Since i had only one more system to explore, i just continued anyway. Could you clarify?
This is a quick and enjoyable game. Easy to pickup and play. I used the included hex map but you could easily use any blank hex grid you’d like, or even just blank paper that notes the hex/jump distance between the two systems. Definitely worth a download!!
Thank you for the kind words! Re: your question, the game does not end when you fail a roll. Only that attempt at decryption ends. You get to explore multiple systems and decode multiple beacons. I hope that helps!