# 5150: New Beginnings *Created:* 2023-07-23, *Modified:* 2026-10-12 ![[5150 - New Beginnings (2e) (cover).jpg|600]] ![[5150 - New Beginnings (1e) (cover).jpg|600]] "Welcome to New Hope City, where we like to say that everyone deserves a second chance and a little hope." That's the opening, and it's delivered the way a loan shark says *welcome to the family*: warm, and fully aware you're about to be in debt. **5150: New Beginnings** is Two Hour Wargames' sci-fi adventure game — the point in the 5150 line where the company's reaction-engine skirmish games lean hardest into roleplaying, handing you a **Star** in a sprawling future metropolis and pointing you at the whole register, from interplanetary smuggler to bounty hunter to a body jacked so full of chrome it stops being your body. It plays solo, cooperatively, or with a table full of people trying to ruin everyone else's second chances. "And it's your Story," the book says, "so let's get started." ## Setting New Hope City sits on the planet New Hope, the capital and most important world of the 5150 universe — a bustling, decades-sprawled future city sliced into eleven Areas, each with its own law level running from a "Police State" down to a "Free for All." The pitch is upward mobility with a twist: everyone deserves a second chance, and what you do with it is your business. That's the whole engine of the game's fiction — the metropolis is a place to make a life, and whether you do it honestly, at gunpoint, or somewhere in the cybernetically enhanced middle is left to you. The world is peopled by the **major races of 5150** — the **Basic** humans and the aliens the line keeps coming back to: the **Grath**, the **Hishen**, the **Razor**, the **Xeog**, and the **Zhuh-Zhuh** — plus the trusted-alien types who've carved out a place in the city. Characters pick a **Profession by Class** from a deliberately pulpy spread: **Movers** and **Shakers**, **Exotics**, **Joes** in service or labor, the **Criminal Element**, and the **Jack of All Trades**. It's a setting built to be inhabited, not toured — a city where you have a home that can get burglarized, a law level that constrains what weapons you can walk around with, and neighbors who may or may not be trying to take your stuff. ## Mechanics Under the hood it's the standard **THW Reaction System** — the shared engine of [[Chain Reaction]] — running an "RPG Lite" version of it. Your character is a **Star**, the plot-armored protagonist with Attributes, or a **Grunt**, the mechanical masses, and nearly everything comes back to a single d6 trick. ### The Reaction System The core roll is **taken versus Reputation (Rep)**: you roll **2d6** and each die that comes up *equal to or less than* your Rep passes. You can pass two, one, or zero of them, and the number you pass determines how the table you're consulting turns out. It's the same clean, brutal economy the whole THW family runs on — your Rep is simultaneously your skill, your cool, and your hit points, which is the whole trick. Rep can climb (fame, success, the right reputation) and it can fall (wounds, humiliation, running away), and a Star runs out of it the way a fighter runs out of gas. Character creation is fast: pick Star or Grunt, pick a race, pick a Profession by Class, roll Attributes, and set a Rep. **Skills** are the two-part People (**Peo**) and Savvy (**Sav**) pair, and beyond that it's about **Items** — what you can carry, what the local law level lets you carry, and whether your toys are **Game Breakers**. ### Beyond the street fight The mechanics reach past gunplay: **Enhancements** let you spend money to literally re-tool your body and risk "Going Hatter," **Psy** gives you mental and physical powers with corruption waiting for the careless, **Net Running** covers hacking in and out of computers, and combat has its own texture with a **Battle Board**, the standard turn sequence, cover, shooting and damage tables, and distinct rules for **Cinematic Combat** — Draw! duels, sword fights, and bar fights with stools thrown in. ### The campaign — where the solo play lives What makes **New Beginnings** an adventure game rather than just a skirmish is the campaign layer. You're tracking your Star across **Day Parts** and planet classes, moving from place to place, and when anything happens the **PEFs** — **Possible Enemy Forces** — are the machine that generates it. PEFs are how the game runs solo and co-op without a referee: instead of the GM deciding what's around the corner, the tables decide. You resolve a PEF to find out *how many* of them there are, *who they are*, and *whether they're friend or foe* — the street is full of things you don't know about until you poke them. Encounters then hang off the classic hooks — Chillin', Confrontation, Contact in Space, Defend, Escort, Find, Hauling Cargo and Passengers, Job Offer, Mining — with the city's eleven Areas and their law levels seasoning how each one plays. ## Editions - **5150: New Beginnings** (2011) — the original, written by **Ed Teixeira** alone, with art by **Tony Yates** and cover by **Paul Kime**. *In the library.* - **5150: New Beginnings — Latest Rules** (©2021; sold on the storefront as the “2023 Edition”) — the current, streamlined 2e by **Ed Teixeira & John Cunningham**, cover by **Marco Primo**, 260 pages; the edition this note is grounded in. *In the library.* ## Supplements *All in the library.* **Setting & universe** - **Known Space** — "The Galaxy Is Your Playground": build your own Nine Rings and map out an expanded 5150 universe — create star systems, planets, and cities, then travel between them with enhanced space-travel encounters and zero-G combat. A New Beginnings supplement usable with almost any system. - **Usual Suspects** — the "Who Are They Exactly?" tool: populate New Hope City and script your Encounters table by table, so your Story runs from one encounter to the next without a referee. **The city & its districts** - **New Hope City** — the city's core guide and its private-investigator campaign: the eleven Areas plus setting the crime, the victim, and where it happened across City Hall, the Financial District, and The Heights. - **New Hope City Bar Fights** — a bar-fight diversion/introduction. - **Working Grave** — the downtown police module of City Hall and the Financial District — protect and serve, while turning a blind eye when necessary. - **Back Alleys, Bright Lights** — the Little Hisha module, the dark side of New Hope City. - **Lawyers, Guns, and Money** — the New Hope City crime, legal, and money module. - **All She Wants to Do Is Dance** — the New Hope City nightlife module. - **Urban Renewal** — urban-renewal content and encounters. - **Step by Step – Urban Renewal** — an Urban Renewal character/play walkthrough. - **NHCS SWAT** — deploy the NHC SWAT team for Urban Renewal when the police just won't do. **The working life** - **Backstory** — the "What's Your Story?" generator: roll your Star's background on the 2d6 table to learn how you got to New Hope City (for Basic or Zhuh-Zhuh characters). - **Poker** — the Poker gambling minigame. - **Exo-Miner** — a 5150 Tales from the Fringe module for working the belt: mining crews and equipment, where the resources are (asteroids or planets), and the expedition/find/travel encounters of an asteroid miner. - **Shipyard** — the ship-acquisition and construction book: buy, lease, buy stolen, trade in, buy used, capture, or salvage a vessel, then build it out (systems, sizes, hull and structural HP). - **Down the Road** — a travel/road encounters sheet. **Play aids** - **City Deck** — a New Hope City card-deck play-aid. - **Bonus Boards** — bonus battle-board play-aids. - **Paper Warriors** — the paper stand-up figures pack. - **Optional PEF Rules** — rules for tuning PEFs in solo play. - **New Hope City PI** — a play-aid (character and flash-chart sheets). **5150: New Beginnings** is the story-first pole of the **5150** line — the member you play as a single Star with a story to live, set apart from the wargames (Star Army, Star Navy, Fighter Command, Total War). ## References - [5150 – Two Hour Wargames](https://www.twohourwargames.com/) - [5150: NEW BEGINNINGS — DriveThruRPG (Rebel Minis)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/341868/5150-NEW-BEGINNINGS) - [5150 New Beginnings (2e) — DriveThruRPG (2 Hour Wargames)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/390598/5150-New-Beginnings) - [5150 – New Beginnings game play, full encounter — YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxdhgDUh6bs)